Book 2, Chapter 4, A Little Advice? (spoilers)

[Bast L.]

So, before heading into the fortress, I told the players that, arbitrarily, they can't just run away and rest after every encounter. But I don't have any justification for that. Even the ritual, which wouldn't work, isn't something they can know about ahead of time.

The mine, specifically, said players should leave, and come back, and beat them by attrition, but for the fortress, it would just be uninteresting. How do you guys handle things like that? Camping in the jungle isn't much threat, since they roll well enough to avoid diseases, and random encounters are never much concern (even using pf 1 tables, we haven't run into anything interesting). They don't run out of food or water, thanks to the druid. I don't see anything propelling them to finish the fortress' defenders quickly.

I also would prefer not having the enemies just swarm in from other rooms, because those rooms add to the encounters.

What do you all do for these situations? Have them reconstruct the golem? (his curse is pretty nasty)

[Ruzza]

This is strange because I was all for my players hit and running the fortress. I even had Renali remind my players that "a spider may be small, but it defeats a foe by not being seen." And my players had a few brutal battles inside, so they were on day three of assaulting the fortress (even dispatching a patrol that came upon them on the first night of rest).

Yet I still wanted to put a clock on them, more than anything. My PCs were playing so safe that, like you said, it was becoming uninteresting. At this point, my players were discussing at the table what could possibly be going on inside. They had already seen the bones that supported the ceiling and were making some pretty big leaps in logic. It was soon agreed that the Cinderclaws were trying to resurrect Dahak. Whatever they thought, the PCs felt there was a time crunch and on the morning of the 4th day, as they paddled across the mud lake, I described tremors in the ground and sucking noises coming from all around them as magma started to lazily eek up from the ground. My group went with all haste inside, assured now that something big was happening, and resolved to press on without further breaks. They stared out over the lake of lava knowing that they were trapped within.

TL;DR: The ritual itself began, but since it was flawed from the start, it began to cause localized tremors and lava flooding.

[Bast L.]

That's an interesting way of handling it. They haven't seen the bones yet, but I'll see what they make of them (they fought the croc outside, golem, and while refocusing, the dormitory people geared up and came in).

[MaxAstro]

Personally, I use the Tension Pool rules for this. I've taught my players that I will happily throw serious complications at them - just last session an encounter trigger by a tension pool roll almost killed two party members and wasted most of their resources on a day they were planning to need those resources, forcing them the change plans.

So they tend to keep moving, trying to avoid suffering more tension rolls than necessary.

[Kennethray]

They manage to sneak in and speak to the kobold at the mine and got a hint about the ritual. When they approached I had the gator slowly circling where the wall use to be so it was easily avoided and they over heard one of the bogard guards in the tower talking about the volcano ritual. Once they snuck in and started the fight with the golem the gator was at the front door to make them think twice about leaving, and they rushed straight down the middle to the last fight, avoiding all the encounters in the side rooms. The last fight was over in 3 rounds due to 2 nat 1's on saves vs phantomsmal killer. They felt a sense of a time constraint once they found out about the volcano ritual so that pretty much insured they wouldn't do much resting.

[Captain Morgan]

So I'm spitballing here because I don't have the book in front of me, but you could have some of the enemies trained in Survival come after the party. Unless they Cover Tracks, tracking them should be a sure thing, and even with Covering Tracks the enemy can still probably find them eventually. It is only an hour on a failed Track roll. That will at least keep your party on edge, rather than feeling like they are definitely safe when they pull back.

You could use a tension pool to accomplish a similar result, but you'd need to decide on your time scale.