Fourteenth Session (9 page pdf) – “Civil War” – The crew sponsors a coup of the cultist leadership and organizes a battle with most factions of the island mobilized against each other. Meanwhile they plan to kill the village priest and get the Lens control item. They can handle two CR 12′s and some trash mobs right?
First – more planning! They negotiate with the Fertile Families and go get the crazy hermit and his killbot (turns out he’s the priest’s disenfranchised brother) into the fray.
They start the battle by luring the death ray away; as it returns Wogan casts a Lunar Veil spell that Saeng Ki gave them in the Rain Tiger, which I let work like a solar eclipse. The mass combat was a big barrel of pain, especially as whenever a cultist was defeated, a firey blob came out of them to join the fight itself. Olibrax the priest was high level, and he brought out his ace in the hole, left here deliberately to guard the Flame control – a Shining Child.
Shining Child
Remember our heroes are still sixth level. But it doesn’t have time for a symbol of insanity and a scintillating pattern would mainly mess up all the various mook troops around, so it scorching rays the heck out of them, nearly killing Samaritha. Every round is a whole load of pain for them. But they pull it out with an alley-oop – Serpent kills the priest and Sindawe passes the Flame control headgear to Xiola, and then Wogan drops the eclipse and Xiola burns the Shining Child to death with the Flame of Guidance! That reminded me of the anime Bastard! where the hero burns fire so hot that it fries an efreet… The Flame actually does half fire and half plasma damage so even flame critters get burned!
Efreet the Fire Elemental
There’s still a bunch of cultists, but this is enough to call for surrender… Next time!
Geek Related 
Do you have a story planned out for “Reavers” or is it more of a case of playing until it comes to a natural end?
I have a story planned, though at various checkpoints where the story could end I check with the players to see if they want another year or not 🙂
We’re actually at the end of Season 4 in realtime (this session summary is from 2012, I am so behind), which we mostly spent in Nidal saving Wogan’s sister and nephew. Currently, they’re headed down to the Mwangi coast to go after the serpent man who impersonated Elias Tammerhawk in part 1, which is related to Serpent’s serpentfolk wife and unborn child(ren), which is also related to Sindawe being from the Mwangi. And I’ll be running Razor Coast as part of it. But I also allow for a good bit of sandboxing in and around the metaplot.
In terms of the sandbox stuff how much do you have planned in advance? Is the whole sandbox laid out and ready or do you have a stack of Dungeon adventures that you can slot in anywhere?
I’m interested in the — for lack of a better word — metagame aspects of a D&D3/Pathfinder sandbox as most of the published stuff is aimed at the adventure path crowd but “Reavers” seems to be an old-fashioned, more organic campaign and we don’t seem to see many of those nowadays.
Plan is a strong word. I have a stack of modules (not AP chapters, but the normal ones), Dungeon mags, and other Paizo “X of Golarion” types of products that provide a range of bare-bones-through-fully-fleshed options to insert. I described my process more in https://geek-related.com/2013/09/28/reavers-sources-third-season/. But I drop the leads, and there’s ones I push more and ones I push less, but there’s still discretion as to where to go. If Wogan had decided “screw my sister, I’m not going to Nidal” then the Midnight Mirror and other stuff would have been out, and I’d compensate somewhere else with its additions to the metaplot.
Then I just do “horizon planning.” I have one doc with my sources and stuff in rough order (by level and planned trajectory) and as we get closer, I do work on them (a one-pager per session, plus Hero Lab portfolios is the most-fleshed version).
Good answer, thanks!