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I love this campaign so much. Played it and ran it 3.5 and PF1. My old group has never played it after I got back to town.
I'm torn between running Age of Ashes, written for PF2 and running Runelords for those who've never gotten to experience it.
How easy is it to run creatures not in the bestiary. Like, say, Karzoug?
Thoughts from those who've dabbled in it.
My group is about to switch to PF2e between chapter 1 and 2 of that AP. I think it should be pretty easy if you have a good idea of how tough something should be in PF1 terms. You can use the chart for DC's in PF2e to bring up any skill tests while most of the monsters should be in bestiary 1 or have something close to them. NPCs like Nualia and Karzoug you will probably have to remake.
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I played this in 3.5 and Pf1, and ran it in PF1.
When I played, we won. Barely.
When I ran it, Karzoug wiped the floor with the party. The zen archer monk, who had been owning the battlefield up to then was useless against the wall of force Karzoug threw out. The time stop and the prismatic wall... they just weren't ready. The group was so depressed and embarrassed afterwards, I had to cheer them up.
I want to make it a brutal, slugfest of a fight like in PF1... but winnable. Where, if the party pays attention, and is on their A-game, they can do it.
Well there a decent chance Karzoug can be like 5 levels down but most likely just two plus down some spells. It might be best to wait for the NPC creation rules to come out.
Yea. He was zero levels down. This group was a crack team of battlefield assassins that paid no attention to plot.
Yea. If the adventure is mostly easily doable up to that point, I can use the upcoming GMG to build Karzoug.
Converting monsters and NPCs is quite easy, DC adjustments aren't much of a problem either. The biggest issue is loot, as it would be in any conversion.
As for how difficult it is for the players, I have a group which has had some real nail biters in book 1 and another that swept book 2 pretty hard. Some fights are gonna be easier based on the new crit math. Your party is less likely to get wrecked because some folks failed a save against a Yeth Hound. But you also can't just optimize your build hard enough to break every encounter.
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Converting monsters and NPCs is quite easy, DC adjustments aren't much of a problem either. The biggest issue is loot, as it would be in any conversion.
As for how difficult it is for the players, I have a group which has had some real nail biters in book 1 and another that swept book 2 pretty hard. Some fights are gonna be easier based on the new crit math. Your party is less likely to get wrecked because some folks failed a save against a Yeth Hound. But you also can't just optimize your build hard enough to break every encounter.
That's good to hear. I love the degrees of success and failure. I hated how 3 of 4 party members would fail a save vs fear and run away for 3 rounds.
And I swear. For years, 8 out of 10 times, when I heard someone talking about a broken, optimized, overpowered build, I would examine it only to see they were stacking something that shouldn't stack. Or using a feat wrong (because they only read the first half of the feat). PF1 is not nearly as broken as a lot of people think. They just were doing it wrong.But I feel PF2 is a lot harder to screw up in that regard.
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A lot of RotRL's harder and/or most memorable encounters are hard and/or memorable because they used old 3.5 monsters that got unfairly powerful abilities (Book 1 Yeth Hounds, Tentamort) OR they threw high level spellcasters with deadly save or sucks that could shut down a party (Book 3 pitting you against spellcasters with confusion is one that sticks out to me). Using new creatures from the bestiary and spells from the 2E CRB will render those encounters much fairer.
I suspect Karzoug will be nowhere near the same indomitable foe that he was in 1E if you build him by PC rules in 2E.
OTOH, the difference in spell DCs based on level means that all of Karzoug's spells are going to be a true nightmare to save against. DC = 10 + 20 from level + 8 from legendary prof +7? or 8? from INT! Good luck saving against DC46 for your 17th level party.
Your best saves at this point are likely to be +17+8+6+2 = +33 and your worst are around +17+4+2+2 = +25. Against your bad save, you have 50% chance to critically fail. Or to put it in perspective: a rogue hit by an unheightened 9th level massacre has a 50% chance to die outright and 50% chance to take 100 damage.
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That's a lot of good points.
The main thing is I want the boss fights brutal but winnable. And I want to reward players who pay attention.
It sounds like it's doable. And with the GMG out long before the Karzoug fight.
I'd just need to concentrate on fixing treasure drops.
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For what it's worth, the final boss of Doomsday Dawn had similar advantages as Karzoug, down to a once per round quickened casting. And he was a huge melee threat to boot. My party managed to win, and they weren't the greatest optimizers or tacticians on the planet.
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I thought loot was quite easy, honestly.
That said, I actually used RotR as an example in my adventure conversion guide (just the Catacombs of Wrath bit). A lot of the odder creatures are actually already in the bestiary, it's just the NPCs that will require some work.