Rule and Lore Creative Director
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This is a spoiler-filled resource thread for the third and final volume of the Shades of Blood Adventure Path, To Blot Out the Sun by Jessica Catalan.
The GM Reference thread for the first volume, Thirst for Blood, is here.
The GM Reference thread for the second volume, The Broken Palace, is here.
We've finished our discussion of Book 3, and the final fight was not what we expected it to be; nor the epilogue. You can find our discussion here.
If you are looking to find out what the major Astrological event that the astrologer was going to observe, that doesn't happen to be here either. I'll get to the complete overview during the coming holiday weekend.
The best fight was ultimately the Fortune Dragon. Deg had almost no impact on the campaign. There is no chance to unite his own people in rebellion despite no one wanting to follow him.
It really would have helped this adventure to build up Nizca in the eyes of the players in gameplay, and also establish the love they have with Lograshi. Not sure why they were given so much GM only information, especially after the 3 days mandatory downtime to understand their plan with the Quietess Beam.
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How are area D and area E connected? text doesn't say much, and the map for area D doesn't show any.
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Scanning through this book... not a fan of the first one, but this seems like running this on its own would be a pretty solid stand-alone dungeon crawl. Anyone have any thoughts on that?
I think I would just throw the PCs in, with a little blurb about them trying to save a sea-side town from an awakened vampire lord and go from there.
There anything preventing the party from using Force Open on the door?
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Due to a combination of the Clockwork Sentries and roving patrols of Tokainen's Chosen, my party is now all unconcious, and in Administration which (unlike many previous areas) doesn't have an entry for what might happen if the party is captured. But at least there's already a prison area and a nearby guard post where I imagine their gear might be stashed, so I guess it's time for me to figure out a jailbreak scenario for the next session!
As a note on how the fight went, the party is centered around two fighters and an investigator for damage, and has essentially no sources of non-physical damage that work on clockwork creatures. The DR blunted most of the physical attacks, with the party only able to defeat one sentry before enough rounds passed that I figured a patrol would happen by, and the Grab abilities + free action manacles on crit grapples restricted the party's movement fairly effectively. The sentries' spell lists were powerful as well, with a Wall of Stone or two keeping the party unable to coordinate their attacks and healing.
So I guess unless you want to have to figure out what to do with a downed party like me, maybe be careful how hard you go with all of the available options! My party had mostly been a steamroller up until this fight, so I had gotten used to using everything at my disposal to try and present as much challenge as possible before the fighters crit everything into paste.
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I was about to comment on how Vye's tactics entry didn't make sense in terms of action economy, but it looks instead like an error in the Foundry data: Undead, Arise! is marked as two actions when it's shown as one in the NPC Core Necromancer entry.
Since I didn't realize this when running the combat, this resulted in two skeletons being summoned then Vye just moving into cover due to no particularly good actions available. Then the party killed the zombie colossus, both skeletons, and Vye before any of them got further actions. (But my party is a trio of martials with a support cleric and bard so they're an absolute crit factory.)
But in any case, don't miss that Undead, Arise! can be used alongside Undead, Attack! or Wave of Death in a single turn if you're running the fight.