Pallid Plague Questions

[burkoJames]

I can't seem to find anyone asking about this. What do you do if players bring in certain items that didn't exist when the module was written? specificly:

Pallid Plague:

When the scenario was first written antiplague was not an item, APG wasn't out yet. given the entire mission is to create an antiplague, how do you handle it if a crazy prepared PC (I mean why would you buy one after being told you are going into a plague zone) brings an Antiplague?

Just say they need a special one for this plague? Say she needs to reverse engineer it to mass produce it?

Im expecting smart PCs for this module, and I want to be prepared.

So, whats advice could you give me?

[Doug Miles]

I think you have the right idea; explain that curing the Pallid Plague requires a specific treatment and anti-plague won't alone suffice. Without the threat of the disease, this scenario becomes pointless. You have raised a good question. I bet that some GMs have come up with more inventive solutions that simply saying anti-plague won't work. I hope they share their ideas. Antiplague is relatively expensive at low levels, but giving that the title of the scenario is The Pallid Plague you are wise to expect it to show up.

[Netopalis]

I generally say that this plague seems to be resistant to it. If off-the-shelf antiplague worked, the herbalist would have had the plague solved in minutes.

[saltyone]

If you just treat it like flu vaccine, it won't be hard to rp.

[DesolateHarmony]

saltyone wrote:

If you just treat it like flu vaccine, it won't be hard to rp.

Meaning, that like flu vaccine you need to get a new one every year because the virus changes enough to fool your body's defenses?

[Auriea]

When I played it, the antiplague was more of a rarity, and was too expensive to make it in mass production for the area. We used one of our potions as help, but overall, it was made somewhat easy because of the items/characters we had.

[Muser]

I just let the antiplagues stay and concentrated on giving a sense of urgency to the action. The PC's might have an instant cure for every ailment, no need for sleep, endless money and a laundry service in their pockets (prestidigitation), but the villagers still need to eat, s**t and especially survive the plague and that's why you're there.

[David_Bross]

50 gold per villager in a 1-7 quickly overwhelms any possible gold reward, as well.

[Ascalaphus]

Antiplague doesn't cure the illness, it improves your saving throw chances/opportunities. For common folk those Fortitude DCs are still very high.

[andreww]

Ascalaphus wrote:

Antiplague doesn't cure the illness, it improves your saving throw chances/opportunities. For common folk those Fortitude DCs are still very high.

For PC's those DC's are still arbitrarily high.

[Muser]

I've run this once, been in a and seen an online table and the antiplagues absolutely gut this scenario. There's zero pressure.

I don't understand what the necro is about though. Ascalaphus, are you correcting someone or what?

[andreww]

Muser wrote:

I've run this once, been in a and seen an online table and the antiplagues absolutely gut this scenario. There's zero pressure.

I don't understand what the necro is about though. Ascalaphus, are you correcting someone or what?

I played this a while ago even with antiplagues and the DC at 6-7 is still extremely high. We nearly had one PC die from the stat damage as we dragged his sorry carcass towards the nearest civilisation where we could get high enough level spellcasting to cure him.

[Ascalaphus]

Muser wrote:

I've run this once, been in a and seen an online table and the antiplagues absolutely gut this scenario. There's zero pressure.

I don't understand what the necro is about though. Ascalaphus, are you correcting someone or what?

The question "was this adventure written before/after Antiplague, and does that matter" came up last weekend when we played it. This was a point I felt was lacking in the discussion.

Sure, it's a bit of a necro, but these GM threads get dug up if someone is preparing to run the scenario, so it's worth posting IMO.

I don't think antiplague would gut the scenario. At tier 3-4 our DC was 22, that's a pretty high DC. Getting a best-of-two roll with regular antiplague doesn't make it easy.

The encounters are all spaced several hours apart. You're not likely to be dosed with antiplague for all of them, and even with a +5, the save DCs are high enough that most likely some PCs will be infected. And in particular, the very first encounter is likely to infect PCs when the wolves hit or die; likely someone is exposed in the first round of combat before anyone's drunk antiplague.

Numbers: I played a dwarven ZAM and have a +7 fortitude. With succesful Heal skill usage, that gets to +11. That means to save I need to roll an 11, so 50% chance of making the save. But to be cured you need two consecutive saves. I really don't feel like using antiplague to get best-of-two on those checks is out of line.

The real problem with tension is that the bad guys put up resistance like single-layer toilet paper, but then afterwards you're spending days and days doing roll-offs to see if you can avoid a slow lingering death, even long after a cure has been formulated.

I'm fine with dying in an awesome boss fight. Dying a week after the action in the adventure, not so awesome.

[Le Petite Mort]

I have a small quibble to bring up: In the 1-2 tier of the final encounter, the human plague zombie is listed as a CR 1/2 monster, but I noticed it lacks the "SQ: staggered" that the other plague zombies have. Given the high DC disease ability, this seems more like an editing oversight than a properly blocked monster.

Should/can I run it with the staggered condition?

I have also come up with a method of contending with the common complaint for this scenario that players wind up dying/spending copious resources after the mission to cure the Palepox disease. I basically don't see any reason that the party couldn't avail themselves of Laurel's services post-conclusion. She could use the Heal skill to grant bonuses on the save, and given their role in her village's salvation, I see no reason she wouldn't give them antiplagues as well.

I'm not entirely sure about the PFS legality of allowing this, though.

[Fromper]

The combats in this one aren't tough. I would (and did, when I ran it) run them as written, not make them easier.

[Ascalaphus]

The combats are easy enough. It's the dying of the plague a week after beating the bad guys part that's annoying. Especially when all the NPCs act like you found a cure.

[Fromper]

I will say that even though this is a tier 1-7 adventure, I wouldn't run it at 1-2. PCs just don't have enough skills for the skill challenge at that low level. IIRC (and it's been 4 years, so I might not), my group had trouble with this, despite having 7 players at subtier 3-4.

[James Risner]

Played this after having ran it several times. The GM running it had ran it twice before. Between us we have ran this 5-6 times. Only one tier 1-2 table managed to deal with the plague. The tier 6-7 is next to impossible to make with the "only use skill once per PC" and it being 10 points higher than the highest CORE Disease from CR 9 Night Hags.