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Hi everyone!
I'm planning to start GMing this campaign as soon as we finnish Outlaws of Alkenstar.
I was tempted to run it because it looks like a nice change of pace. We recently played Strength of Thousands, which was awesome, and we were looking for a totally different approach.
However, I think the campaign betrays its theme pretty early on. I understand why (a full undead or full evil campaign is a risk, from a business point of view), but as one of the potential customers of the original premise, I can't help but feel that it's a missed opportunity.
So I was wondering what I could do to tweak it. I'm spitballing here, with the hope that someone who already played could add things to the brainstorm and I could find what changes I should do.
Main concerns with the AP as it currently is:
1- the undead / negative healing problem. As mentioned by a lot of people, the AP simply doesn't work without a change to Void damage. About one third of the enemies do void damage, and the PC are pretty much inmune to it, either because they got a Undead ancestry/archetype, or because of the book 2 ritual. That's too much. It's fine if a character gets a moment of spotlight because of the ancestry they picked, but the whole party being 100% immune to a boss is just a climax killer. My proposed solution to that is that Void damage is versatile Cold, and Vitality damage is versatile Fire. Currently thinking to reduce the die size by one (so 6d8 void would become 6d6 cold, and 3d6 vitality would be 3d4 fire).
2- book 3 is too disconnected. It's something in a different place, in which the evil, proud wannabe bloodlords work as henchmen of a totally foreign agent trying to mediate or convince two factions from a rival nation, so they can later fight that foreign agent to get the info they need. I don't think this book has much to salvage, personally. It's not that the encounters are bad, it's that it doesn't feel like part of the AP. Maybe replacing the two Holomog factions with two Geb factions (with totally different motivations) would make it feel more Geb related.
3- Reputation is useless for about 5/6ths of the game. There's so much reputation to gain and so much bookeeping to do, with so many different major and minor factions... only to matter a small bit in book 6, and maybe 2 or 3 things in book 4. I have seen some ideas floating around in the web, normally using systems inspired by Pathfinder Society faction reputation reward system. Maybe something like that would be cool. "Spending" reputation to roll or reroll social interactions could be worth it too.
4- Too little player agency. I'm not particularly fond of sandboxes, I think railroaded stories ussually work better (having a blast in Outlast, although I also changed things there). But in a campagin which has this premise of being a manipulative undead aristocrat, scheming to increase your influence, just being everybody's waterboy and do go-and-fetch quests feel against the theme. There should be something for the players to do by themselves. An organization to build, a faction to run, a Game of Thrones to play... something that makes them wanting to plot against the BBEG, besides being told to. Maybe tying with point 3, some way to spend reputation to increase player agency. Some political positions to hold, which gives you benefits, but cost a reputation unkeep (so you need to keep grinding reputation with factions in order to stay relevant).
5- The BBEG is simultanously too early and too late. I think Chancellor Kemnebi reveals too soon, and appears too late. The players know for a fact who is the bad guy as soon as book 3. But Kemnebi doesn't appears until book 6. I think this should be reversed, somehow. Kemnebi should be present from the start. Maybe it's him who send the players to Gravedirge, trying to undermine Berline's control of the farms with fresh, newbie recruits that have little experience. Or maybe he isn't aware of Graveclaw's conspiracy, and discovers it later, through Iron Taviah when he raise her. But I think the revelation that a powerful, maybe friendly Bloodlord is betraying them and/or Geb should be a bigger gotcha moment, and also the players shouldn't have a clear understanding of WHO is the evil hand moving the strings.
6- Player Characters should be evil, and do evil things. Again, I understand why doing unspeakable horrors isn't for everyone, and why Paizo had to soften the theme to make a product that would sell better. But my group won't have a problem with this, we loved the PF1E 3pp Way of the Wicked, and we will have no problems with an evil, undead tone here. So I think some evil, gross things need to happen in the adventure. Maybe add some human farms in Gravedirge, not just produce. Maybe some explicit cannibalism in Ghouls Hunger. Maybe human sacrifices needed to achieve certain levels of reputation, or some dark pact required to pass some milestones. Obviously this shouldn't mean the players can betray each other, and shouldn't mean they plan to betray Geb or otherwise seed chaos into the kingdom. The theme of the campaign is Lawful Evil, to borrow the old alignment designation. It's not "let's have fun burning people", but "the room is cold, some people need to burn to warm us all. We live in a society".
So, there you go. Anyone has any idea about how to improve or change any of these? Anyone that has already developed something similar for their own game?
As a suggestion, you may want to look at the Hell's Vengeance AP for ideas. It's PF1, set in Cheliax, and has a "devils vs. paladins" theme instead of scheming undead theme, but some of the concepts and encounters can be adapted/converted.
Also, Geb (the nation) is more "Lawful with evil tendencies" than outright evil. The Dead Laws strictly circumscribe how much the (un)"Dead" can "get away with" instead of giving them free reign over the living/"Quick."
Will look into Hell's Vengeance if I can. EDIT: any advice about which book should I buy to look into?
I'm not sure I agree with the description of Geb being more Lawful than Evil. While it's true that there are rules about how the Dead can interact with the Quick, that's just because there is an even lower level caste, the Chattel. Ghouls, vampires and wraiths don't feed on the Quick because they have literal farms where they raise people as food. Which in my book is pretty squarely into the Evil part of Lawful Evil.
The first two or three parts of Hell's Vengeance (The Hellfire Compact, Wrath of Thrune, and Inferno Gate), where the PCs act as town enforcers, reclaim another town from the crusaders of Iomedae, and then deal with a betrayal by their initial patron, probably have the most usable material to convert.
The nation of Geb is evil, yes. Just not the cartoony, "evil for evil's sake" (or adolescent "LULZ, evil") where the PCs can run wild without consequences. Sure, they can do evil things; they just have to do them within the constraints of the Dead Laws.
Ultimately, the Blood Lords AP is not an evil vs. good campaign. It's mostly (except for parts of Field of Maidens, if the PCs are not into negotiation) the PCs as agents of the evil status quo vs. evil that makes trouble or is attempting to disrupt the status quo for personal gain.
One comment on point 4: Until the PCs are established/recognized as Blood Lords in The Ghouls Hunger, they are pretty much "go-and-fetch" lackeys. And even as Blood Lords, the PCs have to answer to Geb (as his [plausibly deniable] agents).
The reputation points (point 3) with the existing factions are something that can stand some expansion. You can probably use the rules for Favors and Disservices in the Reputation section of the Gamemastery Guide, as well as re-skin the Research subsystem to use Reputation points in place of Research points to qualify for various boons from a faction instead of information from a library, to expand on what's in the AP. Just make sure that you emphasize (as, I believe, at least a couple NPCs do) that trying to play the factions against each other is likely to result in one or more PCs sharing Tylegmut’s (the dead bank manager in Zombie Feast) fate.
The reputation points (point 3) with the existing factions are something that can stand some expansion. You can probably use the rules for Favors and Disservices in the Reputation section of the Gamemastery Guide, as well as re-skin the Research subsystem to use Reputation points in place of Research points to qualify for various boons from a faction instead of information from a library, to expand on what's in the AP. Just make sure that you emphasize (as, I believe, at least a couple NPCs do) that trying to play the factions against each other is likely to result in one or more PCs sharing Tylegmut’s (the dead bank manager in Zombie Feast) fate.
Alternately, you could go with reputation being a more dynamic version of the Organizational Influence system from Ultimate Intrigue with the PCs (either individually or as a group) trading favors with the factions: doing favors for a faction increases influence/reputation for that faction (and possibly reduces influence/reputation with other factions) while asking for boons/favors reduces influence/reputation for that faction. This will require more work to quantify the "cost/gain" for each type of boon or favor for the factions (based on the factions' interests and which aspects of society they control).
I'm more interested in being in service to evil powers for my own reasons than actually being evil.
I'm more interested in being in service to evil powers for my own reasons than actually being evil.
Going by old rules, this is pretty much the same thing, especially for PCs.
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I have a player who just relishes the idea of an evil campaign. When we were ending our 1E game and I was looking at the 2E campaigns, I looked at Blood Lords and was like... well... it's Parks and Recreation in a Nightmare Before Christmas.
I like it, but BL is just not an evil campaign.
To make it one, maybe the 'bad guys' are really trying to increase the rights of the Quick and overthrow the evil necromancers? LIke they are Pharasmites and Geb is run by foul Urgathoans exclusively?
View my post above:
Ultimately, the Blood Lords AP is not an evil vs. good campaign. It's mostly (except for parts of Field of Maidens, if the PCs are not into negotiation) the PCs as agents of the evil status quo vs. evil that makes trouble or is attempting to disrupt the status quo for personal gain.
To make it "more evil," just include having the PCs doing "evil things": like using create undead rituals to "bring back" their defeated enemies as Chattel (legal under the Dead Laws). The PCs are (or can be) evil, they are just (mostly) fighting against other evil NPCs/opponents; or is the issue that doing bad things to bad people not "edgy" enough?
The point is that Paizo does not know where the boundaries and/or comfort level for specific types of actions lie with your (and every other) group.
Even Hell's Vengeance is fairly well "sanitized" from what it could be.
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The point is that Paizo does not know where the boundaries and/or comfort level for specific types of actions lie with your (and every other) group.
Even Hell's Vengeance is fairly well "sanitized" from what it could be.
Aside from the Chelish curse, HV suffered from inverting the roles of heroes and villains, one of the reasons it didn't feel like an Evil AP.
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We need a proper villains campaign where we actually fight angels, heralds of good deities and their champions, not villain vs villain again
We need a proper villains campaign where we actually fight angels, heralds of good deities and their champions, not villain vs villain again
And being proactive instead of being on the defensive.
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You can run Kingmaker with evil PCs to establish an evil kingdom, if you want a campaign where the PCs (mostly) do what they want, when they want.
To quote James Jacobs (in the foreword to The End of Eternity in the Legacy of Fire AP): "An Adventure Path is supposed to be railroady, to a certain extent. That's why we call them 'Adventure Paths' and not 'Adventure Lots of Different Paths.'" By the nature of telling a coherent, single story that can be planned and developed in advance for (pretty much) any group of PCs, the AP plot almost has to deal with the PCs reacting to an antagonist and/or doing "go-and-fetch quests" for a patron; unless the AP dictates specific pre-generated PCs like the old tournament modules.
Paizo does often include sandbox elements in APs, but expecting them to cater to the specific personalities and goals of a given group of PCs (which may differ quite a bit from table to table) is not very feasible for an AP. ("We have a different name for those - Campaign Setting sourcebooks.") If you want a campaign perfectly tailored to your players and their characters, that allows them to set their own agenda and move at their own pace, then you need to modify an existing AP or develop your own sandbox campaign (which we often did "back in the day" to connect different "modules" before Adventure Paths were a thing).