Tag Archives: Pathfinder

Freeport Pathfinder Kickstarter – Cool, Expensive

Posted on March 21, 2013 | 3 comments

Freeport

Freeport.  My favorite hive of scum and villainy. The very first adventure I got for D&D 3e, at Gen Con 2000 when it launched, was Green Ronin’s Death in Freeport.  Since then I’ve used Freeport or content filched from Freeport for many a game, including my current Reavers on the Seas of Fate Pathfinder game (the PCs just captured Morgan Baumann!).

Green Ronin is running a Kickstarter for a 512-page color hardback for Freeport.  Get in!  But… You’ll need $100 to get the print copy.  Sorry. [Edit – now reduced to $80!]

Let me complain a minute.  What the hell is it with these RPG kickstarters where you need $100 to get the product? I did it for Razor Coast only because I was so invested (I was a volunteer proofreader on the darn thing during the dark years when Logue punked out, and I wanted to contribute financially even though I had bought the $30 preorder years ago). I have been staring at this Freeport Kickstarter for a week now and I guess I’m going to do it but only because I have 12 years of history with Freeport. These things are turning off all but the most die-hard fans of the thing they’re Kickstarting.  And this is it for me; I can’t think of any other properties I love enough to Kickstart $100 for.

Am I going to click this $100 button?  I guess?  Green Ronin isn’t actually doing it, Fiery Dragon is, and I played NeMoren’s Vault, it was no Death in Freeport…  And I am feeling burned by the Open Design Dark Days in Freeport ransom project (started 2010) that has gone through several designers and several years itself with ongoing “no really something’s happening!” updates every couple months but nothing to show.

Oh, wait – they listened to feedback and added a $80 option for just the book and not the other cruft.  Ok, deal!  It is a huge 512-page book after all… It better rock!  I have the previous Freeport stuff (including the Pathfinder Companion) so I needs it to add some value.  Come join in, now I need this thing to make another $23k to fund!

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Jade Regent – Tide of Honor, Session 6

Posted on February 17, 2013 | Leave a comment

master ninjaSixth Session (10 page pdf) – The Master Ninja comes for us but goes down fast. Then our armies go to confront the Jade Regents’ and we defend a fortress from an oni attack.  Now to the offensive!

Well, the master ninja with the ninja artifact coin that’s hunting us showed up. He was clever in posing as a normal commoner and got in his death attack on me, but I made the save and then, somewhat regrettably, as he leapt away V’lk hit him with a flask of burning oil as a target designator and I put one full attack worth of arrows with my samurai challenge into him and that was it.  With this magical bow that lets me put my challenge on arrow damage I do an embarrassing amount of DPR; I actually feel a bit bad about it as I try to avoid min-maxing. Some of this is just normal higher level Pathfinder “glass cannon” syndrome though.

Then it’s shopping and crafting and planning, leading up to our armies intercepting the Jade Regent’s army and us teleporting to the fortress to fight some oni! It was a tougher fight than the ninja but not too bad, most of the damage was from people hitting guys with fire shield on them 😛

Next we hit Chapter Six; we’re taking Ameiko to a shrine in the capital to get blessed (and ideally rescuing our helpful farmer lady spy in the bargain).

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Jade Regent – Tide of Honor, Session 5

Posted on February 10, 2013 | Leave a comment

Fifth Session (15 page pdf) – It’s time to fight a whole mess of samurai! We go to Shirio Onsen, a hot spring lodge, to kill Daimyo Sikutsu Sennaka. It’s pretty much one big ol’ tactical combat, battle mat pictures are in the summary!

13-assassins-movie-image-03First we head out to the lodge and get the “Nine Pawns,” a bunch of ronin, to go hold off the mass of the daimyo’s retainers while we bust in on him and his elite bodyguard. Despite our attempt at stealthily infiltrating the onsen, they bum rush us. You know, when you have six characters all of which have to roll Stealth or else you’re detected, you may as well not bother rolling; the laws of probability indicate someone’s going to bork the roll.

13-assassins-movie-image-01Then we fight our way through a bunch of tengu samurai and normal samurai with some snappy tactics. They got us in a pincer. Gobo and Jacob got caught on the end of the left flank and I figured our little blind gnome oracle was toast, but he has a nice sparkly 30 AC from his magics so he tanked better than the rest of us. I protected Harwynian and shot the samurai up while he fended them off with a Forceful Hand and crowd control including a Persistent Slow. V’lk cast an illusion of the Nine Pawns and that kept the right flank partially protected for a long time. Gobo got a little lucky, but we really clicked tactically and did a great job IMHO.

13-assassins-movie-image-02And finally I got to duel the Daimyo, glass cannon on glass cannon. I almost murderized him in one round (only his samurai resolve saved him – in fact, the GM thought he was dead outright until he realized he was looking at the wrong guy’s hp total), and a dragon breath from Jacob finished him off. His plump ogre mage buddy wasn’t much work. Then it’s all over but the looting.  We even raised the two dead Nine Pawns and gave them all magical katanas.

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Jade Regent – Tide of Honor, Session 4

Posted on February 7, 2013 | Leave a comment

ManananggalFourth Session (9 page pdf) – Special musical episode! Minkaian pop punk samisen-playing band “Hi Hi Puffy Osayumi” is briefly in effect. And when we’re attacked by manananggals, every time the GM says the word “manananggal” we are all compelled to respond “Do doo, do doo doo!” Then we drink tea and hang out with ninjas.

The helpful housekeepers from the manor house were actually horrid undead called manananggals, which are like the penanggalan all us 1e’ers are familiar with but instead of just a woman with a detachable head it’s a woman with a whole detachable torso. They definitely got their surprise licks in before we overcame them. V’lk went to loot their chambers, and we speculated that the real treasure he was looking for (and found) was four womens’ bodies only intact from the waist down. What he also found was that they had mended his pants before coming to kill us! “That’s the best treasure I’ve gotten in a long time,” he noted. We speculated that they are of the obsessive-compulsive sort of undead and they can’t help finishing their domestic tasks before trying to feed on the – whatever – of the living. Subsequent research revealed they mostly attack pregnant women, which led to a bit of a witch hunt among the group to determine if any of us were indeed a pregnant woman.  My money was on Harwynian.

We then got a couple more semi-artifact magic items, a samisen that casts divinations and a tea set that basically lets us put greater heroism on ourselves before a mission!

Then we go to meet with the “Three Monkeys,” the heads of various ninja clans. After some folderol we have a sitdown with them and they tell us they can’t help us because there’s a contract out on us – luckily, not with them. “A problem murder can solve!” we exult. As the meeting wound up I realized I still had one of the ninja fugitive grenades (smoke bombs with a rope trick in it) and it struck me how hilarious it would be to end a meeting with three ninja clan leaders by tossing down a smoke bomb and disappearing ourselves. So hilarious, I had to exercise all of my self control not to do it. We imagined it would go something like this…

“Peace out!” <BAM!>
“this way guys…” <shuffle, shuffle>
<bonk>  “Ow!”
<door slams>
<heard clearly through the paper wall> “Woot! Who’s the ninjas now!” <high fiving all around>

And now, we’re all level 12!

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Jade Regent – Tide of Honor, Session 3

Posted on February 5, 2013 | 3 comments

geishaThird Session (12 page pdf) – Ah, home invasion, the bread and butter of adventuring parties everywhere.  We look to liberate a captured psychic geisha from a big freak, and our Aliens-driven policy of “nobody touch nothing” pays off!

Much of the session was navigating the shadow maze under the mansion, which was pretty cool. We had one false start on the premise that maybe the geisha’s clues were approximate and not super specific – turns out they were super specific. We kill the wizard, free the geisha.  Details in the summary!

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Warning, Don’t Update Your Hero Lab Yet

Posted on February 2, 2013 | 1 comment

Flash traffic – the new Hero Lab updates for Pathfinder will crash your Hero Lab  if you are on Windows XP, Vista, and maybe other platforms.  Don’t update.  If you have already updated and are crashing, there is a Lone Wolf forums messageboard thread with details and a workaround which is to download the older Pathfinder datafile and import it.

The error for Google reference is:

ACCESS VIOLATION
Address: 0x005ab17d
Type: bad read

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Jade Regent – Tide of Honor, Session 2

Posted on February 2, 2013 | Leave a comment

Second Session (11 page pdf) – Murder spree number one garners us our first set of allies, a batch of ronin, so we set about murder spree number two. This one promises to get us a batch of geishas. We’re business in the front, party in the back!

Yes, we’re still playing, I’m just a little behind on posting the summaries. I missed this session due to holiday plans. But the guys finish off a druid and a weretiger to put the kibosh on the bandit threat, and then get a weird riddle-filled quest to go save a kidnapped geisha, upon which they embark with a startling dearth of “love you long time” jokes. Other than that, you’ll just have to read the summary!

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Razor Coast Kickstarter

Posted on January 5, 2013 | 5 comments
Bethany Razor Works It

Bethany Razor Works It

Razor Coast, the mega-adventure by Paizo fan favorite author Nick Logue, has had a long and checkered past. But Frog God Games has it now and is running a Kickstarter to get it out the door finally! It’s in Pathfinder, but they also have Frank Mentzer (Red Box, fools!) himself working on delivering it for Swords & Wizardry too at the same time.

Razor Coast is set on an untamed coastline, with home base being a colonial power’s city and it surrounding plantations. Just on the land you have slavery, hostile natives, crocodile men, volcanoes, and monster-infested jungle to contend with. But Razor Coast, like Skull & Shackles, has a strong nautical component too.  Ply the waves and fight pirates, or be a pirate and fight the navy – plus weresharks and sahuagin and other demented denizens of the deep! (You can get a sneak preview of the maps for RC on Sean MacDonald’s site!) It wouldn’t be Nick Logue if it didn’t reveal the worst side of human nature and end up in various shrieking bloodbaths.

Pele, Goddess of Fire and Wrack

Pele, Goddess of Fire and Wrack

The good news is that the content is pretty much all done.  I was a volunteer editor originally and still am; this adventure (and all the related Indulgences and extras and whatnot) are in the can and just being fine-tuned.  I just finished another round of editing the various Indulgences to make them even better. So there’s not much standing between this and release, unlike other Kickstarters that are being done completely from scratch.

Yes, it’s pricey.  The hardback level is $110, but you are getting a huge tome and a lot of extras for that.  Lou Agresta explains the value and all what you get on the Paizo boards if you’re interested. FGG uses a very high quality textbook printer, made in the USA, so you are paying more but get a book that won’t fall apart and whose binding isn’t mixed with the tears of child laborers. Check out the higher Kickstarter levels too, they have sweet ship models and other cool swag. They’re 2/3 of their way to goal with 19 days left, now’s the time to get in on it! If you preordered back in the day from Sinister, they’ll honor that preorder, so no worries there. You can pledge some to get other bennies though.

Dajobas, Devourer of Worlds

Dajobas, Devourer of Worlds

I’m going to be running Razor Coast as part of my Pathfinder pirate campaign (“Reavers on the Seas of Fate“) soon! Actually, I already ran one of the Indulgences that were available back originally to kick off the campaign, and you can read the extended session summary here to get a feel for the kind of adventure we’re looking at!  (Well… I did zazz it up a bit myself.) I’ll be setting it south of the Shackles with Port Shaw as a Sargavan expansion port.

Do note that you don’t have to be  a pirate for Razor Coast, unlike with Skull & Shackles – it works for good parties as well. In fact, it starts at level 5 (and goes up through 12+), you could capture and impress your PCs with the first chapter of Skull & Shackles and if they end up being goody-goody and don’t want to go pirate, they could flee to Port Shaw and slot right into Razor Coast!  I actually used the first two chapters of Second Darkness to start my Reavers campaign and went pirate from there, out to Azlant and now to the Razor!

Maybe my PCs will see you there… Kickstart now to become on of their many victims!

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Pathfinder Class Guides

Posted on January 1, 2013 | 2 comments

Merry Christmas!  I was kicking around and found this post on the paizo.com forums with links to all the existing Pathfinder class guides out there and I thought I’d share!  Here’s the link to the excellent post curated by harmor. It’s also mirrored at the d20 Min-Max wiki.

In fact, it links a mostly the same but a little more complete list, The Comprehensive Pathfinder Guides Guide from Zenith Games – check it out!  Adding this puppy to my blogroll.  Every class, most prestige classes, and other guides that might come in handy when coming up with Pathfinder builds.

 

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Mythic Adventures Playtest Begins

Posted on November 16, 2012 | 1 comment

Epic level rules in D&D have always sucked.  Usually they’re just bad rules, but also no one ever really gets to those levels – I’ve been playing D&D in various states with various groups since the 1980s and have yet to play any character over level 16. And they don’t end up really simulating much.  The superheroes of myth, Perseus et al., they don’t usually show the totally “uber” attributes of a high level character.  They’re just special.

Paizo had a massive flash of inspiration around this problem.  “Hey, what if there’s levels of mythic type, proto-deity power, but those work at low levels?  So you could be Perseus, the fifth level fighter demigod, where a cyclops or whatever is still a real threat, unlike if he were level 25?” And thence came the new Mythic Adventures rules for Pathfinder, available for free download and up for discussion in the playtest forums.

Now of course, it wouldn’t be D&D 3.5e/Pathfinder if they didn’t take a cool idea and mechanize it all to hell – “You need four greater and seven lesser trials to gain the 7th mythic tier, and if you complete one in excess you regain a use of your mythic power” – which can threaten to turn the sweet idea into more number crunching.  But I plan on giving it a good solid read and, who knows, maybe even playtest it.  It’s the kind of thing I’d like to use, as I prefer lower level play because of the more human, less videogamey feel and the lower complexity. But say “E6+M3″… Now that’s something.

I was initially put off by the path names, thinking “well what about character type X?” But as I looked at it, they are pretty wide ranging.  I can see a niche character (alchemist?) having problems but I tried to map my Reavers party to them, and I think Sindawe the monk/pirate captain would be a Champion (he focuses more on ass-kick and less on leading people, so not really a Marshal), Wogan the cleric of Gozreh would be a Hierophant, Tommy the assassin would be a Trickster.  Serpent the druid/ranger/barbarian is the hard one, I didn’t think there was a fit, but after reading Guardian more in depth it really fits him.  The fluff on that one doesn’t really do it justice. Although with each of them, I could see them making an argument for one of the others depending on how they wanted to spin themselves.

Check ’em out, see how you like ’em!

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Jade Regent – Tide of Honor, Session 1

Posted on November 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

First Session (11 page pdf) – Finally, civilization!  Well, at least the rice paddy and hamlet intensive outskirts of civilization. We roleplay our attempt to recruit allies, but nothing gets you allies like murdering a lot of people.  So we do that.

The first part of the session was more treasure distribution, getting faction points from the named NPCs, giving them presents, etc. Many of the Paizo APs have been anemic in the treasure department in the past.  Not so this one!  Check out the current incarnation of our patented treasure spreadsheet – we have pulled in a lot of loot and stand to see more once we get to a place with walls where we can sell off.

Then we headed like a thousand miles through the Forest of Spirits.  Miyaro and the kami kept us largely safe.  There was a big storm, though, and I finally got to use my Order of the Dragon samurai power to add a big Survival bonus on inclement weather into the mix.  The GM calculated the storm would about wipe out the caravan, but once we pulled out the sashimono of comfort and all our Survival skills, it was only mildly banged up. Once we hit the grasslands I had to take a RP moment to gallop about on my mount Akumu with Miyaro.  Poor mount, he gets so little opportunity to be around in this AP.

Then we went and bantered with a ronin who will aid us against the Jade Regent.  Yoshihiro rolled pretty hard on him; the adventure seems to want you to suck up to him but I was just like, “So how would you like a chance to regain your honor?”

And then we do what we do best – hit a fortress and kill bandits.  Our quick recon set us up great, we d-doored into a storage room next to the main dormitory at night and V’lk murdered most of them including a sub-boss in their sleep.  We fought a couple and then another group with their leader Gangasum (which immediately led us to Gangnam Style references) and put him down without much fuss.  Yay planning.  But then a druid and weretiger bust out!  More next time…

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Jade Regent – Forest of Spirits, Session 6

Posted on November 11, 2012 | Leave a comment

Sixth Session (7 page pdf) – At the heart of the House of the Withered Blossoms, we find the oni Munascuru, and fight her and her children for the kami and for glory!

The first fight took a long time – I arrowed the hell out of the oni and Bjorn dropped her, but the chain devils up near the ceiling were like AC 31 or something once the cover’s figured in, and they have DR.  Took Gobo putting an align weapon on my bow to finally dispense with it. Everyone else was occupied trying to kill a mostly dead but regenerating oni the whole time – by the rules it’s remarkably hard to finish them off while you’re still in combat.

My favorite part of that fight was us trying to cover up for the fact that we have an invisible rogue around.

V’lk casts greater invisibility and runs over to help Bjorn with the archers. Bjorn lands a flurry of blows on an archer, wounding him, and suddenly a bunch more wounds appear, spraying blood, and the archer falls. “Sword of the North Star style!” Bjorn yells and runs after another archer. This one obtains an array of wounds from the invisible V’lk before Bjorn even gets there. “Precognitive Sword Strike!” he yells as he hacks away at him.

As most final boss fights are, the fight with Munascuru was short but brutal.  We almost misjudged badly, we buffed up and busted into her lair based on intel from the prisoners – to find out her lair is a whole sub-dungeon, we ran to and fro trying to find her before our 1/round buffs expired!

Once we busted in on her it was a true team effort.  I charge her and smite her badly, Jacob flies up and breathes a line of fire on her, Bjorn comes in with a full attack routine, and V’lk stab-murders her invisibly from behind.  She got in one shot – a crit with a naginata which probably would have killed me outright. However, one of my newest samurai tricks is to throw off a critical hit using my resolve!

The rest is all wrapup.  The spirit possessing V’lk leaves and gives him a free weapon proficiency.  He takes wakizashi as it fits his two-weapon fighting style so I gave him my magical one, Whispering Shrike, to commemorate the occasion (he got the kill shot in on Munascuru). Hiro is moving from his “glory for me!” origins into a “all for one, one for all” guy along the lines of what the Order of the Dragon dictates.

Now, it’s on to the penultimate chapter, Tide of Honor, where we recruit help to take back Minkai!

 

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