| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I do not know about anyone else but some of the encounters in the Varnhold Vanishing did not feel particularly engaging or fun, or rather, I do not think they would be for my players.
Some of the changes I made include changing the giant trap-door spiders to an equal number of spyder-fiends (from 1st Edition Dungeons an Dragons) and I changed the Ettercap scenario to have 1 Ettercap and 2 kuchrimas instead.
Has anyone else altered any of the location sites/encounters to suit their tastes/players' sensibilities, and if so, what did you do?
Cheers!
Interesting idea on the Dread zombie army. Hmm.
I read Dudemeiser's stuff, it's great! I actually combined his stuff with the mods Orthos made and I think my players will like it.
In my campaign, spellcasting is reduced to 6th level max so my players won't be getting access to teleportation anytime soon.
Getting rid of the dimensional spider is a good idea, I think I will insert a different encounter elsewhere to make up the shortfall in loot.
I am also considering getting rid of the Dead Noble encounter and replacing it with something a little more interesting.
Cheers!
My players are basically done with hex exploration, so they didn't find most of the encounters. The only ones they ran into were the bulette (while traveling to talk to the centaurs), the ettercap trap (exploring the mountains looking for V's island), the roc (ditto), and the zombie cyclops.
I expect they'll never set foot in the swamp in the next adventure for similar reasons. Unless they have to find something that they don't know where it is, they're not going to be exploring hexes.
For sure some groups do get more into the kingdom political aspects and kingdom building, but given the frequency in which my group gets to play (we do so via online roughly once a month for 6 to 9 hours), the players prefers the hex exploration aspects because they enjoy the adventuring and combat encounters more. :)
I haven't got to running VV yet, but I have some intentions to change things up a bit.
I think that DudeMeister's changes go a long way towards making the hex encounters more meaningful, because he modified a number of the random quests tied to those locations into the extended task of winning over the Nomen Centaurs instead. I'm very much looking forward to running his version of Blood Furrows (the Kankerata Run). It also makes a lot more sense for the leadership of a barony or duchy to be fetching Manticore quills and Roc egg yolk to win favour with a touchy tribe of centaurs so they can learn what they might know of the history of the region, in order to solve the mystery of the Vanishing, than for them to be fetching them for a random poet or innkeeper or omelette chef.
Following up rumours or heading to locations they've been told about can also help make hexploration more interesting than blindly wandering looking for anything interesting. Assuming the PCs rescue the Varnhold map before it burns, they'll have a number of sites marked that they can follow up. They can also learn about sites from inhabitants of the lands... the taciturn folks of Nivakta's Crossing, farmers around Kiravoy Bridge, the Nomen Centaurs (eventually), Zzamas the phase spider (if you haven't written her out).
As I mentioned above, I like Dudemeister's mods. I am using it in conjunction with Orthos' mods to have the Trials of Earth (Speed), Sky (Endurance), Water (Wisdom/Insight), and Fire (Courage). The point of doing those trials is not just to learn where Vordakai's lair is located, but also to prove themselves to the centaurs in general. As a result, the centaurs in Iobaria will perceive the PCs (and their kingdom) differently and abandon the idea of raiding the Stolen Lands and Brevoy for the time being (I switched the culture/ecology of the core centaurs in Pathfinder to the one described in Kobold Press' Midgard campaign instead).
Luckily, I did run the Realm of the Fellnight Queen before starting Varnhold Vanishing so keeping the twigjacks and fellnight spriggans wasn't an issue in terms of continuity/storylines.
Because my players are such big fans of Dragon Age, I introduced something similar to the darkspawn (I call them Hordespawn; yeah, not overly creative, but I did make them different enough not to be a complete clone of the darkspawn) since nearly the beginning of the campaign.
I accomplished this by introducing the majority of the materials from the Worldwound Invasion (from the Wrath of the Righteous adventure path) between book 1 and book 2 of Kingmaker (to explain where they got their mythic powers PLUS tie-in their kingdom to another kingdom for a possible future alliance). So instead of demons, the city in that adventure was being overrun by hordespawn.
So to reinforce once again the threat of the hordespawns, I will be removing the encounter with Zzamas (and likely the mudmen) and replace it (them) with a small community of tavi that have been living in an abanadoned dwarven fort in the mountains. The tavi will require the pcs' help in defeating a few advance scouting parties of the hordespawn that are coming in from subterranean passages. The majority of the hordespawns are low-levels but they are capable of using tactics, poison, and diseases to weaken the PCs. Once the small groups of scouts are defeated, the actual mobs of hordespawn arrives.
Basically, I am going to do a mini-version of the Battle of Helmsdeep, one that the PCs can defeat with their new allies, the Tavi.
This will result in me doing more work, obviously, but my players enjoy being overly heroic, and this fits the narrative that they want for their PCs. :)
Cheers!