And if you've seen Disney's Hercules movie, the Percy/troll interaction was pretty much the Hades/titans interaction:
"What do you want?"
"Revenge!"
"Who do you want revenge against?"
"The giants!"
"So if I let you out of there, what are you going to do?"
"Kill the giants!"
"Good enough for me. Have Mass Fly."
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This might have something to do with why Giants seem to be almost unheard of in Starfinder, with the remaining few being relegated to inhospitable places . . . .
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Session 44, Played 11-Apr-2021
DO NOT WRITE AN AP THAT DEPENDS ON THE PCS BEING MURDERHOBOS!!!!!
It just doesn't seem that hard of a concept to comprehend. For every player who says, "I want to try playing an Evil character this time," there are five others who are using NG/CG alignment because they want to be, y'know, heroes.
The Silent Halls are a really neat idea: "Here's an old Thassilonian museum, complete with curator who attacks the party as soon as they start looting everything!"
But what about the party that doesn't attack, smash, or steal everything in sight?
My group skipped 65,890 gold pieces of looting this session (and that's the SELLING price, not the total value) and will likely skip another 60,000-70,000 next session because the museum had a sign that said, "Please don't touch". They're missing out on 64,000 XP, but since we don't use XP for leveling that's not as bad.
Yet again, trying to be decent people is hosing my PCs, and yes, I do get exhausted by it.
The group spent a day selling their loot and buying new items in Magnimar, at which point Percy was approached by Leis Nivlandis, head of the Stone of the Seers academy in Magnimar, asking him to determine what powered the abjuration wards protecting Guiltspur. It was rather hilarious watching Percy fail to remember who the heck the guy was, but he finally agreed to do it. The party's next stop was to the small temple of Erastil to try to trade in the Ring of Protection for one that wasn't holy to Erastil, but they quickly learned that the small temple didn't have the wherewithal to afford such a pricey magic item. Father Lorgell Fendus offered to work with the Lady Heidmarch to get an I.O.U., but eventually Percy got fed up, asked for a map of Absalom, and Greater Teleported the entire party (including Father Fendus) to the temple of Erastil in Absalom, where they received a warm welcome, were invited to a feast, and easily traded in the ring.
After a restful night in Absalom the party teleported back to Guiltspur, buffed up, and proceeded to the boulder the giants had placed to block the deeper levels. After the Red Sash examined the boulder and admitted it would take him some time to smash his way through it, Percy Disintegrated it to get it out of the way. The next two rooms had their own interests: The first had a pit leading down to a blue-green fog Percy identified as a Mage's Private Sanctum, while the second had exposed abysium alloy that would make living creatures sick if they stayed too close to it for too long. The party flew down the shaft into the fog and emerged above a chamber that seemed to be some sort of library. Percy noticed the emerald shimmering that told him they were in a Dimensionally Locked area.
Unfortunately, the party spotted the lurking skull rippers in the library, so the skull rippers were forced to climb the walls to try to get to them. Other than Galyn succumbing to their Dread Visage for a round, it was a routine fight that saw the skull rippers handily defeated. (Percy did have to use up a Force Wall so that the fighters could take them on one at a time, but that was the only major spell that was needed.) The screaming giant heads on the backs of the skull rippers explained why the giants hadn't proceeded deeper into this level, so the party searched the library, found a few valuable scrolls, a couple of valuable books, and a Pearl of Power, and moved on.
The next room had a hextet of blank-faced angel statues, all holding swords, and all enchanted with permanent Magic Mouths. The Red Sash stepped in to set them off, and a greeting welcomed them to the 'Hall of Arcane Wonder' and warned them not to attempt any 'unsanctioned interactions within'. The party decided they must be in a museum, so they'd obey.
Most of the rest of the session was exploring the interesting rooms without touching anything:
- A statue of a faceless sphinx representing Nyarlathotep
- A frozen-in-time Delayed Blast Fireball that could aid a wizard in preparing evocation spells
- A broken down serpentfolk juggernaut from their wars with the Azlanti and Thassilonians
- Part of Desna's Moon Tower, which the Red Sash delightedly climbed to the top, then came back down to report on
- A room full of jarred, preserved specimens.
Throughout it all, the Red Sash kept spotting an old man/hideous leatherbound creature watching them, but making no move to interfere with them as they moved through the museum without touching anything.
The Red Sash's luck finally ran out as they tried to leave the room with the preserved specimens, as his 29 Perception wasn't quite enough to spot the DC 30 sonic detonator trap, so it went off and shattered all the jars, starting a rather hilarious combat.
The roper, on being released from its jar, decided to attack the aurumvorax. The silver dragon babbled incoherently. So Percy put up a Wall of Iron between the party and the combatants. The silver dragon abandoned any pretext of being Confused, flew up, and breathed cold on the party. So Galyn and the Red Sash beat it to death, forcing the intellect devourer that was controlling it to pop out. In one of his crueler moments (and there seem to be quite a few), Percy declared that once the intellect devourer ran into the room beyond (that they hadn't entered but for which the door was open), he'd Glitterdust it.
Yep. The intellect devourer figured its chances were better running into the unknown, so it turned Invisible and ran into the next room. Percy, with See Invisibility always up, Glitterdusted it. Which triggered the summons of the two elder water elementals... with the intellect devourer the only creature that had entered the room.
The party simply closed the door and waited for the beatings to subside.
So yeah, put two elder water elementals on a map with a Glitterdusted intellect devourer and see what happens. It isn't pretty.
In the meantime, the roper easily finished off the aurumvorax, but under the effects of a permanent Confusion and with no other targets, it eventually beat itself to death.
With all the creatures dead and the water elementals eventually dismissed, the party decided to move on...
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Oh, good. Adamantine doors.
Shiro was in an infamous campaign where the players first encountered doors of bronze, then doors of iron, then doors of copper, then doors of silver, then doors of gold...
...at which point they took the doors off the hinges, took them all back to town, sold them, and retired rich and never had to adventure again.
"Immense Adamantine Portals". Seems reasonable to think maybe 0.1m thick (4"), 3m wide (10'), and 2.5 m tall (8') for a total volume of 0.75 cubic meters of adamantine. Iron is 7860 kg/m^3 and adamantine is listed as being of similar density, so let's say it's 7500 kg/m^3, or 5625 kg of adamantine, or 12,375 pounds, for a market value of roughly 3.7 million gold pieces.
"Forget the AP! We're leaving!"
^Was that Tomb of Horrors? I noticed that in Return to the Tomb of Horrors, they put in a note that having the precious metal doors getting repeatedly ripped off got to be too much of an expense, so these all got replaced by fake precious metal doors.
For some reason I had equated Adamantine with Tungsten (which is extremely hard and strong and only slightly short of being the densest material on Earth), so I thought it was incredibly dense. (I think in some other D&D editions, it was, but maybe that was a campaign-specific thing.) It would make it more interesting if it really was that way -- sometimes truth can be a pretty good inspiration for fiction. (I also have some other ideas for D&D/Pathfinder special materials corresponding to materials found on Earth.)
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^Was that Tomb of Horrors? I noticed that in Return to the Tomb of Horrors, they put in a note that having the precious metal doors getting repeatedly ripped off got to be too much of an expense, so these all got replaced by fake precious metal doors.
For some reason I had equated Adamantine with Tungsten (which is extremely hard and strong and only slightly short of being the densest material on Earth), so I thought it was incredibly dense. (I think in some other D&D editions, it was, but maybe that was a campaign-specific thing.) It would make it more interesting if it really was that way -- sometimes truth can be a pretty good inspiration for fiction. (I also have some other ideas for D&D/Pathfinder special materials corresponding to materials found on Earth.)
I *think* it was a homebrew, but I'll have to ask Shiro. I think in general the idea of the "huge, precious metal door" is nothing new, but anyone who's ever done any salvage work immediately realizes the door is more valuable than everything else in the dungeon and makes away with it...
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My spouse was in one such campaign. They looted the doors and ignored the dungeon. The owner of the dungeon was quite pissed off and insisted on being reimbursed by the party doing some quests for the entity or something like that, but I'm not entirely sure.
Another time they looted an entire dungeon, but just as they were leaving one PC tossed a few copper into the dungeon and honestly said they didn't loot *everything* - once the people who recruited them to clear the dungeon investigated, they were a bit annoyed. ;)
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The last book of Serpents Skull has has this as well. We all joked about selling the doors and hiring mercenaries to complete the adventure
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So, the Abysium Core. Save every round or take 1d4 points of Constitution Drain. Every 4 rounds or so someone gets hit with a 10d6 bolt of lightning. Trying to destroy it gets you hit for 10d6 with every hit, and it regenerates.
It's a room designed to kill PCs.
But it's not a trap and has no CR.
This one room vividly explains why we don't use XP in our games.
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^Must have been designed to prevent PCs from stealing the doors . . . .
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Pet peeve: "This vast, high-ceilinged chamber is 100 feet across, and the pond in the middle sinks to a depth of 40 feet."
Er... every single one of the PCs is flying. How high is the ceiling?!?!?!
It should be a requirement that every enclosed space at least have a default ceiling height. Most APs do that. "Unless otherwise noted, ceilings are 15 feet high."
I have an entire level of gargantuan creatures in chambers of epic proportions where the PCs have to be 80 feet up to avoid them...
...and all I get is, "The ceiling rises to form a cathedral-like space above..."
Considering the underground chamber itself is 400 feet by 600 feet, it seems like an 80-foot ceiling would hardly feel "cathedral-like".
Just one of those, "Great. You gave me tons of virtually useless information, and the one piece I really need to run this combat is missing."
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^Sounds unpleasant for most gargantuan creatures -- you're stuck in this room with a low ceiling, and the other passages are too small to fit into at all . . . .
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Nice!
I used 120', which seemed "epic" enough, and the party did a fantastic job of choosing exactly the right height to avoid any encounters.
Which, of course, means they missed out on an entire level's worth of XP and gold. Leading back to the whole, "If you have a game system where XP and gold a required for advancement, make sure the PCs receive the necessary XP and gold for completing the required tasks."
"I run off into a side passage for no reason other than to get extra XP and gold," isn't reasonable roleplay, and my players don't do it.
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Session 45, Played 25-Apr-2021
The author didn't even worry about that, so all his rooms got to ignore the Dimensional Lock. We have:
C6: The Dreaming Tower, where PCs can travel to the Plane of Dreams while in a Dimensional Lock. No excuse for this one. The author just adds, "The... limitation on dimensional travel is lifted in this specific case."
For no reason other than convenience.
C8: The Endless Waterfall. Yet again, "This teleportation effect is exempt," plus a Summon Monster trap. That's not a trap and has no CR nor XP.
C12: Guest Mansion. A Mage's Magnificent Mansion. So the author's going straight RAW: If the spell isn't listed, it's OK. Would've been nice to know before Percy gave up all his pit and summon spells.
E3: The Pit of Silver Mist. You can travel to Leng! In a Dimensional Lock! And this one doesn't even have the requisite, "Oh, the Dimensional Lock doesn't apply in this room."
E7: Binding Chamber. OK. Wow. Now we're even calling Planar Binding a non-dimension-crossing spell, since it's not in the list in the rulebook. I call foul.
Anyhoo, it was a pretty straightforward session.
The party first went the way the squished intellect devourer went, and found what could only be described as a shrine to the aboleth. They didn't touch anything, so they didn't set off any waking nightmares, so they moved on.
The next room was a chapel to the outer gods, leading to a lot of derogatory comments along the lines of, "If all the AP authors are such fans of Call of Cthulu, why aren't they writing modules for it instead?"
Once again, they didn't touch nor approach anything, so no waking nightmares, and they moved on.
In the next room they found the poor, ancient body of the curator himself, easily recognizable from all the glimpses they'd had of his ghost. They decided they'd need to put him to rest, but a solid Knowledge: Religion roll indicated they'd need a Divination spell to know how to do it, and they'd likely have to subdue the ghost as well. They decided to move on and explore the rest of the level before attempting the "rescue". The next room had the aforementioned Mage's Magnificent Mansion, which they refused to enter because Percy was sure it was a trap because of the Dimensional Lock. There was a room with a seemingly open window to some plains, but they quickly determined that it was an illusion so they didn't approach it. So they didn't trigger the waking nightmare...
...beginning to see a trend here?
They finally came to an immense hallway lined with statues as far as the eye could see. They couldn't stop laughing at the ridiculousness of that many statues. They easily spotted the caryatid columns, and instead of just flying over them (the hall had a 60' roof and the caryatid columns can't fly) they decided to smashy-smashy them. Both the Red Sash and Galyn had adamantine weapons, so it wasn't that big of a fight, especially once Percy split the hallway with a Wall of Force so one of the columns had to run off and come back.
With the level clear, the party returned to an area outside of the Dimensional Lock and teleported back to Magnimar. Kyllia got a scroll of Divination and learned that to put the curator to rest she'd have to "show him the open sky... and the fact that Thassilon is no more". They used prestige points to "rent" some Ghost Touch weapons (I allow people to rent magic items at 10% value per day. I figure magic item salesmen make a mint, and PCs can get needed items for single fights), then teleported back to Guiltspur.
The "fight" with the curator was absolutely hilarious. They buffed up, Hasted themselves, and then Galyn stole his body and took off at a run. The poor ghost got off one Baleful Polymorph on Galyn before they'd hopelessly outdistanced him (Mass Fly + Haste is some brutal movement speed) and then Greater Teleported back to Magnimar, where they placed his bones in the sun under the Irespan, freeing him. They paid for a proper burial, headstone, and ornate decorations for him at the temple of Pharasma and the curator had proper rest at last.
Teleporting back, they followed the massive statue-filled hallway to an immense cavern. Flying quietly 60' over the lake, they easily spotted the abyss-worshipping naga trying to create an abyssal portal (yet again in a Dimensional Lock, much to Percy's amusement) and the fact that they were praying to the lake. So the party mapped the edge of the lake, went to the biggest island, examined the largest structure, found the illusory walls, and proceeded down to the next level.
Yep. Area D. Available XP: 256,000. Available wealth: 374,059 gp. Obtained: 0 XP, 0 gp. I think I'm going to have to let them steal the door.
The next level was thrumming as if from some massive power source. The Red Sash managed to surprise us all by both seeing and disarming the sonic trap on the adamantine doors, but then by picking the DC 40 lock on them! And they didn't even steal them!
As they entered the room, the flying polyp triggered its trap and used its Sucking Wind on all of them, but they all had Freedom of Movement up, so not so good. It managed to get off a nice Wind Blast that significantly damaged everyone (only Kyllia made the save), but that just irritated the party. Percy Glitterdusted it to eliminate its natural invisibility, the Red Sash used his Haste to get behind it and provide a flank, and Galyn introduced it to a barbarian wielding a holy battleaxe... which just so happened to ignore its DR.
With no DR and none of its wind spells affecting the party thanks to Freedom of Movement, it was a sad polyp and died.
Percy spotted the secret door in the room and the Red Sash led them through, only to find an old crypt populated by none other than Morcruft the Leng ghoul, who was more than willing to answer any of their questions in return for their getting him back to Leng. The party recognized that this was a common survival tactic among Leng ghouls, so they let him survive. Morcruft was pleased with this arrangement, and told them all about how they'd have to perform a ritual to open the portal back to Leng, and he'd seen the dragon do it, and he knew the ingredients, but he didn't know how she'd known how to perform the ritual, but she'd spent a lot of time through the door to the east, but then a sparkly skull floating on a dust ghost came and took a crystal out of that room and back into the west room with it, and...
The party figured out everything they needed to know from there: There was a demilich in the next room they'd have to kill to get the crystal and learn the ritual. And demiliches were pretty much a, "If you get the drop and kill it it's an easy win, otherwise you're all dead," fight. On top of that, the "ultra secret" power source for Guiltspur was nothing but an ultra-toxic abysium core; kind of like putting a dirty fission reactor in your basement to power your apartment building. It works, but...
So, deadly reactor, torpid demilich. Which to deal with first?
Mythic Dimensional Lock (although it doesn't sound like they specified that) doesn't interfere with your own extradimensional travel spells and effects, so selective Dimensional Lock isn't totally without precedent.
Also, kind of odd that Dimensional Lock prevents Gate, which is higher level. But then again, we have the precedent of Antimagic Field, which prevents almost all spells even when they are of higher level (with a few exceptions called out). (For comparison, in 2nd Edition, Antimagic Field explicitly can't block spells of higher level; 2nd Edition's Dimensional Lock doesn't have this explicit text, but I'm not Trained enough in 2nd Edition to know whether that is implicit from the "counteract" text.)
There are many ways to explain how the original builders managed to avoid Dimensional Locking certain areas, but it still involves a large amount of unnecessary, "The Thassilonians were allowed to do this but you aren't," hand-waving:
- Neither Dimensional Lock nor Mage's Magnificent Mansion are listed among the spells that can be made permanent
- The author gets to pick and choose which effects are affected by the Lock on a whim; the PCs have to follow the rules
It's another of our major complaints about Paizo APs in general: There should be one rule set that both the monsters and the players have to play by. If you can't write a decent AP without bending/breaking the rules in favor of your monsters, then maybe you shouldn't be writing them at all.
I think if you're going to write a permanent dimensional lock effect it should be tied to a specific artifact that the players can find a way to disable to end the effect - that way there's a legitimate source for the effect and it gives the players a specific way to overcome it. It's a much better option than simply saying "This area is dimensionally locked because I said so, except for these specific rooms I want to work." It provides at least some coherency in the world.
You hit the nail on the head: It's an artifact at the end of the dungeon that they can destroy to remove the lock.
The issues are:
(1) There was no need for the lock in the first place. At no point in any of the three levels would teleportation or other dimensional travel have helped the PCs. Basically the author added a "no scrying, no teleporting" rule to the entire dungeon that was completely unnecessary: The only entity they know about (the dragon) isn't even in the same plane as them. So the overall impression from both the players and this GM was that the author was arbitrarily punitive. "I don't like scrying or teleporting so I'm turning them off for no logical reason."
If you're going to disable the PCs, then at the end of the run the players should be able to point at something and say, "OK, I can see why the author did that because otherwise we could have done xxx."
There's no such explanation here.
(2) To add insult to injury, the author arbitrarily allowed his own trans-dimensional effects to work, and again they were completely unnecessary. The Desnan tower was a neat feature, but irrelevant to the story, unrelated to an encounter, and worth 0 XP. Ditto the fountain. Both were written in as, "I'm going to write in cool ambient features that ignore the rule I'm using to punish the PCs."
It's a really cavalier, dismissive attitude towards player agency. "I don't like these spells so I turned them off. But I want to show them that I can turn them on wherever I want."
It's been a while since I cracked my Shattered Star AP PDFs, but there's no way to scry and fry the boss? No way to bypass everything for the purpose of finding the Shard at the end of the dungeon?
Nope; as I mentioned, boss and shard are on another plane of existence. "You can't get there from here."
And scrying a wyrm dragon would be a surprising feat in and of itself.
EDIT: Even if that were a concern (since Scrying can traverse dimensions), put the boss in a Mage's Private Sanctum not the entire previous dungeon.
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Or gee, in theme with the AP make the shards themselves emit an anti-scrying field to explain why no one's been able to find them after all this time.
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Woooow... just started prepping area F.
The first part? They're at over 10,000' and under 0˚F, so they need to make DC 15 Fortitude saves every 10 minutes. Yeah, extra bookkeeping is fun!
The first fight? Sixteen CR 4 nightgaunts.
Except... "you should never bother awarding XP for challenges that have a CR of 10 or more lower than the APL". The characters are 15th level. The nightgaunts are CR 4, eleven CR ratings below the PCs.
It really doesn't matter if you throw in 50, or 100, or 300, it's not a fight worth having, and shouldn't be in an AP.
(In my original run of Crimson Throne I attacked a 14th-level party with 100 regular orcs, 25 advanced orcs, 5 "chieftans", and a red dragon. The fight was over in under 10 rounds and not a single PC took a single point of damage. The power chasm is too vast.)
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Author: "Behold! You're in a mysterious dimension of strange things! Observe as you are attacked by 16 strange creatures I read about in aCthulu Mythos book who are completely irrelevant and worth 0 XP to show you how strange it is!"
Does Percy ever prep AoE blasty spells for "just in case" situations like this? What about flame strikes from Kyllia? This sounds like a fight to just one-round with something like that.
Kyllia's an oracle with Flame Strike. It's a one-spell non-fight.
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This instance may actually call for the use of Troop rules. That way they can still fight Nightgaunts but have them be an actual threat.
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Started prepping Book 6, and gee... look what that author did: The walls are completely impregnable to mortal magic so you can't use magic to get through the walls (no Dimension Door, Teleport, etc.), but anything that doesn't go through the walls is unaffected (he even gives an example of teleporting in from the outside to a room that has doors open to the outside).
It doesn't cripple the PCs, but it has the same effect of, "You can't bypass the encounters. As long as you leave the doors open behind you you can always leave, but you can't jump ahead."
I still don't think much of authors who can't think of anything more imaginative than, "These spells don't work because I don't know how to write my way around them," but at least the author of Book 6 limits the scope of the restriction to, "Only what I actually need," instead of, "Just lock down the whole dungeon!"
EDIT: I've run 5 APs to their "conclusions", and played in two more, and never once did we ever have a party say, "Let's blindly teleport ahead to try to bypass some of these rooms."
The authors are providing solutions to unrealistic problems.
How would PCs (or NPCs, for that matter) even go about teleporting ahead blindly? If you're trying to Scry and Fry, it isn't blind any more if you succeed at the Scry part, and if you don't, it just doesn't work regardless of magical protections. Teleporting ahead blindly could conceivably happen by accident, but this doesn't seem to be much of an issue.
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That's kind of my point -- the prohibition on teleportation seems both arbitrary and pointless, yet now it's two full dungeons in a row.
Would you really buy an AP if the authors were honest with you? "Yes, for the final third of the AP we were worried they'd figure out how to use Teleport in some way we hadn't thought of so we disabled it for all PCs all the time. We're sure players won't mind."
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^Having thought about this for a while, yes, having the authors of an AP have a track record of being honest (even if making some mistakes in design) would be an incentive to buy it.
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Session 46, Played 16-May-2021
This session? A demilich's flight. Every ability is supposed to be classified as Ex, Su, Sp, or a spell. There's a very handy table as to whether Dispel Magic, Spell Resistance, Antimagic Fields, or Attacks of Opportunity apply. It's crystal-clear and one of the best rule sets in Pathfinder...
...except...
...in the Bestiaries they never bother categorizing movement abilities.
So... straight from the rules:
Flight (Ex or Su): The creature can cease or resume flight as a free action. If the ability is supernatural, it becomes ineffective in an antimagic field, and the creature loses its ability to fly for as long as the antimagic effect persists.
Speed fly 30 ft. (perfect)
Notice the complete lack of an Ex or Su next to the entry? Nor will you find it anywhere else.
So it's 100% a GM's call whether a demilich's flight is an Ex or an Su, and it has monumental consequences. We agreed to a house rule that if the creature is using wings, it's an Ex, and if it's not using wings, it's an Su, but considering the number of demons and/or devils sprouting wings that couldn't possibly support their weight, even that house rule is questionable.
Oh, and the magical green slime curtain that collapses if you slash it? Another "trap that's not a trap"? That really peeved all the players at the table.
After a loooooooong discussion, the party decided they should first eliminate the demilich. After another looooooong discussion of possible tactics (my favorite being summoning a Wall of Iron next to the demilich and then tipping it over onto the poor creature, and my second favorite being grappling it and throwing it in a bag before it could act), the party quite literally said, "Well, since we can't summon creatures to make this a fair fight, we're going to be as cheesy as the author and do this the easy way."
They told Morcruft that they needed to return to Magnimar for some supplies, and he responded that he'd happily wait for them and watch the demilich's door in return for some food, so they gave him a day's worth of trail rations (not his favorite, but at least edible), flew out of the dungeon, and teleported to Magnimar. Percy spent the afternoon learning Antimagic Field.
In the morning, they teleported back to Guiltspur, went down to just outside the demilich's room, Percy put up his Antimagic Field (and dutifully carried a torch in one hand since his Darkvision was now gone), and the party moved in on the demilich. The Red Sash sneaked in to the room, spotted the mysterious green curtain, couldn't figure out what it was with a very bad Knowledge: Dungeoneering roll, and went through. Once he saw the torpid demilich he gestured for the rest of the party to come.
As soon as Percy's Antimagic Field hit the curtain, it collapsed into green slime, covering Galyn and Kyllian. They lost a couple of weapons scraping it off while Percy moved in and put the demilich in the Antimagic Field. As per our ruling, the demilich was rendered utterly useless, and Galyn and the Red Sash smashed it to pieces. They swept the pieces into the bag they'd been planning on using to capture it.
With the demilich dead, they looted her room, found the Whispering Crystal that would give them the information they needed, and went back to the crystal room. Percy had no trouble at all working out the correct ritual, and learning that if he destroyed the abyssium reactor he wouldn't need the ritual at all. They stood across the foggy pit from the reactor room as Morcruft opened the door for them. Seeing the size of the reactor, Percy knew he'd need at least three Disintegrate spells to destroy it, so he had Morcruft close the door, they rewarded him with more food, and they teleported back to Magnimar to prepare spells to destroy the reactor.
While in Magnimar, they turned the demilich over to the temple of Pharasma for proper disposal. Unhappy demilich.
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While I never intended for this to transform from "campaign journal" into "anti-AP tirade", I already know that today's session will be execrable if I run it as-written, and prepping the first dungeon level of Book 6 is all of the same old stuff I've been complaining about for 5 books now:
Useless fights: The author wanted to pit a CR 19 BBEG against a 15th-level party. So the BBEG has the Shard of Sloth, which cuts her movement in half and sickens her. That's not quite a CR-1 penalty, but given that the party knows exactly what they'll be fighting (from the start of the book they can make an easy Knowledge roll to pretty much get her full stat block), it should be a fair, epic fight.
Instead, in the tactics as written, she doesn't fight back until she's lost 1/3 of her hit points. I'm reminded of the Gaston/Beast fight at the end of Beauty and the Beast, where Beast lets Gaston beat him nearly to death.
Question: How would you as a player feel if you were finally having the climactic fight with the BBEG of the book, only to have the GM say, "Oh, no. This round she doesn't fight back. Go ahead and beat on her."
Personally, I'd be pretty pissed off about the whole thing. Just give me a real fight; don't make a "too tough" BBEG and water her down in a way that doesn't even align with the curse from the Shard of Sloth!!!!
Disabling PCs: Book 1 was all about disabling the PCs using darkness, so they got Darkvision. Books 2-5 were all about area-effect paralysis, fear, or nausea effects. Book 6 is back at it, with multiple creatures spamming blinding effects just to force PCs to roll save after save after save, figuring they'll eventually fail. Plus the "no scrying, no teleporting" lockdown throughout Books 5 and 6.
Question 1: How would you as a player feel if every third fight you had to make three or four saving throws, and if you missed any of them you'd be out of the entire fight?
Personally, I don't mind penalizing effects (cursed, shaken, sickened, fatigued), but spamming "You're out" effects (paralyzed, terrified, nauseated, blinded) on ALL of the PCs every round is beyond the pale.
Question 2: How would you feel as a player if the Player's Guide said nothing about playing a conjuration specialist, then you hit Book 5 and the AP basically said, "Sorry. Most of your school spells won't work for the rest of the AP"?
Ignoring the Rules: I've already written about dimensional effects working in the Dimensional Lock, or the ever-present, "When the monsters hear the PCs they cast xxx, yyy, and zzz, but the PCs have no chance of hearing the monsters," but Book 6 takes it one farther: "The monsters hover near the room’s ceiling... if they hear the sound of combat... one of them uses Screen... they then place Symbols of Insanity."
The good news? These are spell-like abilities so the monsters can indeed cast them without the PCs hearing them. The bad news? Both of those spells are 10-minute casts! The AP doesn't mention this at all, so a GM who wasn't careful might have players ask, "Really? It took us 20 minutes to go from one room to the next?!?!?!"
The frustration is the sheer simplicity of the answer: "Once the creatures were awakened, they placed their Symbols of Insanity and one of them casts Screen every day."
It's a 24-hour duration spell, so problem solved, and the creatures aren't spending 20 minutes prepping.
Question 1: How would you feel as a GM having to double-check everything the author put in to make sure it's actually rules-legal?
Question 2: How would you feel as a player having to repeatedly notify your GM that something isn't rules-legal?
An AP is supposed to make my life easier. I'm running a homebrew and an AP right now, and the homebrew is taking me far LESS time to prep because I don't have to constantly double-check the work of another author who had little concern for player engagement or Pathfinder rules.
EDIT: And yes, for the record, the group is playing out this AP just for completion's sake, but we've all agreed we will no longer run Paizo APs because our overall experiences have been so negative. Rise of the Runelords was amazing. The 3.5 version of Curse of the Crimson Throne was tons of fun (hate the update). Beyond that, every AP has been a rules-breaking, PC-disabling, too-much-fixing-to-be-worth-it disappointment.
Quick follow-up before the full summary later this week: I ran Cadrilkasta straight-up; no bad tactics, no Shard of Sloth nonsense; just a fully-buffed, fully-prepared party with teleportation against a CR 19 dragon. The *only* thing I did was have her stay in her nest instead of tracking them down and attacking them the moment she heard their fight with the nightgaunts.
Sure enough, a few lucky rolls later and she was dead in 2 1/2 rounds. If not for the lucky rolls, one of the PCs would have died. So an exciting, nail-biting fight.
Without disabling half the party.
Without turning off player abilities.
Without having the enemy break the rules in some asinine way.
The *only* reason the party won with no casualties was that both Galyn and Red Sash crit with x3 crit weapons in the first two rounds. Otherwise her Storm Breath and full-round attacks were enough to one-round anyone other than Galyn. (Who was the first unfortunate victim, since he crit her first, but his 248 hit points plus Stoneskin plus Ablative Barrier kept him alive... that round...)
What bad things did they do to the updated Curse of the Crimson Throne?
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What bad things did they do to the updated Curse of the Crimson Throne?
The *BIG* one was Scarwall: In the original it was a huge abandoned fortress, so finding empty room after empty room added to the creepiness. It was one of the most-fun dungeons I've ever run because it was nearly empty, so when the PCs encountered something it was surprising and scary. In the update they went from 37 described rooms to 94, most of which are "garbage" encounters (player CR or less), so it feels like nothing so much as one of those kids' dungeons where "every room has to have something in it or it's not a dungeon".
They also added an entire section to A History of Ashes called "Mantis and Maiden" that was, you guessed it, just another dungeon crawl trying to provide more background/justification for Cinnabar. I was running a 7-player campaign and all 7 agreed it was one of the weakest sections in the entire AP.
To match the CRs, they dropped Bahor two levels, turning him from a, "Do not fight this fight" encounter into "my PCs could've easily just killed him" in the second run-through.
Long story short: A much more crowded AP with lots of weaker fights, so if your players like fighting, fighting, fighting and easy wins, they'll like it, but if they like mystery, roleplay, a refreshing minimalism where not every door has to be an encounter, and harder fights, then it's not a good update.
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Too late to edit, but Scarwall was one of my favorite AP books ever, and the update ruins it.
It was originally written like a well-done haunted house or horror movie: The PCs hear a sound or see a clue, fling open the door... and there's nothing there. It's how you build suspense. I loved having the PCs carefully map one room at a time, and after three or four empty rooms I'd mention them hearing footsteps or heavy breathing or the clank of chains two doors down, only to have them go there and find... a regular skeleton. Which they would then spend their time examining. Is it undead? Where did the noise come from? What's going on?
When they had real encounters, it was startling and scary.
Now imagine a horror film where every time the protagonists open a door or a window, there's always something there. There's no suspense at all. "OK, I'm going to open this, there's going to be something there, so get ready to kill it."
Even worse, the stuff that was put in was mostly easy to kill, so a "horror/suspense" movie with no suspense and no horror because the protagonists could simply deal with whatever was behind the curtain and move on.
It turned a fun, suspenseful thriller into an unbelievably boring slog of, "Killed that, what's next?"
By the time the PCs figured out the anchors, they'd already decided that all they wanted was to skip the entire dungeon, target the anchors and nothing else, and get out of there. Not out of fear, but out of boredom.
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Having recently completed the updated Scarwall, I'd say it went over better than I hoped, but was still a slog. We hit Book 5 just as lockdown started last year, so we moved the game to Roll20 to continue to play. It took right around a year to get through it, from start to finish.
The biggest issue, besides our inexperience with online gaming, was the size of the place. It was difficult at times for my players to figure out how to get around one of the maps. Moving between them made it virtually impossible. There were a lot of fights, and most of them weren't exactly difficult.
One thing I will give kudos for are the phantasms. They're not quite as good as the haunts in The Misgivings, but they're still good. However, they had to be adapted for online play - a lot of the advice is "roll something behind your screen," or "take the player aside and tell them something." Rather than trying to figure that out, I just told whoever was affected by the phantasm that they should mark down a "Castle Scarwall notice point." They slowly accrued them as the adventure went on, and occasionally wondered aloud what they did or represented. Of course, they represented nothing beyond player paranoia.
Anyway, I learned a lot of lessons from Castle Scarwall, and Castle Korvosa is a much faster experience. In contrast of the near year it took to complete Scarwall, we are almost all the way through Castle Korvosa. Giving the players a map of the place has been a godsend - one of the players has taken to being the map guy, so they have a good idea of where they've been and where they haven't. Next time we play, they'll be fighting their way to the Queen herself.
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Wow, Misroi! Long time no see!
Which is the most recent AP that you think is still good?
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Which is the most recent AP that you think is still good?
That's a really loaded question, because APs vary so much according to taste, and because GMs can take fairly awful APs and make them fun to play.
GothBard ran us through Skull & Shackles and we had a blast, but:
- She removed all the rum rules from Book 1
- She removed all the ship-to-ship combat rules from all the books
- She added NPCs who provided pointers as to what we were supposed to do next.
So, was Skull & Shackles a "good" AP, because GothBard managed to make enough alterations to make it fun?
Here's a quick listing of the ones we've played and my opinions:
Rise of the Runelords (GOOD): Fairly solid start-to-finish, though Foxglove Manor is a bit too punishing with the haunts, and the Runeforge is a bit too much of a grind. Enough incredibly memorable moments to make up for any shortcomings, and I ran it with no significant modifications.
Curse of the Crimson Throne (GOOD): A few more hiccups than RotRL ("Why would we do this, now?", and, "How could anyone NOT know the secret identity of Blackjack?"), but I was able to run the original version without significant modifications. As I mentioned, the new version makes Scarwall a grind instead of a haunted house, and the dungeon at the end of A History of Ashes seems simply tacked on (as it was), but, as Misroi says, it still works.
Second Darkness (BAD): The AP relies heavily on:
(a) Players accepting that drow are mysterious and unknown to the surface, and
(b) Drow poison being dangerous.
With everyone already intimately familiar with drow, and Delay Poison being a commonplace spell that even low-level PCs can prepare, the combats were quite the joke in this AP and GothBard stopped running it in disgust after only 2 books. It would take a massive amount of fixing to make this AP run well, because it relies so heavily on poison and darkness being terrifying, disabling things, and a couple of spells renders them virtually harmless.
Council of Thieves (BAD): "This AP is for evil-aligned PCs." "Your first act is to ally yourselves with a good-aligned NPC who hates you and work to save the city for the good of all."
I have no idea how the rest of the AP plays out, because the conflicting motivations in Book 1 were so terrible that my players voted to abandon the AP rather than playing on.
Gotta get to work, but I'll add more tonight.
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Session 47, Played 23-May-2021
Er, how about, "You must have some clear idea of the location and layout of the destination?" Even with Greater Teleport you have, "You must have at least a reliable description of the place to which you are teleporting. If you attempt to teleport with insufficient information (or with misleading information), you disappear and simply reappear in your original location."
And why turn off scrying, then, if you were only trying to punish the dragon? Who, by the way, has no useful Divination spells other than Greater Scrying, whose target is "a creature", so she couldn't have used it to figure out where to teleport.
In short, "I disabled spells that wouldn't have worked anyway because I didn't understand the rules."
And what happens? The moment the PCs get out of that field, you'd better believe they're going to scry-n-fry, which is most likely exactly what you didn't want.
The next day, they teleported back to Guiltspur, buffed up, anointed themselves from the fountain, and entered the portal to Leng.
Once the nightgaunts were dealt with, Percy summoned a bunch of Prying Eyes and told them to scout in all directions "as far as they could go" to look for the dragon, so of course they spotted her on another outdoor ledge only 250' north of the party's current position, and their fight hadn't roused her from her torpor. Morcruft didn't want any part of the final battle and went inside to his brethren. The party cast all their buffs, got everything ready, and Percy Teleported the party right on top of her.
Surprise Round: Galyn took a 5' step and a swing, but missed. The Red Sash moved into position to flank her. Kyllia cast Prayer to dry to debuff the dragon, but it didn't take.
Round 1: Cadrilkasta used her Storm Breath, but the Red Sash made his Reflex save on the first bolt and his evasion saved him from taking any damage. Not wanting to unnecessarily provoke attacks of opportunity, Cadrilkasta took a 5' step instead of moving. (Seemed like a safe bet since Galyn had had such a clean miss.) Percy put up a Force Wall to prevent her from moving away. Galyn hit her only once, but it was a confirmed critical with a x3 weapon, so a massive chunk of hit points. The Red Sash hit twice, and his sneak attack damage meant she'd lost over 100 hit points in a single round. She needed to do something. I'm pretty sure Kyllia delayed.
Round 2: Figuring the best thing to do was to remove the flank (since the Red Sash had mirror images up and she might not outright kill him), she hit Galyn with both her Storm Breath (113 points after he failed his save) and a full-round attack (145 points thanks to one miss). You'd think 258 hit points would be enough, but between Resist Energy, Stoneskin, Ablative Barrier, and Galyn's 248 hit points while raging, he still stood. Then came the killing blow. Percy cast Irresistable Dance. The Dragonfoe Amulet let him barely pierce her SR. She blew her save. She was toast. Galyn dropped her to below 150 hit points so her Greater Invisibility triggered, but then the Red Sash got 4 hits including a crit that finished her off as Kyllia Healed Galyn.
In short, I ran her fair and square without all the Gaston-like nonsense, and while I could have teleported her away on Round 1 Percy had both Dimensional Anchor and a slew of teleports, so I don't think it would've changed the outcome much at all.
With a +21 Taxidermy skill, Percy very carefully removed and preserved her head as the rest of the party shoveled the dragon hoard into her own Portable Hole, and onto the carpet they were going to use for Treasure Stitching.
Once the treasure was secure, the party teleported back to Magnimar, wrapping up Book 5.
- Madam Seeshaw Raccas was so ecstatic with Cadrilkasta's head that she granted the party BOTH a Rod of Splendor and free services for life, which everyone in the party except the Red Sash gladly partook of. (Kyllia insisted it was "only a massage".)
- The Lady Heidmarch informed them that they were planning to have a "Reforging Festival" atop the Irespan to reforge the Sihedron. I was expecting the players to openly revolt at such a stupid plan, but they gamely went along with it. "If the NPCs want to do something unbelievably stupid, it must be a plot point so we should let them do it."
- When they weren't in the Shucked Oyster, the party was enjoying its newfound fame, whether it was being approached in the streets for autographs, or being approached in their lodgings for permission to use their likenesses or names in all manner of sellable goods. (Toys, foodstuffs, drinks, artwork, etc.)
We'll start Book 6 next week.
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And, 5 more APs for the evening:
Kingmaker (NEUTRAL): The game fell apart due to my quarrels with one of the players, but Book 1 was a fine adventure. I'd be willing to run it again, but none of my players are interested in kingdom building, so it's a no-go. But I'm not going to dis it simply because it's not my players' cup of tea.
Serpent's Skull (NEUTRAL): This is another HUGE sandbox, and I ran the kids through it up to Book 5 with no major complaints. It wasn't a great AP, but it wasn't a bad AP. It fell off the rails because the kids couldn't think of any tactic other than, "Attack the serpentfolk fortress again and again and hope for a different outcome," and after about 8 tries we were all fed up enough to call it quits.
Carrion Crown (BAD): Holy carp. From appallingly-bad WBL, to the fact that to get any wealth you had to rob NPCs (even your own allies!), to sections of dungeon where you quite literally couldn't get past by the rules, to a story so disjointed that the author of Book 6 put an apology in the preface, this AP is a mess. Requires players to be murderhobos? Check! Ignores the rules? Check! No real storyline? Check! Traps that aren't traps? Check! Traps that could easily TPK the party? Check! This AP has everything. Everything abysmal.
We had fun playing it. But more, "Watching a cheesy horror film" fun than, "This is a well-written AP" fun.
Jade Regent (BAD): I had to work AMAZINGLY hard to get the players to finish this AP. Book 2 has a murder mystery with the infamous, "Anyone you try to question dies and Speak with Dead doesn't work on them," plus a "mystery" that is presented to the players as a sandbox, but if they don't do it in the exact correct order it's horrible and confusing. And no, the ninja castle in the viking lands wasn't cool. It was dumb. Book 3 continued this horror with "choose from one of these 3 paths. Oh, you chose the wrong one! I will punish you!"
Don't give players a choice if they don't have one. Books 4 and 5 were quite good, and soothed a lot of ruffled feathers. Book 6 would have been good, except for the whole, "I'm tired and the players need a ton of XP. Is it OK if I put in 53 of the same creature and call it good?" It was... amazingly tedious.
Skull & Shackles (NEUTRAL): We had a blast playing in it, but GothBard had a long litany of complaints running it. She had to get rid of the rum rules in Book 1, and rewrite Books 2 and 3 to have actual plots. She introduced integral NPCs to help motivate the party to move the plot along. So it definitely falls into the, "As much work as it would be to write your own AP," category, but we as players really enjoyed it.
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And on a final note for the evening, Shiro pointed out that because of the Dimension Lock, they hadn't had any desire to explore. They just wanted to get out of the stupid dungeon and be done with it, because dungeons that take away player agency are dumb.
How much did they miss? I don't have the inclination to do a full spreadsheet, but I know it was well over 300,000 in treasure (I think over 500,000), and tons and tons and TONS of XP:
- Unsurprisingly, they cleared all of areas A and B, which were outside of the Dimension Lock, supporting Shiro's claim.
- In area C, being presented with a museum that told them, "Please treat all exhibits with care and respect, and do not attempt unsanctioned interactions within," they didn't loot anything (the 65,890 + 60,000-70,000 more gold I listed in a previous post), didn't touch anything (no waking nightmares), but didn't miss much XP because there are so few encounters in this level.
- The party skipped Area D entirely. Ognathogga and her loot, the nagas and their loot, the drow and their assistance or loot, and the purple worms. All skipped.
- The party skipped the Binding Chamber, but after previous books had so many, "If the PCs come near it triggers the Summon Monster spell to finish, but it's not a trap," events that they weren't going anywhere near any summoning.
- The party skipped Area F entirely, only clearing the landing pad of nightgaunts and the final room of Cadrilkasta.
So yeah, we ignored two full dungeon levels thanks to player anger over the Dimension Lock.
Thanks?
Which is the most recent AP that you think is still good?
{. . .}
Here's a quick listing of the ones we've played and my opinions:Rise of the Runelords (GOOD): Fairly solid start-to-finish, though Foxglove Manor is a bit too punishing with the haunts, and the Runeforge is a bit too much of a grind. Enough incredibly memorable moments to make up for any shortcomings, and I ran it with no significant modifications.
Having followed this AP all the way through, I guess this one is a widespread favorite for a reason . . . although if I were running it, I would still be sorely tempted to make the main villain much more of a tycoon-style villain (I mean, come on, we're talking about a Runelord of GREED, which should not be some banana republic dictator who can't even get out of their own fort).
Curse of the Crimson Throne (GOOD): A few more hiccups than RotRL ("Why would we do this, now?", and, "How could anyone NOT know the secret identity of Blackjack?"), but I was able to run the original version without significant modifications. As I mentioned, the new version makes Scarwall a grind instead of a haunted house, and the dungeon at the end of A History of Ashes seems simply tacked on (as it was), but, as Misroi says, it still works.
I have also heard a complaint about the apparently ininterruptible scripted event that includes the first (on-screen) appearance of Blackjack. I also used to think that the main villain was too cartoonishly evil, but then recent history on Earth has cured me of that misconception . . . .
Of course, one of my favorite PbPs of this is a massive rewrite anyway.
Second Darkness (BAD): The AP relies heavily on:
(a) Players accepting that drow are mysterious and unknown to the surface, and
(b) Drow poison being dangerous.
With everyone already intimately familiar with drow, and Delay Poison being a commonplace spell that even low-level PCs can prepare, the combats were quite the joke in this AP and GothBard stopped running it in disgust after only 2 books. It would take a massive amount of fixing to make this AP run well, because it relies so heavily on poison and darkness being terrifying, disabling things, and a couple of spells renders them virtually harmless.
My idea was to have a Drow character for this AP who ISN'T from the Darklands, but whose parents did too good of a job of shielding her from the evils of the land they fled, so she doesn't know what she's getting into -- and while thist does play against the official recommendations for the AP, it does play into the bait-and-switch that a lot of people complain about. Now that I've been out of redeployment into the coronavirus testing lab (50 to 52 hour weeks of night shift) for a few months, maybe once I get caught up on some of the other work stuff, I can start thinking again about trying to find a PbP.
From the PbPs I followed, it didn't seem that so much emphasis was on the terror darkness and poison, just that these were serious drains on resources, the way spending long periods under a very hot Sun would be.
Council of Thieves (BAD): "This AP is for evil-aligned PCs." "Your first act is to ally yourselves with a good-aligned NPC who hates you and work to save the city for the good of all."
I have no idea how the rest of the AP plays out, because the conflicting motivations in Book 1 were so terrible that my players voted to abandon the AP rather than playing on.
{. . .}
Who said this AP is for evil-aligned PCs? Check out this awesome PbP (except for the major hiccup near the end caused by losing yet another GM) that I followed from start to finish. The majority of the PCs weren't evil, but were local citizens (even if originally from far away) trying to live their everyday lives, and getting fed up with what was going on, and deciding to do something about it.
{. . .}
Kingmaker (NEUTRAL): The game fell apart due to my quarrels with one of the players, but Book 1 was a fine adventure. I'd be willing to run it again, but none of my players are interested in kingdom building, so it's a no-go. But I'm not going to dis it simply because it's not my players' cup of tea.
I like the idea of this AP, so I can see why it is popular, but I can see that you can't rush this one.
Serpent's Skull (NEUTRAL): This is another HUGE sandbox, and I ran the kids through it up to Book 5 with no major complaints. It wasn't a great AP, but it wasn't a bad AP. It fell off the rails because the kids couldn't think of any tactic other than, "Attack the serpentfolk fortress again and again and hope for a different outcome," and after about 8 tries we were all fed up enough to call it quits.
I have followed a couple of these as PbPs, and Smuggler's Shiv (Book 1) takes FOREVER.
Carrion Crown (BAD): Holy carp. From appallingly-bad WBL, to the fact that to get any wealth you had to rob NPCs (even your own allies!), to sections of dungeon where you quite literally couldn't get past by the rules, to a story so disjointed that the author of Book 6 put an apology in the preface, this AP is a mess. Requires players to be murderhobos? Check! Ignores the rules? Check! No real storyline? Check! Traps that aren't traps? Check! Traps that could easily TPK the party? Check! This AP has everything. Everything abysmal.
We had fun playing it. But more, "Watching a cheesy horror film" fun than, "This is a well-written AP" fun.
Another horror AP that seems to have the same problem as Strange Aeons . . . maybe the crew of AP writers doesn't know how to deal with horror properly?
And now I have this devious desire to see an AP that is conceived as a cheesy horror film from the very start . . . And given recent Earth history, it could even be simultaneously conceived as a political AP.
Jade Regent (BAD): I had to work AMAZINGLY hard to get the players to finish this AP. Book 2 has a murder mystery with the infamous, "Anyone you try to question dies and Speak with Dead doesn't work on them," plus a "mystery" that is presented to the players as a sandbox, but if they don't do it in the exact correct order it's horrible and confusing. And no, the ninja castle in the viking lands wasn't cool. It was dumb. Book 3 continued this horror with "choose from one of these 3 paths. Oh, you chose the wrong one! I will punish you!"
Don't give players a choice if they don't have one. Books 4 and 5 were quite good, and soothed a lot of ruffled feathers. Book 6 would have been good, except for the whole, "I'm tired and the players need a ton of XP. Is it OK if I put in 53 of the same creature and call it good?" It was... amazingly tedious.
Sounds like Microsoft Windows updates from the late 1990s.
Skull & Shackles (NEUTRAL): We had a blast playing in it, but GothBard had a long litany of complaints running it. She had to get rid of the rum rules in Book 1, and rewrite Books 2 and 3 to have actual plots. She introduced integral NPCs to help motivate the party to move the plot along. So it definitely falls into the, "As much work as it would be to write your own AP," category, but we as players really enjoyed it.
That's what I get from this PbP, which unfortunately fell apart, but it was awesome while it lasted, and it completely rewrote the railroad in the first part to have an interesting track layout.
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And the final three we've played:
Shattered Star (BAD): As I've mentioned, every book does its utmost to remove players from combat by spamming area effect disables at the party. Not playing isn't fun. Plus traps that aren't traps, rules that are ignored when they're inconvenient for the bad guys, and the requirement for the "good guys" to loot everything not nailed down puts this squarely in the "written for 12-year-olds" category.
Wrath of the Righteous (BAD): Many people love the plot. But everyone agrees that the army rules are unworkable ("roll a die to see whether you win or lose"), the mythic rules are horrific (in his run, Shiro added +10 to all the bad guys' stats (to hit, AC, damage, saves) and multiplied their hit points by 10, and the players still curb stomped them), and many of the later areas are impossible to get through as-written (the labyrinth literally cannot be completed as-written, as the number of encounters is infinite). You have to do a full rewrite of the mythic rules, the army rules, and the later books just to work with that solid plot.
Strange Aeons (BAD): NPCs who hate you to the point of irrationality for no reason. An underlying theme that you used to be bad people combined with a requirement that you murder the innocent and rob shops and libraries. Forced choices ("You must ally with this slaver, but hate that slaver"). Normally my family is pretty easygoing and I can make an AP work, but we had to quit Strange Aeons because the writing was so gosh-darned awful. If you asked me, "Which is the absolute worst AP you've tried to run?", Strange Aeons would be it.
With all that being said, the most recent "good" AP that we've played goes to Curse of the Crimson Throne. On the one hand, it's nice to see that my overall impression that "first two were good, the rest weren't" carried out as I went through them all. On the other hand, having to go all the way back to Skull & Shackles just to hit "Neutral" is pretty appalling.
LOL. Shiro listened to my list and said, "Take a look: Of 12 APs you rated, you rated only 2 good and 3 neutral. That doesn't make the APs bad, it makes you a tough grader!"
Fair enough, point taken.
But honestly, I ask four questions:
(1) Was this AP less work than a homebrew would have been?
(2) Was there a coherent plot?
(3) Did the players enjoy it?
(4) Did it follow the rules closely enough that none of my players complained about it?
If you fail 2 of 4, that's 50%, or an F. And I'll argue that yes, 7 of the APs easily failed 2-3 of those questions.
And the final three we've played:
Shattered Star (BAD): As I've mentioned, every book does its utmost to remove players from combat by spamming area effect disables at the party. Not playing isn't fun. Plus traps that aren't traps, rules that are ignored when they're inconvenient for the bad guys, and the requirement for the "good guys" to loot everything not nailed down puts this squarely in the "written for 12-year-olds" category.
Having followed this thread, I see your point.
Wrath of the Righteous (BAD): Many people love the plot. But everyone agrees that the army rules are unworkable ("roll a die to see whether you win or lose"), the mythic rules are horrific (in his run, Shiro added +10 to all the bad guys' stats (to hit, AC, damage, saves) and multiplied their hit points by 10, and the players still curb stomped them), and many of the later areas are impossible to get through as-written (the labyrinth literally cannot be completed as-written, as the number of encounters is infinite). You have to do a full rewrite of the mythic rules, the army rules, and the later books just to work with that solid plot.
If I ever get to run this, I am going to run it with the PCs being non-Mythic. I have heard several times that this is possible and actually works with less adjustment than if you run it Mythic. Although I would be irresistibly compelled to add snarky references to the Mythic powers that were supposed to be in there . . . .
Strange Aeons (BAD): NPCs who hate you to the point of irrationality for no reason. An underlying theme that you used to be bad people combined with a requirement that you murder the innocent and rob shops and libraries. Forced choices ("You must ally with this slaver, but hate that slaver"). Normally my family is pretty easygoing and I can make an AP work, but we had to quit Strange Aeons because the writing was so gosh-darned awful. If you asked me, "Which is the absolute worst AP you've tried to run?", Strange Aeons would be it.
Having followed your relevant thread, I see your point.
With all that being said, the most recent "good" AP that we've played goes to Curse of the Crimson Throne. On the one hand, it's nice to see that my overall impression that "first two were good, the rest weren't" carried out as I went through them all. On the other hand, having to go all the way back to Skull & Shackles just to hit "Neutral" is pretty appalling.
Did you get a chance to look at any of the ones you didn't list (especially the ones you didn't list between Rise of the Runelords and Skull & Shackles)?