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After eight months of play and thirteen sessions of 4/5 hours, I have decided to put my “Mummy’s Mask” campaign on hold. About ten sessions were devoted to “The Half-Dead City” per se, after which the players ended up more or less deciding on what road the campaign was going to take (more on that later).
So it’s time for me to reflect and write a few observations on the campaign, which I’ve adjusted to my style of play and my player’s needs A LOT. Some things worked, others… really didn’t. I hope it’s useful to any GM who wants to start the campaign.
“Mummy’s Mask” was not my original choice for this group. This was the first campaign I had ever tried to manage, so I originally tried to pitch the more accessible “Rise of the Runelords” to the group. One of the players, however, had already played it. So I put “Mummy’s Mask” on the table because I’ve always been an Egyptology nerd. Historical knowledge was a big help for inspiration during the campaign, as details made my descriptions more “lived in”. The people who wrote the Adventure Path really know their stuff in terms of folklore and archeology, and there’s a lot of subtle Easter Eggs for people interested in that.
Session 0:
One thing I enjoyed about the campaign is that the political situation of Wati is relatively easy to understand for people who do not know much about Golarion:
- King forces clergy to lets archeologists explore ancient tombs because it’s a lucrative business venture which might better the country,
- Clergy is reluctant because disturbing the dead can quickly lead to magical hazards.
It’s a “separation of church and state”-type conflict with good and bad people on either side, and interesting motivations. Xenophobia and religious taboos can also come into the mix. Despite the proud dungeon-crawling of “The Half-Dead City”, adding a layer of politics and ethics is surprisingly easy. Everyone in Wati has an opinion on what the PCs are currently doing. Some parties will try to enable the adventuring groups, others to block their opportunities.
As observed by many players, the campaign hook (exploring mysterious tombs) is pretty opportunistic, which makes the first book pretty adaptable to evil-aligned parties: as long as they play by the rules imposed by the Pharasmean church for the exploration of the necropolis, they can get away with selfish motivations and actions.
During session 0 I made sure to mention that to the players: all they needed to do as far as character profiles went was to create a character who wanted to explore these tombs with a group. They could be interested in this venture for profit, pursuit of knowledge, crusade against undead, etc.
Although the players enjoyed the versatility, this ended up causing problems which I did not anticipate. One of the players had asked me for a little bit more time to decide on an alignment. Given that the three other members of the group had chosen Lawful Neutral or Chaotic Good so far, I foolishly assumed that he was thinking of something along those lines. Much later in the campaign, a situation came up in game where I had no choice but to make him officially decide on an alignment, at which point he declared that his character was “Chaotic Evil”. This created a conflict for three reasons:
- Nothing in the character biography he had submitted me (or his actions so far) even suggested his character was evil or destined to become evil,
- His alignment completely clashed with the other members of the group,
- The group had already gone into heated arguments with the Church of Pharasma, situations which would made the priests cast copious amounts of “Detect Alignment”, and there was no way they would have let a chaotic evil character off the hook so easily.
Therefore I chose to put my foot down and forced him to choose another alignment (he settled on True Neutral). The player (understandably) did not enjoy that. So yeah, although the campaign is adaptable to evil alignments, I should have made SURE that all members of the group made a collective agreement on what the moral trajectory of the group was going to be.
Another thing to anticipate is whether the players wants to play Osirians or foreigners. There’s an incentive to play a citizen of Wati as the GM may be compelled to give advantages to the native characters: contacts already established with NPCs in the city, a place to live instead of staying at the inn, etc. Some GMs might find that too generous and force the Osirian characters to hail from another city instead.
The group formed during my Session 0 included:
- Kufu, dwarven male pahmet true neutral fighter (hammer),
- Zyra, elven female chaotic good rogue (unchained),
- Heka, human male lawful neutral sorcerer (draconic lineage),
- Quinray, half-elf male chaotic good ranger (underground/undead).
Side note: “Kufu” is the real-life pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid and “Heka” means “magic” in ancient Egyptian. Give your players to some Egyptian-sounding name generator if you can, it can really add to the flavor.
Only Quinray’s player had experience with Pathfinder so I encouraged the others to play “simple” classes. However, no one wanted to play a cleric (which, considering the number of undead creatures in this campaign, is regrettable). The need for a wand of “Cure Light Wounds” was pretty much blatant and Quinray’s player decided to take the “Rich parents” traits to pay for it.
As always the campaign traits are pretty great and the players took their time to carefully choose one. It’s also a good opportunity to add in a few details about the world and give them an idea of what they’ll have to deal with during the campaign.
Kufu and Heka are both Wati residents so I let them choose a place to stay, provided they were not the owners of the place. Lodging was free but foreign characters had to sleep at an inn. So after some discussion it was decided that Kufu lived at his parents’ house and Heka in his master’s alchemical laboratory. At the group’s request, I elected that Heka’s master could help the group identifying items. This translated into a +2 spellcraft check when they specifically tried to identify the item with him present in the laboratory. All in all it didn’t end up upsetting the game balance too much.
To be continued…
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Pity that the OP didn't continue.