The purpose of this thread is to clarify questions arising in this adventure. This is a SPOILER filled zone, do not venture further if you do not wish the adventure to be spoiled for you, and spoiler tags are not required when posting here.
This thread is a GM Reference thread for Part 5 of the Ruins of Azlant Adventure Path. Links for the individual threads for each part are as follows:
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Re the necromantic gloop in the pipes of The Vaults: "If these substances are released into the room, all living creatures in the room after 1 minute must succeed at a DC 25 Fortitude save or suffer the released substances’ effects for 1d6 hours." So, your blackened, skeletal limb grows back to normal with no aid?
Auberon's motivations are a bit confusing. None of this is a showstopper, but it probably warrants some thought at least before your group gets to this point.
It is clear that he is desperate to get his phylactery back. A group of well equipped adventurers show up who don't know he is a lich and have 2 motivations. One, they want Ochymua stopped, and two, they want their friend taken prisoner back.
Anyway, in their initial conversation through the statue, why wouldn't Auberon just negotiate with them. "You want Ochymua stopped and the druid girl (or warrior boy) back. I want a very special iuon stone Ochymua stole from me. I will give you the girl (or boy) and reward you greatly."
As opposed to trying to parlay with them once only after they group that totally wiped out his minions throughout the tower ...
I suppose that if the PCs find out more about Auberon, they would likely want to put an end to his other misgivings as well, but I don't recall that information coming out. Otherwise, why would the lich wait until they've reached him when he came talk to them other times...
Looking at Auberon's stat-block, I had to snicker a bit.
He's been alive for 10,000+ years, has the Craft Magic Arms and Armor feat, has had tons of alone time in this tower, and yet he has a masterwork quarterstaff ...
Yeah, I love the tower dungeon and a lot of the background story behind it. Auberon's background could use some help. Of course the players don't really know any of this, and it doesn't seem important to the plot so tweaks are easy here.
The tower could be moved much farther away and Auberon could be a much greater terror to the surrounding area. I am not sure that I would even have Ochymua steal his phylactery, but rather perhaps make it look more like he and Auberon had a great battle in the Omen Dominion once the apprentice's ruse was found out. Perhaps Auberon could also have been pursuing the same weapon Ochymua was in his effort to eradicate agholthu and merfolk alike.
One thing I have to say is that the write-up for additional Azlanti ruins spread around is fantastic. I would be very tempted to incorporate one of those with a much shorter romp through this tower.
Time flies when you're immortal and hatching plans in your tower.
But just wait until his doomsday device is done in one week!
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I dunno, I can relate to the idea that he's planning to do all this stuff, but just hasn't gotten around to it yet. While reading this adventure, every time it mentioned something he hadn't gotten around to yet, I chuckled.
I have a bunch of Bones kickstarter minis that I'm planning to paint. I have a house that needs cleaning before my mother-in-law visits. I have a season of Game of Thrones on Bluray to watch. But I spent my week of vacation watching the Dr Who marathon on BBC America instead of doing any of that. Oh, well, there's always next year...
So maybe Auberon just needs a really kick-ass gaming console or a viewing portal to other worlds (so he can watch the equivalent of Real Housewives of Absalom), and that's where he spends all his time.
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Just to note, NPC don't level up with same rate as PCs do, so you could assume that during that ten thousand years he 1) leveled up several times 2) built everything by himself(maybe he's perfectionist or something and prefers to do it hand by hand) 3) recruited his minion 4) probably got his minions killed by resistance/adventurers several times. 5) recruited minions again/fixed his tower again
Its one of those things you kind of have to handwave somehow in fantasy settings since it never makes sense how fantasy settings can have thousands of years without advancing technology(even with magic, that doesn't really make sense since people like doing things just because they can)
Managing Developer
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I didn't feel like spending a ton of time going over what ol' Auby's schedule had been like over the past ten millennia would have added much to this adventure or Adventure Path, so we used that space for more exciting things.
I also like the idea that liches, while smart as hell for the most part, are also a bit disjointed from the ways mortals normally think. I mean, if doing whatever vile thing it is you do to live forever and then do so (up until a point where PCs show up) you're probably not going to be thinking along the same lines as your average mortal humanoid player race. Also, flaws and "wait-whats!?" are fun and give a ton of agency to GMs to tailor the game experiences to their individual tables far better than I can do in the text space available.
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I would like to point out that players aren't often bothered with such details in my experience xD Lot of time I see forum people complaining about plot points, its only the GMs <_<
I do agree that from logical standpoint it doesn't make much of sense, but again, you have to have suspension of disbelief for lot of stuff when it comes to ancient super villains. I'd personally just go with "He is meticulously super genius with infinite time, so he builds each his clockwork minion as if it was a master piece" type of logic.
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That is a good point, Corvus, as well. If the most glaring issue is "what was the lich doing with his spare time", then everything else is likely pretty solid. Of course, it is hard to discuss actually play matters at this point since very few groups would have made it to this book yet.
Given that, I didn't really try to think about it much, but I imagine that even if you knew what you were going it would take a tremendous amount of time to build and program a functional clockwork leviathan single handed. I am sure there was a lot of time spent on failing and trying again as well.
If I made it to this book, I think I would just play up the "mad scientist tinkerer" aspect of Auberon and perhaps leave a lot more evidence of his clockwork machinations. "One time the master went into his laboratory and didn't come back out for 300 years, oh those were good times ...".
In the second room of the tines it mentions as one of the treasures that there is a telescope lens. I'm assuming this is a big telescope lens, however I can't find anything in ultimate equipment that gives any idea on size/weight etc. Can anyone help?
This is a 12" diameter lens. The article doesn't mention the lens weight, and I know nothing at all about telescope lenses, but I would say that 10 lbs is a fair estimate.
Does anyone know how long the litanus sequestering paralysis lasts?
So all we need is something that explains why he hasn't done anything. Here are three scenarios that do exactly that:
Tinalles, these are awesome. I will use one of them; probably Down but not Out. I want Auberon to be really scary, otherwise there's not much point to this whole episode.
I am struggling with plot in advance because we plan to run Azlant as a Kingmaker game. Modules 1-3 are perfect for this. Modules 4-6 are not, and I have to start planning now for ways to change the pacing and emphasis.
For people saying "players don't care"--mine does, so I have to sweat this stuff. Also, I care, and I GM better when I believe in my material. Auberon needs to scare ME--then I can communicate that in play. The Auberon I get from reading this is an essay on the banality of evil, which is an interesting concept but I don't think it really fits here.
What is the point of having 14th level characters make a DC 15 perception check? In some areas it says if they beat it by 10 but other areas it's just a straight up 15 roll. This is requested numerous times in the AP. DC 15 checks is something that you normally see at low levels.
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I have now run all of Tower of the Drowned Dead and have a few comments:
(1) DCs are, as Roysler noted, surprisingly low almost everywhere. The only hard non-combat rolls are the Symbols, where the DC is set by the system.
(2) It felt very sparse in play. Auberon is supposed to be a great necromancer but there are maybe a dozen undead in total. My player says it's an EXP issue. Groups which don't use EXP, like mine, may want to add a lot more critters. It plays very fast and doesn't feel like a full sized dungeon. I'd recommend doubling or tripling the creature count, using the multitude of empty rooms to contain them.
(3) My group walked all over it. They started at the recommended 13th level and did not level up, so they were still 13th at the end; also we play a spellcasting variant so that they only had 6th level spells, not 7th. I had the creatures clump up much more than the module indicates--I put all of the litanus, juju zombies, and the head torturer together, for example. I added more undead and another pelagic child. Didn't matter. The only things that did the PCs any damage were the nautiloids. Most of the enemies had a lot of trouble hitting the PCs (whose ACs ranged from 31 to 36, which I think is normal enough at 13th level) and they evaporated really fast. I had high hopes for Uluuthan, but that was the one place where the PCs got lucky--critical hit disintegrate. Disclaimer: I did not run the fight with Xochitl as I had already established that it was off on a mission when the PCs hit the tower.
This was a stark contrast with City in the Deeps, which was very hard, perhaps too hard for my group, throughout. (The immunity of deep merfolk to sneak attack really hurt our PCs, who rely on sneak attack quite a bit.)
My player chose a novel approach to Auberon, which was to force him to surrender and cart him off in chains--they had planned this in great detail, and for non-module reasons had a good place to stick him. But it says something about how unstressed they were that they could beat Auberon without using any of their big stuff. They simply delegated their wizard (who is some archetype that is good at dispel magic) to counterspell everything Auberon cast. Only failed once, which got the wizard feebleminded, but by then the fight was essentially over.
If I had it to do over again, I would pack stuff in there and try to make it feel like a challenge. More clockworks of all kinds, more undead, and one or two more serious henchmen like the torturer.
My kids have had serious questions about Auberon. I've tried to explain Auberon in terms of a blend of Xykon from Order of the Stick, Death from the Discworld, and the Greek gods... eternal beings get stuck for eons faffing around with the weirdest stuff, simply because they have too much time. He won't negotiate with the PCs because they're not worth the interruption and he never takes them seriously until it's too late.
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I suppose Auberon spent his time doing whatever incredibly long-lived NPCs have done with their time: obsessing unhealthily over their plans. Or maybe spending a lot of time texting each other about it. "Hey, Rovagug, Auberon here. Still imprisoned, big guy? Ha ha. Still waiting on those genocide tips from ya, ya big ol' force of destruction."
More seriously, the tumbledown nature of the flooded tower is intentional (as is the fact that Auberon hasn't even been back to his mortal bedroom); it shows that Auberon thinks such concerns are so far beneath him that he doesn't even notice that they're missing/falling apart/wholly unused, etc. It demonstrates colossal arrogance. (Similarly, not going to the PCs right at first to say "how about a deal, kids" and instead requiring they fight their way right to his literal doorstep to get his attention is part of this same arrogance.)
Regarding how far his genocidal purge has gone, that's not as critical to the overall story, so it can be much larger if you think necessary to establish him as a genuine threat. Alternatively, have you ever heard of the aquatic elleshthu or nollenom races? No? It's because Auberon started with them, and wiped them out completely!
Ron, thank you for your thoughts on the inner workings of Auberon. Have you ever expanded upon your ideas of the ellleshthu? Or the nollenom races? I would enjoy hearing more about these.
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Running this soon, and prepping the monsters and looking at Dahaaka and ... well, I'd like to know how other people have run her.
in particular her Wild Shape ability.
It seems to me that she should Wild Shape to Water Elemental - at her level that would be a Huge Elemental right?
"At 12th level, a druid can also use wild shape to change into a Huge elemental...When taking the form of an elemental, the druid's wild shape now functions as elemental body IV."
and that would give her
"... immune to bleed damage, critical hits, and sneak attacks while in elemental form and gain DR 5/—."
"Water elemental: ...+4 to Strength, –2 penalty to Dexterity, +8 to Constitution, and a +6 natural armor bonus...also gain swim 120 feet."
What are the down sides to this tactic that I am missing?
thanks in advance for the advice!
Running this soon, and prepping the monsters and looking at Dahaaka and ... well, I'd like to know how other people have run her.
in particular her Wild Shape ability.
It seems to me that she should Wild Shape to Water Elemental - at her level that would be a Huge Elemental right?
"At 12th level, a druid can also use wild shape to change into a Huge elemental...When taking the form of an elemental, the druid's wild shape now functions as elemental body IV."
and that would give her
"... immune to bleed damage, critical hits, and sneak attacks while in elemental form and gain DR 5/—.""Water elemental: ...+4 to Strength, –2 penalty to Dexterity, +8 to Constitution, and a +6 natural armor bonus...also gain swim 120 feet."
What are the down sides to this tactic that I am missing?
thanks in advance for the advice!
It's mostly a sidegrade? The larger size means more PCs might trigger her miasma, but she loses a little AC since the bonuses from the form don't work out to match what her breastplate had been providing. The DR is better than the regen she loses - the value of blocking crits/SA is dependant on your party.
With her tactics mostly consisting of AoEs the extra reach won't mean a massive amount - she doesn't have anything to make AoOs much more threatening than in base form.
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I feel very slightly bad... but not terribly.
I rewrote some of Auberon's statblock to make him far more dangerous.
Specifically, he now has Spell Perfection (Horrid Wilting) because of how appropriate it is to his story. He's spent centuries studying among other things, and now has both an Empowered and a Quickened Horrid Wilting prepared (in addition to the general prep outlined in the AP).
I made a couple other small changes. We have a Paladin/Multiclass, so he has Warding Bracers of Armor, for instance. He also has Secluded Grimoire'd his main spellbook to keep some of his secretes to himself (aka away from the Wizard), and those are the spells he will have if he is reconstituted on Kalas-Ti (my group is dead set on destroying him, so I need to follow up with a book 6 version of him).
I wish I'd come here earlier to think up a better history from him. My timeline is scrunched compared to Paizo's (~5,000 years instead of 10,000) but it still feels lackluster that he is the terror of such a small area. I think I'm going to drop clues in his Omen Dominion bungalo about stasis or tinkering or, more likely, plans of a counterattack against a previous group of heroes that laid him low.
bolding above mine
ok - I must be missing something here... I do not see how this works? wouldn't the Empowered Horrid Wilting be 10th and thus not legal? and the Quickened Horrid Wilting would be even more over at 12th level?(From Spell Perfection - "...as long as the total modified level of the spell does not use a spell slot above 9th level. " so... a Silent Horrid Wilting would be ok, (cast from an 8th level slot), but not the other two examples...)