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Jade Regent is approaching the end. I'll spoiler stuff from the actual adventure path.
Last session our heroes broke the curse of the Golden Pagoda, exorcising its spirits. Killed the Regent's General with a really well planned ambush, by drawing the Regents armies into the city of Uddo.
They also kidnapped Ameiko back from the Regent and replaced her with a shapeshifted Kikonu. Because in my game the Regent was going to marry Ameiko in order to legitimise his rule.
They've found a "back-door" into the palace of Kasai through the plane called Otherworld. They spotted the Regent and all his remaining council in the throne room. Rather than fight, the PCs used their incredible stealth skills to wait for the council to split up through the palace.
Next session our heroes are going to finish the main campaign of Jade Regent. That's nearly 11 years of campaign.
I'm so excited. It's not the end for these PCs, because I have lots of "post-campaign" content that I want to run, but those will be less regular.
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Jade Regent is approaching the end. I'll spoiler stuff from the actual adventure path.Last session our heroes broke the curse of the Golden Pagoda, exorcising its spirits. Killed the Regent's General with a really well planned ambush, by drawing the Regents armies into the city of Uddo.
** spoiler omitted **
They've found a "back-door" into the palace of Kasai through the plane called Otherworld. They spotted the Regent and all his remaining council in the throne room. Rather than fight, the PCs used their incredible stealth skills to wait for the council to split up through the palace.
Next session our heroes are going to finish the main campaign of Jade Regent. That's nearly 11 years of campaign.
I'm so excited. It's not the end for these PCs, because I have lots of "post-campaign" content that I want to run, but those will be less regular.
Yeah, that sounds wildly different from the official module. ^^ You spent 11 years on Jade Regent? Dang, how often did you play? In any case, congrats!
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Jade Regent book 5 (back after a 2 year Covid hiatus).
We are doing a little side quest to rescue a kidnapped girl from an overbearing merchant. Just a little side quest, ignore the 4 greater shadows and the wizard casting Waves of Fatigue…. Fortunately, as Akiko lay unconscious, Dusty the cat collapsed beneath the weight of his own fur, Saash struggled to lift his axe and Tillie tried to parry everything (Sacred Fist warpriest FTW) Thog remembered that he had cast protection from acid on us all in order to deal with an earlier monster, so casting his last spell slot as acidic spray (heightened) on top of the melee was a valid tactic.
Party 1: Wizard 0
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Yeah, that sounds wildly different from the official module. ^^ You spent 11 years on Jade Regent? Dang, how often did you play? In any case, congrats!
Stuff
12 hour sessions monthly since April 2012. We missed a month here or there (some of my players married each other, some had babies, some dropped out and some got added in). The party was a real ship of Theseus, with only 3 PCs from the original campaign remaining in the six person party that finished it. I think in the time that I've run this game we've only cancelled maybe 8 sessions total.
I've mentioned before I've added a load of stuff to the campaign. The Legendary games supplements. My Crown of the World Journey was expanded massively to make it feel like a real Scott of the Antarctic type thing.
I added a treasure filled dungeon in the Giant Downs which added a whole subplot and ticking clock when the Giants wanted justice for breaking the treaty of the giant downs. One of my PCs offered his life in order to prevent a potential Giant War, and they gave him 12 months to get his affairs in order. The Taiga giant trusting his word as a paladin.
I added a whole abandoned and overgrown Sci-Fi city in the Nameless Spires for the players to explore.
I added a whole Body-Swap plot between the Regent and the paladin (who is an Oni-Blooded tiefling, and the secret twin brother of the Regent).
I gave the option for PCs to go under, over or through a pass at the Wall of Heaven Mountains, and my PCs decided to split the caravan three directions to make it harder for the Regent to figure out where the heir and the seal are.
I also had the PCs build the Council of the Jade Regent, and ran a three session mini-campaign so the players would know the villains and give them their own arcs, and also allow me to build optimised villians that would be a real threat to the PCs.
After Ordu-Anghei I added the option of going to either the Forest of Spirits or attending the Ruby Phoenix tournament. My PCs split the caravan in two and did both. I also added two new players to the campaign at that point.
Once the PCs hit Minkai, I added a whole Rebellion system, where the goods and cash they earned on their journey went into the pool to fund a rebellion, recruit teams and make proactive decisions on how to fight the Regency.
I added extra adventures for some of the towns and territories that the campaign doesn't touch. My players being completionists by nature managed to get three of the 5 territories in Minkai under their control before the momentum of the campaign pushed them to take Kasai.
At this stage the players have done so much, and earned their victory. The final battle may not be a deadly, drag-out brawl, but the PCs have done everything they can to undermine the Regents council: Turning the Grand Diplomat, killing the Archmage, convincing the Consort to leave, slaying the Treasurer, and ambushing the General. Leaving only the Ninja Master, the High Priest, The Executioner, The Jade Regent and The Master of the Five Storms!
So yes, I've run Jade Regent for 11 years, but also I've inserted other modules and adventures because my players enjoy this story, their characters, their relationships with the NPCs (it's a travelling home town), and spending time with each other. Adding these additional stories gives players the opportunity to flesh out their backstories.
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Dang, it sounds epic. Congrats, again!
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Next session our heroes are going to finish the main campaign of Jade Regent. That's nearly 11 years of campaign.I'm so excited. It's not the end for these PCs, because I have lots of "post-campaign" content that I want to run, but those will be less regular.
Congrats, man! It's been a long time coming.
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Most 1-20 campaigns I've seen take about 40+ 4 hour sessions, so I'm still flabbergasted at that accomplishment :'D
We started War for the Crown in early 2019, play monthly for about 6 hours per session and are currently level 11, somewhere in book 4. We’ve been using Roll20 since the pandemic started halfway through book 2 ( and spent over a year just on that book), which probably slowed things down, but even so, 40 sessions to go from 1-20 seems blindingly fast to me.
Different styles for different groups I suppose.
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At first I kinda assumed different groups take different times with roleplaying or doing things like rollplaying shopping and other downtime activities in detail or getting on out of character tangents a lot or even taking lot of breaks during 4 hour game, but I've started to realize its likely because I run combats extremely fast x'D
(in Dudemeister's case it sounds like its due to lot of content being added to very roleplay/planning heavy campaign :D)
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Hm, if you have a secret for running combats faster, care to share it? Because that is what is holding our sessions up the most, especially at high levels.
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Yeah, I use VTT even in-person.
For my players who prefer to use their own dice, I ask them to pre-roll.
Even so major combats do take a long time (usually about an hour or two of time, with 6 PCs). All my NPCs and monsters are loaded into the VTT. I also tell my players the ACs, so they can count up hits and damage before it even gets to their turn.
I also ask mages to look up their spells prior to their turn, and to choose a back-up spell in case the battlefield changes.
The majority of table time is taken with Rebellion management and roleplaying.
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I've realized that I'll want to include too many spoilers for Skull & Shackes, Return to Freeport, Plunder & Peril, and Pirate Campaign Compendium so I've started a thread in the Skull & Shackles forum instead of spoiler hiding eveything in here in case other GMs want to eventually play in any of those adventures.
(But it's going great! They're in Freeport now, have met with the Hurricane King, and are currently selling their plunder).
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My current (and first) campaign of pathfinder is of rise of the runelords. I have three player who are entirely new to pathfinder/3.5, so I tonned down the first few modules a bit, but so far they are enjoying it greatly. Last session (the begginning of module 4) was very deadly tho, two of them actually died and the bad guys manage to accomplish their objectives.
The only other death of the campaign so far was against the module 3 boss (who managed to spread them all away thanks to a well timed fear spell), so those last few sessions were intense. Altho this had the bonus of making them rather warry of stone giants which is quite nice at that moment of the campaign.
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After fighting through several Psionicly dominated Orcs and Ogres my group managed to defeat the Psionic Group of thieves. Soulknife managed to flee but the Psion and Aegis went down and the vitalist surrendered once he was the only one left. Psicrown of Domination recovered and returned to the Order.
Was an interesting fight, although I got a little overwhelmed trying to run 4 different Psionic characters at once. Forgot a few of their abilities and missused a couple of others. Over all though a pretty even fight with some clever moves by my group. Druid pulled out a Shifting Sands spell that really bogged down my npcs.
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Hm, if you have a secret for running combats faster, care to share it? Because that is what is holding our sessions up the most, especially at high levels.
In my case its that I was trained to do it by GM who run things even faster than me :'D (they run reign of winter partially bi weekly partially weekly in less than year in 40 sessions) So it kinda got stuck and now that I run society scenarios, I sometimes finish scenarios in 2 and 30 minute mark if they aren't the particularly long ones ^^;
What it pretty much comes down to is 1) do not spend too much time on turn thinking of what NPC does next, when turn starts, you tell PCs what the NPC does. With Roll20 and VTTs this also comes with benefit of dice rolls being fast to do. 2) Ye keep up this pace consistently, it tends to incentive players to also keep up being faster. (note: if you have players who need to take time, let them. If they find game more enjoyable that way then you just need to focus on your own turns) 3) do try to avoid stopping to think how ability works on your round, try to do necessary planning and fact checking when its not your round.
It's... Honestly kind of hard to describe it without demonstrating it. Either way, it is pretty vital to learn to shave combat time in 1e high level because otherwise you get things like "there is single enemy, pcs kill it in single round without it getting chance to act, but it takes 30 minutes out of game for this to happen". Like if your group takes single hour with one encounter in high level dungeon, that means they take about 2-3 encounters per session which uh, can't be incredibly long time in big dungeon. My average time in 1e big high level dungeon is about 3 sessions give or take.
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My Shattered Star/Rise of the Runelords/Return of the Runelords mash up campaign will celebrate 10 years and 100 sessions in a few months. The flow of the campaign so far has been (some spoilers ahead):
• Godsmouth Ossuary module
• City of Strangers Part 1 & 2 (Pathfinder Society adventures – both somewhat modified)
• Shards of Sin (Shattered Star #1) with a brief interlude in Sandpoint for the ‘Catacombs of Wrath’ portion of Burnt Offerings (RotRL #1)
• All of Skinsaw Murders (RotRL #2) except the sanatorium
• Curse of the Lady’s Light (Shattered Star #2)
• Dawn of the Scarlet Sun module
• Most of Hook Mountain Massacre (RotRL #3) – the Grauls, Fort Rannick and Skulls Crossing mashed up with the Hook Mountain clanhold
• The Cultist’s Kiss (Pathfinder Society adventure relocated in Ilsurian)
• Asylum Stone (Shattered Star #3)
• A portion of Runeplague (Return of the RL #3): “The Sundered Seal” exploring the Shrine of the Seal – this was the beginning of a Yamosoth Arc
• A highly modifed version of It Came from Hollow Mountain (Return of the RL #2) – focused mostly in the dungeons underneath Hollow Mountain – for a portion of this adventure the PCs were split into two groups of three
• Another portion of Runeplague: confronting Leptonia in the Gecko
• And now we have just begun Beyond the Doomsday Door (Shattered Star #4) which will conclude the Yamosoth arc – I’m compressing what’s underneath Windsong Abbey into 3 levels instead of 4
My 6 players are now 10th level. We’re about 600 hours of game play into the campaign, using slow progression and with tons of roleplaying and setting-based side quests. Good to now be starting the back nine!
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It's... Honestly kind of hard to describe it without demonstrating it. Either way, it is pretty vital to learn to shave combat time in 1e high level because otherwise you get things like "there is single enemy, pcs kill it in single round without it getting chance to act, but it takes 30 minutes out of game for this to happen". Like if your group takes single hour with one encounter in high level dungeon, that means they take about 2-3 encounters per session which uh, can't be incredibly long time in big dungeon. My average time in 1e big high level dungeon is about 3 sessions give or take.
Yeah, I know, it's super frustrating. We only get three hours to play every week and normally I can go through one to two encounters at high levels. I'll see if I can use some of your advice to speed it up even a little. But rules questions do come up and some of my players simply need more time than others. Thanks for the tips, anyway!
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Good luck yeah :'D I do wish I knew how to explain it better.
(there is also the emergency option of cutting things faster. Like if the exact rule is unlikely to matter much in situation, there is option for telling players that you make the ruling on spot and then after session check what raw would have been. Or if enemy is stunned on first round, its pretty easy to guess high level party will nuke it before stun ends unless they keep rolling nat 1s.
I mostly ended up using latter a lot in wrath of the righteous because otherwise it ended up causing single turn to be player giving really long list of mechanics they use simultaneously which amount to "delete enemy". I was running wrath of the righteous with expectations that players will be having easy time and I was still traumatized by mythic rules hard enough to need long ass break from 1e high level campaigns :'D one of main reason I ended up converting JR to 2e tbh)
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Is this a good moment for some useless Facebook Pathfinder 1e group non-advice such as "Just give the players one minute each to resolve their turn. If they can't, they lose their actions. That will teach them discipline. This way, we played with Gary in 1978, and it worked just fine."? :D
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We had our game yesterday, leveled our characters to level 3, and avoided 3 fights and that is it really it.
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Probably not especially since that advice is bad :p
Like, GM absolutely can hurry up a player, but trying to put timer on it just sounds like bad idea on multiple levels
Yes, it's bad advice, but you'll get it 50 times if you ask in communities that are full of guys who think Pathfinder is just AD&D 1e with some tweaks and high-level combat (which they never got to, as all their PF1 games fizzled out around level 10) is about as quick as it was in the 80s.
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For higher level combat against more than one opponent, we shave just a teensy bit of time by just having one initiative roll per each side, rather than each opponent. No modifiers, just straight d20 roll. It's how we did it way back in the day and my players would rather do this than individual initiatives, particularly when it's late in the session and the three guys who drive 2.5 hours to play don't need to be too tired to drive back.
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For higher level combat against more than one opponent, we shave just a teensy bit of time by just having one initiative roll per each side, rather than each opponent. No modifiers, just straight d20 roll. It's how we did it way back in the day and my players would rather do this than individual initiatives, particularly when it's late in the session and the three guys who drive 2.5 hours to play don't need to be too tired to drive back.
2.5h drive to game? Man, VTTs exist.
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Hm, if you have a secret for running combats faster, care to share it? Because that is what is holding our sessions up the most, especially at high levels.3) do try to avoid stopping to think how ability works on your round, try to do necessary planning and fact checking when its not your round.
This a thousand time over. It’s why I’m in favour of ‘no tech at the table’ rulings, having watched too many games get slowed by people checking their phones or scrolling social media when it’s not their turn, and only looking at the situation on the table when their turn starts.
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2.5h drive to game? Man, VTTs exist.
Not the same. With just voice chat you get a lot of people spacing out, no one wanting to take the lead when decisions are to be made and a general feeling of alienation. It gets better once everyone is using a camera, but it's still far from meeting up personally, where you eat together and can just interact in a much better way.
Not that I have anything against VTT's. We used Roll20 extensively during the height of the COVID era and now still are using it with either beamers or a few laptops. I especially love not having to draw bad circles on battlemaps with a stylus, because I suck at it.
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For higher level combat against more than one opponent, we shave just a teensy bit of time by just having one initiative roll per each side, rather than each opponent. No modifiers, just straight d20 roll. It's how we did it way back in the day and my players would rather do this than individual initiatives, particularly when it's late in the session and the three guys who drive 2.5 hours to play don't need to be too tired to drive back.2.5h drive to game? Man, VTTs exist.
We know. But they also prefer in person games and hanging out with friends. I've known one of the guys for over 30 years now. Most of my group goes back that far or just a little further.
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I've realized that I'll want to include too many spoilers for Skull & Shackes, Return to Freeport, Plunder & Peril, and Pirate Campaign Compendium so I've started a thread in the Skull & Shackles forum instead of spoiler hiding eveything in here in case other GMs want to eventually play in any of those adventures.
(But it's going great! They're in Freeport now, have met with the Hurricane King, and are currently selling their plunder).
Can you point me to the thread in the S&S forum. It'll be my next big campaign once Jade Regent wraps up, and I want to take on as much input as possible.
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Can you point me to the thread in the S&S forum. It'll be my next big campaign once Jade Regent wraps up, and I want to take on as much input as possible.
It can be found HERE
I'm not planning on updating too often nor writing out the campaign as a story to be read. More of a "this is kind of how I made Souls for Smuggler's Shiv transition into Plunder & Peril then into Skull & Shackles and how I added some pieces of Return to Freeport and Fort Scurvy into a cohesive campaign"
It's nothing too complex but if you have any questions feel free to ask on the thread or send me a PM. With how much you did for my Kingmaker campaign I'd be more than happy to return even a small portion of the favour.
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Group's working our way through Rise of the Runelords, I've been doing some pretty serious rewrites as we've gone to flesh out the world and keep things interesting. Currently they are about half way through book 2, about to head off to Magnimar. Before they go though, I've made a stat block for Vorel and they're going to confront him. Should be in a week or two.
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Group's working our way through Rise of the Runelords, I've been doing some pretty serious rewrites as we've gone to flesh out the world and keep things interesting. Currently they are about half way through book 2, about to head off to Magnimar. Before they go though, I've made a stat block for Vorel and they're going to confront him. Should be in a week or two.
The party discovered Ghost Powder and so I've had to rework the Vorel fight, again. Originally he was going to possess the Skinsaw man during that confrontation and show up as a Lich but they ganked TSM during one of his murder attempts so thats out of the window. Looking at all my options, I've decided to let them invalidate the fight with Vorel's ghost and have taken some inspiration from Monster Hunter World (Iceborn) and am gonna have them fight a Black Dragon (Fungal Creature) instead...maybe with a few adjustments if the stats don't line up right.
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Finished Hell's Rebels last Tuesday. The BEG did not last very long, despite being buffed as hell. The player found a combination of feats and builds which made it way too easy on them to take him down. Oh, well.
Next week we are prepping some characters for a short Starfinder adventure, then as of May it'll be on to playing Strange Aeons, where I can be a player, after many years. Going for an Alchemist mad bomber type. :)
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I'm running Jade Regent a second time, for a new group. (A bunch of local strangers I found on the internet.) I hoped that by doing an AP I'd run before, it would be easy, but I now feel compelled to fix all the mistakes I made last time. This time I'm thinking of things for the NPCs to say and do. I'm eliminating the caravan rules and relationship subsystem entirely. I'm incorporating the bits of Eastern Journey Adventures that I like.
First time around I was dealing with an optimized group who I struggled to challenge even a little bit. This time, I'm struggling not to TPK them every time they fight a goblin chief or skeleton champion.
It adds up to a lot of work, and reminds me of why I seem to quit RPGs for a year or two after every campaign I run.
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Finished Hell's Rebels last Tuesday. The BEG did not last very long, despite being buffed as hell. The player found a combination of feats and builds which made it way too easy on them to take him down. Oh, well.
Next week we are prepping some characters for a short Starfinder adventure, then as of May it'll be on to playing Strange Aeons, where I can be a player, after many years. Going for an Alchemist mad bomber type. :)
Congrats!
Of the APs I've run, Hell's Rebels is my favourite. And yeah, my group took out the final boss in 2 rounds, which was probably a good thing as the minions were likely to overwhelm them if it had gone on much longer.
Our DM was sick, so we didn't get to play this past Sunday...another two weeks to wait.
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Group's working our way through Rise of the Runelords Book 2...I am gonna have them fight a Black Dragon (Fungal Creature) instead
The party handily beat down the Fungal Dragon (Fungal Creature Black Dragon with a mix of the Juvenile and Young Adult stat lines) and has reached level 7. They will soon be off to Magnimar, which means I have a lot of prep-work to do. Probably a whole new google doc of references, but thats the GM's life. The story is mostly the same, but the Mayor's Daughter has been kidnapped by the cult to force him into marrying Xanesha. We'll see what direction the party goes once they get to the city and I'll adapt as I go. Instead of a confrontation at the Shadow Clock, I plan for a heck of a wedding.
We did play last session, got through several battles and had a tough time fighting that ice sculpture and ice troll. Though I did enjoy getting a real good crit(we are using the crit deck) with alchemist fire on that ice troll.
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Since putting mine on hiatus a couple of months or so ago, I've thought very little about gaming, and honestly, it's felt pretty good. I'm starting to crawl out of the funk, though, and ideas are starting to flow again from brain to pen to paper. I've made up my mind about the campaign we left hanging and I'm just not going to go back to it. It was a revamp of a campaign that crashed and burned because I just wasn't into it at all and I felt that coming on again when I decided we'd take time off. In our homebrew, it's actually a really good premise that lets the players have a hand in shaping the world as we know it today, but it's not what I want to do at all. So all of my ideas are gravitating toward a section of our 33-year-old setting world where we've never adventured at all. I may actually lose a player or two over it, but even I, the GM, is entitled to have fun, too. I wasn't having any.
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Cancelled 2 weeks running now for various issues. Hoping next week works out and they get to fight the Bandit Group hiding in the old mines
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Had the real session 1 for our campaign today. The team successfully* infiltrated the city and after running away from some zombies and avoiding some wights met up with some survivors. We have a couple of areas of interest to investigate in the morning and a plan to get intel out to the main part of the army that's waiting for us to open the gates (that are guarded by over 200 wights according to the survivors).
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Got a lot more done with our last session, more then likely will finish volume 1 of Reign of Winter by next game session.
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Voyage of Bastards: Skull & Shackles
We're one session in and having a great time!
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I've completely scrapped and washed my hands of it.
As I've mentioned before, I've taken a hiatus from gaming because I've been the GM for nearly the entirety of the last 33 years and I was friggin' burned out. And I wasn't happy with the campaign, which was a revamp and restart of a campaign I didn't enjoy the first time around. I was just out of ideas for that and I ran essentially the same adventure twice in a row without even remembering having run the first one at all. I couldn't remember a single thing, game related or not, from that entire weekend (I quit drinking years ago, so I can't blame it on that anymore). It was literally like looking into a lightless room when I tried to recall anything. That precipitated the first of two insanely bad panic attacks, each one only minutes into the game. So, I pulled the plug and went into hiding.
I've used the downtime to not think as much about gaming, though it's always on my mind to some degree. But I realized that in the homebrew world we play in we have never explored so very much of it and I "needed a change of scenery". I began putting together a fantasy Far East for our setting and I think it's coming along nicely. Then I remembered I had the D&D 3.5 super-adventures, "Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk", "Expedition to Undermountain", and "Expedition to Castle Ravenloft". I really bought them just to have them, but with only a bit of retro-fitting I could run them. So, I've given my brood a choice of what they want to do and I'm waiting for all the votes to come in.
Both options would be challenging for me and the players. Setting up a Far Eastern style game and the modules would be especially challenging for me. I have run precisely ONE module in all of my years of gaming. ONE. It was "Baba Yaga's Dancing Hut" from an issue of Dragon Magazine. We've homebrewed everything ever since. But I think that's what I am missing; a challenge. I was just getting bored and it showed. So, onward and upward.
I'm sorry for the Great Big Wall of Text™. But you asked! LOL
