| upbow |
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
There’s spoilers ahead, so if you’re a player in this AP, maybe ask your GM to read this and see what your group can use.
IF YOU DON’T WANT SPOILERS, STOP READING NOW.
A few weeks ago our group finished Hells Rebels. We loved the AP – how often do you get to found a new nation? It’s like Pathfinder’s version of Hamilton.
We made a lot of tweaks to make it run a bit more roleplaying-heavy, to make it feel more personal, to make it more about the region of Ravounel than the city of Kintargo, to make it more about individual motivations, and to eliminate the extradimensional travel to hell because Hamilton didn’t take place in London either.
I’d like to share the biggest of these tweaks with you - maybe they’ll prove useful for your run of the AP.
MAKING IT PERSONAL BY WORKING AT THE OPERA
During the night of ashes, Barzillai Thrune moves into the Kintargo Opera, and its biggest star disappears. A bunch of noble homes are burned to the ground, and proclamations forbid music, colorful clothing and other simple pleasures. Our Heroes first hideout is used by the Bellflower Network to liberate slaves.
The players and me decided to connect the player characters with all of this:
One of them was a vigilante liberator of halfling slaves – „Saltgate Scoundrel“ at night, bonvivant painter during daytime.
Another was a boisterous tailor with a knack for magical and egregious outfits.
The third was a broody and immortal member of the Victocora family.
The biggest tweak was that all of them worked at the Kintargo Opera (set painter, tailor and backstage tech respectively) which I staffed out with a bunch of interesting NPCs the players could later recruit as teams for the rebellion, like the Maestro or a bunch of singers („The Skylark sisters“) and musicians.
SETTING THE CONTRAST BETWEEN CHELIAX & KINTARGO
In Kintargo, Cheliax and the Church of Asmodeus don’t take center stage. It is a light, living, boisterous city of art and music, and you can tend to forget that you’re a vassal state to a dark, diabolic empire. There’s darkness at the fringes, but the citizens of Kintargo live more in happy denial than in fear.
In order to show how different Ravounel is to Cheliax proper, and how much sense it makes to secede, we began the story in Egorian, where the Kintargo Opera is bound to perform all its premieres. Here we „meet“ Queen Abrogail as the guest of honor, and afterwards travel home in a caravan guarded by Forvian Crowe. We travel from hellish Cheliax, through some foreshadowing at the Menador Gap (where an unusual amount of Chelish forces is spending the night) and the Oakrib Inn (where we already make friends with Olradi), back into lush, green Ravounel, only to return to Kintargo on the night of ashes, as the city is burning.
MUSIC
Music plays a major role in „Hells Rebels,“ not just because we chose to play opera workers, but because of the „song of silver“ later in the campaign. I didn’t want to ask my players to just imagine a rousing rebel tune, I wanted them to have one, so I went with the obvious choice: „Do you hear the people sing“ from Les Miserables.
So when the PCs found the tune, and they gave it to the Kintargo opera ensemble to try and play it, I used an instrumental version of the song:
Spotify link
Once they got their hands on the lyrics as well, we had the opera singers try it out a capella, using this version:
Spotify link
And then later, as open civil war broke out in the streets, we used the „Les Miserables“ movie version, which was just a goosebumps moment:
Spotify link
For all the other Opera music, for instance at the opening night in Egorian, or during the Ruby Masquerade, we needed something that sounded like Chelish Opera. We wanted it to be in English, and to be a bit pompous, so we used Gilbert & Sullivan, mainly „The Mikado.“
This here is Shensen stunning the audience with her amazing voice:
Spotify link
And this is the exiled Opera Ensemble, mourning the loss of their beloved building to Barzillai, while hanging out in the „Tooth & Nail.“ Just add some tavern sound effects:
Spotify link
CONNECTING THE SOUL ANCHOR WITH KINTARGO AND THE ARCHIVISTS
The Soul Anchor needed to be connected directly to the city somehow, so I put it smack underneath the Victocora estate. The lake on the estate was how the sacred order of the archivists used to access it to study it: what looks like a normal, murky garden lake later turns out to be hundreds of feet deep and infused with mild magic. Both our Victocora PC and Blosodriette turned out to have almost drowned in the lake as kids, which explained their unique condition.
During the AP, Barzillai and Tiarise Izoni dug a secret accessway from the Records Hall in the Greens to the soul anchor so they can study it without conspicuously diving into a lake every few days.
TURNING PORTIA VICTOCORA & BARZILLAI THRUNE INTO HAROLD & MAUDE
I didn’t want Barzillai to be a strong, ambitious alpha-diabolicist; simple villains don’t tend to be scary. Instead, I embraced the Paizo tradition of non-majority romance and sexuality to turn Portia into a dedicated archivists that was stuck in a cold and intellectual marriage. One day, while adventuring in Westcrown to save some old tomes from redaction, she meets a young Thrune boy who shares her passion for the occult and helps her save the books from the claws of the redactors. Barzillai becomes the Kintargo archivists’ main source of materials, and he and Portia fall in love, starting an unlikely affair.
But one day, Barzillai finds out why all these specific occult books are being redacted: they hold the secret to gaining ultimate power over a region with the help of a soul anchor. This is where his Thrunian ambition gets a hold of him, because Portia had of course told him about the soul anchor under the Victocora estate. Barzillai now knows that all the books he needs AND a soul anchor lie beneath Kintargo. He hedges a plan, takes control of Kintargo in the night of ashes, and wants to do the heart’s harvest ritual together with Portia, so they can be lovers forever. She refuses, because she knows this would spell misfortune for Kintargo; an enraged Barzillai kills Portia, turning him into the sadist he is in this AP.
Through this tweak in the backstory, the role of Hell is lessened a bit; the story becomes a weak man’s conflict with himself, lost love and powers he doesn’t understand. And it also spares us the slapsticky trip to a lawyer in hell.
I hope this gives you some inspiration for your own run of Hell’s Rebels!