Songbird, Scion, Saboteur: Book Two In Review (2E Conversion Campaign)

[CeeJay]

Hi, everyone! I've been running a Pathfinder 2E conversion of War for the Crown for some time at this point, and this past weekend we finally wrapped Book Two. (I mean, mostly. There is still some epilogue to take care of and a couple of loose ends to tie up in the County of Meratt, but the group have successfully overthrown Count Lotheed and have overcome the bulk of the challenges facing them.) I know there are some people still running or planning to run this book, so I thought a retrospective on some of the things our group did, how they worked out, and which of them I would -- or would not -- recommend might be helpful.

I'll start off by laying the groundwork before getting into the actual retrospective itself in follow-up posts.

About Our Game: I run with a group on VTT that has been more or less consistent, with a couple of additions and subtractions, since late 2016. We run on Roll20 and at this point the player group is seven strong. Our sessions are typically four hours on a weekly schedule.

(This is not a group size that everyone would be comfortable running with, in fact some of my regulars were apprehensive about going to seven, but I think we have enough experience with each other and I've acquired enough of a sense of pacing and time discipline so that it usually doesn't feel unwieldy. It had some interesting effects during Book Two.)

Lessons from Book One & Before: Golarion and Pathfinder more generally were not familiar to some of my group when we started, none of us had played 2E yet, and this would really be my first attempt at running an official Paizo product more or less "as written" (apart from the conversion to 2E).

I started off WFTC with an extensive document explaining the setting, the specific themes and subject matter of the AP, and what my approach to them would be (in particular foregrounding that the AP is about social change and battling enemies with reactionary attitudes and priorities in the context of the game world). It also summarized the broad strokes of Golarian history and especially Taldan history, which also gave me a fuller appreciation for how delightfully bonkers Golarion can get. My Player Guide documents tend to be long: this one was pretty "restrained" at 92 pages.

Lesson One:

Lesson One: I tend to over-rely on writing as a means of communicating information to the players. I'm a writer, after all. But I'm learning to remember that not everyone can process text in the same way and that -- no matter how much I tell them that long Player Guides are a reference rather than required cover-to-cover reading -- some players get simply intimidated. Periodic reminders and ways of parsing out information in smaller chunks are necessary, as I discovered in Book Two. Especially given that the amount of data the players had to deal with was already getting steep by the end of the Senate sequence in Book One.

I started us off in a prologue adventure on the streets of Oppara during the Burning Blades Festival. It was meant to introduce all of us to an early mixture of the AP's signature combination of social play and roleplay, problem-solving, combat and dungeon-delving... and to familiarize ourselves with the 2E ruleset somewhat. We were sufficiently sold on the system to embark on the full AP once this was done.

I didn't want to convert the whole adventure from scratch, so for Book One, "Crownfall," I relied on a conversion by the Archvillain Ediwir (you can find his work and a link to his Discord at A Series of Dice-Based Events), as I would do for Book Two. We learned a few things in the course of Book One.

Lesson Two:

Lesson Two: Ediwir's conversion work provides a solid basis to proceed from, but it takes prep to combine it with the official materials into something that's easy to run, so I discovered early on that it was important to account for that. I also discovered that, as with probably any conversion, specific and debatable choices were involved that I would have to make my own judgements about. On the whole, though, he saved me a lot of time in Book One and would do in Book Two, and I have mostly adhered to how his conversion handles subsystems (with the exception of Relics, but my changes to those came about over the course of Book Two).

Lesson Three:

Lesson Three: I had the overall impression that I don't much care for the way (though I know the reasons for it) that Paizo products treat "dungeons." As a player, they had always felt a bit too static to me: too much a question of plodding from room to room, fighting something, looting it, and repeat. Crownfall confirmed this impression: I ran its first major dungeon crawl mostly "as-written" (to whatever extent this can be said of a conversion) except for swapping out a couple of the monsters, and this impression was noticeable even despite my best attempts to add a bit of dynamism to the proceedings.

Building and running my own adventures, I have preferred to treat dungeons as dynamic and conceptually cohesive environments built from the inside out to make sense as whatever they were supposed to be -- a fort, a warehouse full of baddies, the sprawling mansion of a villain, the catacombs beneath a town -- filled with enemies that reacted and moved around in response to invaders, traps whose placement wouldn't be likely to accidentally kill a bunch of the villains before ever snaring a hero, and containing plenty of spaces that built atmosphere without having to be "event" rooms.

I decided to do this as much as possible for the remainder of "Crownfall" and going into Book Two whenever possible. This would influence some fundamental things about how I ran Book Two.

So, that sets the stage and explains where my group was coming from. I'll start off the retrospective itself next post.