I’m thinking when ever I get around to running this AP about adding the Fear Rules the Sanity rules and Giving all the PCs a corruption of their choice to deal with through out the AP.
What are your guys thoughts?
Did you ever play 3rd edition Ravenloft? These rules are kind compared to them.
By my personal experience, many corruptions will not simply work at low level. They weight too much on the shoulders of many players and offer few rewards.
The useful corruption should be preferred in order to even things up at first, then you can have in game events that shift into another for of more dangerous corruption.
Regarding the sanity rules, the problem is that the sheer horror of many of the first encounters easily scars your players forever without allowing them chances to recover due to both the lack of downtime for the adventure and the lack of resources at lower level to deal with those conditions.
From a meta prospective, there is also to consider that while a PC does know if he's physically hurt, he cannot understand how sanity points and thresholds actually affect him, nor he can modify such outcome without somewhat cheating by either spamming spells like lesser restoration or actively creating a build to counter this. Which implies meta knowledge and may lead to unhappy results.
So, if you want to use those rules, i suggest to talk to your players and explain the high level of difficulty that this will grant to the campaign, and then offer some kind of reward for surviving such experiences.
A good solution could be give each player an object which levels up with them and gives them a few esoteric abilities, like it's being done in Tyrant Grasp.
The reason I am adding it is to increase the difficulty. When I think Gothic Horror I think characters barely surviving by the slimmest of margins. But my gothic horror experience is Ravenloft so there is that.
I was thinking of using the corruption as the players rewards.
What are they doing with the New AP I haven’t even looked at the players guide yet.
Yeah I was kinda thinking the same thing start with fear saves if they fail the fear save by enough 5 10 or 15 each level would give them either more fear effects or sanity attacks
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i think horror adventures were really inspired by Call of Cthulhu, where the PCs all die or go insane.
in an AP you want to get those players through 6 books and what, 16-17 levels?
you can't get there if you are killing them or ruining their minds/bodies in every adventure.
that being said, i really like the Horror Adventures rules. I just don't think that they are a good fit for an AP.
I played through 14 levels of Ravenloft which are more brutal than these rules so it’s possible.
But I do plan on scaling them back some.
Here's my suggestion.
Regarding sanity, i would suggest to keep the rules as they are but offer the Pcs chances to "recover" and cleanse their soul from the baneful effects of what they have seen or done.
To do so, the best solution I can think is to involve the church of Pharasma in the form of a few moments of confession like talk between a npc priest.
Such kind of talks should allow your players to roleplay to the best their sanity stain in a monologue like way, possibly even by writing down something and possibly receive some kind of confirmation. At the end of such talk, i would grant them the effects of a restoration spell aimed only to the sanity damage, and the possible removal of a lesser madness.
Due to how the adventure is structured, this would cover your pcs along book 1 and 2, while leaving them partially exposed between book 3 and 4. At that point, the self healing ability of any pcs should be more than enough to subside such treatment, which could if needed be proposed again in book 5.
However, as written the adventure is very railroaled, therefore it's up to the DM to make the time for the pcs to actually breathe a bit.
Regarding the "reward" of a corruption, that's the tricky part since many of the effects granted by lower level corruptions are mere flavour or not mechanically worth any consideration.
I would therefore suggest the "useful corruption" variant
Regarding CC, the most thematically and mechanically useful corruptions seem to be accursed, demonic, lycantrhopy, lich, possessed and vampiric. The others seems to me not much fur or useful ... unless you are from Illarmarsh ...
Thanks for the ideas
I like doing some type of Ravenloft fear save system that ties into the Sanity like if they fail the fear check by to great then they go to sanity damage.
Yeah I need to look better at the corruptions I scanned them on my phone and was like oh thouse look cool