Finished Ruins of Azlant


Ruins of Azlant


My files suggested we started playing around August 2018, which is about standard for one of our AP campaigns--we always add a lot of material. In this case we played Azlant as a kingdom-building game, which seemed like a natural fit. We just finished today. There's obviously a lot more that could happen but it was an agreed-on natural end point. I did a series of little vignettes to show where the Republic might be 1, 2, 3...15 years in the future.

It was a 1 player campaign with 6 PCs, which is our standard house style. We used custom kingdom-building rules (took us about 3 months to write and test, back in 2018) loosely based on the ones in Kingmaker, with the addition of a Civilization-style technology tree.

Episode 1 ran pretty much as written, except that the PC party started out with more leadership authority than in the module, which was natural since they were to become the colony leaders. They caught on to the fate of the lost colony fairly quickly, as I expected (my player is sharp and his PCs were private detectives back in Andoran, so well equipped to solve mysteries).

Episode 2 was rocky, because the plotline with Helekhterie is a frustrating distraction from the fate of the old colony and attacks on the new one. The PCs did a lot of hexploration (though it took them forever to finish the island--I had made it bigger, about 11 miles by 7, with one-mile hexes). They built up their hometown but were slow to make any more towns, as the island seemed quite dangerous to them.

Episode 3 ran pretty much as written, and touched off a period of local war with the aboleth. I had to develop a number of aboleth bases. A gillfolk town on the nearby southern island, based on the town in Carrion Crown #4, got a lot of play. The colony by this point controlled much of the dry west coast of Ancorato but had not gotten far into the eastern forest/jungle areas.

Homebrew plotlines began to predominate around this point: Azlanti ghosts, aboleth bases, locathah politics, ceratiodi politics....

Episode 4 was pretty thoroughly rewritten. I put an aboleth in Talislantri who had subverted Rillkimatai's personal physician and was keeping him drugged so that he could neither govern effectively nor choose a successor. The PCs got involved in exposing and stopping this plan, though the aboleth got away. My main observation is that the difficulty level of #4 was WAY higher than any other part of the AP: the author built frightfully effective NPCs. I was using NPCs cribbed from #4 throughout #5 and #6 as they were much more effective than what was provided in those modules.

Episode 5 was touched off by undead attacks on the colony's locathah allies, and a homebrew island of allied undead, to build Auberon up more (I did not like the "couch potato lich" quality of the published storyline). Auberon's tower was still very easy for the PCs. We capped the PC level at 14 so I cut down Auberon a bit, but I'm not even sure it was necessary. Six well equipped PCs can really do a number on small numbers of foes, and Paizo seldom provides more than small numbers.

After this we went into a lengthy homebrew storyline in which veiled masters from the Mordant Spire (which in our timeline had been lost to them a century ago) tried to wreck colony society with subtle multi-pronged attacks. The PCs did a brilliant job sorting this out--over and over my notes contain months of escalating attacks and then a note "but this didn't happen" because the PCs nipped it in the bud. (The great release of the Azlanti ghosts would have been fun to run! But kudos to the PCs for stopping it, because it would have been quite nasty.)

The PCs developed technology that let them track algholthu mental links (via special tracking animals) and eventually triggered Episode 6 by hunting down Ochymua, who had been harassing them indirectly through minions for a long time. (There was a plot to sell ioun stones that made the user vulnerable to aboleth control, for example, that they eventually balked.) They easily overcome Ochymua's minions, but Ochymua escaped with its life. However, I was not able to find a convincing reason for it to try again after having been so badly thrashed.

By this point the PCs had 5 towns on and around Ancorato and had developed a LOT of technology, much more than I had really expected. They decided to go after the veiled master at the Mordant Spire, who was drawing mythic power from the dead shade of Acavna. Enormously to my surprise, the PCs decided to bring Acavna back. So the end of the campaign was a series of hard hit-and-run raids on the Mordant Spire to weaken their grip on Acavna, and then a bold journey (by train!) through the Boneyard with Acavna's ghost, ending up on the Moon. (They had previously lured Runequake to the moon, petrified it, and rededicated the temple on its back. These PCs think big.)

We ended on that climatic series of fights, and a scene of Acavna granting boons to PCs and NPCs who had aided in her rebirth.

Lessons from the game in a second post.


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Lessons from this campaign:

(1) The rate of technology development was too high for my personal tastes. I think if we kept playing they'd hit some kind of Singularity in another 5 years or so! I don't know if the best answer would be quarterly rather than monthly kingdom turns, or increasing all the tech development costs, or lengthening the tech trees, but something should have been slowed down. (My player really wanted to have about one kingdom turn per play session, so that was a constraint--it would have been tough to get this with quarterly kingdom turns, and I think impossible with yearly ones.)

(2) As usual, episode 6 was a weak link. The aboleth plans to harass the colony are a bit laughable at this level (a dozen 10th level dominated fighters, really?) and the Compass is confusingly hard to run, unfinished, not internally consistent, and generally unsatisfying. The plot to destroy Absalom is too disjointed from the storyline. (And my player, a Pathfinder Society veteran, would have been tempted to say "Okay, we'll go for that" the same way that players in Second Darkness sometimes ended up helping the drow destroy Kyonin!)

(3) Veiled masters don't fill their campaign role well. They need nondetection *desperately* or by the time they are level-appropriate, none of their illusion and shapeshifting abilities will work. Their spell repertoire is heavily biased towards the annoying Symbol spells (the times I tried to use these, they hurt the aboleth about as much as the PCs....) and their physical capabilities seem pretty irrelevant for a creature that should be shapeshifted into a humanoid all the time. I gave mine nondetection but I ended up wishing I had rewritten them from scratch.

Regular aboleth weren't all that great either. Shouldn't they be immune to mind control?

(4) I asked the player what he wanted to do next and his first comment was "Something less three-dimensional." Underwater combat is a pain! Flying combat is also! We stacked figures on bases to indicate height, or sometimes drew multiple slices through the map, but no matter what we did, it was hard. We had one fight in a 40' wide shaft deep underwater that was just madness to run.

(5) If you run this, be sure everyone agrees exactly what dominate does and how it can be detected. The module authors don't; some of them think that if you don't give orders you can hide the dominate (Episode 1).

(6) I think it's more fun if there are more aboleth and they don't vanish from sight between #3 and #6. We had an aboleth with a living submarine (a fleshwarped whale) that was a recurring threat for a long time.

(7) Ruins of Azlant totally shines as a kingdom-building game. I can't imagine doing it any other way. It hands the PCs two major artifact installations (the Orrery at Nal-Shakar and the Mutation Engine in the Flooded Cathedral) and in a standard campaign these mean nothing. (In ours, the PCs used the Mutation Engine to make two-armed into four-armed sahuagin, as a way of meddling in sahuagin politics; what they did with the Orrery was even more surreal.) It has the PCs explore the island and then nothing much happens with it, whereas we got really familiar with the whole area and fought back and forth over it throughout the campaign.

Overall, a fun campaign. Stressful to run (lots to keep track of, and 14th level with heavy equipment is quite formidable, though still easier than letting it go higher) but quite rewarding. Kingdom-building is good for developing NPCs and long-term plotlines.


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Where the NPCs ended up:

Ramona was Head of Security, and her protege was Mayor of the capital town (the government system didn't allow two roles for one person--did I mention we had a whole lot of election intrigue?)

Rayland was head of T's Edge, a covert operative force.

Eliza, amazingly, not only survived but got hold of a enisysian (a little symbiont that lets you break immunities to mind control) and was slowly and steadily working towards becoming an aboleth. We can only hope she'll be a friendly aboleth.... I was really surprised at who the PCs befriended and who they did not.

Koloshkora was Mayor of Mangrove, a city on pilings out in the bay (where the refugee locathahs went).

Thanaldu and its sibling Emmeroo became important recurring NPCs, part of a plotline where the PCs researched how to break aboleth control over their slave races. (I became very fond of Emmeroo, one of my favorite NPCs of the campaign.) There was a lot of angst over whether humans and faceless stalkers can possibly coexist peacefully.

Ochymua lived to fight another day, but is currently somewhere far, far away from these awful PCs!

Perril ended up sharing her body with the disembodied awareness of a monk from Eox (this is what happens if you fool around with the Orrery) and was the Mayor of the deeply technocratic town of Nal-Shakar. (Her people tend to call her the Queen of Nal-Shakar, offending the anti-aristocracy sensibilities of the rest of the island. We did a lot with subculture clash.)

Harcourt was a major public figure in Pearl Bay, the most Luddite of the kingdom's towns, and a major political adversary of the PCs: a lot of their electioneering was dedicated to not letting him get into office.

Eamon was Minister of Religion. Kurvis lost his election for Minister of Trade but was still a major political figure.

Deadtooth the monkey goblin necromancer kept getting caught supporting the other side, and amazingly, got to claim coercion/mind control/mistakes every time! They eventually exiled her....

Wow. Really a fun campaign with a lot of rich stuff going on. Kudos to the inventors of these NPCs: it was great material to work with.

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