I've tried to run a few prewritten adventures in the past, with the most recent and biggest disappointment being Strength of Thousands. I've been kind of soured on APs in general because they never live up to my expectations. I don't want to dog on APs, there's lots of hard work that goes into them and lots of people love them, but for me they:
1. Felt stylistically disjointed with different authors
2. Sometimes were too stuffed with filler because of the demands of the arbitrary level ranges
3. Were overly on-rails because points A, B, and C all need to connect to one another over the AP
4. Wandered from the main selling point of the adventure
5. Had poor location/NPC continuity with some NPCs popping out of thin air then disappearing from the story for 8 levels. Locations didn't get returned to enough and didn't get room to breathe.
6. Tended to forget basics of games, like the fun of exploration for the sake of loot not just to progress the story
I believe Bastion of Blasphemies has probably the best shot at overcoming my complaints. From what I can tell, it's basically built from the ground up to answer each of them. I want to give it a good honest chance because if someone is catering to my requests, I gotta back up my end of the bargain!
I'm hoping I can get some fresh advice to help me give it the best chance at working for my group as possible.
Me:
I've got ADHD and a GMing style that involves low to moderate prep work supplemented with improvisation, and I can and have improvised full dungeons on the fly. I generally don't use the battlemap outside of combat, using notebook sketches to show the rough shape of rooms and halls and asking them how they proceed. I'll use a wet erase battlemap to sketch out the area they're in for combat. I like to give more loot than recommended so my players have more freedom to play with fun toys. I tend to handwave ammunition, but not carrying capacity.
My Group:
Our group plays for ~8 hour sessions roughly once a month in person. We're not optimization driven, and generally play with what sounds fun. My players hardly ever make "normal" characters, and happily dip into Battlezoo content or rare ancestries. They do get in character and roleplay, and can be relied upon to progress a story. They tend to harshly criticize plotholes or logical gaps, especially when the original author isn't me. They love to creatively solve problems with stealth, diplomacy, and "climbing in through the 3rd floor windows".
Examples of past issues:
In Strength of Thousands, they discovered some snersons up to no good on campus. They immediately, without hesitation, went to talk to some authorities because there was no reason not to based on the timing and info they had at the time. I then had to improvise everything about the authorities, their ability to respond, how they handled it, and what happened to the mcguffin.
I had to cut out whole books in Strength of Thousands because they had drifted too far away from the "Magic School" concept and my players were giving me feedback that they weren't getting enough classroom and teaching goodies. I had to homebrew about a third of the levels worth of content to give them what they wanted.
I've failed to read ahead before a session and stumbled into a portion that I didn't read super well, and ended up improvising most of it, which required later tweaks to the story to keep it working.
I often tell my players about the contents of a room, then realize afterwards that there are also enemies in the room, partly because of the layout of the writeup, partly because they never go in any sort of predictable room exploration order.
Questions:
A. What is the most important thing to do to prepare for the AP? Read the hole thing cover to cover?
B. How do you typically share maps without giving spoilers? Is there a better way than my method of scribbled room layouts I sketch out as they progress?
C. Do you have general advice about running APs?
D. What should I know about the inspirations for this AP (Castlevania, Dark Souls) before heading in?
Creative Director
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Certainly not every Adventure Path is the right choice for every group, and the only way a GM can really get a legitimate grasp on if an Adventure Path IS a good choice for their group is to read the entire thing (or at least do a detailed skim of the entire thing) to size it up. That's now possible on day 1 now that we publish these as full books and not split apart over months. Whether or not Bastion of Blasphemies will be the right choice for your group, I can't say, but I can advise, since I wrote it.
Responses to the questions above:
A) Yes, read the whole thing. You don't have to memorize it, but that's the best way to find potential pain points or areas you might want to expand. You know your group better than the rest of us, after all!
B) I generally draw them out on a blank gridded map on the table, room by room, as the PCs explore. If I have a full map printed out, I might just show the whole thing at once (if it's a single encounter spread out over an area), or I might use pieces of paper or other methods to cover up places they've not yet explored and remove them as they do so... but the "drawing the rooms on a blank map as they explore" is a better solution here for me. If I run a VTT game, I take full advantage of the computer's ability to use fog of war to mask things.
NOTE: The maps in Bastion of Blasphemies are ENORMOUS. They will not fit on any currently produced blank battlemap all at once, so you'll have to do a lot of redrawing. I suggest looking at an inexpensive battle mat paper solution if you want to keep and reuse the maps if you don't want to do a lot of drawing and erasing and redrawing (and if you don't have stacks and stacks of blank flip mats and battle mats to rely upon).
C) See A above—read the thing through once as you would a book. Don't get too bogged down with the details, or studying stats, or coming up with potential custom tactics or expansions. Read the whole thing to get the vibe. Keep notes as you read—in the text itself in the margins can help, or using post-its or the like to make notes attached to the pages can also help. Then, when you run the game, prepare by re-reading the sections most likely for the PCs to explore during that session. Knowing more about the adventure as a whole really REALLY helps when the players inevitably do something unexpected, and knowing the whole story helps you to improvise in ways that support the story rather than do a butteffly-effect cascade of plot clashes.
D) You don't HAVE to know anything about them, really. Bastion of Blasphemies is meant to be self-contained and self-explanitory for players to enjoy without playing those games first. Knowledge of them can enhance the enjoyment for players who get a kick out of callouts and easter eggs, but as long as your group's comfortable with the adventure's horrific themes (we put content warnings out there for this very reason!), take the Player's Guide advice to heart in building characters that won't clash against the story, and are interested in a 9 to 10 level experience set ENTIRELY within a single sprawling castle, then that should be a great start!