Disappointed with book 6? Spoilers ahead, fair warning.

[Val'bryn2]

Tangent, going ONLY by the module, what is keeping Tar-baphon from doing just that? The first and last, if not actually nuking it, though he still has Meteor Swarm?

[Kevin Mack]

What I find odd is how quickly people are willing to jump to the defence of a character like Sorshen I mean I actually diddent mind the end of return that much (did alter it so sorshens turn felt bit more natural) but at the end of the day she's a character who has been responsable for a lot of suffering and attrocity's either directly or indirectly but everyone is just supposed to be okay about it because she's really sorry and wont do it again?

[Rysky]

Kevin Mack wrote:

What I find odd is how quickly people are willing to jump to the defence of a character like Sorshen I mean I actually diddent mind the end of return that much (did alter it so sorshens turn felt bit more natural) but at the end of the day she's a character who has been responsable for a lot of suffering and attrocity's either directly or indirectly but everyone is just supposed to be okay about it because she's really sorry and wont do it again?

It's more be aghast at people wanting to randmonly murder an NPC wanting to help on purely metagame assumptions that doesn't actually sync up with the AP and the NPC.

Yes Sorshen was evil, very evil. 10,000 years ago. But what all evils she committed is not something knowable by the party even with knowledge checks due to 10,000 years since it happened + "okay did this actually happen or was this something the other Runelords made up about her?"

Which is a thing that real world academia has to deal with.

[pjrogers]

I’m going to be annoying and wax philosophical for a moment. I think sometimes we expect our fantasy adventures to end with all the heroes alive, all the villains dead, and a wonderful new world where everyone lives happily ever after. Real life and even much fantasy literature is rarely so nice and neat. Good people suffer and die, some bad people prosper, defeating one evil may create space for new & different conflicts, and so on.

I can imagine the ending to the Silmarillion AP – “OK, most of you are dead and the survivors need to be rescued by a force of deities and angels that are still pissed at you for being a**holes in Book 1. Oh, and your rescuers will be destroying almost all of what you built and the land upon which you built it in the process of rescuing your sorry asses. And I almost forgot. You remember the boss from book 4? He escapes and torments your descendents for several thousand more years”

So while I want an element of escapism in my gaming, I also like a degree of “realism.” Thus, I’m perfectly fine with the less than totally satisfying endings of many of the APs.

[Val'bryn2]

Yes, but I think it bears reiterating that all Tar-baphon is a weapon he only had roughly 7 more uses of, and that this explosion that kills him was happening in, roughly, the command tents of his enemy army. The forces of Absalom's army had to take more damage from the blast, so it ends with the Tyrant MIA until he reforms, his army is almost certainly in better shape than Absalom's. Yes, he might have to go into a battle or 2 naked, gear wise, but that still leaves him as a CR 24 threat, approximately, when a 19 can pretend he's a god and get away with the deception.

[Val'bryn2]

It's rather unfair to say we're complaining about not curb stomping him when our real problem is that the PCs are superfluous in beating him. They do damage, and he ragequits, destroying a huge part of Absalom's army, and while Tar-baphon returns, only needing a shopping trip, the pcs are gone, utterly, not only dead, but so destroyed that they no longer even have souls that can be judged. For a temporary setback, they entered oblivion.

This is not Rogue One, Rogue One set the stage for New Hope's victory. This isn't even Revenge of the Sith, it would be Revenge of the Sith if Obi-wan had tackled Anakin into the lava, and died before Anakin got fished out.

[Cori Marie]

Val'bryn2 wrote:

It's rather unfair to say we're complaining about not curb stomping him when our real problem is that the PCs are superfluous in beating him. They do damage, and he ragequits, destroying a huge part of Absalom's army, and while Tar-baphon returns, only needing a shopping trip, the pcs are gone, utterly, not only dead, but so destroyed that they no longer even have souls that can be judged. For a temporary setback, they entered oblivion.

This is not Rogue One, Rogue One set the stage for New Hope's victory. This isn't even Revenge of the Sith, it would be Revenge of the Sith if Obi-wan had tackled Anakin into the lava, and died before Anakin got fished out.

We don't know that this isn't Rogue One, because the stories after it have not yet been told. What the PCs did might very well be important to taking the Tyrant down once and for all. But because it's not a prequel, we have to wait for the story to resolve.

[Rysky]

The PCs have the Obols which is what short circuits his Radiant Fire.

[Yakman]

Cori Marie wrote:

Val'bryn2 wrote:

It's rather unfair to say we're complaining about not curb stomping him when our real problem is that the PCs are superfluous in beating him. They do damage, and he ragequits, destroying a huge part of Absalom's army, and while Tar-baphon returns, only needing a shopping trip, the pcs are gone, utterly, not only dead, but so destroyed that they no longer even have souls that can be judged. For a temporary setback, they entered oblivion.

This is not Rogue One, Rogue One set the stage for New Hope's victory. This isn't even Revenge of the Sith, it would be Revenge of the Sith if Obi-wan had tackled Anakin into the lava, and died before Anakin got fished out.

We don't know that this isn't Rogue One, because the stories after it have not yet been told. What the PCs did might very well be important to taking the Tyrant down once and for all. But because it's not a prequel, we have to wait for the story to resolve.

well... it almost certainly impacts at least one of the two announced isle of Kortos APs...

[Val'bryn2]

Here's my thing, I'm looking at it through the lenses of Prince of Demons. Both are Paizo swan songs, one for Dungeon magazine, one for Pathfinder 1st Edition. In one you spend the last adventure chipping away at the power base of Demogorgon, a being of power that makes Tar-baphon look like a chump, weakening him to the point where you can beat him. You can choose not to weaken him fully, in which case you still fight him, but it's more difficult. But that's the thing, you have a chance to win.
By contrast, in Midwives to Death, you can't win. You will die, and Tar-baphon is still loose in Golarion. You can't beat him, you just tick him off and fight him at full strength. You don't weaken him, you cause him to drop a nuke in the middle of the army meant to fight him. And everyone's talking about depriving him of the Radiant Fire as a great goal, a true success, but he didn't rely on it. The text specifies that he tries to avoid using it in favor of his undead army.

[Rysky]

Did they permanently at the time (of course non-canonically since he's still around) kill Demogorgorn in in PoD?

And Baphy avoids using it because it's limited. It's still the strongest weapon he's got.