Arrggg, I wus all dressed up in me best duds (shirt, bandana and new hat) and ended up takin' a matey to the VA this morning and then I had to hit the pharmacy. After that I felt like Davey Jone's locker so I steered me craft to a friendly port. Glad to heer yer pappy is doin' well!
Lou or Nick, I have a question about
Absolutely a diplomacy or a bluff could avoid him being arrested. If such was not explicitly placed in the encounter, then GM fiat. By all means. A good sleep spell might work too. Not to mention, non-lethal damage.
Thanks, the rogue rolled a nat 20 on his diplomacy check and has a +9. I also still use the -10/+10 on 1/20 from 3.0 on skill checks so that is a 39! Even at 29 he should have turned Darenar to friendly so I had him release the Tulita to him.
If I can heard the cats, err players in that direction! The problem is I have two Tulita in the party and they decided to follow up the diplomacy with intimidate to try and get Darenar to accept healing. Well, they succeeded in intimidating him with a 30 but only achieved getting him to crawl off in disgust and made an enemy of him now.
** spoiler omitted **
Maybe I should have let my party heal Darenar, but that would mean he would not be there as a BBEG later. It might have gone better if it wasn't the Tulita that were attempting to heal him! That is somewhat of the hazard of PBP and the cleric was in her canoe getting a change of clothes.
You're evil TOZ! I like it!
Aaaaaand we're back!
Relatively short session last night. The party escaped Port Shaw via the sewers courtesy of Lester Farrows and went to Toe's Reach to investigate Harok's tale, meeting some colorful locals there (including a general store owner with a thing for gnomes and an elderly woman with a thing for pirate captains). They calmed Relgrin and convinced him to reconcile with Harok, then made quick work of Grymmer and returned Jessica to Brother Zalen in Port Shaw. Zalen has diagnosed her condition and asked them to retrieve sea krait venom in an effort to cure her lycanthropy (I decided this type of sea snake venom will work much like wolfsbane does on werewolf lycanthropy).
Their next stop was reacquiring their ship from a squib between Port Shaw and Bonegnaw's Cove, and then they headed out to sea, where we did a random encounter with a scrag barbarian leading a boarding party of sahuagin in the dead of night. They made quick work of that encounter thanks to a lucky hold person from Orm that paralyzed the scrag, who couldn't make a saving throw above single digits for anything. =\ This encounter gave them enough XP to hit level 6, as well.
The session ended with Captain Orm spotting the wreckage of the Flying Fortune on the seamount... so next week they'll hopefully start working their way through "The Black Spot"!
Two of my current players are departing from the game due to scheduling conflicts, but I'll be adding a new player who is running a necromancer/agent of the grave... so there should be ample opportunity for him to test his abilities in "The Black Spot". =D
It is interesting to read how different each game is. I have one party exploring the Flying Fortune now and another heading toward the Barnacle.
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Last week the party tried to breakup the Midnight Deal by setting Crook Back Pier on fire.
This week they made friends with Donovan, saving his ship and the dock from fire, and got him to take them to Thumb's Reach. After dealing with things there, the ifrit decided it must be burned to purify the land.
Obviously this is going to be a theme with him. Once he meets his goddess he may burn Port Shaw to purify it as well...
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Nice! And my campaign is running, yet again, entirely differently. I have a party of 5-6 and after using the opening encounter from Sinful Whispers as my intro and...
I really like this because, having sided with Tulita interests in their early encounters they are now helping Hargrove with a problem and not quite sure what to make of the plantations. Yet.
They haven't even made it to Port Shaw. Go figure.
You are being too easy on them Lou! They should be getting so many leads it makes their heads spin!
They just think they are disconnected!
My players are in the Black Spot and just got decimated by the Vile Slashers, 3 dead and the rest ran without denting the slashers. They seem rather tough for CR 5's.
We got noticing that the Razor Coast character sheets do not have a spot for alignment.
It appears as if size took the spot on the sheet.
I am 1E old school on alignment and try to keep to it so it is important in my campaign. I only allow 5 alignments for players LG,CG,NG,LN and N and try and limit the neutrals. I still see the game as the consummate struggle between good and evil. If you are neutral you are usually part of the problem.
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Especially in FGG stuff. I mean if you are not good, why are you here, treasure hunting? In Razor Coast this is even more of an issue to me.
We just added it up and my PBP people have managed to earn over 2200 XP and have yet to have their first combat! It has been some good role playing!
Hey guys-
mass email coming out this weekend to everyone who backed the RC kickstarter, do you all know about this???
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Lost our first character to the...
The whirlwind attack was particularly potent, picking up a paladin in plate and dropping him in the drink. A Taldoran fighter (we've made Golarion the "empire across the sea") attacked from the water then got slammed in retaliation to negative hit points. Despite a valiant attempt the party's sea elf and dragonrider just couldn't reach his location swiftly enough. The fighter sank out of sight, into the murk beyond detection, hit the bottom of the bog and drowned. Eventually, a crocodile ate him, shat out his bones, but kept his prized possessions lodged in its gullet. The croc now swims the edge of the
In the meantime our party -- 5 slightly overpowered 5th level characters attempting a 4 person 6th level adventure -- wisely retreated to tarps they erected in the trees, planning to recuperate. When even that went not-so-well, they retreated again to
Plus begging/advertising for another adventurer to join their party doesn't make them look "heroic" exactly. They plan to return to tackle the
I'm quite certain more shall die. Much fun had by all!
Some party lineup changes since last time leave me with the following PCs in my Razor Coast game:
Lucin Thorne - LG male human monk 6 (zen archer)
Orm Gunnarsson - TN male human oracle of waves 6
Esquire Cumberbund IV - CN male gnome alchemist 6
Archibald - NE male human cleric of Charon 5/agent of the grave 1
The party boarded the Flying Fortune last night. Since they have their own ship, I skipped the bit with Captain Riggs and had the new PC, Archibald, play the same role Riggs would have in the adventure. They discovered him wandering the deck in the early morning light, and he explained that he was on the Fortune when it wrecked and had returned to retrieve a very important item--a green glass plate.
The gryphs on the top deck of the Flying Fortune were an easy encounter for a party of 6th level PCs, but I waited for Orm and Archibald to crash through the rotted deck and then had the gryphs focus on attacking Lucin and Esquire. It was a minor resource drain on the whole, but it did add some nice tension to the situation.
The sea chest mimic on the bottom deck was a decent battle. Orm walked right into that one. While not extremely challenging, it did knock two PCs down into single digit hp and provide evidence to Esquire that something just wasn't right about the situation when he checked out the remains with Knowledge (dungeoneering). They also found Titus Weatherby's body and read his journal, cluing them in that something was horribly wrong with the situation, and possibly their new companion as well.
Lucin led the group down into the seamount tunnel and easily spotted the patches of strangle weeds, which Archibald zapped into oblivion by channeling negative energy (thus setting the stage for a nasty conflict between him and Lucin later). Once they reached the glass portal, Esquire noticed the jade bats on the ceiling and decided to spider climb up to them to investigate. Two flew away, into the ship, but the one nearest the gnome attacked for a few rounds before flying off to join its brethren.
At this point, the party had an intense disagreement about what to do. Lucin wanted to leave Archibald in the pit with his "funny looking green glass", not wanting to have anything to do with the cleric of an evil deity. Esquire felt much the same way. Orm, however, was of the opinion that leaving the area unexplored, especially after reading the journal on Titus Weatherby's corpse, would be irresponsible, given that the slashers seemed intent on luring more people into its trap. Lucin finally relented, but insisted that Archibald would lead the way through the area. Archibald, for his part, surrendered his wand of hold person to Orm, telling the oracle to use it if he did anything untoward.
Once inside, they immediately opened the chamber where the three vile slashers dwelt (they all managed to save against the poison gas in C1). The Engineer attempted a ruse of peaceful intentions, but tried to convince them to leave behind Esquire as part of a cultural exchange. Their Sense Motive rolls were very good, so they attacked the slashers. The Engineer continued to taunt them through his thralls throughout the combat. Archibald used his Command Undead ability to enslave one of the neh thalggu zombies, which made this fight a bit easier. (I also scaled the slashers WAY down from the published statistics after reading brvheart's play reports on this forum; they're really closer to about CR 8 individually as designed, making three of them--effectively a CR 11 encounter--a horribly unfair fight for a party of 6th level PCs.)
With the slashers dispatched, they continued through the neh thalggu spaceship (I got a GREAT laugh out of the vending machine gag btw, which everyone except the monk realized was NOT actually an altar), wisely disposing of the brine zombies from a safe distance, but not-so-wisely walking right into the black leech pit trap. Lucin and Esquire could get across the pit easily thanks to monk acrobatic skills and spider climb, respectively, but Archibald and Orm were stuck behind the pit. Of course, they stumbled right into the Vivisectionist's room next, and Lucin kept the murderous robot occupied while Esquire sneaked around him using an invisibility potion to grab the golden key and explore further into the ship. The Vivisectionist was a tough opponent due to the hardness 10 quality, but the zen archer's ability to deflect melee attacks when fighting defensively negated much of the damage the robot would have dealt, so it was a much longer fight than expected.
Next week, we'll wrap up the rest of "The Black Spot", and then it's time to see what they want to explore next on the Razor Sea!
Was wondering what you were going to do with the slashers. Not sure how the author expects level 5s to grapple a CMD of 47. I am moving the game to Saturday so there will be a realignment of players.
I statted it out in Hero Lab and it is even worse! Add the fast Zombie template and it gets 2 rend attacks, more hp and 5 more to AC and is only a CR of 4! They toned it down quite a bit already.
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Was wondering what you were going to do with the slashers. Not sure how the author expects level 5s to grapple a CMD of 47. I am moving the game to Saturday so there will be a realignment of players.
37 not 47. Whew. I thought 47 had slipped by! True - 37 is bad enough. Not arguing. Just - whew.
Sorry that was a typo I did not correct and should have. The players decided to head back to port after 2 dying and 2 more not here. Five new characters today so it was another get acquainted session. They are heading back into the sewers.
Other than The Wormwood Mutiny, is there anything else that people are using to get players to level 5? I'm planning to run this soon, but I'm lazy.
From my reading of the set piece I don't see a need of changing the time line.
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Well I've started Razor Coast and the players got up and running with Sinful Whisper. Now that they are almost back from that I realize I have a question about ** spoiler omitted **
Hey Mir,
It's not really a discrepancy. Timelines in Razor Coast are left deliberately loose so you can time the
I'm comfortable with the remnants of
If you feel a lack of verisimilitude because you want the remaining inhabitants to have been their for months, I'd just throw in some color. Lots of dessicated animal corpses and skeletons lying about, rotting, partially fleshed. That's what they've been eating.
Or if you're wondering how other folks,
Hope that helps.
Timelines in Razor Coast are left deliberately loose so you can time the **SPOILER** to be whenever your campaign would like it to be.
From what I've run of this campaign so far, it really does play better this way. If you stick to exact timelines to dictate every event, eventually your players are going to try to exploit those timelines to their advantage, or you're going to create a discrepancy that could keep you from introducing something that would be really fun.
It's important to go light on absolutes. One thing I noticed in my game is that some players were very reluctant to return to Port Shaw after their failed jailbreak and successful escape from the gallows. I explained it like this: in the BBC Robin Hood TV show, Robin and his men are the most wanted men in Nottingham County--but they still break into the castle EVERY WEEK. The goal is not to be ultra-realistic, but to have as much fun as possible. I'm not trying to outright murder them every time they sneak back into town.
Similarly, use the flow of events in your game to have fun, not to create a sense of realism. Some campaigns are definitely made for that sort of play, but this isn't one of them.
Yeah I am going to have to keep the timeline loose. It has been six days in my game and with 4 characters dead only one is level 6 and most of the rest are new characters now.
Can never get players. They complain about not enough role playing with RA so stick them in Razor Coast where they have to role play and they complain they aren't doing anything. Go figure. They have at least a half a dozen leads and just needed to decide which one to track down first. Some players are to used to "read the text to the players in the box" type of gaming.
They complain about not enough role playing with RA so stick them in Razor Coast where they have to role play and they complain they aren't doing anything. Go figure. They have at least a half a dozen leads and just needed to decide which one to track down first. Some players are to used to "read the text to the players in the box" type of gaming.
This is my big fear when I start the new campaign. Very few of my players have ever been of the "let's see what's out there" type. I worry I may have to lead them around by the nose, which totally defeats the purpose of a sandbox style campaign.
I only have one player that has experience with a true sandbox and that is my wife. There is, however, enough whispers and inciting incidents that the players should have plenty of leads to follow Feros. They just need to "pull the threads" so to speak.
Other than The Wormwood Mutiny, is there anything else that people are using to get players to level 5? I'm planning to run this soon, but I'm lazy.
I started with the Tale of the Seabear (mysteries of the Razor sea), then moving on to "Little Island" and some stuff pilfered from various aquatic adventures from Dungeon magazine. Plenty of places where I'm patching with homebrewed encounters, too. I'd be happy to send along my planning document if you want that level of detail.