First Time Running Ruins of Azlant.

[Agonous]

I'll be running my first running an Adventure Path, and my first time is with Ruins.

I was wondering if you all had any suggestions to help the game go fun and smoothly.

Currently 3 PCs, looks like all of them being Aquatic elves and siblings. Classes haven't been decided yet.

One of the players want involved with all the other homebrew games we do, but I want to minimize crossover with those games, is there a chance of having a good balance if i do that?

any advice would be helpful.

[Yakman]

Agonous wrote:

I'll be running my first running an Adventure Path, and my first time is with Ruins.

I was wondering if you all had any suggestions to help the game go fun and smoothly.

Currently 3 PCs, looks like all of them being Aquatic elves and siblings. Classes haven't been decided yet.

One of the players want involved with all the other homebrew games we do, but I want to minimize crossover with those games, is there a chance of having a good balance if i do that?

any advice would be helpful.

part of the theme of ruins is that this really is the frontier - you are WAY out in the ocean. resupply is not coming. help is not coming.

so i would say that the sense of isolation is important. i assume your other homebrew stuff is somewhere else. Azlant is far from wherever that is. So it probably doesn't make sense to cross over. Tell them that maybe an NPC might show up in Talmandor's Bounty or something, but your PCs going back and forth is probably not for the best.

as far as all the characters being aquatic elves, part of the wonder of azlant is that you discover all these things under the sea. maybe talk to them about being just 'elves' and they then have this wonderful opportunity throughout Ruins to discover the aquatic world for the first time. just a thought.

maybe some ancient lore has some ancestor being an aquatic elf, but they don't know what that means, or a sorcerer has an aquatic bloodline or something, but just giving them the aquatic stuff which they are supposed to earn through the AP seems like a cheap out for the players.

[Agonous]

Awesome, I'll keep that in mind, They seem to be of the opinion that they did not know they were Aquatic elves, so it seems like they will get a chance to discover their heritage during the AP.

[Yakman]

Agonous wrote:

Awesome, I'll keep that in mind, They seem to be of the opinion that they did not know they were Aquatic elves, so it seems like they will get a chance to discover their heritage during the AP.

then just make them elves. they joined the colony because of an old family legend that they came from beyond the sea.

the mechanic of water breathing will make some of the early encounters lose a lot of their peril, both perceived and real.

work with the idea though.

Spoiler:

there's a bit in book 4 which doesn't make a ton of sense as written, where the heroes go to an island tomb. instead of it being a human, make it their elven ancestor, who sacrificed his water-breathing to save his people, or something like that. everything else is pretty much the same in the episode, but you can really hit home that not only are the pcs defending their family/friends in talmandor's bounty, but also their ancient homeland in azlant

[Mary Yamato]

Underwater combat with swimming is super confusing. Either simplify it, or read up on it and get comfortable with the rules. You'll also want to think about how you're going to represent 3D combat on a 2D map board, if you use figures or tokens....

Module 1 will run much smoother if you read through it carefully and make notes on what happened, because if your players are like mine, they will treat it like a detective mystery and you'll need to be in command of your clues.

I am currently running #5 and we have had a ton of fun with this AP (though we changed it a lot). My warning for later is that #4 is MUCH harder than the others; look carefully at the encounters before running them!