Changing the Early part of chapter 6 - Any advice ?

[Quentin Le Guevel]

Hey !

After 3 years of playing, my player just finished chapter 5 and are tremendously enjoying ruling Xin-Edaseril.

We are about to start chapter 6 and I can't help but feel a bit dissapointed by the way things start. The whole "Fixing temporal injuries" seems incredibly cool and I can't wait to go there, but the beginning of the books seems to me like a good excuse to add some dungeon crawling for the sake of experience (Kinda like early book 5) and I feel like it's a bit anticlimatic.

Convincing Karzoug to give the key to the Cyphergate is actually quite nice, but the way it is handled - Going to some random place never heard off to get a McGuffin, then let's go for another dungeon makes me uneasy.

Me and my player have all been tremendously enjoying RotRL until now... Except for that early Chapter 5, and I don't want to do the same mistake, running something that feel a bit unneccessary to the overall plot.

Do any of you played trought that and had the same feeling ? Or did you actually enjoyed it a lot ? (I could be mistaken...)
If you changed it, what did you do to keep that whole Karzoug reveal and avoid that much dungeoning... While still giving your player the opportunities to get to lvl 20 for the last fight ?

Thank you very much for your help... And apologies for my English, I'm French ! :)

[Davor Firetusk]

Quentin Le Guevel wrote:

Hey !

After 3 years of playing, my player just finished chapter 5 and are tremendously enjoying ruling Xin-Edaseril.

We are about to start chapter 6 and I can't help but feel a bit dissapointed by the way things start. The whole "Fixing temporal injuries" seems incredibly cool and I can't wait to go there, but the beginning of the books seems to me like a good excuse to add some dungeon crawling for the sake of experience (Kinda like early book 5) and I feel like it's a bit anticlimatic.

Convincing Karzoug to give the key to the Cyphergate is actually quite nice, but the way it is handled - Going to some random place never heard off to get a McGuffin, then let's go for another dungeon makes me uneasy.

Me and my player have all been tremendously enjoying RotRL until now... Except for that early Chapter 5, and I don't want to do the same mistake, running something that feel a bit unneccessary to the overall plot.

Do any of you played trought that and had the same feeling ? Or did you actually enjoyed it a lot ? (I could be mistaken...)
If you changed it, what did you do to keep that whole Karzoug reveal and avoid that much dungeoning... While still giving your player the opportunities to get to lvl 20 for the last fight ?

Thank you very much for your help... And apologies for my English, I'm French ! :)

My group loved the dungeon part (nearly TPKed) and found the story aspects entertaining. I would say the best way to handle the transition is to really be ready at that point to completely rewrite the hook to get them there. My group was perfectly ready to use spells to figure out there next move, and finding the right NPC to give the new information was tricky. It's not terribly specific since I'm not sure how your campaign has evolved, but that would be my advice. Rewrite the quest giving section to engage your group and the rest is fun.

[soulnova]

I agree with Davor. If your players are familiar with or played Rise, I'm sure they'll find the exploration of Zinlun's lair and the story of Karzoug's early years to be extremely unsettling and informative on why he turned out like that. To put things on perspective... there are a several hundred (thousands?) inert clones in the outer chambers. Creating each clone required 1 cubic inch of flesh taken from a living target.

Also, if your players forget to destroy the last viable clone when they release Karzoug's soul from High Justice's court, he should wake up down there at the empty liar. This happened in my game and I liked the implications so much that I had to write about the events that ensued on my campaign in Pathfinder Infinite: "Karzoug, A Fluke of Fate".

Changing the hook might work. You just need to drive home with whoever is going to give them the quest that one as stubborn as Karzoug won't give out information for free. Knowing the lengths he went to destroy Zinlun they could surmise getting rid of the lich is their best bet to make him cooperate.