A players review of a OoA campaign that ended in failure.

[Unicore]

Hello all! Before I go into great depth with details I want to say that overall, the Outlaws of Alkenstar campaign was a lot of fun and played well overall into its thematic space of guns, mana wastrels and stick ups.

The first book was amazing! 5 out of 4 stars for creating a fun premise, giving us the heists and outlaw scenarios to make a gun slinging adventure work well. Many of the encounters feature monsters that are happy to duel it out at range and there are encounter spaces big enough to make that work well and let this AP be the right AP for Guns and Gears to really shine.

Book 2. 3.5 out of 4 stars. Overall, very fun book with great and memorable encounters. Airships, mana waste monsters, enemy mercenaries with guns that are absolutely brutal, a lot of fun. The Cradle of Quartz was a meat grinder. It killed 2 of our PCs and nearly derailed the whole campaign, but we were having enough fun to keep it going, and start trying to bring the story back around. I was surprised to find out that Mugland was the villain of book 2 and not a book 3 villain so the replacement character I built who was entirely focused on revenge against Mugland didn't really fit at all with switch in direction that happens with book three...

Which leads to book 3. 2 out of 4 stars. I wanted to like book 3. I love the overall plot. I love the maw of rovagug as an encounter location. I love bomb threat scenarios. I absolutely should have loved everything about book 3. But the encounter spaces!!! Book 3 encounters are brutal for ranged characters and for parties low on magic, which both are directions the AP kind of leads players towards. From encounter locations that are tiny rooms with narrow hallways, monsters that guns are nearly useless against, and with weaknesses that only really magic can easily activate, it almost feels like the whole third book mechanically makes the characters you built and want to play in this campaign useless. Did other folks have this experience? Our party gave up after getting TPKed by an unexpected creature that could grab all of us at once, was 3 levels higher with an extremely AC and our Investigator, fighter, Cleric and Gunslinger were completely useless against. Alchemical shot and persistent damage almost saved the day, and bad rolls did us in, but by that point it felt like it was too late in the final book to magically have a new set of PCs come in to save the day, because the final clock was definitely already ticking and anyone who could have saved the day at this point, and wasn’t already involved felt like far too great of a narrative stretch.

Did other folks get all the way through it? What did you make of the encounters and maps of the third book? Did it feel like it ran counter to everything thematically the rest of the AP was trying to accomplish? Or did we just have the wrong characters/didn’t take the tech-necromancy foreshadowing seriously enough to try completely switch the focus of our party away from accurate gun toting partials and towards more of a traditional dungeon crawling party?

[Coridan]

My group is just finishing up the Cradle tonight, I'm glad I saw this post as forewarning for me to make some changes in Book 3

[Unicore]

For example, and obviously super spoiler-y:

Zombies that super charge with electricity was pretty cool, it is a neat twist on the automatons that we were hitting with electrical damage for most of the campaign. The fight on the roof of the hydro station was awesome, fun and pretty wide open.

Smog wraiths. For the love of Aroden though! And always in small little rooms where everyone is always in the smog aura. Luckily our gunslinger had bought a bunch of rhino shot, but I, as the investigator, was slowed 1, sickened 2, and unable to do any damage, even with devise a stratagem because they are immune to precision. Our maul fighter was very nearly fighting these things by himself because the Cleric also got slowed by the end of the first round and couldn't area of effect cast heal any more.

But the thing that killed the party was the unannounced Clockwork Puppeteer. AC 33 vs level 9 PCs (all of whom focus on hitting against AC) was so brutal. Our Super accurate martials typically needed to roll a 13 on their first attack to hit it, My investigator had to roll a 15 to hit it on the devise a stratagem attack. We all ended up grabbed, stuck in its aura, unable to flank, hanging from strings. As essentially a minion of the boss of the hydro plant dungeon, that creature is way too high of a level, in perfectly favorable terrain. I would strongly consider adding the weak template to it.

[Leon Aquilla]

Quote:

But the encounter spaces!!! Book 3 encounters are brutal for ranged characters and for parties low on magic, which both are directions the AP kind of leads players towards. From encounter locations that are tiny rooms with narrow hallways, monsters that guns are nearly useless against, and with weaknesses that only really magic can easily activate, it almost feels like the whole third book mechanically makes the characters you built and want to play in this campaign useless.

I call this "Knife Fight in a Phone Booth". It can wreck an otherwise interesting encounter or make certain enemies much more dangerous than they would be otherwise.

[DarkSavior]

I am running Punks in a Powderkeg now, I am using Foundry. Overall I am underwhelmed with it as a VTT product, but that's another rant. To the OP's main gripe, I agree. I feel like the Player's Guide very strongly indicates this is a game for non-casters, so in a party that all leaned into that (gunslinger, inventor, investigator, and rogue) it was pretty lame to realize even early on, the oozes, clockworks, and haunts all have damn steep damage reduction that is largely only surpased most easily by spellcasters. It very much felt like the Player's Guide advised the players to their downfall, and seems like dirty pool. To hear that it only gets worse from then on out isn't encouraging, on top of the VTT package lacking (missing scenes, npc, not much music) therefore requiring me to fill in those gaps way more myself than a 35 dollar package should. I contrast it to the excellent Abomination Vaults, which had everything and required very little from me to modify or provide, and I am deeply disappointed. I hope other modules are more like AV and less like OoA, or else my module buying days with Paizo are over.

[keftiu]

I had a friend's campaign stumble and die in Book 2. It's a real shame that this one seems so uneven.

[Unicore]

I think comparisons to Abomination vault are inevitable as another 3 part AP. I am running AV and it has some bumps of very hard encounters, but it is a slow paced mega dungeon without strings of “must face all of this right now” which make many of the later Outlaws dungeons just way too brutal. I think it would be good advice to any GMs to really think twice about having level +2 encounters in a timed gauntlet, and be especially careful dropping in level +3s. This was after we nearly TPK’d on smog wraiths and had to run away in the same dungeon. The faster pace of Outlaws is also frustrating because you get roped into making characters who really want to spend weeks crafting, but the number of opportunities to do so are so restricted.