I ran The Sarkorian Prophecy yesterday with the other system I'm using (Outgunned Adventure) and it was freaking amazing!!
The system has a "Run!" mechanic that lasts a few turns for when the PCs have to avoid something dangerous (like a giant rolling boulder) so I made the Worldwound environmental effects pretty dangerous. When the group made it to the cave and met the enemy pretending to be an ally it became pretty tense. They realized before they slept that she wasn't what she claimed to be, didn't know what she was, but if any of them got hit there was a chance they'd end up dead so they pretended to play along until they could get their health back.
IT WAS FANTASTIC!!! Exactly what I had been hoping for!
I also changed up the attitude of the NPCs in the main building of the scenario. I left them as Shadow Lodge, kept their backstories, but had them be much more moderate. They wanted to help Pathfinders that had been left for dead and DID NOT trust the Decemvirate for the reasons listed in the scenario. (Embla was the leader, the other 2 mostly just followed her lead). They occasionally worked with Caggrigar, didn't really know who their Venture-Captain was (had only met him a couple of times; it was Caggrigar using threefold aspect to appear much older). This allowed me to show some of the nuances within the Shadow Lodge that way there's some foreshadowing involved but kept Caggrigar as an obvious bad guy.
Wonderful session that will have some great pay-off later!
Oh, and you should've seen the look on the two players faces that had played through my Wardstone Patrol / The Traitor's Lodge / Weapon in the Rift / Vengeance at Sundered Crag quadrilogy a couple of years ago when they recognized who the Venture-Captain was that gave them their mission at the beginning!
Looking forward to next week, even though I will be a bit rough, 5 Gamesessions in a row ^^
Wednesday - boardgame night
Casual round with some friends
Thursday - Rise of the Runelords
New group dm'ed by me.
All of them have already played some games but mostly D&D 5e and are all pretty new to Pathfinder. We did a OneShot once, but they were pretty stingy considering their magic items (like Wands, Potions and scrolls), as they are not used to use many of them from their playing experience with D&D 5e.
We'll play every Thursday if possible, but only in 2-3 hour sessions, so I'll see how that will be going.
Friday - boardgame night
A new shop opened in my area, which hosts different games, tabletops and painting sessions. I hope it will last, as many game shops closed the in last years.
Saturday - Dragon's Demand
The group will probably wrap up the upper floor of the monastery and maybe the dungeon floor as well.
Then they will hopefully tackle the BBEG in the next session and we'll do a wrap up.
They have many "what-if-questions" and we'll talk about how to continue afterwards.
Sunday - Homebrew Game
I'll hope to finish the current plot arc with the remaining three players (the gone player's character running along as npc). After that we'll discuss how to go on, and who to ask if they wanna join the game so I can find a way to include their new character.
It will be a little bit stressful, but I'm looking forward to it nonetheless.
In my group's round-robin Torch/Shadow Lodge game, we've reached 10th level, and will be playing Shadows Fall on Absalom tonight. After that, we have 7 more scenarios before the finale of Passing the Torch Parts 1 & 2 at 12th level.
***
In the "sparks" home game, we are 6th level. We are currently investigating the manor of a wizard known as "the Creator," a powerful crafter who invented the first magical slave collars that were used throughout the empire. We now know that he was the target of one of many simultaneous attacks by the Resistance on what became known as the Day of Chaos, but something went wrong and his home is now the epicenter of a zone of frozen time. Even the air is in stasis, until someone moves through an area, leaving a pocket or tunnel that normal air can enter from outside.
Several people are trapped in this field, some with collars frozen in the act of disintegrating, and clearly affected by the confusion effect that followed the collars' destruction in the rest of the world a couple of months ago. The Creator was not present, but we found signs that he had been caught by the phenomenon but later retrieved by the imperial secret police. We've discovered a hidden magical device that seems to be responsible for the effect, but removing lead panels to study it has apparently degraded the field so that time is passing again, just extremely slowly; the effect will likely fail entirely in a few weeks or months.
We now have two new goals that we're trying to figure out how to accomplish:
1. Restore the people frozen in time--and keep them from killing each other (and us!) until the "paused" confusion effect wears off.
2. Find a safe way to siphon off energy from the Creator's device. The thing contains a vast amount of the divine power that we're calling "sparks," with two opposed types of energy held in a careful balance. Opposed sparks normally explode on contact, neutralizing each other and producing half as much neutral energy. We want to prevent such an explosion, and also want to prevent any of this "spark" energy from falling into the hands of anyone less altruistic than we are--but we don't know what this much "spark" energy would do to us, either.
In my group's round-robin Torch/Shadow Lodge game, we've reached 10th level, and will be playing Shadows Fall on Absalom tonight. After that, we have 7 more scenarios before the finale of Passing the Torch Parts 1 & 2 at 12th level.
So close to the end!!
Do most / any of the others know how it ends?