So. I am very stupid.
I have told my players that I am intending to run Return of the Runelords as a direct sequel to Rise of the Runelords - i.e. a 17th to they-aren't-allowed-to-get-more-than-30-because-then-I'd-have-to-adjust-the -XP-spreadsheet AP.
Yes, yes, I know. I'm stupid, I just said that!
Furthermore, before Return came out, I had told the players there was an even 50/50 of running Jade regent as either a direct sequel or a "second generation" game, where the majority or entirity of the PCs would be the children of the RotRL party. The latter is now more the case, and I can see it being the third part of a trilogy.
Anyway, the upshot of this was one of my players asking at the point we are (the break between Fortress of the Stone giants (book 4 of Rise) and Sins of the Saviors (book 5) about whether or not it would be worth his character trying to set-up a farmstead and druid grove in Sandpoint, as a base.
This raises a good question. As I haven't bought all and read all of the Return books yet (I've bought the first two, but not looked at them yet), is there much of the quest pertaining to travel? I.e. if the PCs could teleport to each quest location, would it significantly short-circuit the plot or anything?
If it doesn't, then there is a VERY good reason (aside from the obvious good RP ones) for the PCs to have a proper base in Sandpoint, since they'll only be a [i]Teleport[/i[ away from home.
Return isn't even supposed to be a sequel- you have to assume that Shattered Star has taken place already.
There's travel, oh yes. Lots and lots of travel, plane shifting, and teleportation. It wouldn't short-circuit the plot, since many of the important locations are blocked from direct teleportation, but... I just don't see how you're going to run this AP beginning at 17th level at all.
That requires so much changing that you're basically writing an entirely new AP. I advise throwing that idea out and starting at 1st like you're supposed to. Sorry.
I'll echo what mister Wot said, this AP is the third in a trilogy, and expects a lot of events to have previously occurred. 12 years passing, Year of the Risen Rune, Shattered Star, and even one of the Novels having to have happened. And the bit about writing a whole new AP certainly follows if you plan on using the same PCs from Rise.
That said, it would work surprisingly well for the "Next-Generation" idea you had, with the PCs being the descendants of your Rise PCs going off on their own to be their own heroes. Would even work with future events involving the Sihedron Heroes, which could easily be your actual Rise PCs.
Return isn't even supposed to be a sequel- you have to assume that Shattered Star has taken place already.
There's travel, oh yes. Lots and lots of travel, plane shifting, and teleportation. It wouldn't short-circuit the plot, since many of the important locations are blocked from direct teleportation, but...
Planeshifting/teleportion and teleport blocks are not a problem - my concern is whether in (prsumably) the lower end of the AP, the PCs having the ablity to teleport will mean they skip some bits.
By way of example, in Rise of the Runelords, it wouldn't have mattered if the PCs could have teleported to each location, since 95% of the AP didn't care what happen between Sandpoint and, say, Turtleback Ferry - since I had to fill out the majority of those bits with random encounters myself anyway.
(Jade Regent, on the other hand, I know is specifically about the journey, the the point steps are taken to ensure you casn't teleport to circumnavigate the plot.)
I just don't see how you're going to run this AP beginning at 17th level at all.
That requires so much changing that you're basically writing an entirely new AP. I advise throwing that idea out and starting at 1st like you're supposed to. Sorry.
The plan would as simple as:
After the events of Rise of the Runelords, the PCs settle back to Sandpoint for [some years], perhaps start in on their families, having becoming famous adventurers who saved the world an' stuff.
Other Things Happen during that period (up to and possibly including a different party doing Shattered Star, were I to choose to run that) that don't involve this party.
Start of AP, the PCs would get called in to deal with the things I vaguley recall glancing over in the first part of Return (which would, of course, be scaled to the point of "who are you going to call?" levels) and it goes from there.
(Culminating in - I presume - some sort of battles with some (or all) of the remaining Runelords, because last time it was just one...)
(The same way I would have done Jade Regent.)
(Damn, it just hit me, I almost have to have some sort of final battle with all seven Runelords cheesed back to (for Karzoug and anyone else dead before then) against my seven PCs, don't I, even if I have to bovine-excrement it up from the whole cloth, because it'd be a thematic waste not to...!)
I mean, some fair level of hammering is going to be involved whatever, I'm running 17-Epic for about seven PCs in a 3./PF hybrid, any element of which alone requries me to tweak stuff. (It's not like I didn't take AD&D Dragon Mountain module and do.... Huh, actually basically the same level range as a capstone for that particular party, now I think about it - in 3.5, so I DO have some idea of what I'm getting myself into. Again.)
Return isn't even supposed to be a sequel- you have to assume that Shattered Star has taken place already.
There's travel, oh yes. Lots and lots of travel, plane shifting, and teleportation. It wouldn't short-circuit the plot, since many of the important locations are blocked from direct teleportation, but...
Planeshifting/teleportion and teleport blocks are not a problem - my concern is whether in (prsumably) the lower end of the AP, the PCs having the ablity to teleport will mean they skip some bits.
By way of example, in Rise of the Runelords, it wouldn't have mattered if the PCs could have teleported to each location, since 95% of the AP didn't care what happen between Sandpoint and, say, Turtleback Ferry - since I had to fill out the majority of those bits with random encounters myself anyway.
(Jade Regent, on the other hand, I know is specifically about the journey, the the point steps are taken to ensure you casn't teleport to circumnavigate the plot.)
I just don't see how you're going to run this AP beginning at 17th level at all.
That requires so much changing that you're basically writing an entirely new AP. I advise throwing that idea out and starting at 1st like you're supposed to. Sorry.
The plan would as simple as:
After the events of Rise of the Runelords, the PCs settle back to Sandpoint for [some years], perhaps start in on their families, having becoming famous adventurers who saved the world an' stuff.
Other Things Happen during that period (up to and possibly including a different party doing Shattered Star, were I to choose to run that) that don't involve this party.
Start of AP, the PCs would get called in to deal with the things I vaguley recall glancing over in the first part of Return (which would, of course, be scaled to the point of "who are you going to call?" levels) and it goes from there.
(Culminating in - I presume - some sort of battles with some (or all) of the remaining Runelords,...
Tell ya what, I'll just go ahead and spell it out. Return assumes that the prior PCs are not currently in the picture as of the start of this adventure. For those that would get involved, it is spelled out properly in Books 2 and 5 of Return where exactly their adventure takes them should they choose to get involved with the plot.
Now, if you want to use your Rise PCs, it is certainly possible to elaborate on this adventure that they have, but Return is just as much the story of new heroes going above and beyond those that came before then.
Honestly, if you truly have your heart set on using your Rise PCs for this AP, I'll strongly suggest reading all six books beforehand, see what plot points are still usable, and then build the story from the ground up in order to create a story that naturally flows beyond Rise.
I'm currently in the middle of running Return, and I'm rewriting and expanding upon a good chunk of the AP, with Books 4, 5, and 6 all being heavily modified to allow for a truly epic conclusion.
my concern is whether in (prsumably) the lower end of the AP, the PCs having the ablity to teleport will mean they skip some bits.
Every book in Return of the Runelords is extremely self-contained. You could literally break it up and run it as a collection of six stand-alone adventures for different parties with almost no modification. As a result it's impossible to sequence skip between volumes because the PC's just won't even know who the next chapter's destination/antagonist will be until they get there. As a result it's basically impossible to do the chapters out of order, and skips are only possible within a chapter.
Spoilers forthcoming:
Book 1 is very much a sandbox, and is designed with the presumption that the party is likely to do stuff out of order. It's basically impossible to screw up in this regard.
Given what you've described as your premise, you probably wouldn't run book 1 at all. The actual events are not noteworthy enough to even reach the ears of a high-level group of PC's. We're talking street gangs and bandits, stuff that you couldn't really scale up. This chapter has almost nothing to do with the rest of the AP anyways.
At the outset of book 2 the party needs to travel to Magnimar from Roderic's Cove by boat. The journey itself makes up a fairly hefty chunk of the book, with one of the other passengers planning to steal the McGuffin/Red Herring (the players are lead to think it's a McGuffin, when in fact it's just a Red Herring meant to get them to Magnimar, at which point the main plot forgets about it). You'd miss a big chunk of this volume with teleportation, but nothing that would require modification to the rest of the plot. Given your premise you'd probably just cut this out entirely and start off in Magnimar
After reaching Magnimar the party is sent to a dungeon on an uninhabited island. A high-level party could bypass most of the hazards outside of the dungeon, as well as easily retreating from areas that are supposed to trap them inside until they find the way out. This won't break anything and could be easily adapted around.
There is a lot of traveling in book 3, but the travel is entirely handwaved. Since the party is due to reach 9th level during this book it just presumes they could be traveling via teleportation.
In a hilarious inversion this adventure presumes the party will arrive at their destination by teleportation, but if the party decides to use conventional overland travel they will end up skipping about a quarter of this volume! It turns out that because of all the hoops you need to jump through to teleport to this location, it is faster and easier to just travel there the old-fashioned way.
For immediate consequences, this will lead to an unfortunate "gotcha" moment when they reach the dungeon and are blindsided by a magical defense they have no way of knowing about (and it's really nasty). In the long-run, skipping this part of the AP eliminates a lot of the foreshadowing of book 6, which really hurts the AP as a whole since book 6 is only loosely connected with the rest of the AP to begin with.
A plot barrier prevents non-mythic parties from reaching the intended destination by any means other than the intended one, and once you're at the intended destination it's just a sandbox for the rest of the chapter anyways.
Book 6 is basically a Rube Goldberg machine of adventure plots. The course of action the PC's are supposed to take is so hilariously convoluted that there's no way anyone would come up with this course of action on their own without the designated plot NPC telling them.
The first dungeon of book 6 is skippable, but this is intentional and the book explicitly tells the GM how to handle it if they party does this.
Spoiler:Essentially, by doing this with the same PCs, you need to either come up with another group of PCs and decide why the Sihedron Council went to those PCs first instead of your PCs, OR you have to rewrite major plot portions of the AP.
Actually you don't need to change anything:
As the GM you will need to come up with a different reason for why Alaznist lost the scepter of ages, but this could be as simple as "the ritual the PC's cast later in this chapter steals it away from her".
Spoiler:Book 4 doesn't have a ton of travel that matters either, especially since they can't teleport directly to the Temple of the Peacock Spirit, or find it any way but through the ritual.
Not quite true
Of course, giving the PC's that much information makes skipping part 1 a very possible outcome, so a GM may well decide against giving them all the info as written.
I'll go one step further. This is very spoilery, but since you plan on GMing it, that shouldn't be a problem. This details some of the scope of plot rewrite you'll need. I've put it in spoiler tags, though, with the answer to your questions below.
** spoiler omitted **...
Thank you, that is an excellent summation, and precisely the sort of thing I'm looking for.
(So, only one runelord? Kind of diappointed...! Well, like I said, easy enough to cheese, especially with Time Travel Shenaigans, for a final boss fight...!)
So, I see that basically, it is more or less A N Boat trip to qwork around (easy enough to contrive some excuses - Jade Regent has a non-teleportable warded-thingy, so such a thing even exists to be cribbed. Could be as simply as "make the sword go in a non-teleport box, 'cos it'll make them umpteeth-level thieves have to try harder" (which of coruse means they have to be, like more cleverer...!
(I can go have a proper a look at that at my leisure, as I have up to book 2.)
(Myself, I also stopped making random encounters after the first bit of Fortress of the Stone Giants when I knew the PCs would get to level 9!)
DOES seem like it might be an idea to have a ready-made high-level cast of returning characters, though.
So, either we run Jade Regent as the Epic and The Kids get be Return...
Oooooor, perhaps, I should shelve Return until after we complete Shackled City (in this case, being run down in Sargava).
I'm running SC concurrently, as in we did half of RotRL, then the first third of SC, then we're on the last half of RotRL and then we should do the second third of SC. (Partly this is so that I can do the necessary adjustments to monsters in chunks, as so better get the balance right, rather than trying to do the whole AP in one go and having a large error margin by the end.)
They ARE also running concurrently in time (both starting in 4707 or 4708, one of the two).
We have a new player whose willing to DM Starfinder though, so if I just get him (assuming this first game doesn't put him off!) to run between SC's second and third parts...
We could have the heroes there (who will be about 20th) as the ones called up by the Sidhedron guys (the Sargavan party "Grallus FB" having better publicity, you see!). The RotRL party called in later (they don't even have a group name, you see!) after they lose contact with Grallus FB...
And a cheesed-in epic fight at the end, possibly with both sets of PCs verses seven Runelords, which would be, you have to admit, one fracking hell of a capstone for those parties!
Hell, what a way to open the game - make Grallus FB fight Alhaznist to start with and do the lose... Nothing like the fate of their own characters to motivate the players, right?
Thanks, folks, that's given me some great ideas to mull over and answered my question (I can tell the player, sure, go ahead and get started, though it'll really come into its own as a home base in the sequel.)
Well, that's likely stats for 6/7 (Krzoug being in Rise), so that's plenty to work with (and actually more like what I was expecting).
Has... Krule? Is it? (I vaguely recall from looking at it on Monday, but its been a long day and I'm too knackered to look it up now) made an appearance in anything that I could look at to crib some stats from (well, more "re-create but with some direction" from)?
Paizo really screwed over Belimarius anyways with all those Steal feats they gave her. Totally useless for a high-level wizard.
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Paizo really screwed over Belimarius anyways with all those Steal feats they gave her. Totally useless for a high-level wizard.
Change it if you want. We gave them to her because it fit her envious nature so well. And frankly... she's got plenty to do in a fight already. She can afford to have fun with some of her choices.
Steal feats...? That's a thing?
(Here is where you can tell that I run a 3.5/PF hybrid that mostly uses the PF rules mechanics pasted on top of the 3.5 (usually houserule-modified) classes/feats/spells...)
To PFSRD!
*reads*
Bahahahahahaha!
That's a pricless idea!
Okay, even if it might be limited only to basically cloaks and headbands and necklaces and secondary weapons (vrs PCs without mcguffins), the idea of an Epic-level Belimarius coming along with a whip (she REALLY ought to have one for this, and I'mma gonna give her one) and going "yoink!" on their items (their precious, likely primary spell-casting stat items...) is both a) hilarius and b) going to tweak them off more than her dropping the Automatic Metamagic Quicken spells she is totally going to be dropping on them (and hey, at their sort of level, they are going to have some nice things to yoink!)
If there's not a feat which makes it an attack instead of a standard action, I'mma totally going to make one.
"I want that!" *whip crack* "And that!" *whip crack* "And that as well...!" *whip crack*
Krune has stats in:
** spoiler omitted **
All of the Runelords received stats or partial stats in Paizo's books.
Ta! Excellent.
(Also, dammit, I was one letter out!)
Change it if you want. We gave them to her because it fit her envious nature so well. And frankly... she's got plenty to do in a fight already. She can afford to have fun with some of her choices.
I particularly like what you did with Xandergul. What do his tactics call for? Casting invisibility and stalking his enemies, just presuming that a high-level party that is specifically hunting down the the most powerful illusionist in Golarion wouldn't be prepared with countermeasures for invisibility. Absolutely glorious, and perfectly in character for the Runelord of Pride.
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Change it if you want. We gave them to her because it fit her envious nature so well. And frankly... she's got plenty to do in a fight already. She can afford to have fun with some of her choices.I particularly like what you did with Xandergul. What do his tactics call for? Casting invisibility and stalking his enemies, just presuming that a high-level party that is specifically hunting down the the most powerful illusionist in Golarion wouldn't be prepared with countermeasures for invisibility. Absolutely glorious, and perfectly in character for the Runelord of Pride.
Exactly.
Enemies who make no mistakes and are tailor made to defeat and block every thing that a party of PCs do are not only frustrating to play against... they're plain old frustrating and BORING to play.
Change it if you want. We gave them to her because it fit her envious nature so well. And frankly... she's got plenty to do in a fight already. She can afford to have fun with some of her choices.I particularly like what you did with Xandergul. What do his tactics call for? Casting invisibility and stalking his enemies, just presuming that a high-level party that is specifically hunting down the the most powerful illusionist in Golarion wouldn't be prepared with countermeasures for invisibility. Absolutely glorious, and perfectly in character for the Runelord of Pride.Exactly.
Enemies who make no mistakes and are tailor made to defeat and block every thing that a party of PCs do are not only frustrating to play against... they're plain old frustrating and BORING to play.
I have absolutely nothing against adding flavor. Belimarius' feats are definitely in character for her, as is Xanderghul's arrogance. And she's still an 18th level wizard, of course. I did question how Xanderghul is supposed to stand against true seeing or see invisibility, but I guess as an NPC, it's his job to die anyways.
The optimizer in me (I try to keep it buried under a mountain of multiclassed characters most of the time) still surfaces occasionally.
Erm, Xanderghul has Mind Blank memorized. See Invisibility and True Seeing simply don't work.
From the Mind Blank description:
"The subject is protected from all devices and spells that gather information about the target through divination magic (such as detect evil, locate creature, scry, and see invisible)."
and
"Mind blank even foils limited wish, miracle, and wish spells when they are used in such a way as to gain information about the target. "
I'm sure someone will try to argue that True Seeing surely will work, since it is not mentioned explicitly. However, True Seeing is a level six spell vs. a level eight spell, where both spell descriptions contradict each other (i.e. "see all things as they actually are" vs what I quoted above). Normally the higher level spell takes precedence in those cases.
I quoted the second part of Mind Blank specifically to indicate that actually even a level nine spell like Wish or Miracle is foiled by Mind Blank, hence it logically would foil a level six divination like True Seeing as well.
There's a reason why I took this as my first spell for my Sorcerer when we reached level 16 in the Way of the Wicked campaign one week ago. :p It makes Mirror Image and Invisibility once again truly useful.
"The subject is protected from all devices and spells that gather information about the target through divination magic (such as detect evil, locate creature, scry, and see invisible)."
Doesn't help against Evocation, or Transmutation, or Abjuration, or Conjuration, even Divination spells that don't directly reveal information about the target. Heck, Xanderghul isn't invested into stealth, so if he tries to move while invisible he only has a +27 check. Given the party is expected to be 14th level it's entirely plausible he could be spotted by a simple perception check.
It is true that he has See Invisibility and True Sight covered (I agree by RAW that Mind Blank blocks it, although I do disagree with you on your 6th vs 8th level analysis as there are other factors that are more important: namely the 1 minute/level vs 24 hour duration and the 250 gp material component cost vs no material component costs) but that's by no means a complete defense.
Sure, but I wasn't talking about those other spells or other means of finding the guy, I was talking specifically about See Invisibility and True Seeing. Of course parties have many resources to circumvent Mind Blank, but a lot of players will go the lazy approach and just run around with See Invisibility and/or True Seeing. Of course if you got the paranoid type who runs around with Echolocation on all the time or something like a Dragon Disciple in the group, who has Blindsense, then bad luck for Xanderghul.
There's a reason why I've invested maximum ranks into Stealth for my Sorcerer (Sage bloodline, so I got the spare skill points). ^^
I was talking more about his actual illusions. He can cast all the invisibility he wants, but his programmed image/major image/scintillating pattern/shadow spells won't do anything. I am assuming that a party has true seeing in the first place, but what kind of party that's facing down a high level illusionist won't? If they don't, I'd say that they probably deserve whatever's coming to them.
He's still got some powerful alternatives, and not everyone will have true seeing up. It just throws a wrench in the tactics of one so focused on illusions.
Yeah, there are some schools which are just more easily countered than others, Illusion and Enchantment foremost between them.