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Hi all, my Strange Aeons game wrapped in October after nearly three years of play, and I figured I’d write out my experiences and thoughts on the campaign as a whole.
The game was certainly personalized to a high degree post-book 3, but I think my changes were valid and could possibly work as inspiration for other GMs looking to mix things up. I’m going to go book by book and talk about what changes I made and why, as well as what I liked about each one.
This may be a bit indulgent, and for that I apologize, but after three years, I think I deserve a little indulgence :P
The characters are as follows - they all survived through to the end, which I wanted, as I made the theme of the campaign “Is there an amount of good you can put into the universe that makes you a good decision, and can you really change away from your past sins?” As well as similar musings on morality despite past atrocities. All of their backstories were influenced by what the player had said, but I wrote them up with an evil twist on each of them. For the fighting of shadows in book 3, I statted them up as equal-level evil versions of their previous selves, leading to the most difficult-to-run, but also one of the most rewarding combats of the whole adventure.
As well - for names, I had each player give me a list of possible names, which I chose from for the reveal in book 1 in order to give them some agency over their names, but also still the surprise and curiosity of not knowing who they were. If we met more frequently, I would have loved to have kept their names a mystery for the whole first book.
Kethethar - An inquisitor of a CN god of adventure, who had placed her own enjoyment of life over all others, and was seeking fun (which, to her, was mostly murder before the amnesia). She sold her daughter into slavery in return for a magic sword, along with various other evil acts of violence. Used to be an anti-paladin.
Ur - An oracle who used to follow Bokrug, acting very meek and crippled but influencing people from the sidelines and eventually running his own cult. It was super fun to hint at his connection when Bokrug shows up in Book 3. Used to be a cleric to the old one.
Suavi - An elf Magus who believed himself to be all-powerful and above everyone else. Was trying to become a lich, but while he could pull off the evil acts he needed to perform, he wasn’t strong enough to achieve lichdom. I used a modified forsaken lich template for his old self, though he eventually became mortal again just before he lost his memory. Used to be an Eldritch Knight, as well.
Anummu - A fighter/brawler/maneuver master who felt absolutely sure that he used to be a god - this was such a good prompt, and the source of a lot of jokes. His old self ALSO thought he used to be a god, but was very violent in his attempts to regain godly power. Used to be a barbarian with mythic levels (I used these sparingly throughout the campaign).
Cecelia - A wizard that was basically a privileged little shit, she was manipulative and often tapped into dark powers. She also got married to one of Lowls’ servants, who he was using for a lot of his occult experiments. Used to be a sorrowsoul bard.
Xanthe - This is the player who exited the game after the first book, and while I’ll go into a bit more detail on her later, she used to be a piece of the Briarstone Witch’s soul that was sent to Golarion in order to influence Lowls into doing his occult schtick, and eventually planned on feeding Golarion to Hastur. Plus before she was the Briarstone Witch, she was a super-powered adventurer who fought off the corruption of Hastur from Golarion a long time ago but got corrupted by his influence still and sucked into Carcosa… the backstory here got to be pages long.
Love this thing. Session 0, making characters only took a couple of hours (since I went with the full fugue state - no backstories to write up!), so the back half started with everyone getting murdered. All my players were clearly aware this was some weird situation, but went along with it really well.
The mega dungeon crawl was full of interesting combat scenarios and paranoia for the PCs, but since we meet once every other week and are limited to four hours, I wasn’t able to play up some of the roleplaying (they didn’t talk to many of the survivors for long, I led them to find their files in the second session, etc.), so they were more concerned about dispelling the mist as quickly as possible for their own benefit. Overall it was a bit rushed, even as it took many hours to get through, but the haunts and the Byakhee added some great tension despite that. Definitely would prefer either longer or more frequent sessions - of all the games I’ve played, the first book of SA would probably make the best marathon session.
I didn’t make many changes, other than making Red Destiny one of the PC’s weapons from their lost life (though they don’t figure that out until later). Overall I’d rate this as the second strongest adventure, and one of the strongest intros to any campaign I’ve played from Paizo - the lost memory mechanic can be played out in so many different ways, and I’ve seen tons of different ideas on how to do it that were phenomenal, but it is easy to get over-excited about stealing that agency from your players - this AP, IMO, works much better for those players that you know pretty well, so you can gauge how they’d react to their backstories being stolen from them.
At the end of book 1, I had a player leave, which kinda left me out in the lurch. They were playing an amnesiac psychic (which is so thematically tasty for this AP that I’d recommend pushing it as a GM for your own amusement/more toys to play with), who I had decided had faced Hastur in the past, and was catapulted into the future under his influence - the fugue state actually cured her of her Hastur brain, but I changed that a little bit to fully merge this character and the Briarstone Witch, as I mentioned in her character profile above. So I decided that after hearing the name Hastur for the first time, it activated her programming, and sent her to get her memories from the Mad Poet early, and pursue Lowls on her own. She had already been pretty weird, so her just wandering off wasn’t out of character.
The rest of the party set about looking for Lowls, who had already left, and I have to say that this is probably the best usage of the amnesia mechanic - having characters that knew the PCs, looking around to find contingency plans they had made previously, it was super fun. I agree with some people that it’s hard to get the PCs to ignore Lowls’ manor for the fort, but my players were good sports and followed Cesedia’s plea to look into the fort first.
I didn’t make many changes to this adventure, but I have to say that the players can remove a lot of the dramatic tension by simply recognizing that the biggest house is where Lowls would be and immediately blazing through it, ignoring a lot of the side-content that they would have to come back and clear out in a somewhat boring epilogue later. I’d suggest being pretty harsh on them with your tactics if they go that route, to encourage a bit more stealth and management of side-objectives.
The other thing was that they managed to talk Risi out of a life of crime! They snuck up on her and while she managed to bluff that she was just some thief, they never gave her an opening to assassinate them, and when they killed her boss, she surrendered. The oracle ended up taking leadership, and Risi joined as their companion for the rest of the game! Her and the brawler ended up dating. It was fun to flesh out her character a bit more.
This is absolutely the best book as-written in the AP (or at least, the most fun for me to run). The dreamlands, the dream quests, the intense encounters, that final fight against the evil shadows of the character’s past selves? Chef’s kiss. It was a whole bunch of bonkers fun.
The only problem ended up being pacing: they banged out all of the dream-quests in less than two weeks. Even when they died (and I didn’t pull any punches), having a divine spontaneous caster meant that and psychosis they gained were basically instantly removed. Plus, since they completed all the dream quests before any of the real life content, the grittier moves of the grey wardens and the rat king felt kinda dull in comparison.
The main changes I made ended up being cutting a few of the waking world encounters so they could skip to book 4, and adding a bit of continuity underlying the dream quests - the inquisitor, if you’ll remember, sold her child - the person she sold it to was a Denizen of Leng (Weirilai, who came back to attack the PCs more than a few times throughout the AP), and as such lived in the dreamlands for a long time. So, at a couple points, they ran into the child, who the inquisitor had no memories of, as she was growing up as a slave girl (working for the night hag, working for the prince at the ball, etc). To this end, I turned the child into Vadrack, having her hunt the party as a slave of Weirilai with a longer leash. She actually killed most of them handily, but the oracle managed to grab her hat before they bounced. Later (post-memory recovery) the inquisitor came back and apologized, and promised to kill Weirilai for real, freeing her daughter. Her daughter said she’d never forgive her, but… she’d take being freed from slavery.
Book 4, I think, isn’t all bad. I liked the mysterium, Okeno is an interesting locale, but there’s absolutely some problems with it, especially as it follows the excellence of book 3. The fact that the players spend most of it fighting gnolls is pretty bleh flavorwise, and I’ve run legacy of fire for some people in this group before, so they’d probably had enough gnolls for a lifetime, and I made major, major changes to this book.
I kept the intro - where they had to find more transport to Okeno, where they knew Lowls was going, but I cut out all of the stops before they got to the pirate city. Instead, I changed the tower into one that the party had built in their evil days, as a base of operations where they often went into the Osirian desert to find occult artifacts for their boss (the tower also acted as a magical tuning fork across a bunch of leylines, meaning that they could teleport to and from it very easily, and also it was the tower used as a mirror in the final encounter of book 6 instead of Thrushmoor - more on that later). It had been overrun by some science experiments they had made, and they had to clear it of both the troops Lowls left behind as well as their own nasties.
This is also when I brought the psychic/the Briarstone Witch back into play. Her soul had been separated from her body and put into a doll at the end of all of this by a Lowls unaware that the psychic was actually the key to helping him complete his goals, removing huge chunks of her memory once again but allowing her to act as the stand-in companion NPC for the PCs. Since the big twist of this campaign is that the PCs are unwittingly setting the stage for Hastur to devour Golarion, it makes more sense that they are fooled into heading to Carcosa by an unwittingly evil puppet.
From here, I bridged the gap between books four and five by turning it into a fetch quest - similar to book 3, but with the twist that each item they had to get for the ritual to head into Neruzivan (which had been locked out of time, but was still the only way to get to Carcosa, so they had to get a bunch of items for Xanthe’s ritual) was connected to their past sins. I wrote and re-skinned several different pieces of content to make this work.
The oracle had to return to the town of cultists he had founded (which was infected by the Hive monsters - basically my excuse to run Aliens as a module), the Inquisitor needed to go kill Weiralai on Leng, in her house (Which was a converted temple to the Yellow King), the brawler who thought he was a god needed to go and fight in a tournament put on by one of his followers, the wizard needed to dive, inception-style, into the memories of her wife (who had been erased from memory by Lowls - this was run in a hypercube and was extremely trippy and fun), and the magus needed to cleanse a library he had ruined when they refused to let him continue his work there (I saved the Mysterium from the beginning of the adventure for this bit - I also put a Colour out of Space in the basement as someone else in a different thread had suggested. It was very cool! After that, they were able to teleport themselves to Neruzivan, from where they would then teleport to Carcosa…
Three of the characters actually died in this adventure, but I brought them back under mysterious circumstances - specifically, some of their memories were removed, and they woke up in a puddle of blood at the bottom of their tower. The Pallid Mask was responsible for this, since again, the twist was that they needed the PCs to be alive so that they could complete the feeding of Golarion to Carcosa.
Obviously I pretty much chucked most of this adventure in favor of creating some scenarios where my players would have to do more of what I enjoyed in the second book - facing the consequences of their past lives. I also left the Necronomicon in the Mysterium, writing that there were two copies on Golarion and they had already found the other one for Lowls years earlier, meaning they got an early look at the unholy book.
Because I had so many new dungeons and missions for the PCs in book 4, I sheared off a bunch of stuff in book 5 as well. Specifically, since Xanthe took on the role of their guide to Carcosa, and the mind-swapped Yithian no longer made an appearance, I didn’t see much reason for them to deal with the flying polyps below the city, and obviously they skipped out on the whole travelling through the desert thing. So, they simply went to each star stelae before dealing with the remains of the star seed in the lake.
The saffron king was a bit of a pushover, as they convinced him to get into a 1-on-1 fight with the brawler in exchange for his kingship. Obviously the highly optimized fighter came out on top of that one...
Weiralai’s return here was great, although she almost had a comedic tone - I wrote her as becoming attached to Carcosa (specifically feeding off the energy of the Pallid Mask, which I’ll get into later) after her death on Leng, and as such having a much faster regeneration. She showed up a couple of times in the city, and ambushed the party when the Star Seed spawned. Then, Xanthe zapped them up to Carcosa.
Carcosa also received a few cuts and changes, but as a whole I think it works as a final adventure pretty well. I think pacing wise it felt a little over-long, with the idea that they would teleport directly into the final fight being more appealing, but the three locales they had to deal with were fun in their own right.
The Pallid Mask was pretty integral to the ending I had landed on, and he was fun to play. He showed up a few times throughout each nexus, summoning some of the random encounters that the book has that struck me as filler. He started out very complimentary, but got less verbose as the players made more progress through the world…
I changed the vampire manor to take place in 1919 Paris, as I had run a Dread game the previous Halloween that involved the Pallid Mask (unknown to my players at the time) hunting their characters through a manor after a performance of the King in Yellow goes awry, and eventually pulling the mansion into Carcosa - the characters that got sucked in showed up in their insane states, which was fun!
This meant that I wanted to change the Paris Nexus as well, so I replaced it with Seattle - we live in Oregon so it was a fun little easter egg, and instead of climbing the Eiffel Tower, they fought the Bhole on the Space Needle for maximum intenseness!
Finally, the Elder Thing nexus was fun, but they were always way too on their guard at this point (and had too many escape plans) for me to really menace them with the Wendigo, so after it couldn’t fear and separate them, it kind of gave up.
In both the conflict between the Elder Things and the Shoggoths, and the Leng Ghouls and Erich Zhann, they just ended up mediating a treaty meeting. Which is fine, but also kind of silly. I try to play my NPCs, even monsters, with some sort of reason, so it didn’t make sense to just have them refuse to negotiate.
Finally, they headed to the reflection of their tower in Okeno! I decided to let them run into Lowls pre-transformation at the top of the tower, who was trying to use the Witch’s body as a power source to consume Golarion (though it wasn’t working). I figured, after all this time, they should get a chance to taunt him while he was still capable of speaking common. But, it didn’t take long for him to get decapitated in one hit by the inquisitor (I had him statted as a level 6 bard for the fake-out).
That’s when the Witch (played by her original player) put herself back in her body, and betrayed the party. I think they realized what was happening pretty quick, but they were good sports about it. Lowls’ body morphed into the Star Seed, and the fight went on. I gave Ariadnah a couple of mythic levels, and a focus on control - she had oodles of domination spells and other ways to get people to stop doing anything while the star seed would wail on them. However, the party made a great move in mazing the monster, leaving just Xanthe/Ariadnah to fight on her own (without much in the way of blasting power). Eventually they took her down, then the Star Seed when he came back, and realized they had no way of stopping Golarion from being eaten by Carcosa.
That’s when the Pallid Mask showed up and took off his face, revealing a bunch of tentacles where his head should be - he didn’t outright say it, but he was actually Nyarlathotehp in disguise, and offered the group a choice.
He could turn back time, but with their knowledge, they were a danger to the world - Xhamen-Dor had already grown heavily in all of them and Golarion would be in grave danger because of that.
In ascending order of “Amount of time that Golarion will avoid being eaten by Xhamen-Dor”, their choices were:
1: Have their memories erased, but have it so that they never met Lowls, so they are still a$!$*!@s, just not world-destroying a~+%+$@s.
2: Be put into a permanent fugue state, forever unaware of their surroundings.
3: Be erased from time altogether - making them and this whole adventure never having happened.
They obviously went for the third option (the secret 4th option was to go fight Xhamen-Dor on Golarion, but they didn’t want to go with that). They said their goodbyes, and Nyarlathotehp opened up a portal into his dad’s stomach, where they were unmade and the world was saved - although, of course, it was always safe.
I play for the story, but Pathfinder is undeniably a tactical game. This one had some great fights and some great moments, and I really did love this AP. It’s probably the last thing I’m going to GM for a while since I got way busier near the end of the AP, but it was a fantastic time. If you get the chance, I’d definitely say to run the 3rd book, even as a standalone - it’s that good. As well, the 1st book is also really well written and brimming with creepy flavor for a megadungeon. The others were good overall, but the AP as a whole is really carried by 1 and 3, and its solid premise of just trying to kill the guy who wronged you, and ending up trying to save the world (even if it’s hopeless). I’d definitely recommend this AP to any party that likes fighting weird monsters and dungeon crawling, as it has a lot of great encounters and settings to fight in.
Anyway, AMA! If you have any questions about how I handled something, I’d love to answer them, since I think running the full game gave me a good overall understanding of how (my) players would handle different things.
Hi!
I have some questions
How much of all this did you plan beforehand?
I'm prepping to run this AP (in Pathfinder 2e), its my first Adventure Path, and really my first officially written campaign ever.
Did you go book by book?
I feel that this AP requires you to plan a head a lot, to leave trails and clues for books to come.
Which book to you think is the most important to prep well?
At my first glance, book 1 and 2 seems to have most impact on the characters no?
Cheers!
I am currently about to start book 3 and loved some of the stuff you created for your party. There were things I haven't really thought of, for example, how bad and powerful were they before their memories were ripped and how bad they could have been to pose a threat. After your description, I think I am going to go full gonzo with my players (they are old time friends, some of them have been playing with me since the AD&D era and they trust me with taking away their character creation), so I think it would be super interesting to see how they take that they were actually pretty pretty evil.
I agree with you, Book 1 was pretty solid dungeon crawl with a very unusual and scary twist. I think the key aspect of that book is to play into the eerie atmosphere in the place and just go nuts with how insane and over the top, even for a fantasy world, this all is.
Oh Jeez, I hope I'm not getting back to this too late! Here's some answers to the questions asked:
How much of all this did you plan beforehand?
I skimmed the books when I started the AP, and had read in-depth by the time we finished the first book. I planned out most of the encounters for the second book, but didn't start really digging into changes for books 4-6 until halfway through book 2, when I got a handle on how the players were RPing the characters and what they were after for backstory stuff. Since book 3 I pretty much ran as-is except for the ending, I was freed up to write out player backstories. I had an idea of what I wanted to do post-3 so I could include some foreshadowing, but I didn't really flesh stuff out until the end of book 3 so I could be flexible with the actual content.
Did you go book by book?
So, yeah, I pretty much had a high level overview of how the campaign would be run, but I don't like to overprepare, since PC choices could easily change the context in which they are entering a section of the story - so I kept their choices in the back of my mind, and usually planned around 3 sessions ahead concrete.
Which book to you think is the most important to prep well?
1 is a haunted mansion - there's some stuff to prep re: character files/when they find out their names, but it's mostly just dungeon delving. Maybe if you were playing the long game and messing around with the internal politics of the prison, but those really aren't that important to some parties. 2 is definitely where you want to make sure you know the character backstories and understand how the town reacts to them. The ending of 3 is a HUGE reveal depending on how much your characters remember, so prepping that and the presentation of them getting their memories back so they can finally know what the heck is going on is major. Other than that, any book in which you decide to make changes is probably the most important to prep well, since you could accidentally introduce inconsistencies that may be annoying to deal with later.
snip!
I'm glad I inspired you! The intro/memory loss is such a gift for a GM who likes to mess with PCs. If you haven't gotten to the end, consider if one of the PCs' shadows kills them in the Dreamlands, and re-takes over their body - corrupting them with all that evil again could make for a wild new party dynamic, and a lot of fun if the player wants to mess around with evil for a while - as long as they still want to save the world (which I'd hope they would - they live there!), the party should take all the help they can get...