Starting Abomination Vaults at APL 3


Abomination Vaults


Question is the subject. I have a party who did a brief stint in a different campaign, but we have decided to transition over to Abomination Vaults. Does anyone have any advice or trip ups I might be aware of if I wanted to start the Abomination Vaults collection at a higher level? I assume adjusting encounters here and there, but is there anything that that truly stands out?

Paizo Employee Creative Director

My suggestion would be to start things out as-is, without any sort of adjustments. Your PCs will crush a lot of the encounters, but won't earn nearly as much XP, and as they delve deeper eventually the expected level of the encounters will sync up with the party level. Abomination Vaults is a dungeon crawl, but it's also a sandbox; there's nothing preventing the PCs from heading down to lower levels (with the exception of a very few gate locks along the way), and some of the encounters on each level are designed to be particularly tough anyway. Keep an eye on your players' entertainment level, and if you feel like the lack of challenge is boring them or it's taking too long to get to challenges, you can then start to increase the challenge of fights by adding the elite adjustment here and there or increasing the number of creatures in an encounter—one pretty easy way to do this is to relax the idea that rooms stay self-contained, and when fights break out, have neighboring room occupants come to investigate and join fights. I'm sure folks here will have plenty of more specific suggestions too!

The big thing to remember is that higher level PCs earn less XP for fights, and in some cases might not earn XP at all if they fight foes that are more than 4 levels below the party level.


This is a sound advice. I may adjust some of the earlier encounters slightly to give them a slight challenge, but otherwise, as you suggested, leave them as-is. I need to re-review the XP earning rules as I was fuzzy on the level discrepancy when it comes to awarding XP entirely. I was planning on doing milestone leveling as I have found for this group they prefer to level based on event progression.

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