Advice on taking over Korvosa[Curse of the Crimson Throne Spoilers]

[Malwing]

Since getting to level 3 and getting my blackblade, my LE Tiefling Magus has been plotting over to take command of Korvosa in our Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign.

At first this was a personality quirk, but during this time I've murdered the woman who was to be executed for being an escaped convict and gotten the guy that gave us that quest arrested. Both of those people seemed like important protagonists [metagaming] but my character didn't care because I didn't think he'd suffer such lawlessness and thought that the government didn't have enough power or competence to rule properly.

The rest of the party seemed on the fence about me but after bribes of prostitutes from my character, getting evidence that makes us suspect the queen of causing the plague and Kresenta(ap?) sending us off to fight a Nosferatu at lvl 3 the rest of the party has gotten into my idea of conquest. Last session we spent the entire time getting the were-rats organized towards our cause of taking over the kingdom, made plans to get the Shaonti on our side, spread rumors against the queen and setting up a spy network to get to the bottom of the plague business.

I need advice on kinds of rules to recommend to the DM in regards to staging a coup of the Karvosian Monarchy as well as general advice on how to proceed. I'd also like advice on what to do if we succeed, my first thought being the Kingdom Builder rules in Ultimate Campaign, and the mass combat rules for when Magnimar inevitably shows up opposed to a Korvosa ruled by a Teifling backed by were-rats and a dhampir.

So far we've spent thousands of gold on training, supplying and arming the were-rats and Outygs. We plan to keep low a bit while gathering power, with my personal plan to make an animated statue that I can use as armor and become Dr Doom. before completely taking over the kingdom.

[Krodjin]

As someone who has played the AP and is currently DMing it for my group, i advise you to play out the AP a while longer (like to the end). You'd be stupid to try this now (for in & out of game reasons).

[Cory Stafford 29]

Well, from what I know about CoCT, what you are doing will probably completely derail this campaign, but it does sound very fun. Just make sure you GM is prepared to make major changes to the campaign to suit your ambitions, otherwise you will probably be railroaded into dong what your supposed to do, which will probably mess up your ambitions.

[Malwing]

Krodjin wrote:

As someone who has played the AP and is currently DMing it for my group, i advise you to play out the AP a while longer (like to the end). You'd be stupid to try this now (for in & out of game reasons).

Meaning that we're likely to die?

[Douglas Muir 406]

Malwing wrote:

Meaning that we're likely to die?

It sounds like your DM has already jumped the tracks -- there is a nosferatu in that AP, but you're definitely not supposed to meet him at level 3. So if he's already gone far away from the AP as it's written, who knows what might happen.

Having said that... let's see. Going to go meta here, but not spoilery. It's a 6 module AP, right? So normally, by the time you get well into that last module, you're around let's say level 14, 15, something like that. So you'd reasonably be expecting to meet CR 13-16 opponents, and maybe a CR 17 or 18 boss.

Now, it's possible your DM may decide to nerf the AP and ignore the stuff in the last module. Maybe he thinks your idea is cool and fun and wants to give you a shot. Who knows?

But if your DM decides to keep that stuff... well, you do the math. Speaking for myself, if I were DM, I'd let you have a reasonable warning or two that you were going up against stuff that was out of your league. If you continued to persist, you would then -- in the words of the immortal Jack Vance -- suffer a death of macabre invention.

The AP as written *does* give evil characters a chance to, let's say, explore some exciting new career opportunities. But -- again going meta here -- as you'd reasonably expect, those opportunities come fairly late in the AP. I mean, Korvosa has some fairly high level NPCs running around. They're not going to bow down before a bunch of 5th level characters. You have to build a rep first. (Which the AP does totally give you the opportunity to do.)

Again, no idea what your DM is doing here, so can't say more. Good luck with it either way.

Doug M.