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Am I missing something, or is there no incorporation of the Doll-maker story in the AP? I got the other books because my group is about to start part three of In Search of Sanity, and there are new stories with the initials ~LW but no connections that I can find. I really love the stories and want to incorporate them, but before I make a huge spoiler for the players I want to make sure I'm not missing something.
The individual stories in the Pathfinder Journal are thematically linked to the adventures, but they don't interweave with the adventures at all. However, the sketches and notes in the inside front and back covers as the introduction text before the start of the fiction pieces are all "penned" by the same person (fictionally and in real life). You could use them as handouts that could end up being a creepy way that the PCs discover that someone else has either been on their same path or someone is tracing their path in the future. Again, it's nothing concrete, but it could be a fun element to distract and unnerve.
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What are the symbols on the foreheads of the Apostles in Orpiment and Zandalus supposed to be? A couple spots in the book (B13, F3) describe them as "flame-shaped", and the close-up portrait of Zandalus on p.5 seems to agree with that. I was wondering if Zandalus just plucked that symbol out of thin air, or does it have some deeper significance?
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What are the symbols on the foreheads of the Apostles in Orpiment and Zandalus supposed to be? A couple spots in the book (B13, F3) describe them as "flame-shaped", and the close-up portrait of Zandalus on p.5 seems to agree with that. I was wondering if Zandalus just plucked that symbol out of thin air, or does it have some deeper significance?
I believe it's meant to be an interpretation of the Yellow Sign or Elder Sign, without shoving it right in the player's faces. (The cult wears yellow and all bear a yellow icon on their foreheads.) I had a player specifically ask what shape it was in, the first time it was mentioned, so I made sure play it off as "perhaps inspired by, but definitely NOT whatever this 'Yellow Sign' is you're referring to".
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Hey all - long time lurker, first time poster. I just bought and read the In Search of Sanity .pdf and I'm preparing to run this in the next few months on PbP. I know I'm late to the party here but I wanted to extend some words of thanks to the community.
First, to all of you who have contributed to this and other threads, thank you. Your observations, insights, and suggestions are always brilliant and I'm looking forward to incorporating a lot of what has been written here into my own game.
Second, to Adam and the other developers - wow! I've been gaming for a long time and this was far and away the most interesting and compelling story that I've read. I'm a big fan of the Lovecraftian Mythos and I'm pleased that it's become part of the Pathfinder system. Bravo! Be sure to tell the people that pay you that I just bought a subscription to the Adventure Path solely on the strength of your work. Then go ask for a raise!
Starting to read this to prepare, as we'll finish Iron Gods in a month or so.
Maybe I'm missing something, but... Do the players have their armor in the cell?
If so, why? They are supposed to be patients of the assylum, aren't they? Shouldn't they be removed of any armor?
They have no armor in their cell. Non-magical non-expensive equipment is heaped like garbage near the furnace. Magical or expensive gear is in sacks by the door.
So the 1d4 items each player keeps, is only in the dream, right? In the cell, they only have their clothes, isn't it?
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What are the symbols on the foreheads of the Apostles in Orpiment and Zandalus supposed to be? A couple spots in the book (B13, F3) describe them as "flame-shaped", and the close-up portrait of Zandalus on p.5 seems to agree with that. I was wondering if Zandalus just plucked that symbol out of thin air, or does it have some deeper significance?I believe it's meant to be an interpretation of the Yellow Sign or Elder Sign, without shoving it right in the player's faces. (The cult wears yellow and all bear a yellow icon on their foreheads.) I had a player specifically ask what shape it was in, the first time it was mentioned, so I made sure play it off as "perhaps inspired by, but definitely NOT whatever this 'Yellow Sign' is you're referring to".
Except that it looks nothing at all like the Yellow Sign (at least in the picture of Zandalus I mentioned), which is why I asked.
So the 1d4 items each player keeps, is only in the dream, right? In the cell, they only have their clothes, isn't it?Bonus points is if you have too many players, have some wake up in the furnace. Preferably crammed in an uncomfortable position and having to escape in the dark while the battle is going on outside.
Maybe a little haunt that makes the ignition fire light if they don't get the hint.
We are going to be 5, I think, so I'll put all of them in the cell.
I'm hoping they think about using Aid Another to help the grappler to keep the Doppleganger pinned so they can beat her and I don't have to use the fail safe of the keys falling and then the Doctor fleeing. Even if I understand why it's there (the unconventional way to start), it sounds too much scripted for my players' tastes. Maybe I'd make the tortured patient to shout them "gang her!" or "pile up!"
My plan is that the initial kick make the doppleganger kneel (so -2 AC vs Melee) and give the PC a surprise round (which strips her +1 DEX bonus and +1 dodge bonus as well), which makes for a CMD 16 Let's see if that's enough to start the grapple. With a not so bad roll, they should be able to grab her (I expect about +3 str the stronger one, and a couple of Aid Another)
I'm pretty sure the players will try something totally unpredictable, tho. They are players, and that's what players do.
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Except that it looks nothing at all like the Yellow Sign (at least in the picture of Zandalus I mentioned), which is why I asked.
Perhaps its a symbol of a yellow crown, similar to some imagery of the King in Yellow. Ulver is described as being powerfully clairvoyant, in his ability to illustrate both the Star Stela and distant Carcosa, so it's feasible that he may have glimpsed the King in Yellow directly or any of his symbolism at any point after his initial exposure in Katheer. The symbol, a curved, four-pointed "flame" (as depicted in his character illustration) could even be symbolic of his nightmarish tormentor, the Tatterman, and its sickly claw.
I think it may be as simple as artistic licensing of the artist, like how the Yellow Sign didn't have a defined glyph until designed for Call of Cthulhu. I don't really think it has any deeper significance, unfortunately, but now I'm in too deep to ignore it.
Perhaps that Chambers never fully described the specifics of the Yellow Sign's shape has spared the PCs from witnessing it firsthand.
Are there windows in the assylum? Looking at the map, it seems only c4 and d6 have windows. If not, how is it lightened?
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Are there windows in the assylum? Looking at the map, it seems only c4 and d6 have windows. If not, how is it lightened?
The map itself and the asylum features on page 6 are a bit confusing, honestly. I believe only the rooms that specifically mention having windows would have them. Briarstone may have just been a dimly lit place in some areas.
However, here are where windows are specifically mentioned in the asylum's text:
B5 Chapel - "the Briarstone chapel is consecrated to Pharasma, as suggested by a prominent statue of the goddess standing before the sanctuary’s westernmost wall and depicted on the spiral stained glass windows", "all barred"
C1 Admission - "lofty windows, gridded by bars"
C4 Vistior's Room - "large windows"
C14 Administrator Losandro's Office - "cathedral-like windows"
D2c Patient Room - "the window is broken"
D4 East Ward Hallway - "high windows"
D6 Dayroom - "vast glass windows", "bay windows to the east", "windowlike serving hatch (to room D10)"
D10 Nurse Station - (references the same serving hatch window to D6)
E10 Tower Room - "tall windows"
E11 Tower Heights - "broken windows"
F Ruined Halls (presumedly F1-F3) - "shattered windows"
Don't know how I missed each of those. :/ I guess I forgot them and then became enthralled by the map.
I'm going to suppose that most other rooms also have windows, and most of them are barred
Thanks
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I've been working on a handful of props for various parts of my game and wanted to start sharing with the fine folks here.
In the treasure found after defeating the Bag Lady, the party finds a Harrow deck on the table with a unique card in it, The Foreign Trader, depicted as a Denizen of Leng.
I've always been a big fan of Kyle Hunter's work and wanted to mimic his style when crafting the card. Hope one of you finds some use for it! I'll be back with more in the future.
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I've been working on a handful of props for various parts of my game and wanted to start sharing with the fine folks here.
In the treasure found after defeating the Bag Lady, the party finds a Harrow deck on the table with a unique card in it, The Foreign Trader, depicted as a Denizen of Leng.I've always been a big fan of Kyle Hunter's work and wanted to mimic his style when crafting the card. Hope one of you finds some use for it! I'll be back with more in the future.
very nice!
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I've been working on a handful of props for various parts of my game and wanted to start sharing with the fine folks here.
In the treasure found after defeating the Bag Lady, the party finds a Harrow deck on the table with a unique card in it, The Foreign Trader, depicted as a Denizen of Leng.I've always been a big fan of Kyle Hunter's work and wanted to mimic his style when crafting the card. Hope one of you finds some use for it! I'll be back with more in the future.
Yeah, I'm definitely grabbing this for when I run Strange Aeons.
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Two sessions ago, the party found a puppy dog trapped in a crate by ghouls. It was immediately adopted by one of the party members and named Mr. Wigglebottom. She then spent the next two session loving the dog, protecting the dog, and fearing for the safety of her adorable puppy.
Other party members joked about people needing food in the chapel, and how they would need to eat the dog, constantly. Every time a fight ended, every time rest was mentioned, they talked about eating the dog. Until finally the character who had adopted it stopped all forward progress to deliver an impassioned speech about the dog, how it was the only good and pure thing they could even remember, that the rest of the party should be ashamed of themselves for even joking about destroying something so innocent, and that if need be she would fight the rest of the party to defend her sweet Wigglebottom.
So, did they finally get to eat Mister Wigglebottoms. :-)
I'm going to steal this so much.
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Reading about Mr. Wigglebottom killed me inside, a little bit.
I'd steal it for my game, but my fiance might leave me if I did that to her character.
Tis the fun part of horror!
Here there be puppies where the puppies don't get kicked, but instead kick you!
So, what happens if Oathsday pulls off her bluff, and gets escorted to the safe zone? Bide her time until the heroes actually figure things out and set everyone free?
I guess ultimately GM discretion. In the survivor descriptions, it states that one of the patients is subject to being replaced by a doppelganger who seeks to destroy the Desnan shrine blocking bad dreams. If not that, then she could be interested in picking off survivors one at a time or, as you said, just wants to lay low until escape is possible.
Well, in my game Oathsday was carefully carried in the arms of our cleric back to the barricade, where Winter managed to make the Sense Motive check everyone in the party failed.
Things went downhill from there.
Ok, my PC have so far managed to keep Losandro alive. They used the saps to knock her out, they brought her back to the chapel, rolled well in diplomacy to convince the survivors she might be the solution to the whole problem, (which is what they think). They also built some sedatives from scratch usibg the healing kit and drugs in the nursery station to keep the oneigero out for a couple days, after I made her wake up in the middle of the chapel and reactivate the mist generation.
My doubt here, is how to proceed. I'm unsure if allowing them to succeed and save the oneigero (what would it take to reverse the status? Is it possible? What could came from this?) or use it again to ignite some problems in the Chapel.
Killing some innocent bystanders in the Chapel might work narratively with the vibe of inevitable doom. Very Lovecraftian. It also raises the paranoia level.
But if every NPC they try to help is treacherous or ends being a problem, they will refuse to do so in the future, which might be a problem
I am unsure what to do next
BTW, the nightgaunt is deadly. Lost our Bard there
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Well, don't they get the ritual that created the oneirogens at the end of the adventure? If they're interested in saving Losandro and the rest of the oneirogens, I'd let them do it, and they'd have to perform the ritual in reverse in order to fix them. If I recall, you can't leave Briarstone without killing them, so they're stuck there unless they succeed at the ritual or kill them. So, if they want to leave, they have to do one or the other. Killing them would be easy, but if they persevere, they might remove the oneirogen curse from them.
And that's when I'd reveal that the personalities of these people were destroyed when they were converted into oneirogens. Congratulations, you've saved these people. Death might have been preferable to the state they're in now.
What happens to the Asylum after the adventure?
Does it keep working? If not, do they release the patients? They have almost no way to keep them under control. Do the remaining Apostles go back to their own normality? Do they hire a new director after Losandro's death?
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Here are my thoughts, merely as a GM:
Given the level of destruction to the facility itself, I think this is the end of Briarstone, at least until significant repairs can be made to the entire building. It is beyond being able to safely support and care for people at the given time. This is also NOT taking into account the events of the rest of the Adventure Path; I'm talking only what the characters would know by the end of Book 1. Brairstone's staff and administration are mostly all dead or monsters (or dead monsters) and many of the patients dead. Remember that most of the second floor collapsed in the tremors, cutting off or killing the patients there.
I'd imagine a very sort of real world scenario plays out here: the patients that are more hearty and stable-minded simply matriculate back into whatever society they can (Thrushmoor, most likely), wander to the four corners "in search of sanity", or, for the more unstable or dangerous patients, would either be sent to one of the other facilities across Ustalav or a neighboring country or merely be arrested/held for safekeeping. The Apostles, most of whom were functioning under a mob mentality, return to relative normalcy. Releasing ALL of the patients would be destructive to the neighboring towns, but, as most of them were there voluntarily, there's not much that could be done to stop the peaceful ones from doing as they please.
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After GMing the adventure, I'd strongly suggest to play the doppelganger event in the chapel. It's kind of optional, as it only mentioned in a small paragraph describing one of the patients (the one who sleep walks out of the Chapel), but it was really worth it in my group.
We have a paladin of Torag. Some other chars are also good. They butted their heads against the chapel's guard captain (which was a Royal Accuser soldier in my game, bodyguard of Winter Klaczka, which made him less attached to the patients and more severe and disciplined). My group tried to convince him to let them enter with several outsiders, including Juglan Rivercane, the guy that screamed "Zandalus see" and could not talk much, Ilki Volost, the guy who was biten by a ghoul and was in the process of transforming into one, and Ivory Garidine, the kitchen's assistant chef, all of whom they managed to save.
But Captain York wasn't so happy to receive extra strangers, and they had some strong debates there, both talked among players and NPC, and rolled by diplomacy and sense motive, etc. York's paranoia almost convinced the group (it did, in fact, with every PC but the two lawful good ones). But in the end, they let them enter with Ivory Garidine, the last survivor they found and tried to bring to the Chape, with the condition that Ivory sleeps chained to the paladin.
Then I used Baisily Harbour's option and made him a Doppleganger. While they were sleeping, "Baisily" took the Desna's statue, and hide it. Everybody had bad dreams that night. While the PC were trying to find what happened, "Baisily" bluffed and created a distraction, then hid the statue where the paladin and Ivory were sleeping.
That worked pretty well for my group. They started being paranoid. One of them actually thought that THEY were the infiltrated bad guys (during the fugue state or whatever). When one of the players discovered that "Baisily" was the main suspect, the Inquisitor tried to interrogate him using coercion, but then Naysa tried to avoid it. They knew Baisily was guilty, but with +31 bluff, there's no way they can prove it unless he confess. The alchemist suggested a "small" vivisection, to see if inner organs were different or whatever. After some paranoia, they killed the Doppleganger, but left with the impression that York was right in his approach, and that maybe more people were secretly a Dopplenganger.
It worked well, in a The Thing kind of way, with players being suspicious of everybody, including Winter Klaczka, York, Naya, and themselves.
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Are there any further references to the ancient standing stones on the asylum grounds mentioned in Zandalus' patient record? They're not the Star Stela since those are in Thrushmoor proper and I was just wondering if there was any significance to them (it's entirely possible that my PCs will latch on them as some sort of link to the events going on in Briarstone).
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They are the Sarkorian godstones created by Ariadnah. They don't end up being important to the story. From the Thurshmoor Terror:
Amid its woods and rocks, she raised three new godstones, each attuned to a particular entity: the Lord of the Woods, Shadix Who Dreams, and the Tatterman.
Ah, thank you very much! I looked all over for this, but didn't think to look under the Thrushmoor Gazetteer. This will be of great help.
I originally started running this right after book 1 came out, but had to put it on pause about a session and a half before the end of the book due to time constraints. I'm wanting to start it back up and possibly add one more player to the group, but given that the players have explored almost all of the first floor (everything except for the main ghoul, can't remember his name off the top of my head) I want to be able to work in the new PC while including him in the group as an amnesiac just like the other PCs (so Lowls dropped him off and everything, he's just in a different part of the asylum for X reason). Anybody have any suggestions for a good location/reason for him being there? My current thought was for him to be a soon-to-be victim of the bag lady when the other PCs bust in and save him.
Did they kill Campre Linweight? The dude tied to the table that "Dr Ilesi" is torturing when they wake up.
My group didn't kill him, and didn't let him commit suicide. He was left in the Chapel, trying to recover, as he was seriously wounded. So when the group's bard died against the Nightgaunt, we took him as his new character. That way, he was already there in the cell with the rest of the group. It's a very minor retcon (if they talked to the guy and he told them he was an ordeal or something).
If not, being an amnesiac wounded guy in Dr Elbourn's improvised hospital might work.
They took too long to get situated in the initial encounter so I had the doppelganger kill Campre, but that would otherwise be a decent idea. I like the Elbourn's patient idea so I may go with that if the bag lady encounter seems less reasonable. Thanks!
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Ran another session and this one was rough. They met with Winter and automatically asked for chores/what they could do to help. They chopped wood, got the patient to take his meds, helped heal up the two injured survivors (by the way, why does magical healing cure them? Winter has like 5 channels a day and has the healing domain. I find it hard to believe she hasn't healed them.)I found that odd, too, and resolved it by giving Winter the Divine Scourge archetype (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/cleric/archetypes/paizo---cle ric-archetypes/divine-scourge-cleric-archetype) and flavoring her as having been sent because of her connection to the darker side of divinity. I replaced Extra Channel with Extra Hex, and gave her the Slumber and Evil Eye hexes.
You could also give her Variant channeling (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/cleric/variant-channeling).
My solution to this was to say her holy symbol was lost during the craziness involved in the cult uprising.
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My solution to this was to say her holy symbol was lost during the craziness involved in the cult uprising.Ran another session and this one was rough. They met with Winter and automatically asked for chores/what they could do to help. They chopped wood, got the patient to take his meds, helped heal up the two injured survivors (by the way, why does magical healing cure them? Winter has like 5 channels a day and has the healing domain. I find it hard to believe she hasn't healed them.)I found that odd, too, and resolved it by giving Winter the Divine Scourge archetype (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/cleric/archetypes/paizo---cle ric-archetypes/divine-scourge-cleric-archetype) and flavoring her as having been sent because of her connection to the darker side of divinity. I replaced Extra Channel with Extra Hex, and gave her the Slumber and Evil Eye hexes.
You could also give her Variant channeling (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/cleric/variant-channeling).
This is a very elegant solution. It removes the suspension of disbelief for the fact that people is wounded, but allow the PC to use Winter as a healing NPC, which is the reason why she is there
Erich Zann himself shows up near the end of the campaign, but this viol doesn't actually foreshadow that in any logical way. I just removed it from my game.
Erich Zann himself shows up near the end of the campaign, but this viol doesn't actually foreshadow that in any logical way. I just removed it from my game.
Has anyone here run the campaign and had their players recognize the viol? I am surprised they didn't have it tie into Zann in any way; though from book one to book six is a pretty big gap I suppose.
