[Spoilers] How does the death of a PC affect the AP?


Return of the Runelords


If a PC is killed, how does that affect the timeline considering the time travel aspect of the AP?


The actual time travel PC's undertake occurs entirely in book 6, and the vague foreshadowing that occurs in books 3-5 can easily be swept under the rug with a hand-wave. If it's a particularly egregious change (like a TPK) you'll probably need to explain it as a time paradox, which shouldn't be too hard a sell. It should also be noted that the time travel aspect isn't even alluded to in books 1 and 2, so low-level deaths won't matter at all.

Acquisitives

Cat Whisperer wrote:
If a PC is killed, how does that affect the timeline considering the time travel aspect of the AP?

After book 3 begins I would advise not allowing PCs to die in a permanent manner. There are plenty of time related excuses to keep it from happening, and other ways you can disincentivize dying. But I'm the type of GM that prefers to have consistent characters through out the entire story.

Dark Archive

If you need to be heavy handed in the saving book 6 arguably gives you carte blanche on doing so. I wouldn't think that your too likely to have to be that blatant, but you could.

RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32

Kyron "Death Knell" Shess wrote:
…, and other ways you can disincentivize dying.

You need to "disincentivize dying"??

Acquisitives

For some of my players....

But really, the books hands out 3 separate boons of "If the PCs die, return them to life and ignore the effect that killed them." If a PC permanently dies in this AP they are really working hard for it.

Liberty's Edge RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32, 2011 Top 16

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I had a PC die halfway through book 3, and he strongly preferred to make a new character. So I let him, but told him that his new character would be the altered timeline's version of his character - so same race (though I would have allowed a half-elf, half-orc, or planetouched race, as long as he had the human part at least partially), and physically looked identical (though less muscular since he moved from a fighter to a sorcerer), and even same name.

At the moment of the original PC's death, I had all of his original timeline memories fly into the alternate timeline version of his character, and overlay themselves, so his new character had 2 sets of memories: one was the alternate history of the character up to that point, and the second was what the first character knew, including all of the events of the AP up until that point. The new version of the PC was in town and nearby, and was able to join the rest of the party relatively quickly, as if the timeline knew that they should be there just at that moment.

This also has the benefit of allowing each PC to die once and have a replacement character who's still tied to the twisted timeline events of the AP. For campaign traits, I did restrict them to either the original one they had, or replacing it with Time Lost though, which is especially appropriate for the change.

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