Unicore's Circus (Spoilers for the AP)

[Unicore]

So I was never planning on running this AP, but I had started a different project with this group of old friends, and they were so clearly wanting to play something that lended itself to light hearted play that I decided to switch them over to this AP and it has been an incredible blast of fun.
The party consists of:
A human Bard Clown and a Human Druid big cat tamer who are the sons of the Great Fortunato.
A Half Elf Ruffian Rogue Acrobat (headed into the staff acrobat archetype), member of the feather fall 5, who almost never strides when she can cartwheel or leap.
A dung-sweeping Liberator of Desna, brother to Eliza the snake charmer, who believes his father may have been a serpent folk (I think the player is thinking about MC into sorcerer).
And a Goblin Alchemist Pyrotechnics expert who blew in to the circus and intends to blow up everything which the rest of the party allows.

At this point in the adventure, the party has no idea who murdered the Ring master, but was able to save the show, and is investigating things outside now.
The party has managed to get mauled by Bardolph (knocked out 2 before calming down and being talked back into the pen), before deciding to push the ringmaster's wagon into the pond after discovering the strange tracks leading to it. They assumed that the villainous murderer might have locked themselves inside it, so they barred the door and then got the rest of the circus to help them push it into water. I ruled that pushing it into the pond would probably get the water high enough to flood the trapped pods inside, but also ruin most of the clothing based treasure in there as well, facts they will not be able to discover until the morning when they attempt to pull the wagon back out, because they discovered that it is very difficult to open a mostly submerged wagon door.

But the most fun mishap yet is that the Goblin critically failed to identify the water mephits, mistaking them for water goblins, a very nasty variety of goblin that love wet rocks. The player really ran with this idea and has made up a whole mythology about how water goblins love wet rocks so much that they often sneak into good goblin camps and grab little goblin children by their heads, mistaking them as rocks that must be dunked into lakes and streams. Goblin children grow up learning to love fire because water goblins hate fire and won't come near it, and has now convinced the rest of the party that it must be on the look out for water goblins, and that the circus needs to make sure to incorporate more fire into its acts and its camp to keep water goblins from infiltrating the camp and soaking all of their rock shaped items.

This AP is very well set up to allow for and encourage light-hearted shenanigans, which it turns out is perfect for reconnecting with some old college friends, and I look forward to seeing how they interact with Nemmia Bramblecloak after finding the symbol of Gozreh, the patron deity of the Druid in the party.

[Unicore]

Well, I've probably killed the party.

As mentioned before, it is a party of 5, but that first night is a woozie.

My plan was to have the griggs show up while the party went to investigate snakes in the woods, setting the stage for it by having the musicians start playing a Eulogy to Thunder while the party was there, and that they would start hearing the tune change during the fight with the snakes, which was going very well for the party, no one had even been hit.

Well the turn I have the druid at the back notice that the music has changed to a light jig, the snake landed a serious bite and the acrobat crit failed the fort save. I had the snake retreat into the bushes to give the party a chance to focus on the poisoned character, but they decided to do so by casting the heal spell (2 times in an area) to keep her hit points up instead of having anyone do the medicine check to help her. She crit failed the next 2 fort saves giving her the drained 3 condition (that is not going away for days, if she ever manages her saves to end the poison), and I don't really know how to slow the roll of the big conclusion to the evening now that the grigs are playing with the rest of the circus and Nemmia is probably in a position to Kill off the whole party. The party has no idea what is going on, so if I have Nemmia retreat instead of attack, I guess I can have the party encounter her in town instead of at the circus, but what reason can I give her for not attacking when her plan is essentially going off perfectly? I was thinking that I can logically have Eliza have an anti-venom on her, that she can give to the poisoned player once they stop the dancing, but it is still about to get rough. The bard is a clown and very charismatic, so I think they will be able to get the griggs in to help in the fight, but will it even be enough?

Tune in next time to find out if the circus of wayward wonders will be left wondering when they can finally get a good nights rest.

[Saqcat]

Part of the problem is that you are applying the posion wrong.

This is the snake poison:

]Giant Viper Venom (poison) Saving Throw DC 17 Fortitude; Maximum Duration 6 rounds; Stage 1 1d6 poison (1 round); Stage 2 1d6 poison and drained 1.[/quote wrote:

If somebody fails multiple times the second stage, as is the case of your acrobat, the drained condition doesn't increase. She will only take the 1d6 damage again.

Core Rulebook pag 623 wrote:

You can have a given condition only once at a time. If an effect would impose a condition you already have, you now have that condition for the longer of the two

durations. The shorter-duration condition effectively ends, though other conditions caused by the original, shorter-duration effect might continue.

For example, let’s say you have been hit by a monster that drains your vitality; your wound causes you to be enfeebled 2 and flat-footed until the end of the monster’s next turn. Before the end of that creature’s next turn, a trap poisons you, making you enfeebled 2 for 1 minute. In this case, the enfeebled 2 that lasts for 1 minute replaces the enfeebled 2 from the monster, so you would be enfeebled 2 for the longer duration. You would remain flat-footed, since nothing replaced that condition, and it still lasts only until the end of the monster’s next turn.

Anti-venom will not work in this stage becuase the duration of the snake posion is only 6 rounds and has already expired, she is not longer posioned.

Core Rulebook pag 458 wrote:

An affliction might give you conditions with a longer or shorter duration than the affliction. For instance, if an affliction causes you to be drained but has a maximum duration of 5 minutes, you remain drained even after the affliction ends, as is normal for the drained condition. Or, you might succeed at the flat check to remove persistent damage you took from an ongoing affliction, but you would still need to attempt saves to remove the affliction itself, and failing one might give you new persistent damage.

[Unicore]

Thank you,
I figured out about the poison by asking about it in the advice thread, it has already lasted 3 rounds so Molina (the half elf acrobat) just has to survive 3 more. Giant vipers are still pretty brutal as level+2 monsters, but it is good to realize that their poison would not terribly lethal against equal level enemies.

She has a good chance of surviving now. I think if I can drag out the encounter with the griggs so that it can take 10 minutes, and they can get 2 medicine checks (2 of the characters have it and the healer's tools) in while the bard is trying to peacefully resolve things, they will have a decent shot of handling Nemmia without it being a total TPK. It should be a challenge, but if things start going too badly, there are enough extra circus folks around that I can have them rush out to grab fallen heroes, attempt to stabilize them, and even distract Nemmia, with some noble sacrifices. The circus might be in bad shape afterwards, but I want to give the party a week in town to have a second performance before they head off to the sanctuary, and having one or two of the NPC acts unable to perform for it will help encourage the party to come up with their own tricks to perform for the second show.

[Unicore]

Well the party survived!

The Alchemist had two more elixir's of life and was able to get the champion on his feet, while the poison finally ran its course on the Rogue with the druid casting his last heal to get her through it.

The bard's first instinct was to cast daze on the griggs, but was convinced not to when he realized he could dance his way through the circle of circus companions and attempt to parlay. After a couple of minutes of intense negotiation, it was decided that the griggs should engage in a dance battle with two of the party members. I gave the party 10 minutes to prepare and perform their dance (while the druid tended to the injuries of the champion, who was otherwise going into the last fight with Nemmia at wounded 3 with 7 HP)

The dance battle was incredible. The griggs used glitterdust to set the stage, playing music and flying around while the goblin Alchemist and the Human Bard attempted to recreate the final dance number from dirty dancing. It was close, but the alchemist's use of a silver tongue mutagen put the party ahead and the simultaneously won the griggs over with their willingness to be good sports.

Obviously, I had to wait until the dance battle was just coming to a close to have Nemmia make her big appearance. She gave her speech about environmental distruction and then set her pets to attack this poor and exhausted party.

But their luck had finally turned with their victory on the dance floor.

The Druid crit the rat swarm with an acid splash, while the champion finished it off with a crit from his star knife. The ruffian with the staff got the jump on the giant rat and put it down with a single blow. Nemmia was able to force the champion to crit fail a fear spell, and got a nasty sickle hit in against the alchemist, which nearly dropped him, but otherwise the party put a quick end to the threat.

I have to say that I seriously underestimated how much fun this AP was going to be with the right group of players. The tension and pacing has been perfect and the party really feels like they accomplished something heroic in saving the show and solving the case.

The first night has set a high bar for the rest of the adventure, but players seem to be buying in and are excited to stage their next show. I plan on having the strange occurrences around town play out a little more slowly, giving the party some time to meet the towns folk and do some down time activities related to setting up the next show. 3 of the party members have backstory connections to Jellico bounce-bounce and the Daring Danika, so I look forward to seeing how they handle having old rivals hanging around town, spying on their show.

[Unicore]

So not much happened the session after the party defeated Nemmia, as it is a group new to PF2 and we spent most of the session leveling up and figuring out what new abilities everyone had. Everyone is staying in their class for now except the Rogue, who took the staff acrobat feat, who now leaps everywhere.

After meeting with the mayor, the party headed to the Hawfton mill to investigate the disappearance of the miller family. The bumbled into the spiders in the garden, rolling terribly on perception and two players got bit and failed their saves against poison, one critically. Luckily, they learned a little bit from their snake misadventures, and so the alchemist has picked up Antidote as a formula and now carries 2 of them every day. Still, being clumsy 2 for day is rough, but the party mostly avoided the rest of the fights in the mill, by sneaking around the outside of the building and looking in the window of the master bedroom.

Then they used mage hand to smash a vase on top of the wardrobe because they smelled a trap, and I decided that the disturbance would cause the air mephit to make a bit of a scene about being trapped, but the party decided to climb in, drag the wardrobe over to the door and then lift it to face the door and shoo what ever was under it into the main room of the mill.

I think they imagined the creature fighting the wasps, but instead, it took off and broke through the window in Aima's room without anyone outside to try to watch where it went. They were super thorough about closing the window behind them and blocking up any possible holes in case the wasps got out of the house and tried to swarm them.

They did manage to figure out that it looks like the family didn't leave voluntarily, but responded by wanting to stealing everything they came across and almost decided to set the mill on fire. Luckily the champion managed to talk them out of that by pointing out that there was literally nothing to gain from burning down the town's only mill just to kill a nest of wasps. He's not happy about all the stealing either, but the rest of the party has told him they are just holding on to everything until they find the family.

Which might be a while yet, as the party is planning on stopping by goldenlaws church to ask about the strange carvings on the gozreh holy symbol on their way from the mill back to the circus and I am a little worried the demons there are going to give them a rough time.

I am hoping signs of demonic influence will steel the party up to want to stop whatever is going on, because right now they are waffling between wanting to join the Golarion Liberation Front and put an end to civilization, and just wanting to kill whoever keeps setting venomous animals on them.