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I'm about to start to GM Rise of the Runelords and I just read about the inevitable spoiler that happens when your players look up the Sihedron Medallion on d20pfsrd.com or hero lab. There is no way I can forbid my players to use hero lab, as one of them is completely dependent on it,
but at least I know I don't have to worry about this issue. I'll just call it a heptagram medallion and be done with it.
But I do need to know if there are other possible spoilers that I can avoid. What are your experiences?
You can create a custom HeroLab data file that includes your home rules or custom content, and distribute that to your players who use it. In that file, create a new version of the Sihedron Medallion that doesn't include the spoiler text in the description.
I don't recall any other spoilers - though all the unique items are described in full so once added they will know how the items work. The Sihedron medallion is the only one I remember that has a "hidden" feature.
I discovered this "feature" the hard way. The pc wizard added the medallion and discovered this when reading the entry from Hero Lab. I told him (the player) his pc didn't know that and he kept wearing it. Amusingly the player forgot all about it until he discovered it again when the group was approaching Xin Shalast. I simply explained it as he was much higher level and figured it out. It was also true that when he first started wearing it Karzoug was not using it to scry on him but absolutely doing so as they approached Xin Shalast. The party proceeded to put all the Sihedron items in a bag of holding. They were angst-ridden about having to put them back on later.
Unsolicited fan boy comment: Hero Lab is pretty cool for the GM as well. There are portfolios for all the encounters in the AP - makes running combat a breeze. Especially for later levels when the high level NPC's start showing up. Certainly not free and not everyone can afford it, etc. but if you can, really cool tool.
This is a tricky one. Since I'm the only one in my group with Hero Lab and am thus handling the character sheets of those players who want to use it, I can get by by simply cloning the medallion and editing out any spoilers. That won't help if your players are using it unattended, though.
You could not call it a Sihedron medallion and call it something else instead, telling them that it's a custom item that isn't in Hero Lab (which would just barely be true since you renamed it!). It won't stop them from stumbling across it randomly, though.
The best solution I can come up with is to simply tell your players to avoid using the RotRL data set and add any RotRL-specific stuff to their character sheet by hand. That's painful for things like the campaign traits, but what can you do?
AFAIK, all of the Adventure Path data sets have similar issues to a greater or lesser degree. I can see all kinds of spoilerific stuff in the CotCT data set for the druid I'm playing in it, but after all these years of practice, I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing. Plus, it doesn't have anything quite as "oh crap" as the spoiler you're talking about.
My party just ran across their first Sihedron Ring- same spoiler when I looked for an online description to give them.
This is a tricky one. Since I'm the only one in my group with Hero Lab and am thus handling the character sheets of those players who want to use it, I can get by by simply cloning the medallion and editing out any spoilers. That won't help if your players are using it unattended, though.
When I ran Runelords the first time back in 2012, I didn't have HeroLab, and one of my players did. The fact that the item was spoilered in the tool was very unexpected... and the player read it aloud at the table before I could stop him.
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Ask them not to read the spoilers online and provide a printed or pdf explanation of the item in question.
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Unsolicited fan boy comment: Hero Lab is pretty cool for the GM as well. There are portfolios for all the encounters in the AP - makes running combat a breeze. Especially for later levels when the high level NPC's start showing up. Certainly not free and not everyone can afford it, etc. but if you can, really cool tool.
Combat Manager has all of the monsters and NPCs from this AP as well, plus it is free. I highly recommended it for running Pathfinder combat. I especially like that it has a separate initiative window; I put that on a separate monitor and place it where the players can see it easily.