I love the concept of 13th Age, to take the Pathfinder/d20 System and simplify it, adding some more role-playing elements. But there is a lot of the execution of the game that I just hate. Biggest of all, I hate the meta-gaming system of abilities that are available on an arbitrary schedule: At-Will, Once Per Battle, have a Chance to Recharge after the battle, or Once Per Day. That breaks the player out of the character's head and hurts the immersion of the game.
In our last adventure we decided to try something different with the Animal Companion system. In 13th Age you can either buy an Animal Companion who is always by your side, or a limited companion who is only available every other battle. Instead of that, because I don't understand why you would not summon aid in every battle if it was possible (and there's no good reason for why it is only possible half the time), we tried a new system. For our Ranger who had the limited Animal Companion I had her roll a d6 at the start of every battle, her companion arrived on the turn when the escalation die equaled the number rolled. It got the normal move and standard actions, and always started at the edge of the battlefield.
This seemed to work pretty well, some battles were fast enough the companion didn't arrive. At the least the companion didn't arrive until the second round, and it always needed to move into position, so it was not as convenient as having the constant companion. It seemed to be a good comprimise between not always being there but not being completely unavailable.
Best of all, I could easily define and describe it - the Ranger had to call for an animal, and there was no way of knowing just how close the appropriate type of animal could be to the battle (she only summoned canines, thanks to the murdered ghost of her pet- something that tied into her One Unique Thing). That gives the delay a reasonable explanation from a role-playing standpoint, and makes it a lot better in my opinion. We only tried it for one game, but it seemed to go well so I think we'll keep it as our new system.
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
Saturday, February 28, 2015
13th Age and Fate Mash-up
Well, we played another game of 13th Age with some more friends, and this time we added some elements from the Fate RPG as well. I was quite happy with the results, so I thought I'd present here what we did.
First off, why change 13th Age? I have to admit that after years of playing Pathfinder I loved 13th Age as a simpler, more focused version of a d20 game. However, while it adds a lot of D&D concepts, I think it also carries some D&D baggage and makes some less than optimal additions. The first thing I wanted to change was the Background system.
For anyone who might not know 13th Age, the Background part of a character is basically the character's skills. Each character has 8 points to distribute among as many backgrounds as they want. Each background is a title or sentence that describes what the character knows how to do. For example, you might have the background of "Inner Sea Pirate" or "Assassin of the Black Hand." The idea is to add some more character and details by describing instead of choosing from a dry list of skills.
The problem I have with the system is that while it is nicely descriptive it leaves too much wiggle room. You and the GM need to be exactly on the same page for what kinds of tasks fall under your background and which ones don't. Also, the system is pretty broad, so it is possible to make a background that applies to a very broad group of situations, or one that is very limited. With no objective standards it can be hard to know when to, or when not to, use a background. It can become a "one size fits all" system. That I don't like because I think it limits the group dynamics, in the party I like it when some people are experts at a task, and others are trying to figure out how to make the best of a bad situation.
My solution was to incorporate a concept from Fate, or rather a Fate variant, the Pathfinder Fate Accelerated. Basically, you split "skills" into 2 parts- I call them Expertise and Approach.
Expertise covers what sorts of things you know how to do, there are 5 total: Fighting, Exploring, Investigating, Working and Talking. Fighting has to do with what Pathfinder called "Combat Maneuvers"; overrun, bull rush, trip, feint, disarm, grappling and that sort of stuff. Exploring covers anything that deals with moving through the environment, survival, navigation, stealth, and even dealing with locks and traps. Investigating deals with knowing and discovering facts, basically a way for me the GM to give the Player some extra information. Working is making and creating things, craft and perform and even games/sports, as well as some odd things like healing (working with other people's bodies) and sleight of hand (working with your own body). Lastly there is Talking, which deals with interacting with other sentient creatures.
Expertise is only one half of the equation though, the other half is Approach. Approach covers how you go about doing things, and there are 6 total: Forceful, Quick, Clever, Cautious, Flashy, and Sneaky. So Talking + Forceful = Intimidation, while Talking + Quick = "fast-talking" or distracting someone with words. Exploring + Quick = moving fast, while Exploring + Cautious = covering your tracks so you can't be tracked. There are no hard and fast rules, you have to assess each situation and think of what combination makes the most sense. In the one adventure I ran with the system though, it was not too hard to come up with a combination or two on the spot.
The final part of the system is the same 13th Age stuff that I didn't change. You always add the most relevant attribute modifier and your level to a d20 roll for a total. There are only 3 DCs to aim for, Easy, Moderate and Hard, which change depending on your level. For levels 1 through 4 (called the "Adventurer Tier") the DCs are 15, 20 and 25. Each Expertise and Approach defaults to 0 and can go up to 3 (you divide 8 points total any way you want among them all).
What I like about the system is that it is flexible, each element covers a fairly broad category of actions or outcomes, so you have structure but not a straightjacket. Also, it helps to distinguish characters a bit more, the high Talking character does most of the interrogating and such - but since you can always add an Approach, it's still possible to succeed at something that is not your main focus (my goal was to do Elliot from Leverage, he is the Hitter (Fighting and Forceful) but can still talk to people, he just does it forcefully). And even if 2 or more characters had the same Expertise, the different Approaches let them feel more distinct from each other.
It's kind of an odd system, but it seemed to work well.
The last thing I did for my mash-up was to add Aspects. In Fate an Aspect is a sentence describing some part of your character that is both good and bad. So "World-Renowned Outlaw" could be an aspect, or "Wizard Private Eye," or even "Sucker For A Pretty Face." This is similar to the One Unique Thing that exists in 13th Age but where your One Unique is meant to be storytelling-based, and what could literally make you unique from everyone on the planet, Aspects give actual mechanical benefits and are internal to the character. With Aspects you also get Fate Points. I started everybody with 2. When you "compel" an Aspect, or use it as a reason to fail at something and get yourself in trouble, you gain a Fate Point. You can also spend a Fate Point on an action related to one of your Aspects to get a +5 bonus to the action (the whole action, so attack and damage or the whole turn increase to AC for example). That's a pretty darn big bonus. You can only spend one Fate Point on one action, and you can spend them before or after you roll (I wanted to be flexible). Players did not have to use their Aspects or Fate Points, some pretty much ignored them. Also I only had them come up with 5 Aspects, if I remember correctly Fate uses between 7 to 10.
If you want to know more about Aspects, they are a pretty big topic, try this link on "Writing Good Aspects" by Robert Hanz.
The game we ran was the Shadows of Eldolan adventure for 13th Age, and as a quick side note it was well written and everybody liked it. Two players had played 13th Age before, and Three had not - nobody had played Fate before (including me, I just liked the concepts). Everyone seemed to pick up the system easily, for being new to it. Overall I was happy, and I am still tinkering with some more changes I'd like to make to 13th Age (though, I'm getting close to re-writing the whole game at this point, I have a bad habit of doing that).
I have also been making character sheets for 13th Age and the 13th Age/Fate hybrid. Here is a link to the general sheet that I have on my Google Drive, and the Adobe Illustrator source file. These sheets are based on the most excellent work done by Dyslexic Studeos. Those were the best Pathfinder sheets I had ever found, so I used them as my base.
13th Age / Fate Generic Character Sheet and Adobe Illustrator Source File
Anyways, not sure if any other 13th Age players out there might find this useful (or consider it sacrilege), but there it is. I'll post my more regular 13th Age character sheets sometime soon, but I need to merge some files together (I've done too many variants and I'm getting confused myself). Also, I used a custom system for equipment which I may describe if anybody's interested. Hope some of this is useful, as always you can leave a comment below.
First off, why change 13th Age? I have to admit that after years of playing Pathfinder I loved 13th Age as a simpler, more focused version of a d20 game. However, while it adds a lot of D&D concepts, I think it also carries some D&D baggage and makes some less than optimal additions. The first thing I wanted to change was the Background system.
For anyone who might not know 13th Age, the Background part of a character is basically the character's skills. Each character has 8 points to distribute among as many backgrounds as they want. Each background is a title or sentence that describes what the character knows how to do. For example, you might have the background of "Inner Sea Pirate" or "Assassin of the Black Hand." The idea is to add some more character and details by describing instead of choosing from a dry list of skills.
The problem I have with the system is that while it is nicely descriptive it leaves too much wiggle room. You and the GM need to be exactly on the same page for what kinds of tasks fall under your background and which ones don't. Also, the system is pretty broad, so it is possible to make a background that applies to a very broad group of situations, or one that is very limited. With no objective standards it can be hard to know when to, or when not to, use a background. It can become a "one size fits all" system. That I don't like because I think it limits the group dynamics, in the party I like it when some people are experts at a task, and others are trying to figure out how to make the best of a bad situation.
My solution was to incorporate a concept from Fate, or rather a Fate variant, the Pathfinder Fate Accelerated. Basically, you split "skills" into 2 parts- I call them Expertise and Approach.
Expertise covers what sorts of things you know how to do, there are 5 total: Fighting, Exploring, Investigating, Working and Talking. Fighting has to do with what Pathfinder called "Combat Maneuvers"; overrun, bull rush, trip, feint, disarm, grappling and that sort of stuff. Exploring covers anything that deals with moving through the environment, survival, navigation, stealth, and even dealing with locks and traps. Investigating deals with knowing and discovering facts, basically a way for me the GM to give the Player some extra information. Working is making and creating things, craft and perform and even games/sports, as well as some odd things like healing (working with other people's bodies) and sleight of hand (working with your own body). Lastly there is Talking, which deals with interacting with other sentient creatures.
Expertise is only one half of the equation though, the other half is Approach. Approach covers how you go about doing things, and there are 6 total: Forceful, Quick, Clever, Cautious, Flashy, and Sneaky. So Talking + Forceful = Intimidation, while Talking + Quick = "fast-talking" or distracting someone with words. Exploring + Quick = moving fast, while Exploring + Cautious = covering your tracks so you can't be tracked. There are no hard and fast rules, you have to assess each situation and think of what combination makes the most sense. In the one adventure I ran with the system though, it was not too hard to come up with a combination or two on the spot.
The final part of the system is the same 13th Age stuff that I didn't change. You always add the most relevant attribute modifier and your level to a d20 roll for a total. There are only 3 DCs to aim for, Easy, Moderate and Hard, which change depending on your level. For levels 1 through 4 (called the "Adventurer Tier") the DCs are 15, 20 and 25. Each Expertise and Approach defaults to 0 and can go up to 3 (you divide 8 points total any way you want among them all).
What I like about the system is that it is flexible, each element covers a fairly broad category of actions or outcomes, so you have structure but not a straightjacket. Also, it helps to distinguish characters a bit more, the high Talking character does most of the interrogating and such - but since you can always add an Approach, it's still possible to succeed at something that is not your main focus (my goal was to do Elliot from Leverage, he is the Hitter (Fighting and Forceful) but can still talk to people, he just does it forcefully). And even if 2 or more characters had the same Expertise, the different Approaches let them feel more distinct from each other.
It's kind of an odd system, but it seemed to work well.
The last thing I did for my mash-up was to add Aspects. In Fate an Aspect is a sentence describing some part of your character that is both good and bad. So "World-Renowned Outlaw" could be an aspect, or "Wizard Private Eye," or even "Sucker For A Pretty Face." This is similar to the One Unique Thing that exists in 13th Age but where your One Unique is meant to be storytelling-based, and what could literally make you unique from everyone on the planet, Aspects give actual mechanical benefits and are internal to the character. With Aspects you also get Fate Points. I started everybody with 2. When you "compel" an Aspect, or use it as a reason to fail at something and get yourself in trouble, you gain a Fate Point. You can also spend a Fate Point on an action related to one of your Aspects to get a +5 bonus to the action (the whole action, so attack and damage or the whole turn increase to AC for example). That's a pretty darn big bonus. You can only spend one Fate Point on one action, and you can spend them before or after you roll (I wanted to be flexible). Players did not have to use their Aspects or Fate Points, some pretty much ignored them. Also I only had them come up with 5 Aspects, if I remember correctly Fate uses between 7 to 10.
If you want to know more about Aspects, they are a pretty big topic, try this link on "Writing Good Aspects" by Robert Hanz.
The game we ran was the Shadows of Eldolan adventure for 13th Age, and as a quick side note it was well written and everybody liked it. Two players had played 13th Age before, and Three had not - nobody had played Fate before (including me, I just liked the concepts). Everyone seemed to pick up the system easily, for being new to it. Overall I was happy, and I am still tinkering with some more changes I'd like to make to 13th Age (though, I'm getting close to re-writing the whole game at this point, I have a bad habit of doing that).
I have also been making character sheets for 13th Age and the 13th Age/Fate hybrid. Here is a link to the general sheet that I have on my Google Drive, and the Adobe Illustrator source file. These sheets are based on the most excellent work done by Dyslexic Studeos. Those were the best Pathfinder sheets I had ever found, so I used them as my base.
13th Age / Fate Generic Character Sheet and Adobe Illustrator Source File
Anyways, not sure if any other 13th Age players out there might find this useful (or consider it sacrilege), but there it is. I'll post my more regular 13th Age character sheets sometime soon, but I need to merge some files together (I've done too many variants and I'm getting confused myself). Also, I used a custom system for equipment which I may describe if anybody's interested. Hope some of this is useful, as always you can leave a comment below.
Sunday, December 28, 2014
Unboxing the "Robotech RPG Tactics" minatures game
Christmas was very good to me in several ways, one of which is geeky enough to be worth mentioning here. My friends got me the Robotech RPG Tactics game this year. Now, Robotech is going a ways back, to the 80s in fact, so some of you whipper-snappers out there might not recognize it. Robotech was an American cartoon created by splicing together 3 different Japanese anime and dubbing new dialogue. It was the first anime I ever saw as a kid, and I loved it. Even though it was animated, it was not a "kiddy" cartoon. One of the main characters dies, on-screen, in the first season (ah Roy, we'll miss you). It had some pretty mature writing for its time. Over the years I have gotten the RPG books published by Palladium Books (though I'm the only one who knows the series, so I've never really played it - but we have played Rifts which is mechanically the same) and the DVDs of the show. When I saw the Tactics game, and realized I had a chance to get some miniatures of the mecha, I was ecstatic.
So here is a look at it, I haven't set it up or played it yet (for reasons that will become obvious soon).
First, the box itself, front and back-
Now, I took these pictures with my cell phone, and cropped them down a bit, so they are not fantastic. They should be good enough to give you an idea of the game though.
Upon opening the box something jumps out at you - all the tiny little plastic figures you get to assemble-
This is old school miniatures. None of that easy, one-piece stuff - these bad boys come in lots and lots of tiny, even teeny-tiny, pieces you get to painstakingly paint and glue by hand. Here's the directions for some of the RDF mecha-
And here are the pieces for the Veritech in Jet Mode-
And the Zentradi Officer's Battle Pod-
In all there are a lot of little plastic pieces, in fact a terrifying number of little plastic pieces. This is the one thing that I am not so happy about thus far - I shudder thinking about just how many hours it's going to take me to assemble all this stuff. Why, oh why, couldn't they have made the models either one piece or body and limbs?-
And while the models are bad enough, the stickers to put on the RDF logos and such are incredibly tiny-
You do get more than just the models of course, there are cards, dice and counters to go along with the rulebook-
The extras are divided into the RDF and Zentradi stuff, here's a bit closer look at the RDF cards and such-
Now, this game (from the little I've read so far) is a table-top miniatures battle game like Warhammer 40k or Battletech. So there is something rather lacking in the box - a map or any kind of terrain. I was wondering if I could perhaps use some old Battletech hex maps, but the bases for the Tactics miniatures is huge - here's shot of the round Tactics base with a Pathfinder lizard man on top of it-
It looks way bigger then the Battletech hexes, so I guess if I want some terrain to play on I'll have to make it myself (which is going to add even more hours to the assembly process).
In all I'm delighted to have the game, but it is not for the faint of heart. "Some assembly required" is an understatement. Now, all the work you put into it makes having it that much sweeter, but it's going to take a lot of weekends to get these guys together. Another problem is that you have to make your own terrain, if you want any, and you also have to make your own padding. The box looks big enough to hold the completed figures, but it has no foam padding of any kind - so you'll need to cut your own padding to protect your time investment, or put the competed figures in something else.
This is really a game for the Robotech nut/fanatic. I have a hard time seeing someone casually picking up this game. Even a Warhammer or Battletech player might have a hard time getting used to it (though there are some very detailed and intricate Warhammer 40k models I've seen, so they might take to it easiest). The time investment even before you play will be a turn-off to a lot of people. I haven't yet read all of the rules, well enough to comment on them at least, since you can't really play until you finish assembling the pieces. When (or if) I play I'll write a review of it.
Really though, playing is somewhat secondary. The joy of owning the models, of being able to (someday) display them on a shelf, is the biggest attraction. According to an insert, they are going to come out with more figures, some of which have never been available as models or toys before - like the Zentradi Female Power Armor. That's the coolest thing about this game, having them actually make the figures, new toys for a series that has been "out of print" for decades now.
It is an expensive trip down memory lane though - the box cost $100 (I have really good friends) and the few expansion boxes, each containing only 4-6 models, cost around $40. that's quite the price tag when added to all the work you have put into assembling the darn thing.
Still, to revisit the childhood love of Robotech, I'll no doubt be buying more as they come out.
So here is a look at it, I haven't set it up or played it yet (for reasons that will become obvious soon).
First, the box itself, front and back-
Upon opening the box something jumps out at you - all the tiny little plastic figures you get to assemble-
You do get more than just the models of course, there are cards, dice and counters to go along with the rulebook-
In all I'm delighted to have the game, but it is not for the faint of heart. "Some assembly required" is an understatement. Now, all the work you put into it makes having it that much sweeter, but it's going to take a lot of weekends to get these guys together. Another problem is that you have to make your own terrain, if you want any, and you also have to make your own padding. The box looks big enough to hold the completed figures, but it has no foam padding of any kind - so you'll need to cut your own padding to protect your time investment, or put the competed figures in something else.
This is really a game for the Robotech nut/fanatic. I have a hard time seeing someone casually picking up this game. Even a Warhammer or Battletech player might have a hard time getting used to it (though there are some very detailed and intricate Warhammer 40k models I've seen, so they might take to it easiest). The time investment even before you play will be a turn-off to a lot of people. I haven't yet read all of the rules, well enough to comment on them at least, since you can't really play until you finish assembling the pieces. When (or if) I play I'll write a review of it.
Really though, playing is somewhat secondary. The joy of owning the models, of being able to (someday) display them on a shelf, is the biggest attraction. According to an insert, they are going to come out with more figures, some of which have never been available as models or toys before - like the Zentradi Female Power Armor. That's the coolest thing about this game, having them actually make the figures, new toys for a series that has been "out of print" for decades now.
It is an expensive trip down memory lane though - the box cost $100 (I have really good friends) and the few expansion boxes, each containing only 4-6 models, cost around $40. that's quite the price tag when added to all the work you have put into assembling the darn thing.
Still, to revisit the childhood love of Robotech, I'll no doubt be buying more as they come out.
Friday, December 26, 2014
The Homeless Nerd Reviews- The Hobbit trilogy
I'm not sure how to review this.
To say that it is too long, frequently too boring and ho-hum eye candy was something that was obvious when they announced making a short novel into an epic movie trilogy.
Sara helped me work it out - I wish I could get back the wasted 7 hours of my life watching these movies, and have only seen the two good hours of Martin Freeman as Bilbo.
To say that it is too long, frequently too boring and ho-hum eye candy was something that was obvious when they announced making a short novel into an epic movie trilogy.
Sara helped me work it out - I wish I could get back the wasted 7 hours of my life watching these movies, and have only seen the two good hours of Martin Freeman as Bilbo.
Monday, December 22, 2014
Someone Else's Christmas Thoughts ('cause they're better than my own)
This has been a terrible year. After starting by losing my Grandfather to cancer, to losing a High School friend and roommate to cancer, to my Aunt discovering she had cancer and my sweetheart's Grandfather dying from cancer - it has been rough.
Now, to help take the edge off things I like to read Cracked.com, it's a comedy website that also tends to have some really cool and thought-provoking articles. I'm going to link to one of them below, because I think it's just perfect for this time of the year - and it hit me deeper than I'm sure it will most other people:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-true-meaning-christmas-that-everyone-forgets/
Now, to help take the edge off things I like to read Cracked.com, it's a comedy website that also tends to have some really cool and thought-provoking articles. I'm going to link to one of them below, because I think it's just perfect for this time of the year - and it hit me deeper than I'm sure it will most other people:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-true-meaning-christmas-that-everyone-forgets/
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Thoughts on Pathfinder's Rise of the Runelords - Part 2
So, in my last post I described my experiences with the Rise of the Runelords campaign for Pathfinder. Seeings how it is 6 chapters long, I made it through the first 3 before my post seemed to be getting a little long as well. So here is my breakdown of the final half of the campaign.
I will try not to reveal anything too important (let me rephrase that, the meta-story really is not very important and the encounters are not that difficult), but spoilers ahead.
Chapter 4, Fortress of the Stone Giants.
After hearing that the town of Sandpoint, our sort of base of operations, is in danger of giant attack we rush back there. At this point we are around 10th or 11th level, I don't remember exactly which. The giant attack on Sandpoint is a very long choreographed affair. There is a list in the book of who does what on what rounds of combat, including an appearance by a young red dragon. Now, one spot of trouble here is scale. There is a map of Sanpoint in the book and it has boxes for where giants/the dragon attack on what turns. It does not have a grid. There is a scale, 1 inch is something like 50-100' but that is a little hard to measure on the twisty city streets unless you want to take a piece of string and more time then we cared to devote. So Aaron as GM had to make a lot of judgment calls on how long it took for us to get from one encounter to the next. In-between the giants the dragon is supposed to attack. He did, twice, then Sara and her Astral Construct (or summoned creature) "Mr. Punchy" killed it. Me and Aaron killed the giants with little trouble. In all, it was pretty easy.
So, the book says you can capture a giant alive and has a whole page on all this stuff one of them could tell you. We, being us, left a pile of giant corpses in our wake. There is no convenient book pointing to the next boss, but the giant warband's footprints were easy enough for me to backtrack. We skipped the random encounters along the way, at this point we all knew that an encounter of 6 CR 7 Hill Giants were no match at all for us 3 level 11 characters (plus Sara's summoned Mr. Punchy if needed, who was a brute). In the interest of keeping things short we just said we killed them all and got to where we needed.
Our destination is Jorgenfist Fortress. Now, this was meant to be a very impressive scene. A giant tower surrounded by giant walls and thousands of giant clans itching for a fight camped around it. How could we possibly take on that many giants, or even sneak pass them, oh noes!!! Except, this is one of those points where you need to calibrate your expectations for D&D (as The Alexandrian had a great post about). Now at 11/12th Level we had a lot of power at our disposal. I could alter my Astral Suit to give myself Climb, Flight or Burrow, and I didn't need to breathe. Sara's Mr. Punchy could also be summoned with Flight. Me and Aaron both had really good stealth skills, with bonuses in the 20s to 30s. Heck, if we could bottle-neck the giants into attacking only about 6 at a time we likely could have killed all however-many-thousands of them in an incredibly long melee (300-style, <grin>). I seriously considered trying to find a place we could fight them at and just start killing for the fun of it, to see if we could, but there is no detailed map so Aaron would have had to make a lot of judgment calls about just how many giants we'd need to fight at a time (and that would take many thousands of rolls to resolve). In the end we just decided to fly around the area and scout, and discovered some convenient caves. We found the dragon's old lair and plundered it (we had like 3 bags of holding and 3 handy haversacks between us at this point, so we could carry a lot of loot), there were 3 CR 7 wyverns (yawn), and another cave with 3 CR 6 Deathweb spiders (double yawn). I can't remember if we found the door to the tunnels from the spider cave to the fortress (after all, every fortress has a secret tunnel into it) or we might have just flown over the wall and started killing our way into the tower, it's been a while now.
Either way, once inside (there was no possible way we weren't getting inside) we start fighting our way through the tower. The thing is though, the tower is a red herring. While there is a fairly tough Mummy, who has some super-powerful scrolls for loot, there isn't anything important in the tower. The action is actually in the hole next to the tower.
So into the hole in the ground. We go down and find a friendly giant and her ghostly husband. She asks us to try not to kill any Stone Giants (all other types are fair game) since they have been under the influence of the evil boss. Okay, at this point I had put merciful on my soulblade so I could do non-lethal damage if needed (as well as ghost touch, pesky incorporeal things). There's not a whole lot of Stone Giants in the caves though; Hill Giant, Troll, Lamia, Oger Zombie, yes, Stone Giants not so much. Would have been a good design decision to put a few Stone Giants in key locations that the PCs have to get through but instead it was something that we mostly didn't have to worry about (we might have rescued a giant or two, that's it).
Finally we fight down another level into the ancient library that the boss has taken over. Some more random encounters that aren't too hard and finally we fight the boss. And, well, we kill the boss, duh. We find a convenient map pointing us to the next chapter and now we have a whole library of stuff to learn and even a cool clockwork librarian to help us research. So finally, for the first time and after half the campaign is over, we really start getting some good background information on what the hell is going on with the story.
After the boss' defeat, the evil super-boss Karzug mentioned that all of his servents were marked with a rune so that when they died he gained power to go free, and that was also mentioned in the last town as well. By this point we have killed a lot of Karzug's minions, but there is nothing anywhere about that actually meaning anything at all. While the threat sounds nice, there is no mechanical effect, no change in any of the encounters, no matter how many things you slaughter your way through. A very cool potential twist that was wasted. I honestly forgot about the marking thing until I read it in the book while refreshing my memory to write this post.
Chapter 5, Sins of the Saviors.
Only 2 more chapters to go. We've hit level 13, and are all feeling pretty good. We've got tons and tons of loot and plenty of powers. We're ready to take on the big bad super-boss and turn him into red paste. But first, back to Sandpoint. Apparently a sinkhole has taken out part of the town, and as its only capable defenders we get called in to check it out. Detour!
The sinkhole leads into the Catacombs of Wrath which we had cleared in the first chapter, but now new sections have opened up. Our boss here is The Scribbler, a resurrected priest who relies on mobility and stealth. He's got Dimension Door and Invisibility, Nondetection and Obscuring Mist. He also has a few CR 6 puppies. But again, we're level 13 now. Aaron has True Seeing (well, the psychic equivalent, Pierce The Veils) which sees through all that stuff, and I have Blindsight to 30', so I can pinpoint anything corporeal within that range (we've played Pathfinder before and lots of previous mages have cast illusions). It is mildly annoying but we kill him. Then we read his crazy scribblings and find out about The Runeforge, our next destination.
We head out to find the Runeforge, first we have to bypass 7 statues that hold the keys we need to enter. It is a DC 40 Disable Device to unlock the statue, which Aaron can do in his sleep at this point. We wake up a White Dragon, who actually does some damage to Sara - she didn't have any cold resistance (Aaron dodged it and I had resist 30 to any element, which I set to cold). Still, it is not too bad and we take the dragon out. Then we loot his treasure, 'cause dragons have great treasure.
Now into the Runeforge we go, in its own little pocket dimension. First, a few notes about the upcoming section:
The campaign has this alternate rule about "sin points" that the GM is supposed to give out based on each player's behavior. What sin each player is prone to is supposed to have some few not terribly important effects here in the Runeforge (like a +/- 2, woot) We ignored it. For one simple and good reson, it is stupid and useless. How and what sins a player is supposed to get is this vague, "do what you think feels right" thing that is useless for a reliable and intelligent measure of a character's nature. The book says:
You should give marks ["sin points" -me] for significant events in your game - don't bother marking minor events. If a PC loots a dead goblin, she shouldn't gain a point of Greed - such spoils of war are considered a normal part of the game. If, on the other hand, she gleefully steals the life savings of an NPC and spends all the money on herself, that should certainly earn her a point of Greed.
Wow, talk about stupid. Let me tackle the idiocy of that paragraph in a few bullet points:
⦁ If some activities are considered "accepted" then what are they? List them. The "looting a dead Goblin" is acceptable Greed, so what is acceptable Wrath or Lust or Glutany? Also, please include more than one, one is not much to go off of (takes 2 points to make a line).
⦁ There is an important and overlooked part in that example, "gleefully." Why someone does something, whether willingly or because they feel they have too, could be argued as a mitigating factor in whether or not to award sin points. That is not discussed anywhere in this section.
⦁ When the hell, exactly, built into the campaign, is a player supposed to be able to find an NPC, to rob and gleefully sell said NPCs life savings? If you are going to tie this into the behavior of the characters during the adventure then why didn't each major encounter/side quest have notes about how the players might gain sin points during that encounter?
⦁ Even better yet, why the hell, if this is supposed to be an important part of the game, didn't you write in some moral choices and spots to tempt players with? Why is this a tacked-on afterthought and not built into and throughout the campaign? Why does it now matter during the second-to-last chapter of the whole campaign? Little late now guys.
The book does helpfully list some sample sins, a whole 1 for each sin:
ENVY: Complaining loudly or frequently about another party member's good fortune, skill, or luck
GLUTTONY: Getting drunk multiple times during the game session
GREED: Robbing another PC or hiding a signficant amount of treasure for yourself
LUST: Eagerly acepting Shayless' solicitations under the pretense of hunting rats in her father's shop basement [the only damn event that is actually a part of the campaign, why aren't there more like this? -me]
PRIDE: Bragging about how nothing in the Foxglove Manor was scary [okay, well, if you made your saves then nothing in the Foxglove Manor was scary, it didn't effect you -me]
SLOTH: Encouraging the party to stop and rest for a day after only having one or two signficant encounters in that day [hell, that isn't sloth, that's being a Wizard -me]
WRATH: Eagerly torturing a prisoner [when would you have to do this, they all wrote everything down -me]
There's also a list of Virtues that can balance your Sins, which I will ignore since it is just as stupid to track this in the other direction.
The biggest problem with this is how subjective it is. My character killed a lot of monsters, not because I was Wrathful - I was a soldier, it was my job to keep my party alive. If a monster didn't attack me, I didn't attack it. If anybody had surrendered, I would have let them (but the book had most of them surrender with only a few HP left, and we tended to do more damage than that and kill them outright). I used non-lethal damage if someone told me to, otherwise I killed everything because they were monsters - not misguded civilized folk. You can't assign sin to a character without understanding how the player created that character and the circmstances of each encounter.
Second problem is one of scale. If "minor" sins are okay and "major" sins are bad then you really need a good dividing line between the two. Most of the examples given above are so over-the-top they sound like a Jim Carry routine. Maybe I've just been lucky since I play with characters like I associate with people in real life - stay away from the bad ones.
Third problem is how divorced from the campaign this is. If you want this to be important to the game, you need to build it into the encounters. Have a treasure that a player can get without the others knowing, force a choice between who to save and who to sacrifice, something, anything, that actually creates moments to bring this into the forefront. The way the section is written it sounds like the GM should quietly be racking up a tally of everything a player does wrong to punish them - and I don't want to play with an asshat GM like that. At least make it open, explain it is a part of the game and go over with each player what sins their character might be susceptable to, point out during an encounter if sin or virtue is involved, tell a player when they earn either kind of points.
Oh yeah, having a character creation system that actually said something about a character's psychological makeup might help too.
Anyways, we totally skipped this crap and didn't lose anything for it.
Another point is about loot, specifically spellbooks. There are a lot of Wizards and Sorcerers to loot in the Runeforge. They have spellbooks. The campaign book does not give any GP value for those books, and it says to assume that each Wiz/Sorc has the spells known and whatever number of other spells you want them to have. Only a few characters have actual concrete guidelines for what spells are in their books, and they tend to be "all spells of levels x to y in the Core Rulebook except for opposition schools." That's a lot of spells, hundreds, literally. At the end of this chapter I actually sat down and took the table of how much a spell cost to write into a spellbook for each level and used that to calculate the worth of each spellbook (I could have made a case for adding the cost to cast the spell in the first place, plus the cost to write it, but we made a ton of money as it was). Now, this may be nit-picking, but we didn't have a Wizard or Sorcerer in our group. We were all Psionic characters - so these spellbooks had no use to us except to sell them. Since the campaign book didn't give any idea for how much they were worth, I had to do it myself or have the GM handwave some value. Really annoying. Couldn't anyone at Paizo have sat down with the books like I did and come up with some general values/ value ranges for all those damn books? Really guys?
One last comment and I'll get back to the adventure. Again, we fought a lot of spallcasters in this section. We have also fought a fair number leading up to this, but this felt like the right place to comment on something. Spellcasters in Pathfinder are very, very strange. A high-level caster can wield godlike destructive powers, as long as they don't require a save DC. Most of the spell saves were pathetic, we would on average need a 6-10 or higher on the d20 to resist whatever someone cast at us. Now, again, we've all played Pathfinder and D&D for a while, so we know that getting our saves up was a priority, the moreso the higher level we got. But casters have very, pathetically few, ways to increase their DCs to compansate - so it is actually pretty easy for the defender to resist than it is for the caster to make it harder. It takes two prescious, expensive feats to get a +2 to your DCs for 1 school out of 8 in magic. It takes 4,000 GP for a cloak of resistance +2 that boosts every save at the same time. It's hard to be a magic-user.
Secondly, magic-users are actually not very threatening. Most mages have okay Initiative, but my character took the Improved Initiative feat and got a few more points from somewhere. So on average I managed to go first, and if not me then there was Aaron and Sara, who both had ranged at-will attacks. So it was not hard to hit a spellcaster on the first turn for some damage before they started casting. Once hit, it is a concentration check to cast a spell when injured: DC is 10 + spell level + damage dealt. Okay, so a concentration check is a d20 + caster level + main stat bonus (and maybe a few points from a feat or ability). That doesn't sound bad, until we start getting to the higher levels. When Aaron can hit a caster for 9d6 + 18 damage, that makes casting a level 0 spell impossible (we called him Gazer Beam, loved The Incredibles). Most casters buffed themselves, per their stat block, and maybe got off a spell that was resisted for half or ignored or worked around, and then we beat them to death. They actually tended to be the easiest to defeat, and showed how strangely balanced magic is in Pathfinder in general.
Alright, so enough side comments - back to the story (I'm sure you've been breathlessly waiting ;)
The Runeforge is broken into 7 parts, one for each sin. We have been using a very simple method for exploring everything so far - we go left. We keep going left until we can't, then we go back to the last right, and rinse-wash-repeat until we've explored everything on that level - then we go up, do it again to the top, then we go down to the bottom the same way.
First up was the section for Pride. This got kind of hard for a minute. In the entryway is a mirror of opposition, it makes an evil double of whoever looks at it, and since I was in the front (as the tank), it made a double of me. I'm kind of tough, as the tank, so this was a fairly good fight (but while I can soak up damage, it was Aaron and Sara who could dish out large servings of it). It was a cake-walk after that.
Second was the section of Wrath. It had an Iron Golem archer who was actually quite mean. The rest wasn't too bad though.
Third was Gluttony. More dead bad guys.
Fourth was Greed. The walls were covered in gems and gold, which we debated trying to pry off a few meters of - hey, magic items don't buy themselves - but we just killed monsters. There was a cool pool that recharged magic items, we charged up all the wands we had been carrying around and never used (okay, I think Sara banged me on the head with a healing wand a few times).
Fifth was Sloth, which apparently means dirty and icky. We turned loose the 'evil' water elemental to clean the place. The bad guy was off the ground in a throne supported by immovable rods - me and Mr. Punchy flew up to him while Aaron and Sara hit him with death-rays.
Sixth was Envy, most of which had been prevously destroyed.
Last, thank god, was Lust. Lots of saves against Charm, a poor guy who had been the succubi's plaything, and more dead monsters in our wake.
Finally, each sin area has had components for making a Runeforged Weapon. After defeating the animated statue we all took an item for a dip in the pool. This caused a moment's confusion. Our ultimate enemy is Karzug, and we "saw" him when he took over the corpse of the stone giant who had rallied all the giants to attack Sandpoint and stuff. We've also seen agents of Greed and Wrath previously. We actually got confused for a moment over which of the two he was. His actions seem more wrathful, but in fact he's greed. In part the confusion came from us playing spread out over months, in part it was a telling mark of how badly the campaign had mentioned its main villain throughout (well, and what a weaksauce villain he is too).
Chapter 6, Spires of Xin-Shalast.
This is it, the final chapter, the last conflict - 'once more into the breech' and all that. Thank god. The campaign was starting to feel long at this point.
Off to the partially-time/space-warped ancient city of evil in the mountains. But one does not simply walk to Xin-Shalast, there are the obligatory random encounters first (and here i don't use random in the sense of rolling them, but rather that they do not really mean anything to the meta-story). We found an old building that some dwarves went crazy cannibal in, fought a wendigo, and a tree. It was high in the mountains and very cold - I was glad to have always-on cold resist and not need to breath. Aaron and Sara both had items or abilities that let them adapt to any climate/environment - like I've said, we've played this game before. There are just some things that are essential for a high-level character, and we were level 15 at this point.
Xin-Shalast itself is a strange place. There are a few scripted encounters, and there are huge sections that the campaign book literally says to 'make up yourself' for some extra adventuring either before or after fighting Karzug. We really didn't want to wait, and didn't feel a burning desire to continue, so we skipped those parts. One encounter included some Leng Spiders. They did not immenietly attack, so Sara our grifter/talker rolls a natural 20 on her Diplomacy and the spiders seem quite friendly. Then she rolls about as good on a Sense Motive and relaized that they are lying and will never keep their word and intend to attack us later. So we killed them. So nice of the book to put in the only not immedietly dangerous group of monsters that are really just a fight after all. Like we hadn't wasted enough time.
Finally we entered the dreaded Pinnacle of Avarice, dum dum dum, and had to fight through the mini-bosses to Karzug. Said mini-bosses were pretty easy for the most part, like the majority of the campaign we never got below half health more than a handful of times. Which led us to the final battle, the culmination of about 40-50 hours of playing, the near-max level 18 players against the evil master of Greed, Karzug.
"We" killed him in 6 rounds.
It's kind of a funny story actually.
So the final room has Karzug, a CR 21 super-boss, and a CR 13 adult Blue Dragon, and a CR 17 Rune Giant, and two CR 14 Advanced Storm Giants. Lava flows around the room, making it a long run or flying to get to melee range - or even close range, it's a good-sized room. The range gives Karzug a chance to cast some spells.
It also gives Aaron a chance to manifest some psionic abilities.
Aaron has been a very strange character. Since he has been player and GM he's been in a hard place. He didn't want to have to put a lot of thought into his character, he's got his hands full running the monsters. He likes playing thieves, he's a sneaky-bastard like that. Since we were making an all-psionics group, he took the psionic rogue, the Cryptic. In a strange twist though, the crypic has the most damaging at-will ranged touch attack of any character I've ever seen in Pathfinder. From the beginning he played more like a mage, throwing the high damage around and having to stay at a distance since he was kind of squishy. Cryptics also learn a few psionic abilities. Most of those he took to buff the party or use in emergencies. He had a hard time finding abilities he liked though, so by the end he started getting a fairly diverse group of powers.
So combat begins. I'm thinking about how I'm going to fly over to the bad guy, Sara's warming up another Mr. Punchy. Karzug acts. He attacks us with a Meteor Swarm, not for that much damage. He stops time and buffs himself.
Then Aaron stops time. He teleports over to Karzug and thinks to himself, I've got this ability that controls people's minds. If I cast it at maximum power it can effect people and monsters, and hit all of the bad guy's minions. I'm sure they'll make their saves, save DCs are pretty easy, but if it takes out even just one or two guys that will make the fight easier - and make less for me to juggle. Why not try it? Since he's playing, he has us roll the saves for everybody.
I roll a 4. I show him the die, I'm so stunned by it. Sara rolls a 1. And I roll another 4. Sara rolls a 3.
All of the minions fail their saves.
Aaron tells them, "Sit! Stay!"
Now it's just Karzug and us.
There is a script for what Karzug and his allies are supposed to do. It has now been thrown out the window since he no longer has the support of his minions. Aaron is in about melee range and the three of us are coming. Aaron-the-GM decides Karzug will try to slow us down. He stopsw time (the last that he can) and casts a Wall Of Force and a Prismatic Wall to block me and Sara and Mr. Punchy (big room, needs 2 walls to block his side off). A logical move (we made his Meteor's 30-ish save DCs easily, anything else offensive we probably would have laughed at, I think my lowest save at that point was a 26). I'm getting ready to fly and carry Sara. Aaron fires off his Gazer Beam and hits Karzug for something like 11d6 + 38 damage - he's not casting any spells next round. We get to the wall, Karzug attacks Aaron in melee and does some pretty good damage. Aaron Gazer Beams him for, like, 10 times more damage - still no spells for mister greedy-pants. Then Aaron figures he can use a move action to command his mind-controlled dragon to just pick us up and fly us over the wall of force. More melee (poor Aaron is getting pretty beat up), another gazer beam. I manage to hit Karzug once (I think, I'm not sure if I did manage to hit him at all - Sara didn't) and Aaron finishes him off with a final blast of ridiculous damage.
Super-boss wizard dead, he cast like 4 spells.
Minions never attacked.
Me and Sara and Mr. Punchy pretty much could have eaten popcorn the whole time.
And the thief took him out.
After getting over the shock of it, we laughed our asses off.
Final Thoughts
Again, while the book had some ideas for follow-up adventures, we were all tired of Pathfinder by that point. It was time to stop and try a new system, which led to our current 13th Age campaign. Pathfinder in general has just been getting so big, so full of tracking GP and XP and stacking magic item bonuses that it's really become a headache. As Aaron once said, as we were shooting the breeze a while ago, "it's more fun to make characters than to play them." Which is too true. So much of building a character needs to be planned out, feat chains of prequisites and trying to synergize different bonuses into a cool gimmick - you pre-plan so much of your character that it takes away from actually playing it. I'm not saying that Pathfinder is a bad game by any means, but it does get a little tiring to work so hard at juggling numbers and progression when you're trying to fit it into having a life and doing other stuff. Again, not that planning any campaing is easy.
As for Rise of the Runelords, I would say that overall it was an "okay" campaign, in our experience. It takes way to long to get up to speed, and the over-arching meta-story gets lost in the weeds a lot, but it is not bad. Again, if you have plenty of time to tweak sections to your own player's tastes and needs, it would be a lot better then running it straight out of the book like we did - it's pretty basic. Likewise, role-playing relationships with people in Sandpoint, some stirring descriptions of the other cities and backstory would help; we didn't have a lot of time or desire to explore the cities or do a lot of the stuff that didn't directly move the adventure along. That is a part of why I rate the experience as just "okay," we could have been a little more involved ourselves. But also, if there were some side quests or NPC interactions that gave bonuses from learning the backstory or to accumulate sin/virtue points, it would have provided some more incentive to care. The murder-mystery was passable, but the haunts sucked big time; the haunt system in general is just worthless. If you have some skilled players who can optimize their characters, add a monster or two to every encounter.
Overall, I like making adventures - as much as a pain as it can be. We had a campaign going with rotating GMs and each new GM built on what the last did in a really fun, organic fashion. And we weren't afraid to play with the rules. We did a split adventure with our fighting characters in a gladiator ring and our talking characters in the stands (we all have several characters). We used the Ultimate Combat system for performance combat and said that each point we earned on the field distracted the people we were talking to in the stands, giving the talking characters bonuses on their social checks to gather information and influence the NPCs. It's one of my favorite adventures. We've also created plot twists based on things that have happened in each game. The original adventure featured a city that Aaron didn't like - so he destroyed it in the next adventure. I filled it with a Drow army. When our friend Matt mis-read a spell description (don't just read the blurb, always read the whole description) and drank some demon's blood I ended up giving him an evil twin recurring villain/comic relief. While that campaign took a lot of work to prep and run, it gave us a lot more fun since it grew with us. That's something that is hard if not impossible to replicate in a canned/pre-written campaign. In fact, that's why I generally don't run modules or pre-packaged campaigns. I like it when my players give me their character ideas and I can build a world and story around them. So that also factors into my less than enthusiastic reaction, my normal way of playing is much more engaged (with, of course, some exceptions - we've had plenty of quick and dirty adventures that were not high art).
Still, I don't regret the time we spent. It was fun to play with my friends. We did it, and just finishing it has its own satisfaction. If you've got 50 or so hours to kill and some good friends, you should try it too.
I will try not to reveal anything too important (let me rephrase that, the meta-story really is not very important and the encounters are not that difficult), but spoilers ahead.
Chapter 4, Fortress of the Stone Giants.
After hearing that the town of Sandpoint, our sort of base of operations, is in danger of giant attack we rush back there. At this point we are around 10th or 11th level, I don't remember exactly which. The giant attack on Sandpoint is a very long choreographed affair. There is a list in the book of who does what on what rounds of combat, including an appearance by a young red dragon. Now, one spot of trouble here is scale. There is a map of Sanpoint in the book and it has boxes for where giants/the dragon attack on what turns. It does not have a grid. There is a scale, 1 inch is something like 50-100' but that is a little hard to measure on the twisty city streets unless you want to take a piece of string and more time then we cared to devote. So Aaron as GM had to make a lot of judgment calls on how long it took for us to get from one encounter to the next. In-between the giants the dragon is supposed to attack. He did, twice, then Sara and her Astral Construct (or summoned creature) "Mr. Punchy" killed it. Me and Aaron killed the giants with little trouble. In all, it was pretty easy.
So, the book says you can capture a giant alive and has a whole page on all this stuff one of them could tell you. We, being us, left a pile of giant corpses in our wake. There is no convenient book pointing to the next boss, but the giant warband's footprints were easy enough for me to backtrack. We skipped the random encounters along the way, at this point we all knew that an encounter of 6 CR 7 Hill Giants were no match at all for us 3 level 11 characters (plus Sara's summoned Mr. Punchy if needed, who was a brute). In the interest of keeping things short we just said we killed them all and got to where we needed.
Our destination is Jorgenfist Fortress. Now, this was meant to be a very impressive scene. A giant tower surrounded by giant walls and thousands of giant clans itching for a fight camped around it. How could we possibly take on that many giants, or even sneak pass them, oh noes!!! Except, this is one of those points where you need to calibrate your expectations for D&D (as The Alexandrian had a great post about). Now at 11/12th Level we had a lot of power at our disposal. I could alter my Astral Suit to give myself Climb, Flight or Burrow, and I didn't need to breathe. Sara's Mr. Punchy could also be summoned with Flight. Me and Aaron both had really good stealth skills, with bonuses in the 20s to 30s. Heck, if we could bottle-neck the giants into attacking only about 6 at a time we likely could have killed all however-many-thousands of them in an incredibly long melee (300-style, <grin>). I seriously considered trying to find a place we could fight them at and just start killing for the fun of it, to see if we could, but there is no detailed map so Aaron would have had to make a lot of judgment calls about just how many giants we'd need to fight at a time (and that would take many thousands of rolls to resolve). In the end we just decided to fly around the area and scout, and discovered some convenient caves. We found the dragon's old lair and plundered it (we had like 3 bags of holding and 3 handy haversacks between us at this point, so we could carry a lot of loot), there were 3 CR 7 wyverns (yawn), and another cave with 3 CR 6 Deathweb spiders (double yawn). I can't remember if we found the door to the tunnels from the spider cave to the fortress (after all, every fortress has a secret tunnel into it) or we might have just flown over the wall and started killing our way into the tower, it's been a while now.
Either way, once inside (there was no possible way we weren't getting inside) we start fighting our way through the tower. The thing is though, the tower is a red herring. While there is a fairly tough Mummy, who has some super-powerful scrolls for loot, there isn't anything important in the tower. The action is actually in the hole next to the tower.
So into the hole in the ground. We go down and find a friendly giant and her ghostly husband. She asks us to try not to kill any Stone Giants (all other types are fair game) since they have been under the influence of the evil boss. Okay, at this point I had put merciful on my soulblade so I could do non-lethal damage if needed (as well as ghost touch, pesky incorporeal things). There's not a whole lot of Stone Giants in the caves though; Hill Giant, Troll, Lamia, Oger Zombie, yes, Stone Giants not so much. Would have been a good design decision to put a few Stone Giants in key locations that the PCs have to get through but instead it was something that we mostly didn't have to worry about (we might have rescued a giant or two, that's it).
Finally we fight down another level into the ancient library that the boss has taken over. Some more random encounters that aren't too hard and finally we fight the boss. And, well, we kill the boss, duh. We find a convenient map pointing us to the next chapter and now we have a whole library of stuff to learn and even a cool clockwork librarian to help us research. So finally, for the first time and after half the campaign is over, we really start getting some good background information on what the hell is going on with the story.
After the boss' defeat, the evil super-boss Karzug mentioned that all of his servents were marked with a rune so that when they died he gained power to go free, and that was also mentioned in the last town as well. By this point we have killed a lot of Karzug's minions, but there is nothing anywhere about that actually meaning anything at all. While the threat sounds nice, there is no mechanical effect, no change in any of the encounters, no matter how many things you slaughter your way through. A very cool potential twist that was wasted. I honestly forgot about the marking thing until I read it in the book while refreshing my memory to write this post.
Chapter 5, Sins of the Saviors.
Only 2 more chapters to go. We've hit level 13, and are all feeling pretty good. We've got tons and tons of loot and plenty of powers. We're ready to take on the big bad super-boss and turn him into red paste. But first, back to Sandpoint. Apparently a sinkhole has taken out part of the town, and as its only capable defenders we get called in to check it out. Detour!
The sinkhole leads into the Catacombs of Wrath which we had cleared in the first chapter, but now new sections have opened up. Our boss here is The Scribbler, a resurrected priest who relies on mobility and stealth. He's got Dimension Door and Invisibility, Nondetection and Obscuring Mist. He also has a few CR 6 puppies. But again, we're level 13 now. Aaron has True Seeing (well, the psychic equivalent, Pierce The Veils) which sees through all that stuff, and I have Blindsight to 30', so I can pinpoint anything corporeal within that range (we've played Pathfinder before and lots of previous mages have cast illusions). It is mildly annoying but we kill him. Then we read his crazy scribblings and find out about The Runeforge, our next destination.
We head out to find the Runeforge, first we have to bypass 7 statues that hold the keys we need to enter. It is a DC 40 Disable Device to unlock the statue, which Aaron can do in his sleep at this point. We wake up a White Dragon, who actually does some damage to Sara - she didn't have any cold resistance (Aaron dodged it and I had resist 30 to any element, which I set to cold). Still, it is not too bad and we take the dragon out. Then we loot his treasure, 'cause dragons have great treasure.
Now into the Runeforge we go, in its own little pocket dimension. First, a few notes about the upcoming section:
The campaign has this alternate rule about "sin points" that the GM is supposed to give out based on each player's behavior. What sin each player is prone to is supposed to have some few not terribly important effects here in the Runeforge (like a +/- 2, woot) We ignored it. For one simple and good reson, it is stupid and useless. How and what sins a player is supposed to get is this vague, "do what you think feels right" thing that is useless for a reliable and intelligent measure of a character's nature. The book says:
You should give marks ["sin points" -me] for significant events in your game - don't bother marking minor events. If a PC loots a dead goblin, she shouldn't gain a point of Greed - such spoils of war are considered a normal part of the game. If, on the other hand, she gleefully steals the life savings of an NPC and spends all the money on herself, that should certainly earn her a point of Greed.
Wow, talk about stupid. Let me tackle the idiocy of that paragraph in a few bullet points:
⦁ If some activities are considered "accepted" then what are they? List them. The "looting a dead Goblin" is acceptable Greed, so what is acceptable Wrath or Lust or Glutany? Also, please include more than one, one is not much to go off of (takes 2 points to make a line).
⦁ There is an important and overlooked part in that example, "gleefully." Why someone does something, whether willingly or because they feel they have too, could be argued as a mitigating factor in whether or not to award sin points. That is not discussed anywhere in this section.
⦁ When the hell, exactly, built into the campaign, is a player supposed to be able to find an NPC, to rob and gleefully sell said NPCs life savings? If you are going to tie this into the behavior of the characters during the adventure then why didn't each major encounter/side quest have notes about how the players might gain sin points during that encounter?
⦁ Even better yet, why the hell, if this is supposed to be an important part of the game, didn't you write in some moral choices and spots to tempt players with? Why is this a tacked-on afterthought and not built into and throughout the campaign? Why does it now matter during the second-to-last chapter of the whole campaign? Little late now guys.
The book does helpfully list some sample sins, a whole 1 for each sin:
ENVY: Complaining loudly or frequently about another party member's good fortune, skill, or luck
GLUTTONY: Getting drunk multiple times during the game session
GREED: Robbing another PC or hiding a signficant amount of treasure for yourself
LUST: Eagerly acepting Shayless' solicitations under the pretense of hunting rats in her father's shop basement [the only damn event that is actually a part of the campaign, why aren't there more like this? -me]
PRIDE: Bragging about how nothing in the Foxglove Manor was scary [okay, well, if you made your saves then nothing in the Foxglove Manor was scary, it didn't effect you -me]
SLOTH: Encouraging the party to stop and rest for a day after only having one or two signficant encounters in that day [hell, that isn't sloth, that's being a Wizard -me]
WRATH: Eagerly torturing a prisoner [when would you have to do this, they all wrote everything down -me]
There's also a list of Virtues that can balance your Sins, which I will ignore since it is just as stupid to track this in the other direction.
The biggest problem with this is how subjective it is. My character killed a lot of monsters, not because I was Wrathful - I was a soldier, it was my job to keep my party alive. If a monster didn't attack me, I didn't attack it. If anybody had surrendered, I would have let them (but the book had most of them surrender with only a few HP left, and we tended to do more damage than that and kill them outright). I used non-lethal damage if someone told me to, otherwise I killed everything because they were monsters - not misguded civilized folk. You can't assign sin to a character without understanding how the player created that character and the circmstances of each encounter.
Second problem is one of scale. If "minor" sins are okay and "major" sins are bad then you really need a good dividing line between the two. Most of the examples given above are so over-the-top they sound like a Jim Carry routine. Maybe I've just been lucky since I play with characters like I associate with people in real life - stay away from the bad ones.
Third problem is how divorced from the campaign this is. If you want this to be important to the game, you need to build it into the encounters. Have a treasure that a player can get without the others knowing, force a choice between who to save and who to sacrifice, something, anything, that actually creates moments to bring this into the forefront. The way the section is written it sounds like the GM should quietly be racking up a tally of everything a player does wrong to punish them - and I don't want to play with an asshat GM like that. At least make it open, explain it is a part of the game and go over with each player what sins their character might be susceptable to, point out during an encounter if sin or virtue is involved, tell a player when they earn either kind of points.
Oh yeah, having a character creation system that actually said something about a character's psychological makeup might help too.
Anyways, we totally skipped this crap and didn't lose anything for it.
Another point is about loot, specifically spellbooks. There are a lot of Wizards and Sorcerers to loot in the Runeforge. They have spellbooks. The campaign book does not give any GP value for those books, and it says to assume that each Wiz/Sorc has the spells known and whatever number of other spells you want them to have. Only a few characters have actual concrete guidelines for what spells are in their books, and they tend to be "all spells of levels x to y in the Core Rulebook except for opposition schools." That's a lot of spells, hundreds, literally. At the end of this chapter I actually sat down and took the table of how much a spell cost to write into a spellbook for each level and used that to calculate the worth of each spellbook (I could have made a case for adding the cost to cast the spell in the first place, plus the cost to write it, but we made a ton of money as it was). Now, this may be nit-picking, but we didn't have a Wizard or Sorcerer in our group. We were all Psionic characters - so these spellbooks had no use to us except to sell them. Since the campaign book didn't give any idea for how much they were worth, I had to do it myself or have the GM handwave some value. Really annoying. Couldn't anyone at Paizo have sat down with the books like I did and come up with some general values/ value ranges for all those damn books? Really guys?
One last comment and I'll get back to the adventure. Again, we fought a lot of spallcasters in this section. We have also fought a fair number leading up to this, but this felt like the right place to comment on something. Spellcasters in Pathfinder are very, very strange. A high-level caster can wield godlike destructive powers, as long as they don't require a save DC. Most of the spell saves were pathetic, we would on average need a 6-10 or higher on the d20 to resist whatever someone cast at us. Now, again, we've all played Pathfinder and D&D for a while, so we know that getting our saves up was a priority, the moreso the higher level we got. But casters have very, pathetically few, ways to increase their DCs to compansate - so it is actually pretty easy for the defender to resist than it is for the caster to make it harder. It takes two prescious, expensive feats to get a +2 to your DCs for 1 school out of 8 in magic. It takes 4,000 GP for a cloak of resistance +2 that boosts every save at the same time. It's hard to be a magic-user.
Secondly, magic-users are actually not very threatening. Most mages have okay Initiative, but my character took the Improved Initiative feat and got a few more points from somewhere. So on average I managed to go first, and if not me then there was Aaron and Sara, who both had ranged at-will attacks. So it was not hard to hit a spellcaster on the first turn for some damage before they started casting. Once hit, it is a concentration check to cast a spell when injured: DC is 10 + spell level + damage dealt. Okay, so a concentration check is a d20 + caster level + main stat bonus (and maybe a few points from a feat or ability). That doesn't sound bad, until we start getting to the higher levels. When Aaron can hit a caster for 9d6 + 18 damage, that makes casting a level 0 spell impossible (we called him Gazer Beam, loved The Incredibles). Most casters buffed themselves, per their stat block, and maybe got off a spell that was resisted for half or ignored or worked around, and then we beat them to death. They actually tended to be the easiest to defeat, and showed how strangely balanced magic is in Pathfinder in general.
Alright, so enough side comments - back to the story (I'm sure you've been breathlessly waiting ;)
The Runeforge is broken into 7 parts, one for each sin. We have been using a very simple method for exploring everything so far - we go left. We keep going left until we can't, then we go back to the last right, and rinse-wash-repeat until we've explored everything on that level - then we go up, do it again to the top, then we go down to the bottom the same way.
First up was the section for Pride. This got kind of hard for a minute. In the entryway is a mirror of opposition, it makes an evil double of whoever looks at it, and since I was in the front (as the tank), it made a double of me. I'm kind of tough, as the tank, so this was a fairly good fight (but while I can soak up damage, it was Aaron and Sara who could dish out large servings of it). It was a cake-walk after that.
Second was the section of Wrath. It had an Iron Golem archer who was actually quite mean. The rest wasn't too bad though.
Third was Gluttony. More dead bad guys.
Fourth was Greed. The walls were covered in gems and gold, which we debated trying to pry off a few meters of - hey, magic items don't buy themselves - but we just killed monsters. There was a cool pool that recharged magic items, we charged up all the wands we had been carrying around and never used (okay, I think Sara banged me on the head with a healing wand a few times).
Fifth was Sloth, which apparently means dirty and icky. We turned loose the 'evil' water elemental to clean the place. The bad guy was off the ground in a throne supported by immovable rods - me and Mr. Punchy flew up to him while Aaron and Sara hit him with death-rays.
Sixth was Envy, most of which had been prevously destroyed.
Last, thank god, was Lust. Lots of saves against Charm, a poor guy who had been the succubi's plaything, and more dead monsters in our wake.
Finally, each sin area has had components for making a Runeforged Weapon. After defeating the animated statue we all took an item for a dip in the pool. This caused a moment's confusion. Our ultimate enemy is Karzug, and we "saw" him when he took over the corpse of the stone giant who had rallied all the giants to attack Sandpoint and stuff. We've also seen agents of Greed and Wrath previously. We actually got confused for a moment over which of the two he was. His actions seem more wrathful, but in fact he's greed. In part the confusion came from us playing spread out over months, in part it was a telling mark of how badly the campaign had mentioned its main villain throughout (well, and what a weaksauce villain he is too).
Chapter 6, Spires of Xin-Shalast.
This is it, the final chapter, the last conflict - 'once more into the breech' and all that. Thank god. The campaign was starting to feel long at this point.
Off to the partially-time/space-warped ancient city of evil in the mountains. But one does not simply walk to Xin-Shalast, there are the obligatory random encounters first (and here i don't use random in the sense of rolling them, but rather that they do not really mean anything to the meta-story). We found an old building that some dwarves went crazy cannibal in, fought a wendigo, and a tree. It was high in the mountains and very cold - I was glad to have always-on cold resist and not need to breath. Aaron and Sara both had items or abilities that let them adapt to any climate/environment - like I've said, we've played this game before. There are just some things that are essential for a high-level character, and we were level 15 at this point.
Xin-Shalast itself is a strange place. There are a few scripted encounters, and there are huge sections that the campaign book literally says to 'make up yourself' for some extra adventuring either before or after fighting Karzug. We really didn't want to wait, and didn't feel a burning desire to continue, so we skipped those parts. One encounter included some Leng Spiders. They did not immenietly attack, so Sara our grifter/talker rolls a natural 20 on her Diplomacy and the spiders seem quite friendly. Then she rolls about as good on a Sense Motive and relaized that they are lying and will never keep their word and intend to attack us later. So we killed them. So nice of the book to put in the only not immedietly dangerous group of monsters that are really just a fight after all. Like we hadn't wasted enough time.
Finally we entered the dreaded Pinnacle of Avarice, dum dum dum, and had to fight through the mini-bosses to Karzug. Said mini-bosses were pretty easy for the most part, like the majority of the campaign we never got below half health more than a handful of times. Which led us to the final battle, the culmination of about 40-50 hours of playing, the near-max level 18 players against the evil master of Greed, Karzug.
"We" killed him in 6 rounds.
It's kind of a funny story actually.
So the final room has Karzug, a CR 21 super-boss, and a CR 13 adult Blue Dragon, and a CR 17 Rune Giant, and two CR 14 Advanced Storm Giants. Lava flows around the room, making it a long run or flying to get to melee range - or even close range, it's a good-sized room. The range gives Karzug a chance to cast some spells.
It also gives Aaron a chance to manifest some psionic abilities.
Aaron has been a very strange character. Since he has been player and GM he's been in a hard place. He didn't want to have to put a lot of thought into his character, he's got his hands full running the monsters. He likes playing thieves, he's a sneaky-bastard like that. Since we were making an all-psionics group, he took the psionic rogue, the Cryptic. In a strange twist though, the crypic has the most damaging at-will ranged touch attack of any character I've ever seen in Pathfinder. From the beginning he played more like a mage, throwing the high damage around and having to stay at a distance since he was kind of squishy. Cryptics also learn a few psionic abilities. Most of those he took to buff the party or use in emergencies. He had a hard time finding abilities he liked though, so by the end he started getting a fairly diverse group of powers.
So combat begins. I'm thinking about how I'm going to fly over to the bad guy, Sara's warming up another Mr. Punchy. Karzug acts. He attacks us with a Meteor Swarm, not for that much damage. He stops time and buffs himself.
Then Aaron stops time. He teleports over to Karzug and thinks to himself, I've got this ability that controls people's minds. If I cast it at maximum power it can effect people and monsters, and hit all of the bad guy's minions. I'm sure they'll make their saves, save DCs are pretty easy, but if it takes out even just one or two guys that will make the fight easier - and make less for me to juggle. Why not try it? Since he's playing, he has us roll the saves for everybody.
I roll a 4. I show him the die, I'm so stunned by it. Sara rolls a 1. And I roll another 4. Sara rolls a 3.
All of the minions fail their saves.
Aaron tells them, "Sit! Stay!"
Now it's just Karzug and us.
There is a script for what Karzug and his allies are supposed to do. It has now been thrown out the window since he no longer has the support of his minions. Aaron is in about melee range and the three of us are coming. Aaron-the-GM decides Karzug will try to slow us down. He stopsw time (the last that he can) and casts a Wall Of Force and a Prismatic Wall to block me and Sara and Mr. Punchy (big room, needs 2 walls to block his side off). A logical move (we made his Meteor's 30-ish save DCs easily, anything else offensive we probably would have laughed at, I think my lowest save at that point was a 26). I'm getting ready to fly and carry Sara. Aaron fires off his Gazer Beam and hits Karzug for something like 11d6 + 38 damage - he's not casting any spells next round. We get to the wall, Karzug attacks Aaron in melee and does some pretty good damage. Aaron Gazer Beams him for, like, 10 times more damage - still no spells for mister greedy-pants. Then Aaron figures he can use a move action to command his mind-controlled dragon to just pick us up and fly us over the wall of force. More melee (poor Aaron is getting pretty beat up), another gazer beam. I manage to hit Karzug once (I think, I'm not sure if I did manage to hit him at all - Sara didn't) and Aaron finishes him off with a final blast of ridiculous damage.
Super-boss wizard dead, he cast like 4 spells.
Minions never attacked.
Me and Sara and Mr. Punchy pretty much could have eaten popcorn the whole time.
And the thief took him out.
After getting over the shock of it, we laughed our asses off.
Final Thoughts
Again, while the book had some ideas for follow-up adventures, we were all tired of Pathfinder by that point. It was time to stop and try a new system, which led to our current 13th Age campaign. Pathfinder in general has just been getting so big, so full of tracking GP and XP and stacking magic item bonuses that it's really become a headache. As Aaron once said, as we were shooting the breeze a while ago, "it's more fun to make characters than to play them." Which is too true. So much of building a character needs to be planned out, feat chains of prequisites and trying to synergize different bonuses into a cool gimmick - you pre-plan so much of your character that it takes away from actually playing it. I'm not saying that Pathfinder is a bad game by any means, but it does get a little tiring to work so hard at juggling numbers and progression when you're trying to fit it into having a life and doing other stuff. Again, not that planning any campaing is easy.
As for Rise of the Runelords, I would say that overall it was an "okay" campaign, in our experience. It takes way to long to get up to speed, and the over-arching meta-story gets lost in the weeds a lot, but it is not bad. Again, if you have plenty of time to tweak sections to your own player's tastes and needs, it would be a lot better then running it straight out of the book like we did - it's pretty basic. Likewise, role-playing relationships with people in Sandpoint, some stirring descriptions of the other cities and backstory would help; we didn't have a lot of time or desire to explore the cities or do a lot of the stuff that didn't directly move the adventure along. That is a part of why I rate the experience as just "okay," we could have been a little more involved ourselves. But also, if there were some side quests or NPC interactions that gave bonuses from learning the backstory or to accumulate sin/virtue points, it would have provided some more incentive to care. The murder-mystery was passable, but the haunts sucked big time; the haunt system in general is just worthless. If you have some skilled players who can optimize their characters, add a monster or two to every encounter.
Overall, I like making adventures - as much as a pain as it can be. We had a campaign going with rotating GMs and each new GM built on what the last did in a really fun, organic fashion. And we weren't afraid to play with the rules. We did a split adventure with our fighting characters in a gladiator ring and our talking characters in the stands (we all have several characters). We used the Ultimate Combat system for performance combat and said that each point we earned on the field distracted the people we were talking to in the stands, giving the talking characters bonuses on their social checks to gather information and influence the NPCs. It's one of my favorite adventures. We've also created plot twists based on things that have happened in each game. The original adventure featured a city that Aaron didn't like - so he destroyed it in the next adventure. I filled it with a Drow army. When our friend Matt mis-read a spell description (don't just read the blurb, always read the whole description) and drank some demon's blood I ended up giving him an evil twin recurring villain/comic relief. While that campaign took a lot of work to prep and run, it gave us a lot more fun since it grew with us. That's something that is hard if not impossible to replicate in a canned/pre-written campaign. In fact, that's why I generally don't run modules or pre-packaged campaigns. I like it when my players give me their character ideas and I can build a world and story around them. So that also factors into my less than enthusiastic reaction, my normal way of playing is much more engaged (with, of course, some exceptions - we've had plenty of quick and dirty adventures that were not high art).
Still, I don't regret the time we spent. It was fun to play with my friends. We did it, and just finishing it has its own satisfaction. If you've got 50 or so hours to kill and some good friends, you should try it too.
Saturday, December 20, 2014
Thoughts on Pathfinder's Rise of the Runelords - Part 1
Well, it took 14 sessions and around 50 hours of play-time, but the three of us (we have a small group) finally finished the Rise of the Runelords campaign for Pathfinder a while ago. We played it by the book, from levels 1 to 18. We did do something unusual though in that we all played psionic classes from the Ultimate Psionics book. I thought I'd share my impressions, both about the campaign and the Ultimate Psionics rules. First, about the campaign in general.
I was an Aegis/Soulknife/Metaforge - which if you have not read Ultimate Psionics means that I created my own magic armor and weapon (a big hammer) from my mind. I was the tank. Sara played a Wilder, she could cast "spells" basically like a mage but she could also use a "wild surge" to increase her caster level above her class level; she was mostly a Sorcerer in Core Rulebook terms. Aaron was both the GM and played a Cryptic, who was at first glance a "magic"-using Rogue, but who turned out to be the highest damage-dealer, party-buffer and trap/secret-finder. The game was meant for 4 players, but the three of us had no problems at all.
Oh yeah, since I am going to be talking about my experiences with the campaign, spoilers (duh) - though I will try not to reveal anything too important. (and, honestly, I doubt it matters)
There are 6 major parts to the campaign.
Part 1, Burnt Offerings, starts with goblins attacking the city of Sandpoint. Even though I wasn't the GM (well, except for one section), I talked with Aaron about his take on running the campaign and I read over the book after we finished - which leads me to my first comment. While there is a lot of background information for the GM, it's not very clear on how much the players will discover, and what of that background is really useful. Before the first page for the players there is a full page about Nualia, the main boss for the first section, and while her backstory is cool-ish, little of it will actually be revealed to the players. This is a running issue for the whole game, in my opinion. Having a cool backstory is nice, but if the GM is the only one to hear it, it is pretty much wasted. Also, if it is not directly relevant to the progress of the story, it is also immaterial. If investigating this background stuff gave some sort of benefit to fighting a villain (perhaps by revealing a hidden weakness) or allowed the party to anticipate future events, then it would be helpful - but since the players don't even get any real clues of where to investigate there is not much to build on. I wish there had been a block for each villain with its motivation, goals and means to achieve them, and hooks/key things the players may be able to investigate or ways to explore the villain's background and how that may be useful. A clear bullet-point list instead of a page of rambling prose.
Also, thank god every NPC writes everything down and sends letters to each other. Just about every section ends with finding a letter or journal on the main bad guy that spells out where to go next and points towards the next villain. This is quite ham-handed, and one of the things I did not like in general about the campaign, and also Pathfinder as a game. Having to take people alive to interrogate them is a nice tactical and strategic challenge (-4 to hit if trying to go non-lethal, and grappling is hard if you are not a fighter class, or trying to grapple someone who is), and using divination magic to speak with a dead spirit or read the "aura" of an object or place gives the magic-users something to do besides toss fireballs. While these things exist in the game, they are sub-par choices; being good at grappling means taking at least 2 feats and a fighter class, which is a noticeable investment, while the -4 to hit really sucks at lower levels and divination spells are scarce for investigating. And for this investment you have to remember, the PCs are likely to be killing more people/monsters then they take alive, so strategically speaking building your character this way will possibly hurt more than help (depending on your campaign style of course). The game kind of relies on this ham-fisted approach because there are so few mechanical options for doing anything else - and you have to pre-plan and build your character to be good at non-lethal combat. It makes me like the Brawler class from the Advanced Class Guide (may talk about that book somewhere down the road), the Brawler has an ability where they can temporarily gain a combat feat, so something like Improved Grappling, but only 1/day (up to like 3-5/day max). This at least gives them some of that tactical flexibility to use when needed instead of having to pre-plan everything. Would be nice if spellcasters had a similar way to dynamically generate a needed effect, like a speak with dead, instead of having to wake up in the morning and think "hey, I might need to talk to the bad guy we accidentally kill later today, better memorize that speak with dead spell." (and, of course, be a 5th level cleric - the only ones with that spell, guess no wizards ever tried to talk to the Great Majority) This is a general complaint about the rigidity of character creation, but even more rules lite systems like OD&D have the problem of how to adjudicate taking someone alive (not sure when the grappling rules were added, think it was in 2nd Ed, and if I remember right it was a horrible kludge) or what to do if you accidentally jogged someone's memory too hard.
Anyways, back to the campaign. The goblins are a sort of comedy relief with fangs, and their attack is kind of entertaining while also being fairly dangerous for 1st level characters. There are some random encounters after that, then the next big encounter with the assault on the glassworks. The final boss there, a monk 2/rogue 2, is a pretty good fight. The last two locations are the Catacombs of Wrath (which kind of bug me, the main villain at the end is Karzoug, who is a master of Greed - but throughout the game we only see Wrath, with Greed near the end, wish they would have focused on just Greed or more evenly included all the sins) and the goblin fortress of Thistletop. None of these locations are very memorable, or very difficult, and there is almost no loot until the final enemies at Thistletop, so when you hit level 2 you are likely to be under the "recommended adventurer wealth" until you finish the goblins and hit level 3 - after second chapter, there is plenty of money, our 3 person party ended with level 20 total wealth at level 18.
One thing we did was ignore XP and just level up when the campaign said the PCs should be whatever level. This worked out just fine, really I think more and more that counting XP is an exercise in tedium and the party should just level up whenever they feel like it and the GM is ready to up the monsters/challenges.
Another side note is about accessories. You really need to have Monster Manuals 1 and 2 (I think there might have been a few from 3, not sure) since not all the monsters are described in the book. Also, we got the hard-back book with the complete campaign, not sure what differences there are from the six soft-back books originally published. And if you got the "pawns" collection of cardboard figures for the campaign, also get the pawns for Monster Manuals 1 and 2 as not all monsters are in the campaign collection (or, like we did, just make a cloud giant substitute for anything).
At the end of Chapter 1 the book says:
Relatively little involving the metaplot of Rise of the Runelords occurs during the course of "Burnt Offerings." Although the chapter's events are closely tied to Karzug's awakening, and certain characters in the adventure have ties to characters whom the PCs are destined to meet later in the campaign, the adventure's primary purpose is to introduce them to their new home of Sandpoint and to instill in them a desire to protect it and its citizens.
I have several problems with this goal. First, my character had no connection to Sandpoint and did not give one good damn about it. Playing the adventure did not instill any desire in me to protect the town or call it home. I saved Sandpoint because it gave me XP, and it was scheduled in the campaign. I think it is generally a bad idea to try to make your characters care about anything. Unless you know your players very well, you don't know what they will actually bond with. And, why should they like the town? What is there about it that is so much more likable than any other town? Throughout the campaign the players are going to go to several towns, and even long-lost cities, so why care about this one little hamlet? Mechanically, whether a player likes the town or not has no effect on their abilities or options.
Second, if you have a metaplot, for God's sake kick it off early and refer to it often - otherwise, as with this campaign, by the time you actually get to the meat of the metaplot your players may feel like they have been wasting time chasing down random side quests. In media res, "in the middle of action," is the old writing advise- if you have a slow start you make it that much harder for your players to emotionally invest in the crux of the story - worse, you might mislead them into thinking they are playing a different type of game and have them miss options and plot points they should be working on. Knowing the metaplot means you know why you are doing each individual step, how this current boss is going to get you to the final boss, and thus you feel like you are accomplishing something with each step. RoR did not do a good job of creating that feeling. We played the whole first chapter in 2 quick settings, and honestly we could have just started the second chapter at level 3 and not missed anything important (or still better, skipped to the 3rd chapter).
Having saved Sandpoint from goblins, we kick off Chapter 2, The Skinsaw Murders.
This was my least favorite chapter, and Aaron the GM disliked one part of it so much that I had to step in and GM a section for him. It begins with a serial killer known as the Skinsaw Man taking an interest in one of the PCs, in this case our only female player, Sara. This, I guess, is supposed to be a cool departure from the typical "kill the monsters and take their treasure" paradigm that the rest of the campaign will follow. Instead the players get to investigate a murder mystery. Again though, Pathfinder itself has no real structure or rules for investigating a murder, so we get another series of ham-fisted clues and rambling role-playing sessions that just feel slow. Also, again there is no clear link to the metaplot, so all this feels like a pointless side quest (which kind of fixes itself at the end with the obligatory letter to the next villain).
I will say though, this section had an amusing accident. My character was a tank, and a backup thief (he was designed for a different campaign where we didn't have a thief, so Aaron's Cryptic ended up taking over the thief duties and negated some of my character's concept, which was no big deal). My race was the Forgeborn from Ultimate Psionics, and there was a mention of how the race tended to be interested in history. Now, as a fighter-type I got pretty good skill points, 4 each level, and my Int was a 14 for 2 more points each level. So I made Disable Device, Perception, Stealth and Survival key skills that I always leveld up. I also put a random point into a few skills here and there, and somehow I ended up making Knowledge: History one of the skills I always leveled up. As the tank that seemed a bit of an odd skill, but I thought it added some interesting flavor to my character. Well, darn if it didn't turn out to be useful after all in investigating some of the historical bits throughout the campaign. I actually made the DC 25 check to identify the Sihedron Rune at level 3! (not much I know, but you take what success you can get)
In our "mystery" you wander around and investigate in the town and the neighboring farms. One thing happened here that I can kind of clearly remember, but not exactly place. Since this was a mystery we were looking around at everything, so I was asking Aaron about the description of, I think it was, an insane asylum. He read me the incredibly long block of flowery-prose and totally non-helpful description. I got a little miffed since I was just looking for some practical details about the place, not some Steinbeck turtle-crossing-the-road detail on non-important things, to which Aaron replied, "I didn't write this shit." It was something that we would hear time and time again. Reading a lot of the descriptions in the book is quite tedious, they put way more detail into it than we needed - we were not looking for a novel, we wanted an adventure. More nouns (things we could interact with) and less adjectives (since for the most part we didn't care about what things were like, just what they were). Also there were some times, and its been long enough I can't remember any specifics, when an NPC would do something stupid, or we would comment on the convenience of finding yet another letter to another bad guy in a faraway place, that would elicit once again the refrain of, "I didn't write this shit." Which was totally true, Aaron is normally very good about describing what's important and keeping the action going logically - he was deliberately trying to run this one straight out of the book, and he works regular overtime so he didn't have the luxury of reading it all and then re-writing it to his tastes. But it was funny to hear each time he said it.
So after wading through a mountain of random details and events you finally put together that the evil Skinsaw Man is actually Aldern Foxglove, an NPC you met and saved in Chapter 1, oh noes!!!! Actually, whatever, it really doesn't mean anything at all - the meeting with Foxglove was to go boar hunting after the goblin attack. The book says that Foxglove is a "charming character" and can be used to "establish details about the characters" like where they grew up and totally random crap like that. It does not mention that he is going to become a major enemy and so you should prepare the ground ahead of time. Also the PCs never see him again. There's a really bad lack foreshadowing for the GM in the book to make him be an effective villain. But at least now knowing who you're hunting means traveling to the haunted Foxglove Manor. Dum dum dum (that's supposed to be dramatic music).
This is the section that Aaron didn't want to GM. I don't blame him, since I did. It is, in a word, stupid. The Foxglove family and the haunted manor have an incredibly long and detailed backstory going back about 90 years and 3 generations. You do manage to learn all this backstory by exploring the manor and dealing with the haunts. Haunts were introduced in the GameMastery Guide, and they are basically traps. But they can't be disabled like regular traps, instead you have to make one or more saving throws to resist their effects. Now here's a problem, a saving throw is a passive effect. You cannot really "role-play" your saving throws or strategically build your character to be good at them (there are a few feats and traits, but a miniscule number compared to the non-saving throw feats/abilities). So making a saving throw does not feel like you did something clever, it feels like you got lucky. Making 30 saving throws (one for each room) feels like a chore. The only good thing about the haunts is that they pull you back in time into the shoes of a previous inhabitant of the house, and show you ghostly images of what has happened in the past, revealing the tragic story of the Foxglove family (well, they did the way I played them, the GameMastery Guide is kind of vague on that and so is the RoR campaign book - it's a possible interpretation that if you succeed on the save you don't see anything, it doesn't effect you at all; since that would rob what little we had to learn, I described the haunt and said the save just meant it didn't get under your skin/force you to act strangely). Which, again, doesn't mean one damn thing. This family's story is not connected to the metaplot, so nothing you learn does you any good whatsoever. It is a long, rambling exposition dump for a different movie than the one you are watching.
During all this haunting we were also rolling pretty good and only had one failure. Aaron's character blew a save and contracted the evil "Vorel's Phage," a disease that did Cha damage and if it killed him would turn him into an undead horror. Except it has an onset time of 1 day and saves of 1/day, so it was very easy after we got done to bop over to a cleric and get a Remove Disease for him.
Our stay in the manor also ended very badly. Well, it was kind of funny, we did chuckle, but it was not much of a boss fight. See, in explorer fashion we went from the ground level to the top of the manor and then down. But at the top level we found the murdered wife of the boss monster. She has been turned into a Revenant. She is stuck staring at her reflection in a mirror, but if you cover the mirror she then wakes up and immediately seeks out her killer (we made the knowledge check for this one). So she ran down to the basement and the tunnels underneath and into the room where our killer was. They looked at each other, talked for a sec, and then she attacked. We decided to actually play this out. Sara took on the revenant, Iesha Foxglove, and I played her husband who murdered her, Aldern Foxglove. She butchered me in three rounds, revenants get a lot of hit and damage bonuses against the one who killed them. Then she died too. And it was over. Now, we played this out but remember, our characters did nothing at all to defeat the final boss, and did nothing except roll saves against the haunts of the manor, and really it felt like two hours of nothing. Some backstory, sure, which was moderately interesting, but not like we actually accomplished anything by our own will or determination or cleverness. We were observers, not players. I honestly wish we had skipped the whole chapter.
But it wasn't over yet. We watched Foxglove be defeated by his wife, and then found a letter he received from the next bad guy in the neighboring city. Turns out he was working with another group of bad guys, oh noes!!!! So we go to the next city, and we have the stupidest ambush ever. And I do mean stupidest ever, in the history of all adventures of all time, stupidest. See, Foxglove has a townhouse in the next city, Magnimar. A logical place to go visit and look for more clues. But in this city there is the bad guy Foxglove was working with, and he knows that some pesky adventurers might come looking around, so he has set an ambush. He has dispatched two "faceless stalkers" who can shapeshift, and they are currently mimicking Aldern and Iesha Foxglove. That's right, the two people we just watched fight and kill each other. So, the second we see the faceless stalkers we know that they are bad guys of some kind. I cannot grasp why on earth the adventure would have the bad guy make a shapeshifter look like the other bad guy that he is afraid the PCs will defeat. That is beyond stupid. Why not make them look like Long-Lost Aunt and Uncle Foxglove (or even just servants, or the missing sister and her husband?) and invite us in for poisoned tea? So, needless to say, they did not get the drop on us and we killed them quickly and easily.
From the townhouse we go to the sawmill and fight the stupid bad guy who left the stupid "ambush" and his minions (of course, thanks to a note in the townhouse). Kill all them and another journal points to the abandoned clock tower, there to kill the final boss and end the chapter. This was the first section where one of us was seriously hurt, me. After a trap in the clock tower (a falling bell) I was left with just 1 HP. However, the only reason I got so low on HP was because I did not stop once in the chapter to heal myself. I had been taking so little damage overall that I got cocky and didn't heal myself between fights like I should have. Still, I drank a few potions and made it out of the chapter alive.
I know that I'm picking on the campaign overall, but what someone does wrong is easier to see than what goes right (and, honestly, more informative on average) - however, in a campaign that overall was okay, this chapter was downright bad. Long and boring and stupid and just plain bad.
So we move on to Chapter 3, The Hook Mountain Massacre.
Oddly, we don't find a note to move on this time - instead one of the NPCs from the last chapter tells us to go check out the village of Turtleback Ferry, which has lost contact with the nearby Fort Rannick (which was actually a nice change). On our way to the fort we run into a lost animal companion and then a farmhouse of ogres who have captured the last of the "Black Arrows" Rangers who were manning the fort. Easy enough to kill and rescue. Now we get 3 companions, along with another one we met in a previous chapter, to help us retake the fort. Honestly, we didn't need them.
Retaking the fort is supposed to be a big tactical problem, how do you few adventurers take on the many more powerful and scary ogres? In actuality it was a cakewalk. It got off to a crazy start when our new ranger friends suggested we drive some Shocker Lizards out of a cave and into the fort. Those damn lizards, as CR 2 creatures, wiped out a half-dozen CR 8 Ogers in a single fight. But even without reptilian help, two-to-one odds of ogers were a breeze. We killed them easily and in droves.
Next we ended up going back to the city in time for a huge flood to awaken a sea monster. The sea monster is a CR 15 challenge, and we at this time are level 9. It is only supposed to attack for a few rounds and then swim away, but a lucky critical from me and another lucky critical from Aaron end up killing it. Then we go to the broken dam in a fairly pointless side quest. Apparently the dam is controlled by demons, something no one noticed or cared about. But one of the two demons powering the ancient device is dead and the other near death, thus causing the flood of the town. This is a whole page for something really stupid. The magic of the dam, created by evil sorcerers long ago, needs to inflict 1 negative level on some hapless creature in order to control the floodgates. But it is only 1 level, and on any creature, so you can simply cast a 1st level Summon Monster and feed it to the device. That's not exactly a big problem. Station a 1st level Wizard or Druid up here, or heck, for like 500 GP you can make an item that will summon a 1st level monster 1/day and keep a steady supply. The book sort of seems to make this a big deal but it really isn't, and how the hell has the town survived all this time with no clue that its fate was controlled by a demon-powered device?
A few more side quests in the forest and we end up in the cave of some giants, whom we kill with little trouble. Honestly, most of the fights in the campaign ended up being relatively easy, despite there being three of us instead of four. After taking out the boss a convenient letter warns us that Sandpoint may be in danger (again). Apparently Sandpoint in Rise of the Runelords is like Tristram in Diablo - that annoying city that is always being attacked.
This finishes the first half of the campaign.
Up to this point we were meeting pretty infrequently, maybe just once a month or so. So this first half took a long time to finish. Given that we're trying to stop the rise of the runelords, there have so far just been some dribs and drabs of hints as to who exactly the runelords are and how exactly they are rising (also, it will turn out to be only a single runelord rising, not plural). Most of the fights have been pretty easy, and only my own stupidity at not drinking some of the half-dozen healing potions I always carried brought me to a critically low level (throughout the campaign I rarely got below half)(no, wait, there was the lucky critical by the x4 scythe that did a good number on my health in the bell tower). Really, while the total experience had not been that bad, there had not been anything more exciting or engaging than the ad hoc adventures we have come up with on our own (in fact, during our own adventures we've tried to push things and make up our own non-combat mechanics to broaden our storylines). The attempt at some "non-combat role-playing" with the murder mystery and haunted house really fell flat. They were not very engaging. And the slow drag of metaplot has made it unclear on who exactly the bad guy is and how we're supposed to stop him/it/them - or, honestly, give a damn whether they rise or continue sleeping/napping/clipping their toenails/whatever they are doing.
I was an Aegis/Soulknife/Metaforge - which if you have not read Ultimate Psionics means that I created my own magic armor and weapon (a big hammer) from my mind. I was the tank. Sara played a Wilder, she could cast "spells" basically like a mage but she could also use a "wild surge" to increase her caster level above her class level; she was mostly a Sorcerer in Core Rulebook terms. Aaron was both the GM and played a Cryptic, who was at first glance a "magic"-using Rogue, but who turned out to be the highest damage-dealer, party-buffer and trap/secret-finder. The game was meant for 4 players, but the three of us had no problems at all.
Oh yeah, since I am going to be talking about my experiences with the campaign, spoilers (duh) - though I will try not to reveal anything too important. (and, honestly, I doubt it matters)
There are 6 major parts to the campaign.
Part 1, Burnt Offerings, starts with goblins attacking the city of Sandpoint. Even though I wasn't the GM (well, except for one section), I talked with Aaron about his take on running the campaign and I read over the book after we finished - which leads me to my first comment. While there is a lot of background information for the GM, it's not very clear on how much the players will discover, and what of that background is really useful. Before the first page for the players there is a full page about Nualia, the main boss for the first section, and while her backstory is cool-ish, little of it will actually be revealed to the players. This is a running issue for the whole game, in my opinion. Having a cool backstory is nice, but if the GM is the only one to hear it, it is pretty much wasted. Also, if it is not directly relevant to the progress of the story, it is also immaterial. If investigating this background stuff gave some sort of benefit to fighting a villain (perhaps by revealing a hidden weakness) or allowed the party to anticipate future events, then it would be helpful - but since the players don't even get any real clues of where to investigate there is not much to build on. I wish there had been a block for each villain with its motivation, goals and means to achieve them, and hooks/key things the players may be able to investigate or ways to explore the villain's background and how that may be useful. A clear bullet-point list instead of a page of rambling prose.
Also, thank god every NPC writes everything down and sends letters to each other. Just about every section ends with finding a letter or journal on the main bad guy that spells out where to go next and points towards the next villain. This is quite ham-handed, and one of the things I did not like in general about the campaign, and also Pathfinder as a game. Having to take people alive to interrogate them is a nice tactical and strategic challenge (-4 to hit if trying to go non-lethal, and grappling is hard if you are not a fighter class, or trying to grapple someone who is), and using divination magic to speak with a dead spirit or read the "aura" of an object or place gives the magic-users something to do besides toss fireballs. While these things exist in the game, they are sub-par choices; being good at grappling means taking at least 2 feats and a fighter class, which is a noticeable investment, while the -4 to hit really sucks at lower levels and divination spells are scarce for investigating. And for this investment you have to remember, the PCs are likely to be killing more people/monsters then they take alive, so strategically speaking building your character this way will possibly hurt more than help (depending on your campaign style of course). The game kind of relies on this ham-fisted approach because there are so few mechanical options for doing anything else - and you have to pre-plan and build your character to be good at non-lethal combat. It makes me like the Brawler class from the Advanced Class Guide (may talk about that book somewhere down the road), the Brawler has an ability where they can temporarily gain a combat feat, so something like Improved Grappling, but only 1/day (up to like 3-5/day max). This at least gives them some of that tactical flexibility to use when needed instead of having to pre-plan everything. Would be nice if spellcasters had a similar way to dynamically generate a needed effect, like a speak with dead, instead of having to wake up in the morning and think "hey, I might need to talk to the bad guy we accidentally kill later today, better memorize that speak with dead spell." (and, of course, be a 5th level cleric - the only ones with that spell, guess no wizards ever tried to talk to the Great Majority) This is a general complaint about the rigidity of character creation, but even more rules lite systems like OD&D have the problem of how to adjudicate taking someone alive (not sure when the grappling rules were added, think it was in 2nd Ed, and if I remember right it was a horrible kludge) or what to do if you accidentally jogged someone's memory too hard.
Anyways, back to the campaign. The goblins are a sort of comedy relief with fangs, and their attack is kind of entertaining while also being fairly dangerous for 1st level characters. There are some random encounters after that, then the next big encounter with the assault on the glassworks. The final boss there, a monk 2/rogue 2, is a pretty good fight. The last two locations are the Catacombs of Wrath (which kind of bug me, the main villain at the end is Karzoug, who is a master of Greed - but throughout the game we only see Wrath, with Greed near the end, wish they would have focused on just Greed or more evenly included all the sins) and the goblin fortress of Thistletop. None of these locations are very memorable, or very difficult, and there is almost no loot until the final enemies at Thistletop, so when you hit level 2 you are likely to be under the "recommended adventurer wealth" until you finish the goblins and hit level 3 - after second chapter, there is plenty of money, our 3 person party ended with level 20 total wealth at level 18.
One thing we did was ignore XP and just level up when the campaign said the PCs should be whatever level. This worked out just fine, really I think more and more that counting XP is an exercise in tedium and the party should just level up whenever they feel like it and the GM is ready to up the monsters/challenges.
Another side note is about accessories. You really need to have Monster Manuals 1 and 2 (I think there might have been a few from 3, not sure) since not all the monsters are described in the book. Also, we got the hard-back book with the complete campaign, not sure what differences there are from the six soft-back books originally published. And if you got the "pawns" collection of cardboard figures for the campaign, also get the pawns for Monster Manuals 1 and 2 as not all monsters are in the campaign collection (or, like we did, just make a cloud giant substitute for anything).
At the end of Chapter 1 the book says:
Relatively little involving the metaplot of Rise of the Runelords occurs during the course of "Burnt Offerings." Although the chapter's events are closely tied to Karzug's awakening, and certain characters in the adventure have ties to characters whom the PCs are destined to meet later in the campaign, the adventure's primary purpose is to introduce them to their new home of Sandpoint and to instill in them a desire to protect it and its citizens.
I have several problems with this goal. First, my character had no connection to Sandpoint and did not give one good damn about it. Playing the adventure did not instill any desire in me to protect the town or call it home. I saved Sandpoint because it gave me XP, and it was scheduled in the campaign. I think it is generally a bad idea to try to make your characters care about anything. Unless you know your players very well, you don't know what they will actually bond with. And, why should they like the town? What is there about it that is so much more likable than any other town? Throughout the campaign the players are going to go to several towns, and even long-lost cities, so why care about this one little hamlet? Mechanically, whether a player likes the town or not has no effect on their abilities or options.
Second, if you have a metaplot, for God's sake kick it off early and refer to it often - otherwise, as with this campaign, by the time you actually get to the meat of the metaplot your players may feel like they have been wasting time chasing down random side quests. In media res, "in the middle of action," is the old writing advise- if you have a slow start you make it that much harder for your players to emotionally invest in the crux of the story - worse, you might mislead them into thinking they are playing a different type of game and have them miss options and plot points they should be working on. Knowing the metaplot means you know why you are doing each individual step, how this current boss is going to get you to the final boss, and thus you feel like you are accomplishing something with each step. RoR did not do a good job of creating that feeling. We played the whole first chapter in 2 quick settings, and honestly we could have just started the second chapter at level 3 and not missed anything important (or still better, skipped to the 3rd chapter).
Having saved Sandpoint from goblins, we kick off Chapter 2, The Skinsaw Murders.
This was my least favorite chapter, and Aaron the GM disliked one part of it so much that I had to step in and GM a section for him. It begins with a serial killer known as the Skinsaw Man taking an interest in one of the PCs, in this case our only female player, Sara. This, I guess, is supposed to be a cool departure from the typical "kill the monsters and take their treasure" paradigm that the rest of the campaign will follow. Instead the players get to investigate a murder mystery. Again though, Pathfinder itself has no real structure or rules for investigating a murder, so we get another series of ham-fisted clues and rambling role-playing sessions that just feel slow. Also, again there is no clear link to the metaplot, so all this feels like a pointless side quest (which kind of fixes itself at the end with the obligatory letter to the next villain).
I will say though, this section had an amusing accident. My character was a tank, and a backup thief (he was designed for a different campaign where we didn't have a thief, so Aaron's Cryptic ended up taking over the thief duties and negated some of my character's concept, which was no big deal). My race was the Forgeborn from Ultimate Psionics, and there was a mention of how the race tended to be interested in history. Now, as a fighter-type I got pretty good skill points, 4 each level, and my Int was a 14 for 2 more points each level. So I made Disable Device, Perception, Stealth and Survival key skills that I always leveld up. I also put a random point into a few skills here and there, and somehow I ended up making Knowledge: History one of the skills I always leveled up. As the tank that seemed a bit of an odd skill, but I thought it added some interesting flavor to my character. Well, darn if it didn't turn out to be useful after all in investigating some of the historical bits throughout the campaign. I actually made the DC 25 check to identify the Sihedron Rune at level 3! (not much I know, but you take what success you can get)
In our "mystery" you wander around and investigate in the town and the neighboring farms. One thing happened here that I can kind of clearly remember, but not exactly place. Since this was a mystery we were looking around at everything, so I was asking Aaron about the description of, I think it was, an insane asylum. He read me the incredibly long block of flowery-prose and totally non-helpful description. I got a little miffed since I was just looking for some practical details about the place, not some Steinbeck turtle-crossing-the-road detail on non-important things, to which Aaron replied, "I didn't write this shit." It was something that we would hear time and time again. Reading a lot of the descriptions in the book is quite tedious, they put way more detail into it than we needed - we were not looking for a novel, we wanted an adventure. More nouns (things we could interact with) and less adjectives (since for the most part we didn't care about what things were like, just what they were). Also there were some times, and its been long enough I can't remember any specifics, when an NPC would do something stupid, or we would comment on the convenience of finding yet another letter to another bad guy in a faraway place, that would elicit once again the refrain of, "I didn't write this shit." Which was totally true, Aaron is normally very good about describing what's important and keeping the action going logically - he was deliberately trying to run this one straight out of the book, and he works regular overtime so he didn't have the luxury of reading it all and then re-writing it to his tastes. But it was funny to hear each time he said it.
So after wading through a mountain of random details and events you finally put together that the evil Skinsaw Man is actually Aldern Foxglove, an NPC you met and saved in Chapter 1, oh noes!!!! Actually, whatever, it really doesn't mean anything at all - the meeting with Foxglove was to go boar hunting after the goblin attack. The book says that Foxglove is a "charming character" and can be used to "establish details about the characters" like where they grew up and totally random crap like that. It does not mention that he is going to become a major enemy and so you should prepare the ground ahead of time. Also the PCs never see him again. There's a really bad lack foreshadowing for the GM in the book to make him be an effective villain. But at least now knowing who you're hunting means traveling to the haunted Foxglove Manor. Dum dum dum (that's supposed to be dramatic music).
This is the section that Aaron didn't want to GM. I don't blame him, since I did. It is, in a word, stupid. The Foxglove family and the haunted manor have an incredibly long and detailed backstory going back about 90 years and 3 generations. You do manage to learn all this backstory by exploring the manor and dealing with the haunts. Haunts were introduced in the GameMastery Guide, and they are basically traps. But they can't be disabled like regular traps, instead you have to make one or more saving throws to resist their effects. Now here's a problem, a saving throw is a passive effect. You cannot really "role-play" your saving throws or strategically build your character to be good at them (there are a few feats and traits, but a miniscule number compared to the non-saving throw feats/abilities). So making a saving throw does not feel like you did something clever, it feels like you got lucky. Making 30 saving throws (one for each room) feels like a chore. The only good thing about the haunts is that they pull you back in time into the shoes of a previous inhabitant of the house, and show you ghostly images of what has happened in the past, revealing the tragic story of the Foxglove family (well, they did the way I played them, the GameMastery Guide is kind of vague on that and so is the RoR campaign book - it's a possible interpretation that if you succeed on the save you don't see anything, it doesn't effect you at all; since that would rob what little we had to learn, I described the haunt and said the save just meant it didn't get under your skin/force you to act strangely). Which, again, doesn't mean one damn thing. This family's story is not connected to the metaplot, so nothing you learn does you any good whatsoever. It is a long, rambling exposition dump for a different movie than the one you are watching.
During all this haunting we were also rolling pretty good and only had one failure. Aaron's character blew a save and contracted the evil "Vorel's Phage," a disease that did Cha damage and if it killed him would turn him into an undead horror. Except it has an onset time of 1 day and saves of 1/day, so it was very easy after we got done to bop over to a cleric and get a Remove Disease for him.
Our stay in the manor also ended very badly. Well, it was kind of funny, we did chuckle, but it was not much of a boss fight. See, in explorer fashion we went from the ground level to the top of the manor and then down. But at the top level we found the murdered wife of the boss monster. She has been turned into a Revenant. She is stuck staring at her reflection in a mirror, but if you cover the mirror she then wakes up and immediately seeks out her killer (we made the knowledge check for this one). So she ran down to the basement and the tunnels underneath and into the room where our killer was. They looked at each other, talked for a sec, and then she attacked. We decided to actually play this out. Sara took on the revenant, Iesha Foxglove, and I played her husband who murdered her, Aldern Foxglove. She butchered me in three rounds, revenants get a lot of hit and damage bonuses against the one who killed them. Then she died too. And it was over. Now, we played this out but remember, our characters did nothing at all to defeat the final boss, and did nothing except roll saves against the haunts of the manor, and really it felt like two hours of nothing. Some backstory, sure, which was moderately interesting, but not like we actually accomplished anything by our own will or determination or cleverness. We were observers, not players. I honestly wish we had skipped the whole chapter.
But it wasn't over yet. We watched Foxglove be defeated by his wife, and then found a letter he received from the next bad guy in the neighboring city. Turns out he was working with another group of bad guys, oh noes!!!! So we go to the next city, and we have the stupidest ambush ever. And I do mean stupidest ever, in the history of all adventures of all time, stupidest. See, Foxglove has a townhouse in the next city, Magnimar. A logical place to go visit and look for more clues. But in this city there is the bad guy Foxglove was working with, and he knows that some pesky adventurers might come looking around, so he has set an ambush. He has dispatched two "faceless stalkers" who can shapeshift, and they are currently mimicking Aldern and Iesha Foxglove. That's right, the two people we just watched fight and kill each other. So, the second we see the faceless stalkers we know that they are bad guys of some kind. I cannot grasp why on earth the adventure would have the bad guy make a shapeshifter look like the other bad guy that he is afraid the PCs will defeat. That is beyond stupid. Why not make them look like Long-Lost Aunt and Uncle Foxglove (or even just servants, or the missing sister and her husband?) and invite us in for poisoned tea? So, needless to say, they did not get the drop on us and we killed them quickly and easily.
From the townhouse we go to the sawmill and fight the stupid bad guy who left the stupid "ambush" and his minions (of course, thanks to a note in the townhouse). Kill all them and another journal points to the abandoned clock tower, there to kill the final boss and end the chapter. This was the first section where one of us was seriously hurt, me. After a trap in the clock tower (a falling bell) I was left with just 1 HP. However, the only reason I got so low on HP was because I did not stop once in the chapter to heal myself. I had been taking so little damage overall that I got cocky and didn't heal myself between fights like I should have. Still, I drank a few potions and made it out of the chapter alive.
I know that I'm picking on the campaign overall, but what someone does wrong is easier to see than what goes right (and, honestly, more informative on average) - however, in a campaign that overall was okay, this chapter was downright bad. Long and boring and stupid and just plain bad.
So we move on to Chapter 3, The Hook Mountain Massacre.
Oddly, we don't find a note to move on this time - instead one of the NPCs from the last chapter tells us to go check out the village of Turtleback Ferry, which has lost contact with the nearby Fort Rannick (which was actually a nice change). On our way to the fort we run into a lost animal companion and then a farmhouse of ogres who have captured the last of the "Black Arrows" Rangers who were manning the fort. Easy enough to kill and rescue. Now we get 3 companions, along with another one we met in a previous chapter, to help us retake the fort. Honestly, we didn't need them.
Retaking the fort is supposed to be a big tactical problem, how do you few adventurers take on the many more powerful and scary ogres? In actuality it was a cakewalk. It got off to a crazy start when our new ranger friends suggested we drive some Shocker Lizards out of a cave and into the fort. Those damn lizards, as CR 2 creatures, wiped out a half-dozen CR 8 Ogers in a single fight. But even without reptilian help, two-to-one odds of ogers were a breeze. We killed them easily and in droves.
Next we ended up going back to the city in time for a huge flood to awaken a sea monster. The sea monster is a CR 15 challenge, and we at this time are level 9. It is only supposed to attack for a few rounds and then swim away, but a lucky critical from me and another lucky critical from Aaron end up killing it. Then we go to the broken dam in a fairly pointless side quest. Apparently the dam is controlled by demons, something no one noticed or cared about. But one of the two demons powering the ancient device is dead and the other near death, thus causing the flood of the town. This is a whole page for something really stupid. The magic of the dam, created by evil sorcerers long ago, needs to inflict 1 negative level on some hapless creature in order to control the floodgates. But it is only 1 level, and on any creature, so you can simply cast a 1st level Summon Monster and feed it to the device. That's not exactly a big problem. Station a 1st level Wizard or Druid up here, or heck, for like 500 GP you can make an item that will summon a 1st level monster 1/day and keep a steady supply. The book sort of seems to make this a big deal but it really isn't, and how the hell has the town survived all this time with no clue that its fate was controlled by a demon-powered device?
A few more side quests in the forest and we end up in the cave of some giants, whom we kill with little trouble. Honestly, most of the fights in the campaign ended up being relatively easy, despite there being three of us instead of four. After taking out the boss a convenient letter warns us that Sandpoint may be in danger (again). Apparently Sandpoint in Rise of the Runelords is like Tristram in Diablo - that annoying city that is always being attacked.
This finishes the first half of the campaign.
Up to this point we were meeting pretty infrequently, maybe just once a month or so. So this first half took a long time to finish. Given that we're trying to stop the rise of the runelords, there have so far just been some dribs and drabs of hints as to who exactly the runelords are and how exactly they are rising (also, it will turn out to be only a single runelord rising, not plural). Most of the fights have been pretty easy, and only my own stupidity at not drinking some of the half-dozen healing potions I always carried brought me to a critically low level (throughout the campaign I rarely got below half)(no, wait, there was the lucky critical by the x4 scythe that did a good number on my health in the bell tower). Really, while the total experience had not been that bad, there had not been anything more exciting or engaging than the ad hoc adventures we have come up with on our own (in fact, during our own adventures we've tried to push things and make up our own non-combat mechanics to broaden our storylines). The attempt at some "non-combat role-playing" with the murder mystery and haunted house really fell flat. They were not very engaging. And the slow drag of metaplot has made it unclear on who exactly the bad guy is and how we're supposed to stop him/it/them - or, honestly, give a damn whether they rise or continue sleeping/napping/clipping their toenails/whatever they are doing.
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