2 - The Broken Palace (GM Reference)

[Luis Loza]

This is a spoiler-filled resource thread for the second volume of the Shades of Blood Adventure Path, The Broken Palace by James Jacobs.

The GM Reference thread for the first volume, Thirst for Blood, is here.

The GM Reference thread for the third and final volume, To Blot Out the Sun, is here.

[Dhaise]

Still reading through, enjoyed the backmatter a lot (I always read it first). I'm surprised there's nothing for the Atzlanti Engine to do this time around , but I like what I'm seeing with scheme as presented here.

[UpliftedBearBramble]

Now that we’ve had our discussion on book 2 livestream first and foremost I’d like to thank Kait (Mispelled it Kate before) in customer service for getting us the pdf sooner and answering my questions. She was extremely helpful in understanding the situation, and that the humble bundle was causing some issues with no longer available physical books of FotRP at the same time they were dealing with a technical issue for the foundry vtt bundle for Shades of Blook 2.

I’m much more understanding of having less time to work with a new release, and my heart goes out to those in customer service during those kind of problems where they are caught between releasing a public message, or fixing the issue to ensure less complaints overall. I am glad I called and put in a ticket when requested, Rue was helpful in getting me some information as well that things were going on behind the scenes on the press discord, thank you Rue.

Alright, this is another megadungeon delve as advertised but the actual material here suggests otherwise. I’ll deal with that first, before getting to the lack of combat challenges presented in the book as that was the number 1 complaint made by everyone on the discord and discussions- surprisingly not me. I’ll let someone else elaborate on the number of trivial encounters, as it’s their feedback and not mine.

Shades of Blood’s En Gokal is a megastructure, not a megadungeon. A megadungeon like Emerald Spire and Ambonation Vaults is a collection of maps that presents actual gameplay battlemaps to the player to navigate and experience the story through exploration, and includes multiple methods of travel and passages to all reach destinations, sometimes even shortcuts and secret passages, for the player to take a nonlinear path through and reach their goal.

Megadungeons have not in the past, focused on item crafting or crafting methods, and the pace at which a player progresses is meant as a sense of urgency for something bad happening in the background, slowly getting worse as they progress further into the megadungeon.

A megastructure is an extremely large dungeon, but not a lot of maps or playable area, as travel between locations is entirely linear or similar to a hallway design between rooms and playable battlemap areas that gives the player the sense of progression by getting to a singular exit to reach the next playable location. Crafting as well as subsystems involving subsisting are given to the player, with the added bonus of being focused on saving time to make this progression at a faster pace since there is less playable area to cover overall.

En-Gokal is made up of 3 such structures, the entryway/isle, the subterrain broken palace, and the lighthouse all connected together by exploration, but not by actual gameplay. Calling it a megadungeon in advertising is not accurate nor does it compare to previous megadungeons released with that missing playable content, and alternative routes.

Both times in both books there has been a singular exit to the next area with no alternative means to reach them, nor has a single passageway yet acted as a shortcut to previous areas already visited.

In fact for this module the players are trapped in the subterranean and cannot revisit town, or the Azlanti Engine- a previously established method of crafting valuable items that can be used to open locked doors in the prison, as well as rune crafting and swapping something players continue to need at all levels of play. It’s odd they would take this away from the player after going through such great lengths to establish it in book 1. A group will be unable to return to it for at least 6 sessions, which in itself isn’t that long and only shows how short this adventure really is in scope of AV’s second book.

To replace this, essence forges are presented to the players. Forges of great power that are extreme time savers for player crafting. The catch is that you need not only crafting but the discipline of magic such as occultism, nature, religion, or arcane to craft an item of that study on the appropriate essence forge along with the requisite wealth for market cost. Odd how the forges understand how prices like that work, but that’s mechanical crunch in a system, not the ancient magic.

These seem very useful, but also very heavy. 20 bulk means they won’t fit inside the opening of an extra dimension pouch, and they cannot be carried out of a structure we are locked inside of currently or taken on the transport to the next section. The adventure writes that nothing is stopping the players from taking it, but assume the Azlanti and essence forges remain mutually exclusive to the player’s use for each module.

The adventure works much better on the premise of the players being agents of Andoran looking for Azlanti magic and technology to give them an edge in the Hellfire Crisis. I believe that’s how the grant for Andoran it sent out to its people was intended to do, and that these forges will be weaponized for that conflict. Having them just as a means for adventurers makes little sense in the bigger metaplot, but it’s convenient.

This also ties back to what the astrologer told us before that she needs to give the Andoran government something, even after explaining to the players it’s all about getting free money to improve society. It was in fact an investment in Andoran’s people to shore up developments and infrastructure for the coming war with Chilleax.

Now that we have this huge piece of information, we can start to fix the adventure. No more are the players, several randomly hired adventurers, but spies and investigators for Andoran that are focused on getting their hands on Azlanti relics of use for the war. That to me seems much more interesting and gives credence to the reason they would remain after the shadow creature attack in book 1, as normal adventurers wouldn’t be paid to investigate the potentially vampire filled structure that could be much large than it first appears in the entryway.

Having a cult at the base of the prison that connects to a society was a great idea, but falls apart when you realize Romi could have gotten any of these other vampires serving Nalushae to turn them into a vampire. His motivation seemed to focus on her, for whatever reason not just tied to a deal to provide victims.

General Aside: We also learn that Romi has supplied well over 100 people out of an 800+ population town, with a window of 25 years per victim. I’m not sure why vampires think blood tastes best, but kudos to Nalushae and Romi for not making it weird and taking children who are easier to abduct and put up less of a fight. We aren’t going for realism here in the story anyway.

Okay, now we have a whole town underground that thinks Vampires are their protectors and that getting to age 25 means they get to live in the palace, but they are in fact just being taken as food. We can’t just start setting people free because first there is no way for them or the players to escape at the moment, and they are under the impression Vampires are the best part of their society and protectors.

This is an extremely dark turn, and I love it. A shame it isn’t developed or elaborated on, but told to us in passing. Huge missed opportunity here to have one such celebration of a 25 year old and use that as the means to infiltrate the palace. We cannot sacrifice one of the 100+ people to rescue to get the job done and cross into a morally grey area, or even cause a riot/uprising against the vampires.

The one interesting relationship was a rivalry between two minor villains, the players may not even find out about it given one appears as a monster and is inside of the palace, and the other is in disguise and wants to kill them outright.

Assuming the players kill everything inside of the palace and do manage to convince 100+ prisoners to escape, where can they go? The transport isn’t big enough for that many people, nor does it say it can be sent back on the other side, or that there is an exit further towards the tower. If the players take a boat back in book 3 it definitely will not hold 100 people nor can they sustain themselves once free. It’s more than a small plot hole when it’s the focus of the adventure to liberate them and be directly rewarded on the number freed. (I looked ahead at book 3, no mention of rescue for those 100+ people is mentioned nor are they returned to TB, only the players along with no method of transporting that many people as navigation without the sun and stars is very dangerous).

My hope is that Nizca is actually going to give a reason that she didn’t just use the essence forges to make an item to teleport across the ocean, but given the amount of resources at her disposal at this point it feels like she was built up into this saturday morning villain that underutilized all these resources in En Gokal. Nor does she use sending or similar messaging to her lover and establish contact.

Still no mention of Sarenrae anywhere, I guess she doesn’t mind Nizca blocking out the sun. Get to work Kyria, mug that interior artwork.

Clearly still not feeling like a megadungeon, which I apparently didn’t need to convince Niktorak or Ironbear on, as once inside the entryway we’re missing a large portion of the megastructure to explore travel between maps as playable contact. That to me is empty nonplayable space which equates to less content, wether we have maps for those portions of the dungeon or not focusing on ecology which can be a single sentence explanation.

.

[ArbieGM]

pg. 10, Dero Punks, what is the attack bonus for dagger for these little ones?

[James Jacobs]

ArbieGM wrote:

pg. 10, Dero Punks, what is the attack bonus for dagger for these little ones?

+7 seems like a good solution.

[cavernshark]

I've got more to say about book 2 in general, but I wanted to share some adjustments I made to the Essence Forges after seeing them in action in Chapter 1.

Summary Changes:

Activate - Priming the Forge removes the requirement that the Forge has no essence in it. This prevents the double jeopardy of losing half the value on a failure, and then potentially losing the other half simply because it's not enough to craft what you wanted or having a failed crafting event for the secondary item.

Activate - Craft an Item now takes 1 hour, instead of 2 and can be done up to 6 hours with no penalty. Each attempt on hour 7 or 8 requires a Fortitude Save against the Item's DC or be fatigued for 24 hours (no rest option). Cannot craft beyond 8 hours. Four rolls against the target DC simply isn't enough for a player to reasonably get to 4 points consistently. 6 rolls boosts the EV for forge points to 3-4, and 8 moves it closer to 5-6. This lets players actually consistently craft their items with the maximum time investment (which is non-trivial during Chapter 1) and even have a shot of making something cool. They can gamble on the last two hours.

Activate - Craft an Item can now be done with an appropriate tradition similar to the Forge as long as the Crafter is also at least trained in Crafting. This lets other players participate and run in parallel. My summoner wanted to use the Matter and Life forges, using Nature, but simply could not participate. At five when he takes Crafting, he'll be able to do more if they're able to come back.

Activate - Craft an Item uses the DC of the item being crafted, instead of the base forge. This just feels like common sense. A level 3 item is DC 18 which significantly smooths out some of the issues. A level 5 is DC 20. Most of the recipes the players have are level 3-5 items. In the event they get higher recipes later, this makes the normal crafting progression relevant.

Rationale: When I read through Book 2 in preparation, I expected the Essence Forges to functionally work as a stand-in for shops and to let the Crafting rules play out a bit. On paper they appear to do this, especially since the players are given access to many basic recipes for items you'd expect players to want to buy in the levels of 3-6.

In practice, I found the forge is more of a casino, and therefore a trap to burn players time and money. If that's what they were intended to be, then that's fine, but as I said I wanted them to act as a reasonably reliable stand-in for stores and provide a compelling bit of downtime activity for how much page space their given. It'll get better over time, in theory, but for when the players encounter these and have the most access and time to use them they feel really bad.

The Problems:

Priming the Forge adds an additional failure point to the crafting process. DC20 isn't awful to hit, but consuming half the resources on a failure means that even a 55-60% success chance is going to eventually eat a good chunk of gold.

Crafting at the Forge has a few problems:

The flat DC20 is fairly unreliable for a level 4 to hit consistently. A player with max Int, trained in Crafting, and level 4 will only have a +10 to Crafting, +11 if they happen to have a +1 item bonus. The forge can provide that if your Primer crits, but that's not a guarantee either and realistically only happens about 5% of the time for players at level 4. All of this means that for all intents and purposes, assuming a player spends the maximum 8 hours to forge an item, they will only be expected to get between 2-3 forge points based on expected values across 4 rolls.

You need four points to make the item permanent. 6+ gets a crit success, but that's an incredibly low probability requiring most players to crit twice and succeed twice on something they're likely looking at 50% chance of success on. In practice, most players will need to make all 4 two hour attempts to craft an item with 4 forge points. There's only a 24% chance that a single failure will not not occur across 4 rolls when you have a 70% success chance of hitting a DC 2 (a +13/14 mod, level 8 trained or level 6 expert). That means 76% of the time, a player will need at least once crit to craft a permanent item. Most players will have lower success chance that that at levels 4 and 5. They'd be better off having a single roll for all 8 hours.

Crafting is the only skill you can use to actually assemble an item creates two conflicting problems. 1) With the DCs being as difficult as they are initially for a level 4-5, you will probably only end up with a single person being able to make use of time. 2) Reaching the water at area C creates a natural delay for the party to reassemble the barge. This can take a few days if your primary crafter uses the forge and only secondary crafters are able to make progress on the barge.

Actual Play Example:

My party has 4 people, three of which have crafting. The Wizard has crafting trained, max intelligence (+10). A fourth party member (a summoner) has Nature and the Herbalist dedication. A champion has crafting trained, and our rogue has crafting trained -- each with +0 or +1 intelligence (+6-7 mods). When they reached the water in area C, they decided to make camp there while they built the barge. This took the secondary crafters two days. During that time, the party decided to try to use the Forge to make a Rank 2 Wand with the Scroll of Create Food that the party found on the beach.

In this practical example, a level 5 item is a DC20 to craft anyway. The Summoner primed the Forge and failed on the first attempt burning half the cost of the item before any crafting was attempted. A 2nd Rank want is 160 gold, so this automatically meant that they only would have 80. They cannot restock this and would have to craft a 80 gp or less item instead of their intended item or waste this 80 g on top of putting another 160 in to gamble again on priming successfully. I allowed priming to be additive because their gold reserves aren't infinite and this was a definite feel bad moment if I'd followed the written Priming instructions.

Then our wizard crafter stepped in, having learned and prepared a Create Food spell the day before to fuel the requirements. I allowed our Summoner to use Nature to attempt to aid despite not having Crafting because our other two crafters were working on the barge all day (they were using the Matter Forge). In his first 2 hours, he succeeded earning a forge point. In his second attempt, he failed, earning 0. In his third, he rolled a 19, getting a 29 -- one shy of a crit. On his fourth, he failed but used a hero point to succeed.

This would be 3 points, effectively creating a temporary wand which could cast Create Food once in 24 hours before the wand would break (even if not cast). For 240 gold (150% of the wand cost) and costing a full day of the Wizard's time meaning he couldn't meaningfully contribute to barge construction. I ultimately decided to give the +1 bonus arguing the first "Prime" of the forge was from the NPCs and they'd crit to give all Craft attempts the +1.

The whole experience was nerve-wracking and would have felt awful to expend that much money and time while the players were actively making choices to try to engage with the dungeon content and problems being presented (resource scarcity). I didn't want to discourage that. Failure is okay and getting unlucky happens, but this was a nail-biter and felt like the system was rigged against the players trying to use all the tools at their disposal that they could reasonably summon in the limited time they had to know about the Forges (including Aid, etc).

[ckobbe]

So I've been Halloween reading these 3 volumes as I've been catching up on my backlog of unread books. I finished volume 2 last night i have a lot of the same issues that others have mentions with the first two volumes, but specifically wanted to mention the two new Point systems introduced.

I really fail to understand why in a complex with dozens of prisoners and npcs camped out in supposedly resource poor areas we need to add an artificially imposed Food and Water Points system. From the writing, it seems like the prisoners a kept waiting between transport legs for days or more at a time, with the dero guards having been stationed in the area for a significant time. Honestly with the adventure as written it bothers me that the dero guard running this slaving operation don't already account for their own needs and their prisoners needs by already having bulk food and water stores present. Honestly if I ever run this adventure I will ditch this unnecessary mechanic and just have the dero have the logically necessary stockpiled provisions for themselves and their prisoners.

The Underheaven Trust system. I think my main problem with it is your players are somewhat railroaded into having to care and engage enough with these brainwashed idiots to not simply bypass them. Bypassing them will inevitable result in the population's eventual panic and saving these people is built into the adventure as part of your goal due to the XP awards at the end of the adventure. Logical actions like showing them they lie they are living without building absolute trust means wrecking their trust in the players, not the blood sucking monsters they should be concerned about. I would ditch this entire system and build up 3-4 npcs that you gain influence (as in the already existing system) with. Probably a doubting but trusted Kartho, a not-dead rebellious Claithe, and secret bad guy Danva. Increased influence will let the fake nature of Underheaven be accepted by these influential citizen and then the populace.

Also, as a final thought (I have just started reading the 3rd volume and that may alter some of these opinions) I really think that the first two volumes work better as two unconnected adventures. I realize that the prison complex, atlanti technology and blood-drinkers themes are all supposed to link the adventures together. But, the entire opulent palace/vampire fiefdom doesn't feel like its part of a prison complex and could easily be dropped almost anywhere you want a subterranean vampire fiefdom (hello Ustalav or Nidal). The werebat cultists do feel like a great low-level tropical island threat, but their lair could literally be any old abandoned complex. Finally, as written the second volume completely cuts you off from the events/locations of the first, so any momentum you build up on the mysterious atlanti technomagic is cut off and discarded in the second adventure, which is a shame, because i thought the (essentially) AI Azlanti personality you find in the first Volume has a lot of potential as a through thread for the campaign.