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A really cool thing happened during and after my most recent Pathfinder session for my youngest son and his group of friends. To put them on the path of looking for a lost city, I set things up so that they were hired by a nobleman to go in search of his treasure-hunting son who has disappeared. In their earlier adventures they had located a series of caves but were wounded and had expended most of their supplies in locating it. They decided to return to the city of Endhome to heal, re-supply, and hopefully hire a healer before tackling the caves and anything that lay beyond. Spoilers ahead for one particular plot in The Lost City of Barakus (TLCoB).
This group of heroes is a collection of misfits & outcasts – a goblin, a lizardfolk, a minotaur, and a gearforged. They’re young PF enthusiasts, what can I say? None of them grew up in the city, so when two of the group went about trying to find a healer, one of the players quickly thought to inquire at the city’s temples. In a rare moment of respectability, they asked a guardsman for directions to a temple.
In this particular instance, I had forgotten after the previous session that they intended to hire a healer and I really didn’t expect them to spend any time in the city given their eagerness to get to the caves. As a result all of my prep had been focused outside of the city. However, The Lost City of Barakus has a great overview of Endhome and while it doesn’t detail every building, it does provide info on three of the major faiths of the city.
A d3 roll later, it turns out that the guard directed the PCs towards to Temple of Jamboor, god of Knowledge, Magic, and Death. The temple is located in the slums of the city (or poorer district, at least – I don’t have the book in front of me), so my players weren’t too surprised that a guard would send unsavory-looking types that direction.
In TLCoB, this particular temple is a front – it’s staffed by priests but not priests of Jamboor. They’re up to nefarious plots and are the villains of one of the city-based adventures contained within TLCoB. My players meet with the high priestess and are innocently very forthcoming with details about their current quest. Despite the risk of discovery, some good Diplomacy rolls combined with their open book approach result in the priestess deciding it’s too good an opportunity to pass up. She agrees to let them hire one of her priests as a healer. My inner GM cackles with glee that a potential traitor has been welcomed into the group.
The session went great, everyone had a great time, and my secret acolyte of Da-Jin is still embedded with the group, having performed his role as healer well. So as part of my post-session review I started looking at TLCoB and the temple of Jamboor and its inhabitants. As written, only the high priestess is a public figure for fear that her acolytes, being less experienced, would more easily be discovered. So I started looking to see about alternative builds, trying to improve the acolyte’s deception abilities without impacting or retconning the healing abilities he had used thus far.
I was delighted to find that the Zealot Vigilante fit the bill perfectly. I figured that I’d be able to work a Vigilante into my game at some point but I never imagined I’d be able to so seamlessly fit it into an adventure written years prior.
I truly love the amount of customization available in Pathfinder. I really enjoy that NPCs and monsters work off of the same system as PCs as situations like this frequently arise that allow me to develop NPCs and monsters as characters rather than just stat blocks by providing me inspiration for developing those characters that I might not have considered.
Anyhow, just a fortuitous scenario that I encountered in my game that I thought was cool and I just wanted to share. Happy gaming!
P.S. I just have to give a shout-out to The Lost City of Barakus and the Lost Lands. They freaking rock! Go Frogs!