I feel sorry for the Stormblades


Shackled City Adventure Path

RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32

My party are running slipshod all over them so hard, its almost not funny.

I'm running Shackled City (on Golarion), with seven characters (and seven players, otn a good night!) I gave the players a slightly modified (primariy Golarion-ised)version of the community player's handbook, and one of the players decided his wizard would be the son of the Lathenmires.

Great, thinks, I, ready made rivalry, and a grand excuse to tie the Stormblades in a bit deeper to the party. So, as part of his background[1], Grallus Lathenmire was originally part of the Stormblades with his older sister dear (being opposites it pretty much every respect, they don't get on), but found the Stormblades distasteful. (Especially Annah, because he is smarter than she is and doesn't like to be patronised.) So he decided he would go away and (actual lines from background) form his own party with beer and hook horrors.

Which he actually did; the party as is met up while wandering around looking for the drunk dad of one of the dwarves.

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So, we come to Meet the Competition, and the first one-screen appearance of the Stormblades. Their attempts to rile the PCs up fell flat at one comment from the 16-year old archer character (and my complete inability to come up with a rejoinder, partily because I was too busy laughing).

So the Stormblades went off in a bit of a huff.

The party pretty much beat the individual Stormblades out in the all the festival games, or the Stormblades did it themselves... For example, using the festival games from the community resources, Cora managed to screw up completely and come in nearly last in the obstacle course.Thy completely failed to give the Stormblades the chance to win in the tug-of-war by just not participating (entirely reasonably, as the party consists of a wizards, two archivists, a bard/cleric, an archer, a rogue and a crusader - and the rogue is the second-strongest member.)

The invitations to the ball came in and the party IMMEDIATELY went out and got costumes, hired both good carriages and got a few lessons, with only the one character (whose player wasn't there) being elected to have a poor costume, becuse it was funny.

The party of course, did all the usual stuff in the adventure in their typically competant fashion. We got to the Lucky Monkey, and Grallus' player asked about what were the chances of them taking it over. I said, as we had the Pathfinder downtime rules there and ready, if they wanted to do all the number crunching, I was absolutely fine with it.

So, of course, Grallus asked Daddy for some help, and Daddy was delighted to see his son taking up a real job ("A man's job, not like this stabbing people lark!") and thus giving Grallus the chance to score some points of his sister,

We come, then, to the Demonskar Ball (using, of course, Delvedeep's expanded version). Starting off, four of them easily won over the Aslaxins (with the chap in the poor costume still managing to win approval), to Annah and Zachery II's annoyance.

And then it was time for the Song of Heaven. Annah is upagainst the party's bard, Wathiki.

Now, Wathiki is a M'Wangi.(This is set in Sargava, only with Cauldron being less racist than the rest of the country, because, of course, the module wasn't written with that tone in mind and I felt no need to complicate it). Wathiki has an Afro. Wathiki's background, as handed to me by the player in its entirity, runs thusly:

Quote:

Now, this is a story all about how

Some dude’s life got flipped-turned upside down
And I'd like to take a minute
Just sit right there
I'll tell you how I became what I call an adventur”rare”

In west Kalabuto born and raised
In the tavern was where I spent most of my days
Cleanin' up maxin' relaxin' all cool
And all shooting some beats ‘cause my words were mah tool
When a couple of guys who were up to no good
Started making trouble in my neighbourhood
I wielded my words an’ Ma hated the din
She said 'You're movin' in with the Clerics of Shelyn'

We whistled for a friar and when he came near
His lyrics were fresh and he used ice as a mirror
If anything I could say that this dude was too much
But I thought 'Nah, forget it' – ‘Let’s see this god and such'

I studied for some years, about 7 or 8
Before I yelled to the cleric 'Yo homes, see ya later'
I looked out at the kingdom
I was finally there
To drop beats in the world as an adventure”rare”

Wathiki - to his player's enormous credit - has spoken in nothing but rhymes for the entire adventure path[2].

Wathiki, who was very nearly the reason the party was called Grallus' Funk Band and not Grallus FB, because I warned them that the former name would probably make them the laughing stock of the city. (The more fool I.)

Annah chooses from the five options, the harp and with her "I paid the judge" is on +13. Wathiki, naturally, chooses "voice." I should thank Delvedeep, actually, for specifically using "voice" and not "singing" (as Wathiki's Perform skill is technically Perform (Beatbox). After lessons, (and the player being plesantly surprised he was going to get his full skill check) was at +12.

I found I had got two sets of DCs noted and wasn't sure which one I should use. Looking it up now i'm back, the original lists two set of DCs and I had apparently reduced all of them down a bit, because I thought they were a bit high.

I needn't have bothered.

Wathiki blew Annah out of the water, with his lowest check on the penultimate verse being 25 - the rest were over 30 (which passed on Delvedeep's highest set of DC!) Annah, meanwhile - not doube increasinly infuriated by the performance, failed her last two checks.

So, let us be clear. Wathiki delivered not only one of the finest performances of the Song of Heaven Cauldron has ever seen, but he did it beatboxing.

Annah stormed off, ignoring Wathiki's offered "good show" shake on it (and I had her snarl at Professor Palendor, just as a way for the PCs to know Wathiki won even when the judge was being bribed.)

During the dancing, I regretfully decided that there was no way Grallus would be stupid enough to let Cora anywhere near him dancing (because he knows exactly what she's like), so the only other one (not currently beatboxing!) with an elaborate cosume was dwarven archivist (and ladies dwarf) Danagar. Whom she utterly failed to out-dance to ruin the costume.

(And that is as far as we've gotten.)

After this, I fear no-one is going to bat an eyelid at the Lucky Monkey becoming the Funky Monkey, not now...!

________________________________________________________

So then, the poor Stormblades have been shown up at every single turn. They are about as threatening a rival to the PCs as DickDastardly, and about as successful.

Maybe I ought to just give up and make them the full-on comedy relief rivals at this point...! (Presumably that makes Todd Muttley...?)

________________________________________________________

Have the Stormblades fared better in anyone else's games?

________________________________________________________

[1]I let the players do as much or as little of background as they like, and then do the rest myself (typically just localising it), and using as a grand excuse to feed in pertinent background information. (Like all the stuff on the Splintershields for the two dwarves in the party.)

[2]The player viewed it as a challenge, since it wasn't something that comes naturally to him. But he's definitely getting better at it as this goes on!


IMC, the rivalry between the PCs and the Stormblades can be boiled down to this:

Stormblades: We're awesome, amazing and rich. You peasants should just leave everything to us!

PCs: I'm sorry. You are ...? We've been too busy saving the city to keep up on local politics.

*Stormblades storm off in a huff*

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder Adventure, Rulebook Subscriber

That's what makes them such great foils. And makes the party hate them. :)

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