Hey folks,
I'm starting Rise of Runelords with our team in the next few weeks. As forums are such an amazing resource I wanted to ask for advice, thoughts, and ideas for the campaign? What were your highlights and memorable moments?
We've got four players (fortysomethings that have played for +25 years). I've read through the full campaign and done research on the forums.
My key concern is that the beginning seems very well crafted from story/NPC point of view. However the second half of the adventure seems like a more regular dungeon crawl. How was this for your group? How did you manage time per encounter in higher levels (they can easily take 1-2 hours at the higher levels and that doesn't leave a lot of room for storytelling)?
Also in recent years our games have drifted towards optimization and hack & slash. Now most of the players want to get back into the "old school" RPG:ing where combats aren't the key focus. Any ideas on how to max out feeling/emotion/engagement in the campaign?
Thanks in advance!
I am a player in a current Runelords campaign. We have just finished the Fortress of the Stone Giants, so I am unable to comment on the later stages.
Like your group, we have also been playing rpgs for a long time (our youngest player started prior to 3rd ed's existence) and have run the gamut from hack'n'slash to pure roleplaying with no dice rolling at all.
In brief, here are some of my thoughts/experiences (likely going to be several lengthy posts, if you want to hear them all):
1) Thistletop is really tricky if the PCs are the official levels. We had 4 out of our 5 PCs multi-classing after 1st or 2nd level and it made us even weaker. We also lacked any divine spellcasters and were relying on a wand of CLW.
I would include some major hints that Orik and the wizard will switch sides - in our game they virtually volunteered to work for us as soon as we met them and they made the difference between us being killed and the goblins being killed. (We also assaulted the fort from the bottom, having found the crab cave entrance while scouting. The hedge maze looked like a total ambush trap so we avoided it.)
I might also consider adding some 2nd level follower types from Sandpoint as henchmen to the party so the sheer quantity of goblins can be faced without risking everyone dying.
The imp wasn't a major problem to a party with ranged specialists (2 gunslingers), but was tricky enough to be memorable. Make sure your party has an effective missile weapon or two available.
Malfeshnakor was vicious, invisible and surprise-attacking the last PC to enter his room (which dropped him) and then blocking the exit. The problem was his DR. Equip the party with appropriate weapon blanches (best used on ammunition, so a ranged combatant is also helpful) and it'll be much more balanced.
2) The ghouls from the 2nd part are far too weak and die without being a challenge. If you allow the party to be higher level in order to cope with Thistletop, then the ghouls will be even less of a challenge. I'd make them change from weak ghouls into a stronger form of undead over the next few days after they get made.
On the other hand, the haunted mansion is really terrible and excellent and very weak, all at the same time, and depending on the party.
To a paladin, who is immune to fear and therefore immune to haunts and their effects, the mansion is tedious and once the party realises this negates every encounter; meanwhile the non-paladins have no way of coping with any of the haunts and it feels like a 'roll the dice and see if your character is dead' sort of thing. However, the atmosphere is amazing and the story you uncover is excellent. Therefore, I'd change the nature of the haunts entirely - make some of them work like magic mouth and/or programmed images, so the party gets to discover the story, while making others be more straightforward encounters with actual undead beasties so the characters feel like there is something that they can do that is effective.
More to follow, if you are interested.
I ran Burnt Offerings for a mixed group - my wife has played since 2E, one player who had run in one Pathfinder group prior to this, and one brand-spanking new newbie. We focused a lot more on role playing due to inexperience with rules, and preference. The upside is that backgrounds and motivations for the different characters provide rich opportunities for rp. There's not much use parlaying with the general goblin grunt, but Gogmurt, Lyrie, and Orik can be made an allies rather easily. Ripnugget could easily be adapted to beseaching a tyrannical king to switching sides. Nualia is largely unflappable from her motivations, but I even had her make a deal with the PCs to free Malfeshnekor in order to save their lives. They ended up double-crossing one another almost immediately, but there was definitely the ability to make deals if that's your group's speed.
I ran Burnt Offerings for a mixed group - my wife has played since 2E, one player who had run in one Pathfinder group prior to this, and one brand-spanking new newbie. We focused a lot more on role playing due to inexperience with rules, and preference. The upside is that backgrounds and motivations for the different characters provide rich opportunities for rp. There's not much use parlaying with the general goblin grunt, but Gogmurt, Lyrie, and Orik can be made an allies rather easily. Ripnugget could easily be adapted to beseaching a tyrannical king to switching sides. Nualia is largely unflappable from her motivations, but I even had her make a deal with the PCs to free Malfeshnekor in order to save their lives. They ended up double-crossing one another almost immediately, but there was definitely the ability to make deals if that's your group's speed.
Good ideas, here.
I'd also make sure that any group spends quite a lot of time getting to know the citizens of Sandpoint. The intention is for the PCs to get attached to the place and there is a lot of story you miss out on if the group proceeds to Thistletop too soon. In particular, once the skinsaw murders start it is too late to be making friends who are about to be murdered.
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For the AP's I've GM'ed and played in the key has always been having a backstory or premise that unites the players.
I've run Runelords twice. Both times the party has had compelling reasons to stay together and "care" about completing the AP. Once they were all members of the Dwarven Construction company that built the Sandpoint Cathedral. The second time, and more effectively, they were all members of the Magnimar Special Division of the Watch -- so fixing things in Sandpoint, Magnimar, and Turtleback Ferry was their job.
But even for other AP's (and I think) RPGs in general, having a compelling reason for the party to be together really solidifies a campaign.
As far as RotRL goes -- as a GM I would advise...
* Use the no XP option and level the party when needed. Tracking XP is a drag and this way you can freely have the party encounter whatever is cool and not have to worry about them being too powerful for whatever is next in the AP.
* The AP Railroad can get to be a bit much. Plan some side treks.
* Don't worry about Chapter One being largely unrelated to Chapter Two or Three. Burnt Offerings is the primer to let the PCs thrash some goblins and have fun.
* Expand the party's time in Sandpoint and let them get to know (and love) the local NPCs. This will make the dangers posed by the Skinsaw Man and the giant assault more meaningful.
* Adjust things as much as necessary for your players to have fun. Remember the old saw that the rules (and the scenario) as written are a guideline. Deviate freely.
* Make sure both YOU and your players are having fun.
CJ
I have a similarly constructed group (by age and experience anyway.)
My advice would be:
- read the forum, especially the gm specific sticky threads. This will start to highlight issues or opportunities you might have. I stress MIGHT have.
- take advice about "this encounter was hard" or "this encounter was easy" with a healthy dose of salt but do take it. Difficulty can vary widely based on group composition and player tactics. You may have to adjust based on your groups unique makeup.
- my group is just finishing Thistletop so I can't speak to the later chapters from direct experience but the AP does a good job of varying encounters and, especially appealing to me (in a belated discovery), does things I wouldn't have done. The extraplanar creatures in the Cathedral of Wrath and Thistletop in particular can be very challenging (and my players squawked accordingly.) But guess what? They're fixed in place and the players have plenty of opportunity to withdraw, adjust tactics and re-engage.
- corollary to the above: groups that have one tactic - kick in door, fight to death - will be rewarded with exactly that.
- read the entire AP through end to end at least once if not more before beginning. There are a lot of tie-ins between the books/chapters. There are a lot of opportunities to build connections and foreshadowing if you know they exist.
- the AP provides plenty of guidance on NPC motivations and tactics, make sure you understand them and if you decide to alter them, how that might impact future encounters or elements of the backstory. Especially important, many NPC's do not willingly fight to the death, at least when first encountered.
- Use the players companion guide or whatever its called (it's FREE!) - it will help give the players background info about the area and help them choose character features such as weapons or feats that are regionally pertinent. Also there are traits in the Advanced Player Guide that also help tie-in to Sandpoint/Varisia.
Thanks guys! Great stuff.
I'm giving the players 25 point buy and in general don't expect them to have a lot of challenge in the early levels. As part of their background everyone will get one magic item so they should be pretty pumped for 1st level. Then it's going to be really dry in terms of magic items (just what's officially available, which won't be much unless you're shopping for repeating crossbow +1 :) so they should treasure the flavour items from their background.
I am a little concerned about Latrecis's point about "kick in door and fight to death". Over recent years we've gotten lazy as players and typically play very recklessly. This could sting a little...
I loved thelesuit's point about Skinsaw murdering NPC's that they've made friends with. So now I plan to intro as much NPC's as possible and make sure the memorable one's are on top of the Skinsaw list. I'm also looking to flesh out Shayliss as much as possible and keep here close to the players in the early days.
For the last 4-5 years we've been playing without XP and now I'm also going to introduce it back. This for two reasons; 1) you'll get XP from RPG:ing so having few combats in a session won't slow advancement and 2) for the first time I'd like the players to level up individually. So if you go heavy on RPG:ing and get bonus XP you can actually level up before rest of the team.
I know that's going to be quite a bit of work to maintain, but that way I'll have the option to reward people for RPG:ing well when ever appropriate.
Really the key question for me is going to be how to get long term NPC involvement. When PC's interact with friendly NPC's that typically is a great spot for character building. This should work really well for Sandpoint and I've got a couple of ideas for Magnimar, but modules 4-6 don't give out as much alternatives. Perhaps getting lucky with a recurring villain would do the trick. Let's see.
BTW: We just wrapped up Council of Thieves. While the beginning of the AP was totally amazing the latter half didn't deliver much else than combats.
Early in the AP there's stuff which we hadn't seen before (the Play we got to act was one of the highlights of recent years - I don't recall us ever laughing as much in a single session) and worked great.
However from half way through the AP just turns pretty much into a series of encounters and by the end we started game sessions with simple "Err.. who are we supposed to kill this time? Anybody remember? Anybody?" followed by a black look at our DM.
I'm kind of getting the same wibe from Runelords. First half awesome, second half pretty faceless hack and slash. I'm considering some long term motivation to off Karzoug (appear in nightmares for the palading or write a separate back story about big-K and his motivations)? It feels like it would be important to introduce him to the players around half way through so that the players would know what they will be facing in the end? Something like the Black Magga (but with the big-K) encounter could works out pretty well in theory? Any ideas?
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I'd encourage them to take a trait from the AP player's guide. And as others have said, try to get them to spend time and get to know the NPCs of Sandpoint.
It would have helped me to have read further ahead, into Skinsaw, and made a hit list of NPCs I wanted them to meet and form an opinion of.
And in retrospect, I wouldn't use the lust obsession again. It's so heavy-handed and obvious. I think it would be a lot easier to set up a bunch of potential suspects using the envy or jealousy obsession. With lust they instantly homed in on Aldern as the murderer.
Review the timeline in Misgivings, too—you don't have to be a slave to it but it'll give you an idea of the expected timing.
BTW: We just wrapped up Council of Thieves. While the beginning of the AP was totally amazing the latter half didn't deliver much else than combats.
snip
I'm kind of getting the same wibe from Runelords. First half awesome, second half pretty faceless hack and slash. I'm considering some long term motivation to off Karzoug (appear in nightmares for the palading or write a separate back story about big-K and his motivations)? It feels like it would be important to introduce him to the players around half way through so that the players would know what they will be facing in the end? Something like the Black Magga (but with the big-K) encounter could works out pretty well in theory? Any ideas?
Adding divinely inspired dreams should help, or more magic messages from K. Or using the Sihedron medallion to give a PC nightmares. My GM added several extra encounters/traps/etc: one trap from a different AP was transplanted into Thistletop, which left a male PC reincarnated in one of Sorschen's clones. Then we met an epic level Succubus/L20 Bard who merely wanted to snigger about how much Sorschen would hate to have one of her clones swaggering around. We're currently doing the Breaching Festival (also from another AP) because we're each a member of a guild/organisation with some benefits based on Fame points. All of these tie our characters into the background and gives us more information about the Runelords.
Apart from that, bring Shalelu into the game early and often; mention the Black Arrows too and their never-ending struggle to keep ogres/giants at bay; mention NPCs from Magnimar by their names regularly; re-do Hook Mountain so Barl & co assault the party at Fort Rannick instead of using the official module (see the thread about it); consider the alternative methods of having the Giants attack Sandpoint (again, see the thread), if you like them.
I have no idea what the last 2 sections will be like as yet, but the main advantage of having Barl attack Fort Rannick is to prevent it feeling like more of the same dungeon-bash (Fort Rannick, Hook Mountain, Fortress of the Stone Giants, all in a row).
A bit long-winded, sorry. Particularly if you've already thought of most of that.
BTW: We just wrapped up Council of Thieves. While the beginning of the AP was totally amazing the latter half didn't deliver much else than combats.
Early in the AP there's stuff which we hadn't seen before (the Play we got to act was one of the highlights of recent years - I don't recall us ever laughing as much in a single session) and worked great.
However from half way through the AP just turns pretty much into a series of encounters and by the end we started game sessions with simple "Err.. who are we supposed to kill this time? Anybody remember? Anybody?" followed by a black look at our DM.
I'm kind of getting the same wibe from Runelords. First half awesome, second half pretty faceless hack and slash. I'm considering some long term motivation to off Karzoug (appear in nightmares for the palading or write a separate back story about big-K and his motivations)? It feels like it would be important to introduce him to the players around half way through so that the players would know what they will be facing in the end? Something like the Black Magga (but with the big-K) encounter could works out pretty well in theory? Any ideas?
Without disagreeing with anything above, I would make a couple observations:
1. Runelords provides a variety of "role-playing" alternatives in the 2nd half of the AP. (For my purposes, role-playing = problem can be effectively solved by talking or thinking instead of killing) However they are definitely in the minority.
2. But that isn't a limitation of the AP or even Pathfinder AP's in general, it's a defect that has plagued the game system since it's very inception. Role-playing encounters for high level characters (loose definition 10+) can be hard to create. Role-playing implies or is based on an interaction of peers, a negotiation between entities that have something to gain and something to lose. There really isn't much point in your 12th level barbarian haggling over the cost of an ale with the tavern owner when the barbarian probably has enough wealth in his pocket to buy the tavern 10 times over. (An exaggerated example to be sure.)
This creates a challenge for adventure/world designers - either you fill the world with high level NPC's etc. for the players to interact with or you don't But if you do, your forced to come up with a host of silly conceits to answer the obvious question - if there are so many high level characters about, why are the pc's (often of much lower level) having to deal with this awful crisis? (See also, Forgotten Realms.) And if you don't, your pc's have an increasing shortage of peers to interact with as they advance.
All that being said, any effort to get the pc's to hate or fear Karzoug can only be a good thing :)
For "old school" feel, make horror horrible. Make them keep up with mundane details like rations, water, weather, and carry weight. IMO its attention to details that makes a game old school. ROTRL can seem light hearted at times, but if your group is mature I'd ramp it up ALOT and drop some of the sillier elements, mostly that you will find in book 1. A lot of it will just be in presentation though.
You said your group tends to power-game a bit? I'd use an average point buy OR for that real old school feel one set of 3d6 no swapping and then let them make their characters.
I'm running a different adventure that's been converted to Pathfinder and we are using XP. We had been using level up points (like when we did RotRL), but my players are loving going back to the XP system. Nothing says old school like going back to basics.
Runelords Structure - The adventure path is a path, a to b. Most of the older stuff was similar, but IMO left the players wandering and wondering what to do at times. Runelords always shows you where you need to go, but doesn't play like a kick in the door game. There are very few doors and they are at them for very specific reasons. If they kick in too many they should get arrested.
Runelords difficulty - Probably not the hardest adventure ever, if you have experienced players I'd ramp up the difficulty especially since they are setting the pace of the encounters. Sandpoint is kind of a safe zone, which can lead to the 15 minute adventuring day. Later books get more difficult, I'd say around book 3. I'd double the random encounters frequency minimum throughout the series for them.
My group loved ROTRL I've ran it several times, but they preferred Kingmaker, if you want something dungeon crawly and old school "kick in the door" look up Rappan Athuk.
Lastly, to add in some horror plug in the Chopper's Isle quest from the free fanzine Wayfinder #7. (I'm shameless, I know.)
Let us know how it turns out!
I'm facing the same issue: little chance for RP in the second half of the AP. But I have some ideas...
* I plan on doing more with the other giants running about on the Storval Plateau. Some of them are reluctant to join Mokmurian's cause -- which could give the party opportunity to RP. Also there are stone giants (besides Conna the Wise) who are working to undermine Mokmurian.
* The rise of the Karzoug isn't going to just be bad for Sandpoint and Magnimar. It is also going to be terribly bad for the Shoanti. They still tell horror stories about Giant Rune Kings enslaving them. I'm going to steal some of the ideas from Curse of the Crimson Throne to interject into RotRL. But the Shoanti are far from united and many are going to believe that the giants will target the tzemik (sp?) first.
...maybe more to come if I can think of something.
CJ
Make sure you are very familiar with the people of Sandpoint. There is a lot of cool history between characters you can use to get your players attached to various people in town.
I've never been a fan of "OK, everyone levels up" type of progression, and I wanted Sandpoint and the area to be more of a sandbox, so I put everyone on the slow xp track and let them explore and interact and fight stuff mostly on their own, with a little guidance from NPCs and the Help Wanted board at the Rusty Dragon. Don't forget about that, random quests and such can easily be introduced by starting out as a posting on that board.
I actually printed out a page of wood grain texture with a burnt looking "Help Wanted" on top and use sticky notes as the postings. Been a good way to spend the sessions where people have bailed or otherwise not managed to show up.If I still have the file for it, and if anyone actually wants it, I'll post it to the community created stuff thread.
Thanks again for the comments folks! Trying to incorporate quite a bit of those (and yeah, Orik just might get out of hand given the way things are going). We've been playing for two months and the AP feels great. So many NPC's with so many different angles. The beginning is DM heaven. :)
Here's the campaign log so far:
Go to Campaign Log.