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Hello everybody!
So I’m currently running a heavily modified Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign, and it’s likely we won’t be done with that game for another year at least (currently starting Book Four). But I want to be able to offer my group a choice of several options on what to play next once the CotCT game concludes, assuming that my players do in fact want to play through another AP and not do something else (like run screaming out the door, heheheheh). By my count, that’s 18 possible choices of the next AP to play through, assuming you include Hell’s Vengeance and Strange Aeons in the list (I did say it’d take another year to finish CotCt *at least*).
Now, why I am posting this here instead of General Discussion asking for advice is that I already have some ideas on which APs are at the forefront of my own personal preferences to run. If I had infinite time and resources I’d probably run them all as I’ve found parts of each AP that are intriguing. But since I can only manage about one AP at a time, I think the next AP I would like to run after Curse of the Crimson Throne is Hell’s Rebels (assuming my players can stomach *another* city campaign right after).
Interestingly, before we started Curse of the Crimson Throne we were debating which AP to play, and it came down to Curse of the Crimson Throne and Council of Thieves. Due to Council of Thieves being the very first Pathfinder AP written, it has some known problems and ends at an earlier level than all the other APs, so we ultimately went with Curse of the Crimson Throne.
But as I was thinking about running Hell’s Rebels, I had an idea. Hell’s Rebels is the latest Pathfinder AP, a city-focused AP set in Cheliax focused on rebelling against House Thrune (or a member of House Thrune anyway). Council of Thieves is the first Pathfinder AP, a city-focused AP set in Cheliax that appears it will be about rebelling against House Thrune but pulls a bait-and-switch to substitute in the titular Council of Thieves. Do you see the resemblance? They are similar but different, not parallel stories but ones that could fit together, like two sides of one coin.
And so I welcome you to my latest deranged project, a mash-up of Hell’s Rebels and Council of Thieves. I welcome you to – HELL’S THIEVES! confetti geysers Here-in you will find my attempts to splice together these two APs – it should go without saying that there will be HEAVY spoilers for both Hell’s Rebels and Council of Thieves. Possibly also Hell’s Vengeance as well if I decide to shoehorn in some elements from there as well, like the Glorious Reclamation (like suggested in another thread on these boards – what can I say, I really like our plucky heroes having to stab their Glorious Reclamation allies in the back, else Cheliax crush them right alongside the Reclamation). Likewise, this is nowhere near a step-by-step accounting of the spliced AP – for one thing, I only have up to Book 4 of Hell’s Rebels at the moment (short on cash), so I can only speculate as to the details they hold. I also only have PDFs for Book 1 and 2 of Council of Thieves at present (I did say I lacked infinite resources after all) but I have read many threads in the Council of Thieves forum so I at least have a general gist of how the remaining books go.
As a result, expect this to be more of a stream-of-consciousness series of posts as I come up with various ideas to support a joint AP. You are welcome to provide commentary, suggestions, and/or just call me plain crazy, as some of my ideas probably will be rather out there. As with the write-up for my Curse of the Crimson Throne alterations, if you see anything you like, feel free to hijack it for your own Hell’s Rebels/Council of Thieves’ game!
Now then, let’s get started talking about how we can ram these two APs together like children with action figures, shall we?
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So first off, some discussion of how this game would work.
Given that we have twice as much material to work with for our hypothetical Hell’s Thieves AP, I am planning on using the Slow XP track – nothing new there, as I’m already using that for the Curse of the Crimson Throne game. That should give around 30% or so more XP to play around with each level, and I can cut out some of the filler encounters in each AP to also trim things down. Further adjustments to XP can be made as necessary, whether slashing XP rewards even more or simply dealing with the party being ahead by a level or two now and then. I would also probably try to shoehorn in a bunch of my own custom-made content.
Council of Thieves tends to end around 13th level, as does Book 4 of Hell’s Rebels. So barring custom content or pumping up the levels involved, the Council of Thieves portion of Hell’s Thieves will end around the same time as Book 4 of Hell’s Rebels, leaving Book 5 and Book 6 of Hell’s Rebels alone to use in finishing the AP up. That’s fine, as at the conclusion of both those plot lines (CoT 1-6 & HR 1-4), the heroes are largely in control of the city. It does mean that the content for our joint AP is rather front-loaded, unfortunately, which is when PCs tend to level up the fastest (as no one wants to hang around at level 1 any longer than necessary, it seems.)
One idea I had for that involves implementing a “level 0” for the PCs at the start of the game. Basically each PC would start the game with 1 level in an NPC class – this would be essentially a “free” level, and at 1,000 XP or so they would gain level 1 in a PC class, and level-up as normal from there (keeping whatever the NPC class gave them as a “bonus” without it impacting APL). There would need to be some sort of incentive for the PC to be a Commoner rather than a Noble, however – perhaps a few extra starting attribute build points?
This also effectively doubles the amount of time the PCs spend at level 1, which of course has the negative that their characters could just flat out die before hitting the real level 2. On the other hand . . . there is a game system out there called “Dungeon Crawl Classics”, which has a very interesting mechanic for generating characters. The first session of the game is spent playing through what is called a “character funnel” – each player controls 2-4 down on their luck 0-level commoners who decide to risk their lives at would-be heroism. Most of them die in the process – horrifically – but at the end ideally each player has at least one character from this swarm survive – that PC then gets promoted to an actual character class for future game sessions.
I am of a mind to do something similar here, with each player making let us say 4 of these simple 0-level NPC class characters. To keep things relatively sane and balanced, each player only controls one of these 4 at a time – that’s their character they’re controlling and is in the “spotlight”. The others are nearby, but standing just off-screen – and as our would-be PCs move through the initial couple of encounters of the AP, and some of them inevitably die, one of those off-screen personas comes rushing in to fill the void.
By the time the PCs establish the Silver Ravens, they should have sufficient XP to hit level 1, which I think would be an appropriately suitable moment for them to become “real” heroes, as they move from frustrated citizens of Cheliax to people who can actually do something about it. Any left-over 0-levels could perhaps become the Silver Ravens first supporters, and act as reserve characters a player can take over should their newly minted level 1s do what level 1s do best – eat a crit and die.
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Location, location, location – where an adventure takes place is of critical importance, and by splicing two separate city APs together we have a fairly obvious problem – the action is taking place in two distinct cities! Two cities, in fact, on roughly opposite ends of Cheliax, with Kintargo off in the northwest corner and Westcrown should perhaps have been named Southcrown, given its below Egorian near the southern border of Cheliax.
Since most of the blending between the two APs takes place at the beginning of the game, I can’t really have a scene shift where the PCs liberate Kintargo and then move on to Westcrown afterwards. The players don’t have personal access to teleportation magic until level 9 or so either, so jumping back and forth between the two cities is beyond their own power for most of the level range. There’s also the issue of Westcrown being liberated by the Glorious Reclamation during Hell’s Rebels/Vengeance, but that could be easily handwaved away, especially at the beginning of the game (Westcrown is simply not liberated - yet).
I could do something like introduce an ancient teleport circle connecting Kintargo and Westcrown that is found in an abandoned rebel base very early on in the campaign. That would let the party hop back and forth between the two cities as desired, although convincing them to be concerned about the events in another city on the opposite side of Cheliax might be difficult. You also have an issue of flip-flopping and splitting the focus of the story – does the action in one city simply freeze at some point, mandating that the party has to go to the other city to continue? What happens when they find a plot point that they latch onto to the detriment of all else, as players are wont to do?
And finally and perhaps most importantly . . . what would be the point of doing this? If you just have two disparate stories running side-by-side, one in each city, why don’t you just run the two APs separately? Why bother creating Hell’s Thieves if it’s just Hell’s Rebels and Council of Thieves shoved together under one campaign, the books from each leafed together to create a confusing back-and-forth leapfrogging of two separate stories?
So . . . there needs to be one city, one joint plotline that threads elements from each AP together to support the new joint story rather than two stories where the PCs leap back and forth through. I tend to play extremely fast and loose with my campaign’s version of Golarion – I am definitely not a strictler for adhering to Paizo’s vision for the world. So my solution is to just say “f$%# it!” and mash the two cities together like I’m mashing the two APs together.
There’s a couple methods by which this could be done. One is to simply replace any mention of “Westcrown” with “Kintargo” – since Book 5 and 6 of Hell’s Rebels focus on keeping the city and surrounding region out of Thrune’s hands, it seems logical that we should keep the action focused on that northwest region of Cheliax. Another method is to have them be twin sister cities divided by a river – essentially how Gotham & Metropolis are supposedly right next to each other for the upcoming Batman vs. Superman movie. The final method is similar to the first in that you splice the two cities together – the older name for the city is Westcrown, but the one trendy neighborhood that did well during Westcrown’s decline was called Kintargo, and eventually it grew out into a rose of a city on its own from the corpse of Westcrown. Westcrown is dead, long live Kintargo. A final option is to simply pull out a few threads from Westcrown – various noble families and characters, for example – and cram them into Kintargo somewhere, and just let the rest rot in Westcrown off-screen of the AP itself.
There’s definitely issues with any sort of combination between the two cities – they are definitely two very different cities with different demographics, layout, history, and problems. They do both seem to be coastal cities though, so at least they have that in common. And worship of a number of other gods *not* Asmodeus is also practiced in both. So . . . it could potentially work, but obviously it’s going to require modifying/throwing out the city maps and starting over, and thinking carefully about the impacts of each city’s history – Westcrown being the former capital of Cheliax being the first and most obvious issue.
It’s a lot of fine detail work here, and is not something that can just be hacked together (and you would obviously need player buy-in for them to go along with this version of Golarion having a rather screwy Westcrown/Kintargo abomination sitting in Cheliax rather than two separate cities). I’ll need to think through some more of the implications of this, but I think having the city combined in some manner is essential for combining the two APs into one.
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And now we come to the part that I *really* want to talk about, and that motivated this entire effort really – the AP’s villains. Everybody loves a good villain, and we’ve certainly got a good one with Barzillai Thrune. Eccardian is a bit more hit and miss, but like most Paizo AP villains he suffers a lot from his “last minute introduction” – sure his actions are directly linked to most of Westcrown’s woes, but the players probably never meet or interact with him very much outside of the last book or two of the entire AP. This doesn’t give him a lot of time to build-up in the player’s minds nor actually develop any real kind of bond with them at all beyond “this is the last guy we gotta kill before we win and the credits roll”.
Ilnerik also probably deserves a mention here as well, as he is also directly responsible for a lot of Westcrown’s woes, perhaps even more so than Eccardian given how long the Shadowcurse has been eating Westcrown’s nightlife. And yet he’s still relegated to underling status to Eccardian, and in fact the final battle with him even gets pushed back after all the build-up in Book Three’s Delvehaven by the Infernal Syndrome’s pit fiend reactor meltdown fiasco.
Now, one might say that you will really detract from Barzillai (who is an excellent villain and doesn’t need anyone to either prop him up nor risk stealing some of his thunder) if you have other big-name villains sharing the spotlight with him. However, I would argue that there is plenty of narrative space to have other major bad guy players in Kintargocrown, especially if you’re running a slower and more expansive game.
The way I see it, Hell’s Thieves focuses on three major threats to the city that are distinct from each other but also very much interrelated with each other. Those threats are Barzillai’s Eventual Apotheosis (and his general misrule until he gets to be a giant living piece of land), expansion from Nidal while Cheliax’s back is turned, and Hellish Politics – we have Mephistopheles helping Barzillai with his ritual for his own reasons, and Mammon making a bid on the city through his “son” Eccardian. Now they could both remain arch devils to play up the hellish politics and backstabbing, although I’ve been debating replacing Mammon with some sort of demon lord to bring demons into the mix and sort of provide a “CE comes in to thrive on the chaos of revolution” theme.
Anyway, with this dynamic you have a three-pronged threat to Kintargo that our heroes have to deal with, each headed up by one of the major villains – Barzillai for himself, Eccardian for Mammon/Demon Lord, and Ilnerik representing Nidal’s interest in discretely annexing the region. As a result of this, Barzillai remains largely unchanged although Ilnerik and Eccardian are reworked, Eccardian probably most of all.
Ilnerik starts the AP as Ambassador Ilnerik, Nidal’s latest chief representative in Kintargo and enjoying the benefits of diplomatic immunity by day and slowly spreading his Shadowcurse over the city to pave the way for a Nidal invasion by night. Presumably he strikes some sort of deal with Barzillai where they agree to work towards their mutual best interests (hence all the Zon-Kuthites the party keeps running into around the Asmodeans), but secretly they’re each planning on stabbing the other in the back when it becomes most convenient. For added fun, instead of making Ilnerik a member of the Pathfinders, I’m thinking of making him a former member of the original Silver Ravens, who got put down in the twilight hours of their failed rebellion and was resurrected as a vampire, fleeing to Nidal until he grew stronger and everybody forgot he ever existed (you can thank Thrune’s endless redactions for that!)
Eccardian, on the other hand, is a steadily darkening mirror of the Silver Ravens. Instead of enacting all of his plans to overthrow his jerk racist grandfather, everything he does is aimed at facilitating Barzillai’s downfall. But, unlike our heroes the PCs, Eccardian is willing to cross any line to accomplish his goal, and becomes increasingly corrupted by his fiendish bloodline. In a particularly nasty twist, I’m even considered replacing Rexus with Eccardian – a close friend and ally of the PCs who starts out noble and idealistic, but steadily becomes worn down by the revolution’s bloody cost until he is willing to make desperate pacts because he believes the rebellion against Barzillai can’t succeed otherwise, and he is willing to break away from the Silver Ravens and turn on them if that’s what it takes to oust Barzillai.
And there’s one other, fourth villain that I think really should get some screen time here in an AP about rebelling against House Thrune: Abrogail Thrune herself. As usual, Paizo is very conservative with introducing anything that could risk fundamentally changing their campaign world, such as toppling their entire big bad evil empire (although it’s certainly an empire in decline by all standards). As a business it makes perfect sense not to go and upset the campaign world apple cart by the end of every AP – you wouldn’t have much of a campaign world left if half of it got razed every six months. As a random insane DM though, I don’t give any f&$*s about that s@%@ – I’ll burn the whole campaign world if I feel like it, and *if* by some miracle we end up playing through another AP afterwards I’ll just wave my hand and conjure up a fresh new Golarion if I have to, as if nothing from the last AP ever happened. And if my players don’t like it, well . . . I can always find new ones. :-p
Anyway, so yeah, this AP is all about opposing House Thrune, yet I don’t believe the PCs ever meet the Queen B$#&$ of Cheliax or even hear a peep out of her aside from her negotiator near the end of Hell’s Rebels. In Hell’s Thieves, that’s going to change somehow – not sure of the exact details just yet, but I have a few ideas floating around in my head about giving Queen Abrogail herself an opportunity to meet these impudent upstarts face-to-face (And Power Word: Kill the lot of them if they do something stupid like try to assassinate her on the spot with zero preparation, research, or planning). Possibly even have her sic them on Barzillai or the Glorious Reclamation with her clandestine approval – if they don’t want to watch their precious city burn, ancient diabolic contract be damned!
So that’s what I have written up right now, just some rough and crazy ideas. As I have time and think of them, I will try to post most stuff here, although it may be more stream-of-conscious planning than anything organized to exact detail. But since I have plenty of time before Curse of the Crimson Throne wraps up, I figure I might as well get started laying out the groundwork for this newest s!$* show of mine now. Hope you enjoyed reading, and are not in fact, currently clawing your eyes out while muttering “why . . . why . . . why would anyone DO that!?”
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I like it. I think adding CoT as a very strong side story to Hell's Rebels is an interesting idea.
I'm not sure I see Eccardian as a good ally-turned-enemy. I played in the second half of a CoT campaign and honestly didn't really know what was going on a lot of the time. The one thing that stood out to me was how Eccardian betrayed his sister. It made him irredeemable and made her prime material for redemption. If he did start out as an ally, you'd have to find something to do with her that made sense and kept her important in his life.
Also, I'd call it Council of Rebels. ;-)
I also like the idea of Council of Rebels (and yes, DO Easter-Egg in some Star Wars references).
I wouldn't be so quick to throw out the idea of keeping Westcrown(*) and Kintargo as separate cities. Having the PCs go between them could be a very important part of setting up a revolution against Thrune, with the Glorious Reclamation secretly working with the Silver Ravens. If course, it could start out a bit chaotic (despite the Glorious Reclamation's wishes -- my thoughts are that their forward agents are casing the situation in Westcrown, and realize that they are going to have to have somebody stir up trouble somewhere else in Cheliax as a diversion, even if it doesn't gain them a foothold. Now, Paladins normally wouldn't think that way, but one of their forward agents is a bit unorthodox and suggests the free-thinking city of Kintargo, and -- being not in the best of favor with some of the Glorious Reclamation leadership -- gets "volunteered" to make the connection when the forward agents discover a Permanent Teleportation Circle to Kintargo in the ruins of one of the Wiscrani noble houses (that had their own Kintargo connection) destroyed during the Chelish Civil War, in one of the more ruined than average parts of Westcrown. The Glorious Reclamation needs the PCs to help them set up Westcrown for liberation while making it look innocuous, but also needs them to stir up Westcrown enough to honk off Thrune just enough to get them to waste attention and resources there but not destroying it. The Kintargo Contract could even become something that the Glorious Reclamation tacitly approves as long as the PCs can find loopholes to worm their way out of the separate peace with Thrune, conditional on Thrune doing something that they don't expect to do until after crushing all rebellion, but that the Glorious Reclamation can force their hand to. Of course, for all this to work, nobody in Thrue must be able to obtain proof that anyone in Kintargo is working with the Glorious Reclamation -- perfect for Ultimate Intrigue! (Of course, Thrune is almost certainly going to suspect it anyway, but if they can never get proof, they may be willing to sign a contract that they are sure gives them the upper hand, just to get the thorn out of their back.) (Of course #2: The pair of Teleportation circles ABSOLUTELY HAS TO BE KEPT SECRET, and the PCs have to quest for alternate means of transport between the 2 cities in case they have to destroy the Teleportation Circles to maintain secrecy -- in fact, they and their Glorious Reclamation liaison should strongly suspect that this will be necessary eventually, and so they should be actively seeking to prepare for this beforehand.)
(*)I dont have documentary proof, but I think Westcrown got its name from becoming the new capital of Cheliax when Cheliax seceded from Taldor, since Westcrown is WAY west of Oppara; its position relative to Egorian was not relevant at the time.
I have also wondered about the Demonic involvement aspect, inspired by recent events on Earth, and wondering what goes wrong in Hell's Vengeance if the (Evil) PCs in that fail at their mission. Maybe when Thrune says that they are keeping the lid on something even worse, they are speaking more truthfully than they think, and when the Glorious reclamation breaks their absolute hold on power in parts of Cheliax, the Demonic State in Isger and Cheliax arises and hijacks the revolution, featuring -- among other things -- a lot of cultists who got radicalized in Mendev and the Worldwound. Bonus points if these cultists had a diaspora when some big fancy heroes up north managed to close the Worldwound . . . Until it popped back open again about 6 months(*) after they got their divine ascensions and left for other Planes.
(*)Hence the Crusades/Crusaders references in Iron Gods Book 2. If you REALLY want to get crazy, have some of the Demonic Cultist diaspora bring Numerian technology with them.
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Eliandra Giltessan - I like that name too! Particularly since I had been debating having several rebel groups beyond the Silver Ravens bouncing around as potential allies or rivals - the Council of Thieves that our new "wannabe rebel" Eccardian starts up (that may be a new organization in and of itself rather than a fully formed secret society - although having Eccardian somehow get in charge of an intact Council that slowly corrupts him by whispering in his ear could also work), and of course the Children of Westcrown - which since there are mentions in the Hell's Rebels player's guide that the Silver Ravens are still operating (when in fact they haven't been for years - oops!), you could patch over that by making the Children of Westcrown the Silver Ravens! Still just as hopelessly out of their depth, but at least they've resurrected the name for the PCs to take over.
As for Eccardian, that's sort of the point. By making him an immediate ally of the PCs early on, they get to interact with him a lot, and assuming they like him (this is always unpredictable), they'll be willing to tolerate his early warning signs of going off the deep end without murderhoboing him. Until, of course, we get to the end of his plot arc around Book 4, where he attempts to use his sister as a sacrifice to unleash a devil/demon army upon Kintargo in a last-ditch attempt to kill Barzillai, consequences be (literally) damned. By that point, Eccardian will have crossed lines that you *don't* come back from. I was even planning on having him throw it in the PCs faces during their final fight - "I was willing to sacrifice my own beloved sister to stop Barzillai. What price are YOU willing to pay?"
Of course, particularly diplomatic PCs might be able to talk Eccardian down from this somehow, at some point. I think the common (and justified!) reaction to him trying to human sacrifice his sister and unleash an invasion of their city by outsiders is going to be to murderhobo the s@!! out of Eccardian, but you could have some interesting roleplaying going on there if they're willing to forgive him even for the unforgivable and talk him down from the very precipice of that final ledge into damnation. But I'm pretty sure 99% of the time it's going to be "alright, finally! Time to die Eccardian!"
As for Chammady, I'm not entirely sure what to do with her yet. I don't want to make her just the tagalong damsel-in-distress, but like Eccardian she also needs a fairly heavy rework from femme fatale that serves as Eccardian's assassin, confidant, and public face. An intriguing twist would be to make Chammady start off as the lost one, a would-be rebel who's gone off the rails and has to be coaxed back by the PCs with Eccardian's help - only for Eccardian himself to go over the edge a couple Books later.
Actually, I really like that idea now that I think about it. Maybe make Chammady the leader of the Bastards of Erebus or something, an opponent that the PCs deal with relatively early on so that they can make friends with Chammady afterwards over the rest of the AP. If you keep her out of sight or an enemy for too long, it's obviously going to spoil the whole "Eccardian has gone too far this time!" if the PCs react to Chammady's potential fate with a resounding "Meh. If Eccardian had told me what he was doing, I'd help hold her down while he slit her throat!" Having her be in charge of the Bastards could be cute because you have the whole Book 1 of the combined AP be Eccardian whining about his whole family being dead and he misses his sister, and then just before the PCs invade the Bastards' base say something along the lines of "Alright, these people are animals. We've got to kill every last one of them. No Mercy! . . . SIS!!?? WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE!?" (Chammady, obviously, having believed that Eccardian was dead as well from the Night of Ashes, and going and joining some wannabe rebel group - the Bastards - out of spite.
UnArcaneElection - It could work. I do like the teleportation circles idea. The problem is I would be worried about the focus of the game drifting too much with two cities to worry about, and without Eccardian and his Council of Thieves to go around stirring up s&++ in Westcrown (because he's hanging out with the PCs) there's not a lot of bad guys for the PCs to rail against there. With, of course, the exception of House Thrune, so maybe that *is* a way to play up the wider aspect of the revolution and drag House Thrune itself more into the spotlight. It would also make contact with the Glorious Reclamation a lot easier, especially once they've seized control of Westcrown. I also really like the idea of the Silver Ravens and the Glorious Reclamation seeing each other as a distraction for them, and squabbling over who gets "top billing" on Thrune's hit list.
As for the Demonic State of Isger, that's basically the initial seed of my idea for Eccardian. Basically, during the Chelish Civil War, Thrune was fighting off all contenders for control of Cheliax. One of the last ones they crushed were the Silver Ravens, but there was also a cabal of demon worshippers who wanted Cheliax to become a second Worldwound (or at least a demon vacation spot). Most of those that didn't get killed fled to Isger, but a few remained in Cheliax and went underground. Such as the Drovege family, and in an attempt to revive their plot Eccardian's father makes his deal with (insert demon lord here - admittedly I still like Mammon the arch devil due to him being a genus loci, foreshadowing Barzillai's own goal to become one, and the "devils infighting". *Shrug* maybe it's a situation like Graz'zt where he started out a devil but become a demon?) Anyway, their pact was for Eccardian to be born and then used as a ritual component to open a gateway to allow the demonic armies to pour out into the middle of Cheliax, and perhaps we have Daddly Drovege show up at some point to cause trouble (since I don't think he *ever* makes an appearance in CoT).
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I don't care for it, Hell's Rebels is such a strong AP, with an already tight focus, what's the point in watering it down.
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The point is that I enjoying tinkering with things and tweaking them to make them my own. Okay, scratch that, it's a thing with me that I can't resist leaving well enough alone and tend to use the AP as-written as simply a baseline from which to design my own game.
The end result is that the game I'm running has some resemblance to the original AP, but pieces are often switched around, changed in some way, and combined with ideas from elsewhere outside the AP. It's not much different from someone deciding to include a particular module in the flow of the AP because they like said module, think it fits well with the AP, their players need gold/XP somehow despite APs generally giving players exactly as much as they need, or whatever other reason. What I do is simply a more extreme version of that.
And for Hell's Rebels and Council of Thieves, I think that they compliment each other and so into the blender they both go. As a result Council of Rebels is not really a Hell's Rebels game anymore, it's more some weird AP that I've made up in my head. But there's not really a forum for "weird AP mash-ups that shouldn't exist", so here it is in the Hell's Rebels forum.
Furthermore, this new AP that I'm vomiting up is still basically Hell's Rebels, just with various pieces bolted and surgically grafted on. I agree that Hell's Rebels is a well-put together story with a reasonably focused story - that's why I'm using it as the skeletal frame with pieces of Council of Thieves and such, and not Council of Thieves with pieces of Hell's Rebels thrown in.
As far as watering the story down goes, I would argue that I am simply expanding upon other themes that are present but that Paizo chose not to focus on - particularly the darker side of revolution. I do only have up through Book Four so maybe it's present in Book Five and I'm simply wrong, but I didn't really see anyone trying to hijack the Silver Raven's message of revolution for their own ends, or questionable decisions that the Silver Ravens have to make (such as allying with Vyre) coming back to bite them once the uniting goal of overthrowing Barzillai is accomplished in Book Four. Like I said, maybe some of Book Five does focus on that, I don't know right now as I haven't seen a lot of discussion about it and I don't have the book. But I think there is room in the story to cover that as a side issue, and it's no more or less a distraction than the Grey Spiders subplot.
So, since Council of Thieves is an AP also set in Cheliax, is a city campaign, and also presents the illusion of revolting against House Thrune, it felt to me like a natural source of inspiration to draw from, and one that was similar enough in theme that Hell's Rebels could remain relatively intact with these expansions/additions. (As opposed to using, say, material from the Serpent's Skull AP - although thinking about it now I can come up with at least a half-ass idea for that mash-up).
So, if I wanted to just go completely off the rails, I could rip pieces off of both Hell's Rebels and Serpent's Skull, maybe a little bit of early Mummy's Mask for some tomb delving in the desert, rip-off Raiders of the Lost Ark completely, and have Barzillai go looking for his apotheosis in the lost city of Savith-Yi. Cue the players getting involved in a race against Barzillai and his army of facists, until they get to Savith-Yi and unleash disaster by waking up Ysderius. End battle is Barzillai's head on top of Ysderius's body in the middle of Egorian just for laughs, roll credits. I'd probably call it Rebel Snake or something ridiculous to suit the premise, but there you go, a new AP made of mashed up parts of Hell's Rebels and Serpent's Skull.
Which isn't really my aim here - the goal is to take the base-level plot of Hell's Rebels, revolting against Thrune, and expanding it to be about more than just some plucky heroes standing up to Barzillai Thrune (with the threat of back-up from the rest of House Thrune) and eventually winning. Perhaps the expansion makes the story better, perhaps it waters down the focus of the story and makes it worse, I don't really know (yet) and in the end it's all a matter of taste anyway. But it is different from the Hell's Rebels AP as-written, and as I started this post with, making things different to satisfy my particular DM neurosis is pretty much what I do when I run an AP. *shrug* Your own mileage may vary.
Well, now that you've explained your idea more, I in turn have a bettet idea than what I was proposing to conect Kintargo with Westcrown, although admittedly it still involves a Teleportation Circle discovered by Glorious Reclamation agents (and some NOT discovered by them) -- but much of the dependence upon the Teleportation Circle is moved into the past. Specifically, the AP events of Council of Thieves have already happened . . . But the deal is that the band of heroes who attempted to stabilize Westcrown in 4709 - 4720 failed in their mission, and Westcrown itself is now ALL a post-apocalyptic wasteland, instead of just part of it. Several noble families and several other people and organizations in Westcrown saw things going sour, and made a break for Kintargo -- by various means, but with the noble families (including House Drovenge and the upper echelons of its associated Council of Thieves) favoring Teleportation Circles, while those lacking Kintargo connections either had to make a deal with those who had such connections (if they indeed wanted to go there) or get there the hard way -- which was quite a hard way due to a containment cordon set up around Westcrown in its last few weeks by House Thrune. By AR 4815, at the start of Hell's Rebels Council of Rebels, the more successfully fleeing nobles have successfully set up a new city, named New Westcrown, as a suburb of Kintargo. Although it was intentionally built in the image of Westcrown (in miniature), it falls under the same jurisdiction as Kintargo, with unfortunate results when Barzillai Thrune arrives (and with some people suspecting, perhaps with some justification, that this sudden addition to Kintargo actually stimulated this action by House Thrune). In addition, New Westcrown's imitation of original Westcrown was more thorough than some would have liked, for, as noted above, along with House Drovenge came the Council of Thieves and assorted other villains, who wasted no time in imposing their image upon New Westcrown and its more idealistic neighbor. And they weren't the only evil things to follow the noble houses to Kintargo -- although the Teleportation Circles were supposed to be deactivated after the escape was complete, some (including that of House Drovenge) weren't, and some of the evil things plaguing the original Westcrown have followed them to New Westcrown . . . Including some things smart enough to know not to attack the owner of the Teleportation Circle and risk having it deactivated, but to do their evil elsewhere . . . And so in New Westcrown, a New Plague of Shadows has begun . . .
The actions of the previous heroes of Westcrown, although ultimately unsuccessful, were not entirely without effect. Before they went down, they managed to put a temporary stop to Eccardian's plan to sacrifice his sister Chammady, early enough that he was able to come up with plausible denial of his intentions towards her, thereby giving him a chance to restart his plans in the new city. But in the meantime, his patron was changed out from under him -- Mammon has sold the option on his soul to Areshkagal, the Demon Lord of Greed. Mammon's purpose in this was threefold: By putting a Demonic thorn into the side of Cheliax at the time of the closing of the Worldwound (in early AR 4714), he could distract Chelish do-gooders freed up from the Fifth Crusade with a familiar threat long enough for the Worldwound to be popped open again, whereas otherwise they might turn their eyes on the de facto Infernal Worldwound of Cheliax; the nearby Demonic threat would galvanize the Chelish people to support their Infernal overlords; and House Thrune -- which was starting to get sloppy -- would be forced to improve its own discipline. Of course, the flaw in his plan was that the do-gooders freed up from Mendev, namely the Glorious Reclamation, DIDN'T abandon their new goal of freeing Cheliax from Infernal oppression, even as they scope out the Westcrown Wasteland for setting up their base . . . And even with the reopening of the Worldwound in late AR 4714 and the resumption of fighting in the vicinity of Mendev, the newly relocated Demons are all too happy to give Mammon, Asmodeus, and their pet nation a BAD case of blowback . . . .