I recently got the Iron Gods adventure paths through the humble bundle website. I am very excited to DM this for my group. I was just wondering if anyone has advice on any character builds or combos that would ruin the fun of this campaign. I want the players going into this one semi blind due to the out of the ordinary nature of this adventure. In other words I really want a wow factor when they enter a technology filled spaceship or battle a chainsaw-wielding orc.
Thank you :)
Check out the Iron Gods Player's Guide, which is a free download (and, if I remember correctly, got included in the bundle). It has suggestions for players of what sort of classes, archetypes, feats, etc. will work well in the campaign and gives a glimpse of what they should expect. It's a good place to start for both player and GM alike.
I'm playing in it, and we just finished book 2. Aside from encouraging at least one party member to take Technologist (or work toward taking it), I'm not seeing any particular builds that would ruin the fun. The reason I recommend encouraging at least one Technologist is that there's a lot of tech loot, and if we didn't have someone to identify it we'd be missing out on a lot of the things that make it cool and unique.
One commenter in the Iron Gods forum expressed regret for designing an anti-technoiogy barbarian for Iron Gods. He had to surpress his character's core anti-technology attitude to avoid intra-party conflict when the other PCs became interested in technology.
Arranging for the players to start this adventure semi-blind will be difficult. The PCs are in Numeria, a land with pieces of technology lying around, and they enter a town that was known for its giant heat beam shining in the sky. The first encounter, before the PCs bite the plot hook, is a battle with a damaged repair robot. The plot hook is that the town hires them to rescue a lost wizard so that the wizard can fix the heat-beam technology, but really, the party will have to fix it themselves.
My current Iron Gods game is at the beginning of the 5th module, Palace of Fallen Stars, and my players have introduced derailing plot twist at almost every step. I kept a chronicle of the first 2/3 of The Fires of Creation at Iron Gods among Scientists, which warns of some roleplaying pitfalls.
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First, congratulations on your choice. I really like GMing the AP so far. (Early book 3.)
One thing that wasn't included in the Humble Bundle was the book Numeria, Land of Fallen Stars which details Numeria itself. I can't recommend this book enough to GMs.
The way the AP is written, it does work best "out of the box" with a Good-ish party that is happy to stand up to evil oppressors because that's what heroes do. If your players start asking "why to we have to fix all this?", keeping it on the rails will be harder.
Also, get your players on board with the idea of "Sci Fi in my Fantasy" - that it's cool, and that it's okay to play a PC that doesn't like it all that much even though the player does. But that it's probably nicer to make anti-Technic League PCs who might "use their tech against them", than total tech-haters. Because a lot of the treasure will be tech.
These are all really helpful. I do have the players guide and didn't realize how useful that is as a starter tool. I'll recommend technologist to my group and also make sure to acquire the Numeria book. Thank you guys very much. I'll try to post a summary of my first session :)
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You don't exactly need Technologist from the start, because several of the campaign traits give you part of the Technologist (and a bonus if you later take it). That can be good because it spreads some of the spotlight among players.
Also, those campaign traits are intentionally on the powerful side because they're meant to lure players onto the train :P
An enchantment focused caster won't have much fun.
Yeah, there's a good chunk of enemies that will just be immune to mind-affecting. At least through book 2, though, it's been mostly humanoids, with robots mostly being boss-type critters. Still, it would suck to be mostly sidelined in the bigger fights.
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Oh, and there's an important note on how Hardness works on creatures in this blog post.
How does hardness work for creatures? Does energy damage such as cold deal half damage to creatures with hardness (Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook 173-174) even before applying the flat numerical reduction?
When a creature with hardness sustains damage, subtract its hardness from the damage dealt. The rules for halving damage, doubling damage, dealing damage with ineffective tools, immunities, and the like only apply to damaging inanimate objects.
Using the regular Hardness rules kinda screwed over our wizard and magus until we found that post.
Ok so we had our first group planning session. This is the group
Halfling Rogue
Ratfolk Alchemist (aspiring to be technomancer)
Half Orc Gunslinger (Gun tank archetype)
Dwarf Inquisitor
It's an odd combination but the players are happy with it. Our first session should be this week and I will happily share a summary of how it goes down.
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Doesn't look like a bad setup to me. Some possible ideas:
- You might want to warn the gunslinger not to specialize overmuch in a single type of firearm, because you'll keep finding different and better guns. You might want to switch some 2H to 1H guns in the loot though.
- A technomancer in the same party as a gunslinger means more opportunities for recharging guns. They'll like that.
- There's a neat (higher-level) PFS adventure set in Chesed involving the dwarven high priestess of Abadar, Returned To Sky. It could easily be turned into a sidequest.
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Technomancer with Alchemist doesn't make much sense. He can't use the vast majority of tech spells. And unless you allow a house rule he can't actually qualify, he's not an arcane caster.
Ratfolk Alchemist (aspiring to be technomancer)
You might suggest, that the Ratfolk Alchemist might be happier as a Ratfolk Wizard, for four reasons:
1 - Greater access to Electricity spells (this will help party survival during the first few levels).2 - Greater benefit from found spell books (the AP has quite a few).
3 - Access to the technology spells from the Technology Guide.
4 - Even with House Ruling, he/she would qualify for the Technomancer Prestige class one level earlier.
thank you very much for clearing up the alchemist thing. I was questioning if they were considered arcane. I spoke with that player and he's fine with not being a technomancer. He's happy as an alchemist.
The party gunslinger is going to have a LOT of fun later in on the path. You find a lot of neat guns.
I just finished GMing my Iron Gods campaign on Monday. We had a gunmaster vigilante PC, and by the end of the campaign, she basically had an entire coat full of weapons like one of those Old West gunslingers.
I'd definitely recommend encouraging your players to review the player's guide and think about their characters' opinions of technology, backgrounds, how long they've been in Numeria, etc. We had a lot of neat roleplaying opportunities thanks to character backstories.
I'm just about finished GMing Iron Gods and it has been a blast.
My party has been working out great and is as follows:
Android Wizard (Spellslinger)/Technomancer
Gnome Rogue (Unchained/Numerian Scavenger)
Android Alchemist (Chirurgeon)
Human Brawler (Mutagenic Mauler)
Halfling Monk (Martial Artist)
The Monk has an aversion to tech. Not a particular hatred of it, just a refusal to wield it himself. Works out fine since the gnome and wizard take their fair share plus a bit of the tech items. I did houserule the spellslinger a bit since its generally not a preferred archetype, but he's currently running around with a plasma thrower and every tech spell imaginable. The party interaction is very amusing. The rogue took a 1 level dip in gunslinger and a 1 level dip in alchemist. The rogue uses the alchemist's mutagen and an arc rifle. The Alchemist has 4 arms and runs around with a trauma pack, medlance, sonic pistol, and bombs at all times.
The monk and rogue have a tactic that is generally referred to as the 'midget mugging' technique. The rogue walks into melee and readies an attack. The monk walks up to flank and performs a trip maneuver. The monk has greater trip and vicious stomp and the rogue has combat reflexes and opportunist. This results in 1 sneak attack from the readied attack, 1 from the greater trip AoO, and 1 from the opportunist AoO. The rogue's archetype allows her to ignore hardness when she performs a sneak attack, so many a robot has met its demise via this technique.
As a note, some gun related archetypes don't mix well with heavy weapons as written, so I'd highly encourage house rules that allow players to make effective use of their tech if they go out of their way to take things like Technologist. The game is much more fun when the party is marching around with lasers and chainsaws.
I might also recommend to allow for some retraining during downtime between scenarios. The last thing you want is for someone to look at the chainsaw and say 'this is really cool but I already spent 2 feats on greatswords... into the loot chipper!'
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Ya my PCs have all looked through the players guide and I gave them a fair warning to not base their character builds around a certain type of weapon. We will be playing our first session soon. Can't wait to share with you all :)
Side note: which thread do I share and summarize how my sessions go?
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Comment on technomancers: They are exclusive to Technic League, so technomancer outside technic league is capital offense(aka sentence to execution). Just warning on that technomancer might not be best fit prestige class wise because of Technic League's nature as the bad guys.
Besides land of numenera campaign setting book being really important, since sandbox campaign and all.. Well, there are some fun options in people of the river, at least spell wise since your party has already started playing.
I'd also recomend using campaign traits since, besides being really useful, they are rather flavorful.
Oh as warning as GM, Hetuath is really dangerous boss :D On last wednesday, I'm running game for 6 players, he took down almost half of the party(two ko'd, one almost ko'd) rather easily(well, rogue got knocked out almost immediatly, barbarian did most of damage with powerful blow rage power and got knocked out eventually, bard almost got knocked out, barbarian had whitled most of hp so gunslinger managed to barely finish off Hetuath despite him doing barely any damage due to dr.) and party wizard was just panicking on background because he happened to be immune to all of his spells(Hetuath is immune to electricity, magic missiles, cold and resist fire. Sooo yeah). The AP in general is bit hardcore, so while optimization will break it(like optimization always does), be warned that Collector Robot's hardness 10 can come as quite a shock if players don't have one character who can do damage high enough to even scratch it. In case nobody in party can overcome that, consider lowering it to hardness 5 for the first book.
I have played multiple campaigns with this group of players and they have never had to deal with a PC death, so this actually excites me to hear a boss being scary and dangerous :)
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We had to fight Hetuath three times, because no one figured out to press the GIANT YELLOW BUTTON.
After the third time they took me aside and said in no uncertain terms that they would not be fighting him a fourth time. :-)
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We had to fight Hetuath three times, because no one figured out to press the GIANT YELLOW BUTTON.
After the third time they took me aside and said in no uncertain terms that they would not be fighting him a fourth time. :-)
Did you have to tell them what they missed?
They didn't even want to know. :-D
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They could have just taken Hethuath's remains out in separate boxes and consulted with the town cleric on how to definitely destroy it.
My players fought him and barely made it, then camped in the dungeon, moved on, recovered Khonnir, then came back to discover Hethuath respawned, just like the skeletons in the desert seemed to be respawning. I then used a chase scene to show them running away from Hethuath because they were in no position to fight him.
They consulted with Joram Kyte who concluded that although he had no idea about the four arms, the type of undead itself was not uniquely alien and had some ideas on how to kill him. When they went back they were well-prepared with Magic Weapon spells and had much less trouble killing him.
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No camping, they liked hanging around town and partying with Sanvil (*exaggerated wink*) so they would fight through the skeletons and Hetuath or go habitat cave searching and then break for the day and then repeat it the next day.
And yes, I put heavy emphasis on the GIANT YELLOW BUTTON. *bangs head against the wall*
They were also really classy about returning all the dead bodies from previous expeditions, so.
The advanced gremlins were a gigantic pain in the ass, that extra +4 to AC was really annoying, like 24 rounds annoying. :-)
Edit: Also, don't get me wrong, I love Iron Gods, hands down the best adventure path, and I was literally the first person to say they wouldn't buy it when it was announced. :-)
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You're right! I went back to look, and where we ran into issues was everyone was rolling terribly against them especially our Android Fighter who took the lead. By the end I was just ignoring their DR because one thing we don't do is plan ahead and bring anything to get through it.
They brought Masterwork Stilts with though, because if it's one thing you need exploring caverns is Masterwork Stilts. :-)
Our party had...somewhere around 5 deaths? (Fortunately, 3/4 of the party had hooked up with the resident clerics - Meyanda, Dinvaya, and the Pharasmin priest in Torch- so raise dead/resurrection was fairly easy to come by at the point all the deaths started happening.) Never had that many deaths in an AP before.
Most of them were flukes, too! PCs botching saves I completely expected them to pass, and my rolling not one, but TWO natural 20s in the fight with
Dice, man.
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Apart from the Kasatha habitat, there isn't really enough empty room in the rest of the ship to have additional wandering monster encounters. They'd constantly be bumping into the already-scripted encounters.
How so? Random encounters can happen everywhere. In Black Hill Caves monsters could come from darklands tunnel or from the cracks in wall, dome is obvious, in science floor they could come from tubes or stasis chambers or other sciencey stuff.
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In a theoretical spaceship, yeah. But these maps don't have a lot of empty rooms and many doors are locked (which is a bit of a plot element to railroad people through them the right way). So you could still have some monsters coming out of tubing, but they'd need to be pretty small monsters if you don't want players exploring tubes that weren't on the map.
In short, not every dungeon has wandering monsters. I think that's a feature of much bigger dungeons with more "blank" between scripted encounters.
So my group will be entering the habitat some next and I haven't gotten the chance to read into that part (which I will make sure to do so ahead of time). Is it really just an endless army of 4 armed skeletons.
Yup.
I mean, not endless, there's only seven or so. Unless they regenerate.
I figured out how long it would take each one to get to the party, but we had an Android with a Greatsword, so it was pretty much watching her bat them around. All those arms do add up to an occasional hit though and can drain resources.
The Ghelarn is what you really need to know how works. It can be a little confusing.
Hopefully, you have at least one character who cannot resist pushing the GIANT YELLOW BUTTON. :)
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Haha I'm pretty sure one of them will happily push a large button :)