Assistant Developer
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I believe that was supposed to be "if the PCs attack him after the first two rounds" or "If the PCs attack him in the first two rounds, he turns his attention toward them in round 3" but it may have been changed by an editor. Something obviously got lost in translation.
Yes, the idea I was intending to get across is that Vargrim attacks Uliyara on round 2, or spends round 2 moving up to her if she is too far away, giving the PCs a bit of extra time to attack him before he unleashes his fury on them.
Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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I wonder though, given how fast Vargrim is, and how slow the ice makes everyone else including Uliyara - doesn't that make it extremely hard to stop him?
I do think the "push past the PCs for the first 2 rounds" tactic would be a lot better.
What kind of irks me is the interaction between a couple of his abilities in high tier. He hits fairly hard with claws, then grab-constricts with high probability (CMD goes up slower than AC for most PCs). Fine.
The nasty part is the cold aura; that one's very likely to kill off PCs that he's dropped below 0 HP.
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2) If anyone knows any one fact about revenants, tell them the Self-Loathing ability. Some of the other abilities are nice to know about, but really this is the key to the fight.
This made a huge difference when I played it. No one had a mirror, but one of the players had a highly polished silver dagger and shoved the flat side in Vargrim's face rather than attacking. He failed his save, and someone was able to coup-de-grace the helpless revenant.
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I ran this twice up in Boston (one at each tier, both for four players), and I have to say I really loved this scenario Hopefully this post will remind myself to write a review soon. It does a great job of really making players feel like they have control over what's going on in the scenario, rather than moving from area A to area B. It also does a great job at getting players new and old alike to do a bit more actual roleplay than usual.
I do wish, however, it had shown up a bit earlier in the season. I know that scheduling the season must be a challenge, with plenty of story and logistical concerns. The mini-arcs (Red Redoubt, Slaves, etc.) this season have proved quite popular, and many people like to play the same character through the storyline. With Tapestry's Toil significantly higher level than this, a little more space between scenarios would make that more manageable.
As for other notes:
-Did anyone have experienced players who realized what happened to the town? When I ran it, the reveal was very much obvious in hindsight, but mysterious up until then. Well done!
-The ice becomes much more manageable with proper gear. One of my parties made a point of picking up a variety of winter gear, including ice skates, which appear to allow for 5 foot steps (assuming the DC 5 Acrobatics check is passed). That, coupled with feather step, ended up helping the party make enough of a hole to let Vargrim get through to Uliyara.
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I always got the idea that they had two teams working in parallel.
"Our team of Irrisen-bound diplomats found out that the Sky Key Piece is in the Hao Jin Tapestry? Send a more seasoned group in to get it. Who knows what could be in there?"
And it's not just 1-5 and 5-9s. There is 3-7, 7-11 links too.
Etc.
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What are Witch-tree seeds. They are mentioned as things the PCs might want to buy in Dalun, but then there is no information about them.
This might help, but other than the implicit fact that they're valuable Irriseni exports, I don't think the details are too important.
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The thing that caused some confusion the first time I ran this was the timing of past events.
The trip from Kalsgard to Whiterook/Dalun is stated as taking 'several weeks', so presumably the journey taken by Uliyara in the opposite direction took a similar duration. Add in the time to recuperate from the ordeal and make contact with the Pathfinder Society (not to mention any time spent waiting for the PCs to arrive), and unless 'several' means 1 or 2, you're looking at a couple of months or so for her whole round trip.
However, when speaking to Halvor, he mentions that the attack on Whiterook took place at (or since) 'the last moon', i.e. at most a month ago.
I don't know what the right answer is here, but be prepared for players to be unintentionally misled if they (understandably) can't get these timings to align. Personally, I just was a bit vaguer about how long ago the attack on Whiterook was when I ran it again.
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Venture-Captain, California—Sacramento
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After the initial diplomacy checks to impress "Halanti(sp?)" on the ship, I don't think the PC rolled under 40 on diplomacy all night long. (Charisma 20, level 5 Scroll Scoundrel with persuasive, max bluff and diplo, Coax information and rhetorical trick, Plus an oracle and two paladins aiding her...)
There was a great moment where they found the masterwork shield, and someone pointed out it could be used as an improvised sled if they had no better use for it. On of the PCs jumped on to demonstrate, and immediately took off down the tunnel further into the complex (which they had not yet gone down (and as a result I had not yet placed that part of the map)
GM: "Okay, give me two acrobatics checks."
PC: "Why two? Okay. 26, and 7"
GM: "Well, you shove off quite gracefully, and careen across the floor into the tunnel, and out the other side, where you see the floor ahead of you end. You try to stop, but you are going too fast..."
Fortunately, he was yanked back at the last moment, largely due to the fact that I miss understood one of the other PCs powers... I was going to have him stopped by rubble, teetering on the edge of the 20 foot drop anyway, but it was funny to watch the players sudden realization of what they had just found. (Their first though by the way was that they had just found out what that part of the sky key did, and were momentarily unsure if they should go on looking for anything that blatently destructive.)
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It is from the player perspective who will now repeat it has a gm.
Because it was the first time someone trap us but don't attack us, the group decided to take long tour. Dalun was still safe.
The dwarf was easy. (tier 4-5) First of all, when we see it, I had a scroll of deadwatch. So we knew that he was an undeath. We buff and our barbarian has rolled critical hit. For precaution, we had put "haldani" in the back.
I will see if a less prepared group than last time will survived this.
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After the initial diplomacy checks to impress "Halanti(sp?)" on the ship, I don't think the PC rolled under 40 on diplomacy all night long. (Charisma 20, level 5 Scroll Scoundrel with persuasive, max bluff and diplo, Coax information and rhetorical trick, Plus an oracle and two paladins aiding her...)
There was a great moment where they found the masterwork shield, and someone pointed out it could be used as an improvised sled if they had no better use for it. On of the PCs jumped on to demonstrate, and immediately took off down the tunnel further into the complex (which they had not yet gone down (and as a result I had not yet placed that part of the map)
GM: "Okay, give me two acrobatics checks."
PC: "Why two? Okay. 26, and 7"
GM: "Well, you shove off quite gracefully, and careen across the floor into the tunnel, and out the other side, where you see the floor ahead of you end. You try to stop, but you are going too fast..."Fortunately, he was yanked back at the last moment, largely due to the fact that I miss understood one of the other PCs powers... I was going to have him stopped by rubble, teetering on the edge of the 20 foot drop anyway, but it was funny to watch the players sudden realization of what they had just found. (Their first though by the way was that they had just found out what that part of the sky key did, and were momentarily unsure if they should go on looking for anything that blatently destructive.)
"Er.. I was the one that decided to go for a sled ride. It did not go well, but was pulled back, and kept going into a wall."
I will say that it was fun, yet funny at the same time. I would have had minimum damage though due to Boots of the Cat.
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RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16, RPG Superstar 2013 Top 16
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I ran this twice recently, both low-tier, once in normal and once in Core.
The paladin was taking the lead at the normal table, and as they approached Whiterook, he was seriously spooked by the bodies of the Jadwiga soldiers. Despite multiple Sense Motive/Heal/Knowledge checks that confirmed the guard's stories about being attacked, he refused to believe that the townspeople were not about to string the party up alongside them.
So the paladin refused to go any further, and declared that they were going back to the boat to continue on. The guard declared that they couldn't leave without speaking to Halvor, 5-foot-stepped back toward the town, and shouted for reinforcements. The party decided to attack, and wiped him out before he could go. When they saw the dozen reinforcements coming, they decided "We can take them," so I went back into narrative mode and explained the negative boon they'd just earned.
I probably should have had the paladin fall for ignoring lawful orders, but I didn't have the heart to add that on top of the negative boon
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I probably should have had the paladin fall for ignoring lawful orders, but I didn't have the heart to add that on top of the negative boon
I was reviewing this thread for running this tonight, to see what kind of ideas people had and this stuck out to me.
Lawful does NOT mean 'obeys local laws blindly'. Please do not punish Paladins sticking to their code and order when it doesn't line up with laws made by a single leader who may or may not be insane, unlawful, or evil.
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RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16, RPG Superstar 2013 Top 16
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I probably should have had the paladin fall for ignoring lawful orders, but I didn't have the heart to add that on top of the negative boonI was reviewing this thread for running this tonight, to see what kind of ideas people had and this stuck out to me.
Lawful does NOT mean 'obeys local laws blindly'. Please do not punish Paladins sticking to their code and order when it doesn't line up with laws made by a single leader who may or may not be insane, unlawful, or evil.
Except I allowed multiple skill checks to demonstrate that the villagers were not murderous, but he still chose to attack the city guard. He convinced the party to literally murder people, rather than submit to a border security check.
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What are Witch-tree seeds. They are mentioned as things the PCs might want to buy in Dalun, but then there is no information about them.This might help, but other than the implicit fact that they're valuable Irriseni exports, I don't think the details are too important.
Yup! This is what they are. I had some description of the types of cuisine, but it didn't make the word-count cuts. Mmm... bark soup!
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The thing that caused some confusion the first time I ran this was the timing of past events.
The trip from Kalsgard to Whiterook/Dalun is stated as taking 'several weeks', so presumably the journey taken by Uliyara in the opposite direction took a similar duration. Add in the time to recuperate from the ordeal and make contact with the Pathfinder Society (not to mention any time spent waiting for the PCs to arrive), and unless 'several' means 1 or 2, you're looking at a couple of months or so for her whole round trip.
However, when speaking to Halvor, he mentions that the attack on Whiterook took place at (or since) 'the last moon', i.e. at most a month ago.
I don't know what the right answer is here, but be prepared for players to be unintentionally misled if they (understandably) can't get these timings to align. Personally, I just was a bit vaguer about how long ago the attack on Whiterook was when I ran it again.
My thinking was that with the very swiftly flowing rivers, traveling up-stream would be slow going while traveling down-stream would be quick swift.
In my head, I was imagining Haltani traveling downstream for 1 week and upstream with the PCs for 2. (super-rough head canon math)
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After the initial diplomacy checks to impress "Halanti(sp?)" on the ship, I don't think the PC rolled under 40 on diplomacy all night long. (Charisma 20, level 5 Scroll Scoundrel with persuasive, max bluff and diplo, Coax information and rhetorical trick, Plus an oracle and two paladins aiding her...)
There was a great moment where they found the masterwork shield, and someone pointed out it could be used as an improvised sled if they had no better use for it. On of the PCs jumped on to demonstrate, and immediately took off down the tunnel further into the complex (which they had not yet gone down (and as a result I had not yet placed that part of the map)
GM: "Okay, give me two acrobatics checks."
PC: "Why two? Okay. 26, and 7"
GM: "Well, you shove off quite gracefully, and careen across the floor into the tunnel, and out the other side, where you see the floor ahead of you end. You try to stop, but you are going too fast..."Fortunately, he was yanked back at the last moment, largely due to the fact that I miss understood one of the other PCs powers... I was going to have him stopped by rubble, teetering on the edge of the 20 foot drop anyway, but it was funny to watch the players sudden realization of what they had just found. (Their first though by the way was that they had just found out what that part of the sky key did, and were momentarily unsure if they should go on looking for anything that blatently destructive.)
"Er.. I was the one that decided to go for a sled ride. It did not go well, but was pulled back, and kept going into a wall."
I will say that it was fun, yet funny at the same time. I would have had minimum damage though due to Boots of the Cat.
This sounds amazing... I kind of love it.
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Played this yesterday. Our group was only 3 PCs. The other two had level 5 melee monsters, so I brought my level 4 debuffer cleric, and we brought Kyra along as a heal stick with legs.
From reading this thread, it's obvious that my GM didn't read this thread. Which is fine, but certain things played out differently than what's described here.
I was playing Green Beard the Pirate, half orc cleric of Besmara, who has +9 profession: sailor at level 4. I rolled high on the net trap, and he didn't have us stopped at all, so we completely missed that whole section of the adventure.
Also, this was Green Beard's first time meeting Calisro Benarry, the female, half orc Venture-Captain who lives on a ship, and now he's madly in love. I had fun playing up my pirate with 7 charisma trying to hit on her... badly.
Also, when the boxed text describe us seeing huts walking around on stilt legs in the distance, two of us went nuts. Green Beard had been saving up his "Pathfinderin' money" to buy his own pirate ship in the future, but now he's thinking of getting one of them walking huts to "go a-piratin' on land". One of the other players agreed - the ability to get one of those huts for prestige as a vanity should definitely have been a scenario reward for this one. Two of us would definitely have done it.
The fights were pretty easy for us. The dwarf did some damage, but Kyra just sat there channel healing the melee types, while they beat the sucker down. She could have channeled for damage to the undead, but we figured we'd let the melee monsters have their fun.
All in all, a good time was had by all. And now that I'm reading this thread and realizing how much I missed, I'm tempted to buy this scenario to read and GM in the future.
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There's a single spot in Nalduk's Point where the PC's are expected to search and find a secret door. If they don't find it they lose out on the loot on the chronicle. As a GM, I do follow this pretty strictly and I've reduced the amount of gold the PC's get. But, I have to admit, I feel a little bit bad about this one since it doesn't seem obvious if/why the PC's might search for this secret cache. I'm curious to know what other GM's think about in regards to this particular area.
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There's a single spot in Nalduk's Point where the PC's are expected to search and find a secret door. If they don't find it they lose out on the loot on the chronicle. As a GM, I do follow this pretty strictly and I've reduced the amount of gold the PC's get. But, I have to admit, I feel a little bit bad about this one since it doesn't seem obvious if/why the PC's might search for this secret cache. I'm curious to know what other GM's think about in regards to this particular area.
The description of C2 includes the arrow slits on either side (though the north is visibly collapsed). Seeing the access path from C5 to the arrow slits should indicate to the party that maybe there's an access point to the north arrow slits as well. If they don't look for it, then yes, I'd say they lose out on that gold.
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There's a single spot in Nalduk's Point where the PC's are expected to search and find a secret door. If they don't find it they lose out on the loot on the chronicle. As a GM, I do follow this pretty strictly and I've reduced the amount of gold the PC's get. But, I have to admit, I feel a little bit bad about this one since it doesn't seem obvious if/why the PC's might search for this secret cache. I'm curious to know what other GM's think about in regards to this particular area.The description of C2 includes the arrow slits on either side (though the north is visibly collapsed). Seeing the access path from C5 to the arrow slits should indicate to the party that maybe there's an access point to the north arrow slits as well. If they don't look for it, then yes, I'd say they lose out on that gold.
The way that I interpreted what was happening behind those arrow slits was that the area was in complete collapse and nothing really was visible through the slits but a lot of rubble. But, yes, I see how that could work in the players favor.
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There's a single spot in Nalduk's Point where the PC's are expected to search and find a secret door. If they don't find it they lose out on the loot on the chronicle. As a GM, I do follow this pretty strictly and I've reduced the amount of gold the PC's get. But, I have to admit, I feel a little bit bad about this one since it doesn't seem obvious if/why the PC's might search for this secret cache. I'm curious to know what other GM's think about in regards to this particular area.The description of C2 includes the arrow slits on either side (though the north is visibly collapsed). Seeing the access path from C5 to the arrow slits should indicate to the party that maybe there's an access point to the north arrow slits as well. If they don't look for it, then yes, I'd say they lose out on that gold.
Exactly this. The arrow slits were supposed to not only give the area verisimilitude, but the intact ones act as a hint that there might be a way into the other side. The armory seemed like the perfect place to stash a little forgotten loot.
EDIT: Clarity.
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This scenario blew my mind when I played it; it was the first PFS scenario I played as actual Society play (as apart from being run as a one-off or stolen for a home-brew). I was amazed at the level of actual choice available to the PCs.
I'm glad you enjoyed it! Player choice and effect on the game world has always been a huge reason tabletop gaming is so fantastic. I find it very important.
Can anyone recommend another one with similar amounts of player agency?
Here are other "sandbox" scenarios, ones with significant player choice, or ones that just feel very open (even if they aren't):
Scenario-Number Title Level-Range
2-01 The Bloodcove Disguise 1-7
3-18 The God's Market Gamble 1-5
3-21 The Temple of Empyreal Enlightenment 1-5
4-09 The Blackros Matrimony 3-7
4-11 The Disappeared 1-5
4-13 Fortress of the Nail 5-9
4-24 The Price of Friendship 5-9
5-01 Glass River Rescue 1-5
5-03 Hellknight's Feast 5-9
5-04 The Stolen Heir 1-5
5-10 Where Mammoths Dare Not Tread 7-11
5-11 Library of the Lion 1-5
5-22 Scars of the Third Crusade 1-5
5-99 The Paths We Choose 3-7 (what you do depends on the factions present)
6-07 Valley of Veiled Flame 5-9
6-09 By Way of Bloodcove 3-7
6-11 The Slave Master's Mirror 3-7
6-22 Out of Anarchy 1-5
6-98 Serpents Rise 7 (Special)
6-99 True Dragons of Absalom 4 (Special)
7-03 The Bronze House Reprisal 5-9
7-12 The Twisted Circle 1-5 (tends to run very long)
7-17 Thralls of the Shattered God 5-9
7-21 The Sun Orchid Scheme 1-5
7-22 Bid for Alabastrine 1-5
That's just the ones I remember from a quick skim of the catalog.
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Just started prepping and woah, pretty damn nice.
Few questions:
1. About Naldak's Point, which meaning of the word "point" are we dealing with here? I'll be running in Finnish so...
2. Does the block of ice give Vargrim cover or total cover? He's got an aura and plenty of PC's favor various detect spells so knowing might come in handy.
3. If worse comes to worst, particularily if Vargrim decides to roll well and the party leaves the ruin a few bodies short, would the Dalun trackers aim to take the PC's alive? It's entirely possible for a party to be reduced to just, say, a wizard and a rogue with no chance of making the Diplomacy check against Kiryena.
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Just started prepping and woah, pretty damn nice.
Few questions:
1. About Naldak's Point, which meaning of the word "point" are we dealing with here? I'll be running in Finnish so...
2. Does the block of ice give Vargrim cover or total cover? He's got an aura and plenty of PC's favor various detect spells so knowing might come in handy.
3. If worse comes to worst, particularily if Vargrim decides to roll well and the party leaves the ruin a few bodies short, would the Dalun trackers aim to take the PC's alive? It's entirely possible for a party to be reduced to just, say, a wizard and a rogue with no chance of making the Diplomacy check against Kiryena.
1. In this case, 'point' is just part of the name - like a coastal city sometimes have it in their name.
2. The ice breaks line of effect, but does not provide cover or concealment.
3. Take 'em alive.