Hi all,
Fairly new GM here, but learning quickly on my feet! I'm currently GM'ing for 2 different groups. Group 1 is going through the Crimson Throne AP, and group 2 has been doing a string of stand-alone modules to learn the system.
Group 2 has recently decided that they want something with a bit more story to it, and that they're ready to try a campaign. I want to run Reign of Winter, as it looks like a really fun one!
My question is this: are there any good GM or player logs from someone running this campaign in the past that I can read through? I found several for CoTCT, but it is a much older AP and seems to have a lot more play-throughs. I haven't been able to find any log/journal/notes that go past book 3.
I know it's a big thing to ask for, but has anyone finished the entire AP and recorded all or most of it as they went?
I found those resources to be a huge help in thinking through my Crimson Throne game. It helped me think through what parts were going to be hard/easy, and tended to give some cool ideas for side plots or ways of integrating other material.
RoW offers cool scenes and crazy settings, so you can totally have a great time with memorable sessions, but to me the overarching story felt pretty weak from book 3 onwards. It is a good read from what I've heard, but it does assume very specific behavior from the players and is no fun if they don't want to follow the heavy handed rails. It requires a good GM to prevent the players from feeling like they have no agency of their own. Don't expect it to run as smoothly as CoCT likely will is all I'm really trying to say.
Our game fell apart during book 5, but if you are interested I can share some impressions I got as a player up to that point. It is not a journal, but maybe it can still help.
I would definitely be interested in hearing your thoughts, especially from the players' side of the table. I am getting the feeling that some work may need to be put in to make the story flow a bit better, so any thoughts specifically about where the story felt weak would be helpful.
I know I want to try to tie the story together a bit tighter, but I do not have a good plan in mind on how to accomplish that yet.
Sure thing. One major problem was that the story didn't really create a strong incentive to rescue Baba Yaga, but a lot of obstacles. I believe that while our GM could have done better to provide motivation or context, it was at least as much a fault of the AP.
Unfortunately our GM was not really reading ahead, so he often couldn't really improvise or allow us to gather information about stuff that wasn't in the immediate future. He was also rather strict about looting, so if we didn't mention to check every room for valuables, we would miss a lot of it and the resulting lack of equipment and knowledge caused deaths. But as the whole idea of Pathfinder is overcoming challenges facing resistance really shouldn't cause an AP to fall flat, right?
RoW did just that for us. A lot of threats you face are servants of Baba Yaga herself. When the campaign eventually fell apart every character was either a replacement or died at least once to the minions of the very being we were supposed to save. Now add the fact that we could at best hope she might help us, but there was no guarantee at all.
Another problem was that book 3 and 4 didn't really advance the story and felt disconnected. Even now I have no idea why Baba Yaga would hide some keys randomly on another planet. Either she trusts her megadungeon from book 3. Then she doesn't need the ice planet at all. Or she doesn't trust her dungeon, but if someone stole its keys her riders (or now the characters) would never reach the ice planet to get the next ones either. Her actions seemed irrational at best, which made our characters question her judgement (and us players the writers of the AP).
Enough so that we eventually just wanted to head back to Irrisen and search for hints of Baba Yagas current location (or maybe just try and face Elvannas) rather than keep running around like headless chicken when the third set of keys didn't really seem to get us any closer to our goal (and the huts defences killed yet another character).
Just then we realized that a powerful geas affected our characters and they literally couldn't do what they wanted without slowly dying. This basically put the final nail in the coffin. We were forced back on the rails, but a few sessions after this we called the whole thing off when nobody was really having fun any longer.
So how to prevent this? We desperately needed allies that could cheer us up and drop a hint every now and then. This worked really well during book 2, where we all were invested to help the resistance against the evil queen, but in the end this made book 3 feel even more jarring. Basically everyone but one women (didn't know anything and was escorted out) in the dungeon would hinder our progress and most likely try to kill us. We got one fey to surrender and talk to us, but she had very limited knowledge as well. An old hag approached us during our first rest and might have been willing to talk, but she had attacked us the day before, so we were cautious. When one of our characters drew a weapon she literally disappeared (the next time we saw her she tried to kill us again). Later two characters died in an insanity pit, as they had no idea what it was until it was too late (I assume the hag could have told us?). Overall there was no real conclusion, just a bunch of confused players moving on with the keys.
It didn't really get better after that. On the ice planet the guys in their castle assumed we were there to invade them and attacked us when we wouldn't give them all our magic items. We already agreed to give them our weapons and they really only had to wait a few minutes until the lady that kind of recruited us would arrive (we tried to teleport), but for some reason they didn't. I assume this was at least in part poor communication by our GM, but I can't be sure of course. In either case it prevented us from really bonding with those guys and we mostly went along helping them because we assumed this was the intended behavior in the AP.
Book 5 had the grim reaper dude in the begining and a fey in the camps lake that would tell us at least a little bit, but again not too much useful information and both were not really interested in our success and felt more like neutral observers. The main antagonist himself was nice enough to tell us most of his plans, so when he offered us to ally up we were actually willing to do so, if only he freed us from the geas. Unfortunately he was apparantly just messing with us and attacked instead. During all of book 3,4 and the part of book 5 we played, we met less memorable and helpful NPCs then in either book 1 or 2.
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I was a player in Snows of Summer and just bailed on it. It wasn’t a decision I took lightly because it ended the game in its entirety. A player had already bailed, another had maybe 50% attendance, and another probably would have stayed if I did and the GM did retcon surgery to fix problem #1 below - but the GM didn’t seem interested in putting in the effort - and why should he? Isn’t that what APs are supposed to be good for - saving the GM prep time?
Three big problems in this AP in my opinion from the get-go are:
1. The premise isn’t self-consistent (massive plot holes)
2. You need to make sure you have player buy-in on the plot and premise before you play.
3. You need to make Baba Yaga a more sympathetic character somehow (or better yet replace her with another being/person).
From reading there are more problems (the books are connected by a hackneyed magic coupon system that forces the players through a bunch of pointless encounters) and potentially more beyond that.
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2qcle?Is-this-adventure-path-a-dud
The way you fix #1 is reduce the story’s impact to regional (say winter spreads to a single Linnorm Kingdom where Heldren is). Otherwise why wouldn’t the PCs just pass the torch to some 17th level NPCs if they really were interested in saving the world? Even better just make it an internal Irriseni civil war and the PCs are exiles from Irrisen that have a reason to return.
The way you do #2 is straight up reveal the premise in its entirety to the players before you start the first session. Otherwise shortly after finding out the plot premise a majority of your players may just quit the game. Get that buyin ahead of time.
For #3 you need to make Baba Yaga at least somewhat sympathetic. Something like it is well known that she’s a fey being of pure balance and for every person she helps or saves she has to balance that with an equivalent atrocity. Or replace Baba Yaga with a rebellious offspring that took her out. Or make Baba Yaga have been dead for a very long time and was replaced by an unknown trickster god murdering Irriseni witches that are reincarnations of Baba Yaga every 100 years before they grow into demigod level threats (a disguise of Aroden?) but Aroden/Baba Yaga hasn’t shown because of his untimely death. Most payers aren’t going to be interested in serving an ancient witch demigod that eats a lot of children and murders innocents by the thousands just to perpetrate revenge against their rebellious relatives.
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Here are some PbPs and campaign journals that I have been following (although due to life etc. I am shamefully far behind on most of them):
- PbP -- this one has gone quite long
- Dragonlance Reign of Winter campaign journal
- One of Poldaran's campaign journals -- also be sure to read the supplementary documents linked from the 7th post