Developer
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It was my mistake for failing to include the text for that ability.
Here you go:
Cannibalistic Vitality (Ex) When a kuru hits a living creature with its bite attack, he gains 1 temporary hit point by ingesting the target’s blood. This ability does not work on creatures that do not have blood.
So I'm realizing now, Fort Hailcourse only has one entrance. The front gate is barred behind a DC 35 (!!) STR check, making me think its not really the intended way for the PCs to get into the Fort in the first place. So... how ARE they supposed to be getting in? Scaling the walls? Hardly seems subtle.
So I'm realizing now, Fort Hailcourse only has one entrance. The front gate is barred behind a DC 35 (!!) STR check, making me think its not really the intended way for the PCs to get into the Fort in the first place. So... how ARE they supposed to be getting in? Scaling the walls? Hardly seems subtle.
My PCs climbed over the walls, they made some really good stealth checks, threw a rope up, and managed to get up in two rounds before any of the JuJu zombies noticed them. (I rolled pretty bad on Perception for the JuJu zombies).
I hadn't expected them to do that right after they got to the fort, so I on the spot decided the walls were 20 feet tall, and just never went back to see how tall they really were, if a height was given.
They then proceeded to blitz through the entire fort, wrecking every encounter in it pretty quick. They all rolled really well that night. The next session saw them fail 12 Remove Curse rolls, though, so they made up for the good rolls with a lot of bad rolls.
My players will most likely start this book during our next session and I'm trying to get familiar with Thrushmoor's stat block. According to the Game Mastery Guide a Large Town has 5th level spellcasting available, but Thrushmoor has the superstitious quality, which should reduce the spellcasting quality by 2. But the stat block in the book says spellcasting is 5th level. Am I misreading/missing something in this description?
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I most likely have just missed it, but can anyone tell me where the Phrasmaran priestess has up and left to? Or kidnapped to? My PCs are rather concerned since they have befriended Winter, and I don't want to make it some side-quest if it'll be explored later? The only mention I can find is that she hasn't been to the church in several days.
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I was thinking maybe the priestess leveled up to 10th, and then got killed by the penanggalan. Since the manananggal can only rise from a 10 HD female, and was created when the penanggalan got to Thrushmoor, and I would think the disappearance of a 10th level NPC would be noteworthy in town.
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Clymes Prett seems to have one too many abilities. With a CR of 7 he should only have two Ghost abilities (1 per 3 points of CR), but has three (corrupting touch, frightful moan and telekinesis).Hmm, I've always read it as they start with Corrupting Touch and get an additional ability for every 3 CR after 1.
A ghost retains all the special attacks of the base creature, but any relying on physical contact do not function. In addition, a ghost gains one ghost special attack from the list below for every 3 points of CR (minimum 1—the first ability chosen must always be corrupting touch). The save DC against a ghost's special attack is equal to 10 + 1/2 ghost's HD + ghost's Charisma modifier unless otherwise noted. Additional ghost abilities beyond these can be designed at the GM's discretion.
BUT, looking over other Ghost entries, namely the one the Bestiary, this appears to not be the case. I guess the author thought the same way I did then.
I was just reading through this more thoroughly, and I noticed something.
That's an interesting shade of blonde hair Lelwyn Hasok has, would that be called Midnight Blonde?
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To the fellow GMs that have already ran this.
How did you make your players fear it? How do you make the horror part relevant? Unlike in the first book, I'm not feeling the mood here, maybe I'm missing something.
Thrushmoor is supposed to be isolated, with people not trusting their neighbours. But half the NPC you find are friendly, or can become friendly, or they are outright helpful. The artist, the sleepless agency, your friend in the Pier, the girl that ask you for her brother, or even the tavern, after you have done a few things for the community, are "safe places" with people that respect or help the players.
Also, I don't feel the same horror than in the claustrophobic nature of the Assylum. Players aren't challenged, they can move and come back later, the enemies aren't as terrifying... Sure, a gibbering mouther description is ugly. But it's not uglier than any other gibberign mouther you have faced in every other encounter. Players do not fear gibbering mouthers in, say, Kingmaker, so they won't fear them here either.
In book 1, there was some oppresive atmosphere, and the encounters actually put the players on their toes. You face dopplegangers, and some of them even try to trick you. You can't be sure who else is a doppleganger, and who isn't. Winter has eyes of different colors, would that mean she is a doppleganger? How can you be sure? What if the doctor is a dopplenganger too? After the first wounded guy happens to be a dopplenganger, do you help the second one? The scenario is also oppresive, you can't sleep out of a certain place, and if you do, horror happens.
In Thrushmoor, I don't feel that. It feels like a regular adventure: players have a few places to go, some of them are dungeons, those dungeons have denizens, and some of those denizens have a fear aura. Big deal. Oh, and you are attacked by a few cultist, which are just run-of-the-mill rogues that ambush you. Not any different that the Ninjas that ambush you in Jade Regent 2, or the assasins that ambush you in Giant Slayer 1. Nothing horrific about that, just a standard ambush.
Maybe I'm missing it, so if I am, please point me to it.
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Perhaps my most effective moment of horror in TT came from playing with the concept that the players don't know who they were. For instance, the party investigator in my group named Norin (yes he was based off of the magic card) is easily frightened by even the slightest noise. This is, of course, fun to see him role play, but I took that concept and fit it with the revenant segment of the adventure. It started with him getting strange visions when they passed the lake front. Something was calling to him from the ground. Later, when they entered the butcher's shop I had his character experience a flashback from when he was one of Lowls' lackeys. His job was to snoop around and "investigate" townsfolk when Lowls called for taxes, contraband, rare texts, etc. This meant most citizens didnt like him very much and when he entered the shop, one of the butcher's assistants jumped out to scare him, wearing a pig "mask". They all had a good laugh when Norin ran out the door nearly pissing himself.
Later, Norin kept looking over his shoulder and noticing that a man kept silently following him through town. Unfortunately, the butcher's assistant following him was mute, and Norin's paranoia meant that seeing a man in a bloodied apron chasing him around the city with "something" in his hand led him to run screaming through the town. Eventually, the mute caught up with him and surprised him again. Norin panicked and stabbed him, fearing for his life. As the life drained away from the poor man, Norin realized he was only trying to return Norin's coinpurse that he left at the shop when they scared him earlier. Ashamed and horrified at having killed an innocent person, he hid the body and buried it without a marker. This resulted in a revenant that came back for revenge wearing a bloody butcher's apron and a pig head.
I revealed this story at different points and saved the twist for when the revenant actually showed up. Essentially, the point was to take the personalities the players had given their characters and twist them to fit their dark backgrounds. I think challenging their heroic identities and creating cognitive dissonance in how they see themselves can lead to some good "What have I done?" moments and some awesome cooperative storytelling. Of course, you have to make sure the players are okay with you pinning things like murder on one of them.
Edit: Some examples would be if one of your players is a gung ho crusader type, maybe they led a witch hunt at one point and mistakenly killed a bunch "cultists" Lowls told him about that were really just a nightly book club. That way, Lowls could have their texts. Maybe if one of your players was a scholar they could have gone too far with their studies. They could have released a terrible monster on the town by accident, or were responsible for the deaths of children who were playing in the arcane waste behind their lab. Maybe the party ranger's quest to convince the townsfolk that the skum were really just misunderstood creatures led to the abduction and murder of several townsfolk. I'm just spitballing here but hopefully those get you thinking.
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Good ideas.
I was already planning to play the backgrounds (or lack of, because of the fugue state) into this part of the AP. I forced them to pick one of the campaign trait, and also forced them to pick one drawback. One of the players took pugnacious, so I'm going to make him be the dude who punched someone, maybe to death, in the tavern. Another player took Twitchy as trait, and paranoid as drawback, so probably I can figure out something for him as well.
The player who took consumed by guilt will probably be the one who killed the revenant.
Reading some of the experiences (namely, the one by Amber Dice group), I agree that the assasin could be a good point of tension. I'm not going to use Rissi picture, though, just her stats, and probably will play the Jack The Ripper angle. Might or might not convert him to a vivisectionist alchemist/assasin, that's less important. But a creepy assassin might work well.
Now that I'm thinking on it, maybe changing some of the Rogue cultists to something else will help to make them look more deranged. Don't know what, or how, but something that screams "cthulhu cultist" instead of "Richelieu's thug", which is what I see when I look to the (on the other hand, really good) cultist art. Random dudes with a sacrifice dagger and some black robe chanting some crap, or whatever.
Pier 19 might have also some potential, if I make them hear a lot of stories about that Pier, before I tell them that they have gear hidden there.
Well, this sounds a bit better now. I hope I get a few more ideas before we arrive there, I'll have more than enough time to think about it.
What if the Jack the Ripper character was inspired by one of the PC's and is just an imitation serial killer? That would be an awesome reveal when they finally corner the murderer and uncover his/her motives.
I'm going to TOTALLY steal that. So much yes.
One of the players is going to be an Alchemist. He's not going to be vivisectionist, as far as I know, but I can work around that.
He could have been a vivisectionist in the past, just that the amnesia strip all his knowledge and effectively removed his levels.
He could have been just a normal alchemist (mindchemist in his case), but with a murder dark side. The copycat killer is just better at it. Maybe because he obssesed with being better.
An optional angle, is that Jack the Ripper is some kind of old friend of said PC, and the PC wasn't the original serial killer, but he "helped" his friend to become one, because he gave him some Mutagen formula that made his friend become Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
So many good possibilities in that angle. Thank you very much.
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Warning to fellow gm's. Do not underestimate the zombies at Fort Hailcourse. The template gives them some really darn good defensive abilities, and ac is pretty decent at 19.
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To the fellow GMs that have already ran this.
How did you make your players fear it? How do you make the horror part relevant? Unlike in the first book, I'm not feeling the mood here, maybe I'm missing something.
Haven't run this yet, but I plan on changing things around a bit and playing up the paranoia running rampant in the town. In particular, people are disappearing, disturbing strangers are arriving in town (cultists invited by Melisenn), the fort is locked down, and Lowls has disappeared. Pretty much everyone the PCs run into that doesn't recognize them from before is going to be unfriendly at best towards them, and if they are made to talk they go on and on about the town's woes.
People can't go out at night, there are strange lights across the water, anyone who gets too close to that pier either vanishes or goes crazy, there's a tentacled ghost that roams the streets, hopping figures are glimpsed in the shadows, the magistrate won't do anything, the Count is gone and no one's in charge, this bizarre ship captained by a foreign slaver brought these awful savages to Iris Hill, weird strangers are arriving in town, this winged head/torso was seen flying through the night sky, folks are disappearing night after night... There is so much going on that it's a little crazy.
Make the town's problems seem overwhelming. Hit the players over the head with the fact that they're not liked and trusted because people knew them from before or because they assume the PCs are with the cultists showing up in town and are maybe tied to all the vanishings. Make it known that people are being kidnapped just about every day, or it seems like it from the rumors. The place is under siege! People are scared - with good reason! Bring that to the forefront.
Any idea of where in Thrushmoor could the PC buy and sell gear?
There's no weaponsmith, as far as I know (the local blacksmith is not much into the weaponcrafting trade). I don't see any local pawnshop either. There are places where they could buy and sell books, and buy magic potions and alchemy stuff. Would the High Mart work? Which NPC could be selling some magic gear? It's supposed to have 3d4 minor items and 2d4 medium item plus 1d4 major items (sounds like a lot of major items for a small population like this, btw). But who sells them?
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Yeah, I had another dwarf approach my group after they sold off some silver daggers to the blacksmith and let them know if they wanted USEFUL smithing done, they will take orders. For magic items they went to the High Mart.
I always thought they meant to check the bestiary for the advanced template.
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Yes, the eldritch template is from the Green Ronin's Advanced Bestiary - in particular I think they're using the newly updated Pathfinder version. D20Pfsrd has all the templates IIRC, but also if there's one third party book GMs should look to pick up, it's that one. It's so good, it gets referenced in Paizo's products all the time.
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I .... am amazed that they would use a third party source in official product. Bah, my players are going to through a fit.
They use 3rd party books all the time. They always include all the abilities and reference where it's from though.
And really, if you want a zillion templates, Advanced Bestiary is the way to go. :-)
Huh, I guess I have never noticed it before.
The APs I've read have regularly pulled from the Advanced Bestiary and/or the Tome of Horrors. Less so now, as many of the templates/monsters have been imported into the Bestiaries, but they still show up.
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Developer
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Advanced Bestiary, Book of Fiends, and Tome of Horrors are books we've used with some frequency in the past. (Oh, some stuff from Kobold Press too.)
In the cases in which we use material from such sources, we print all of the information you need to run the creature. (You also might note that we do the same thing when we reprint/use anything from a non-PRD source, such as a creature from a Campaign Setting book or a feat from a Player Companion.)
I will be starting up TT in 2 weeks. I've been pouring over the story for the last week or so, trying to match up the order of events that lead to the PC's getting locked up in Briarstone, but I'm having a little trouble putting it all together.
I read earlier in the thread that someone was going to put together a timeline and was wondering if anyone actually had yet.
The events that lead up to them being locked up are covered more in book 3, book 2 has more day to day life in Thrushmoor with a couple of hints of things, like stashing goods.
On a different note, I have found my biggest weakness as a gm, in that I cannot let things be as they are. I just ran Fort Hailcourse and it was almost too much for my pc's. They handled the main level just fine, but when they went to the upper level.... I lost control. Pre-Buffed Sorcerer Scum (Not even going to try to remember his name) was a decent fight that spilled out to the roof proper, which aggroed the slime, and the guards in the 5 towers came to check it out (This is my problem, I can't have 5 guards in towers ignore combat like that.) So it was a Wizard, a Shaman, an Alchemist, and a Barbarian vs 5 Juju Zombies, a Sorcerer, a Slime, three rounds later 3 skum, and three more rounds the other slime.
Honestly the Juju Zombies are the biggest threat, high ac, decent damage, immune to so many things.
So they beat that, recovered and then went to the basement which was mostly empty, they found the cracked wall, and encountered the ghost which they luckily burned down in one round, because the ghost did 42 damage in one hit, almost killing the barbarian. They oddly had no issues with the Ranger or the Doppeldrek though.
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Did you check for perception?
Assuming it is raining, as the adventure says, they have a perception check of +0, vs DC 0 +1/10feet. It is not a hard roll, and they can suceed, but the advice work the same for other guards in other encounters: NPC guards do not autosucceed their perception rolls
Did you check for perception?
Assuming it is raining, as the adventure says, they have a perception check of +0, vs DC 0 +1/10feet. It is not a hard roll, and they can suceed, but the advice work the same for other guards in other encounters: NPC guards do not autosucceed their perception rolls
Good advice, I always forget about the -1 per 10 feet to perception.
The events that lead up to them being locked up are covered more in book 3, book 2 has more day to day life in Thrushmoor with a couple of hints of things, like stashing goods.
Good to know, I'll be giving that book a flip through this week
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2010 Top 8
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After my players spent a day wandering Thrushmoor (selling off all their loot from the Asylum), I gave them the map of the town from page 64 and a list of short descriptions of each location (with all the secret stuff redacted, of course).
They connected the dots between the description of the star stelae and the mysterious stone obelisks featured in Zandalus's drawings, and decided to visit the star stelae themselves.
Also, after running into the mob outside the artist's house they might go looking for the chalk drawings, which appear near the stelae.
So, I am really worried about the Denizen of Leng tpking my group. Any stories of how it went for other parties?
- Does the Star Stelae consist of the steps and pedestal as shown on Page 7?
- Would walking onto the stairs qualify as touching a Star Stelae for purposes of triggering the telepathic connection? If not, should this touching be much a more deliberate hand-to-pillar kind of thing?
- Do the symbols of Hastur need to be held in hand, worn, or can they just be anywhere on the person (like stored in a backpack)?
Right now a cleric has six symbols of Hastur tucked into his backpack. He definitely doesn't want to wear one and is totally unlikely to pull them out when near the Star Stelae. I really want to have the PCs learn about the abilities of the Stelae because I think it will be a hook to make them want to discover more and add to the desire to chase down Lowls; however, I don't want to do it in a manner that goes against their intended design.
Perhaps they are only to be understood by characters with a leaning towards the occult and not stumbled upon by someone lucky/unlucky enough to be carrying a symbol of Hastur in the right place?