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Jade Regent – The Brinewall Legacy, Session 3

Posted on February 22, 2012 | Leave a comment

Third Session (9 page pdf) – We travel across Varisia and see the sights, until we reach Brinewall.  Ameiko falls mysteriously ill and we go recon the town, which is mostly intact but abandoned. What caused its sudden abandonment? We mean to find out.

We’re still going in The Brinewall Legacy, the first chapter of the Jade Regent Adventure Path. Apparently the first major arc in and around Sandpoint isn’t even half the chapter!

As we open in Sandpoint, V’lk continues to torment the local Sczarni for no real good reason. Then we get on the road in our caravan.  We manage to avoid “caravan combat,” which is for the best, and basically just have a travelogue of Varisia for a while.

I got to roleplay Hiro’s somewhat naive side… He was raised by his strict and somewhat assholey dad and then was shipped off to Chelaxian military academy. “Dad always said that the Varisians are a dog people…”  And he’s learning the samisen from Ameiko.  Note that in our previous Rise of the Runelords campaign, fratricide Tsuto Kaijitsu went to jail and wasn’t killed, hence that reference here.

As a result of our Riddleport-based Reavers on the Seas of Fate campaign I run, neither hell nor high water can convince our band of only second level adventurers to go to Riddleport. I’ve done my job as a GM; the group is sure they will all be robbed and rape-murdered if we go within 60 miles of the place.

The one downside was that the relationship rules started to get stupid. The Jade Regent Player’s Guide has these rules for relationships with the primary NPCs, with the intent that you build up point after point for a long time so that they’ll like you. (Apparently I need to “gain faction” with my own sister?) Anyway, it seems like giving gifts is the surest way to a quick +1 and so you’ll notice a couple gift buying and giving frenzies, ending up with Bjorn finally being rebuffed after buying a puppy for Shalelu.

I don’t mind relationship mechanics but I don’t like when they are too exposed – it makes the relationship between us and the NPCs forced and mechanical. I can spend an evening learning the samisen from my sister, but that doesn’t get a point, just the list of things in the ruleset… With new NPCs we meet, we have to be concerned about are they “special” NPCs we should track faction with to generate relationships or just normal NPCs we make relationships with the old fashioned way. Bah.

We finally get to Brinewall and scout the place out, it looks interesting.  Most entertaining is meeting Spivey, the “lyrakien azata” who lives in the graveyard.  She looks like a little fairy. She’s clearly a fairy.  Why would you have an outsider that just looks exactly like a fairy but it’s not because it’s from some made up outer plane? It’s just like the undead that aren’t undead because they are <some excuse here>. Anyway, she’s nice, even if the fact she’s a not-fairy is retarded.

Next time, we hit Brinewall Castle like a load of bricks!

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Jade Regent – The Brinewall Legacy, Session 2

Posted on February 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

Second Session (13 page pdf) – We unearth a lot of beached ships in the swamp, and then best a samurai skeleton warrior! We put a caravan together to go check out the lost Kaijitsu secrets in Brinewall.

Our adventures continue in The Brinewall Legacy, the first chapter of the Jade Regent Adventure Path. I sure got my money’s worth from my samurai resolve ability that lets me stay up when at negative hit points.

I was pleased with my character development in this one – besides the fact that a lot of the plot points have to do with my family, my attempt to stand alone against the skeleton warrior to get beaten down and bailed out by my comrades is helping get Yoshihiro out of “personal glory” mode into more proper “all for one and one for all” mode.  It’ll be a while  yet, but that’s my intended arc.

V’lk being mute is a continued source of difficulty and amusement. His attempts to explain to us what he’s scouted sometimes go horribly awry. And then he really did just flip out and try to kill the toughs hanging around outside the inn.  He later explained that he wasn’t paying close attention and thought we were still in the wilderness and they were being more directly threatening…

Humorously, only two of us (me and Gobo) got a relationship point with Ameiko for giving her the scroll because no one else made it out of the brothel after their baths for their own demented reasons (Jacob – bisexual threeway; V’lk – handjob and book reading, Harwynian – afraid of getting dirty again).

Then we wrestled with the “caravan rules” as we planned our caravan to head north.  Having a large party (plus a horse) actually turned it into quite a task to balance out space and supplies and all. Here’s the kind of stuff we had to do…

I don’t mind the logistics planning though I’m not terribly fond of additional little minigames like “caravan combat” – and I hear from the Paizo boards that the rules are crappy and unbalanced.  Paul’s doing something else in their place I believe, but it’s not defined yet so that makes us not really able to make tactical choices. So we just tossed something together and we’ll see how it goes!

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Twenty-Third Session

Posted on February 15, 2012 | 2 comments

Twenty-Third Session (23 page pdf) – “Monster Island, Part 3″ – The pirate command staff messes with an arcane Azlanti orrery. And then they go into what they are pretty sure is the bowels of some vast beast.  And Jaren the Jinx returns!

Another session of From Shore to Sea; we’re getting our money’s worth out of this one!

Our pirates bumble their way through the arcane workings of the Azlanti island. It’s an interesting challenge – the three of them don’t have a lot of book learnin’ between them, but trial and error wins the day, with a little extra slack.

They can’t read any of the Azlanti writings since they used both scrolls of comprehend languages already. I came up with a good “see the lines of magic” special effect for the Necklace of Alvis, making it more cool than “+5 to spellcraft in the orrery.”

They pretty much just investigated and intuited what to do about the orrery, even without going through all the nonsense the module says.  “Spellcraft check DC 40?” What the fuck?  Forget that. They didn’t even need to go raise dead guys in the graveyard or read the plaques.  They found some shattered crystal, saw the tower zooming by, and figured “Well of course we need a new lens and I’m sure they’re in there…” and bing bang boom they went up, got a lens, put it in, and deactivated the domination amplification rune. They didn’t know they did that, or why they needed to do it, or what it did, but by gum they did it.

Then they met Sarah, Jaren’s wife. GM rule #1, never have some unrelated hapless NPC when they can be somehow related to the PCs instead. She was all sad, but they made her come along anyway, and then once they went up the tower they all were happy they’d done something and went scurrying down – Serpent was the one who noticed Sarah wasn’t with them and turned around to see what was up. She did the classic “tell him I loved him…” I like it when I can give players those real oh-shit moments.

[P.S. Van Helsing is just the most shitful movie ever… It’s playing while I write this… OMG]

A recurring theme was Gareb and Slasher Jim running to be the first to loot fallen enemies. I enjoyed how when Wogan was faced off trident-to-trident with a fish-man they stood by taking bets.  There was quite an argument when Serpent ran in and killed it; everyone in the whole discussion felt aggrieved.

Then Jaren the Jinx resurfaces.  His jinxiness is much less now – it used to turn any crit into a crit failure.  Now it just makes me draw on the fumble deck (well, I use the iPad app) whenever there’s a natural 1. This makes the party not kill him out of hand.  Surprisingly, Wogan is normally the most amiable member of the party, but he was very much in favor of killing Jaren out of hand. He gets under his skin somehow.

When they went down under the ziggurat, they were totally convinced they were headed down the gullet and into the bowels of some huge creature.  Fun stuff.

I like how my “examine the area don’t just roll” plan is making for more interesting things even during combat – in the final fight, Sindawe really did just happen across and then use that aberration bane spear without knowing what it was, and was really impressed when it wasted a cloaker out of hand!

Next time, the finale!

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Twenty-Second Session

Posted on February 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

Twenty-Second Session (19 page pdf) – “Monster Island, Part 2″ – It goes from bad to worse on the ruined Azlanti islands; the number of living pirates is going down while the mutations and insanities of the survivors increase. And then a huge spiderlike monstrosity appears standing right next to you.

Yet another session of From Shore To Sea. More fun with just the three PCs and two of their pirate buddies (the outgoing yet fragile Gareb and the suspected serial killer Slasher Jim). They did a good job of cutting up, despite getting increasingly mutated by the Warping effect the Azlanti island has. Though in the end, Gareb was a mess psychologically and Slasher Jim was a mess physically.

They get to fight a giant frilled lizard. After, we’ve seen trailers for “Mysterious Island 2” where there is indeed a giant frilled lizard! Alas, a month too late for me to use it as a visual aid.

This session had lots of good classic adventuring.  Dungeon delving, cutting open felled monsters to look in their guts, etc.  With this session I tried something different – I told the players that in order to combat 3e-disease we were going to ramp back on the skill checks and do things more old school – you observe and manipulate your environment, not just “make search checks.” I think that worked well!

The octopus fight was epic. I about had some player revolt due to the annoying rules of fighting underwater/through water… By the rules, attacking that octopus in a floating muddy water ball is like -8 to hit, 50% miss chance. I let Wogan’s purify food and water get rid of all of it.

They were grim when they found their ship and the whole crew slaving away digging some kind of canal for the fish-men. Correctly divining that the big orrery in the observatory on the top of the island was a key point, they went and started to mess around with it, starting a really fun fight with a couple of phase spiders!  Gareb got hit by a stray effect from the thing, blurring him, which made him able to see them. The resultant combat really hinged around blink and blur and a variety of effects that interact with ethereal creatures.

Read on, there’s more coming up!

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Pathfinder MMO Sounding Not Too Thrilling

Posted on February 10, 2012 | 13 comments

More info is coming out on the new Pathfinder MMO being worked on by Goblinworks, an outfit with Ryan Dancey, Lisa Stevens, and Mark Kalmes.

Sadly, it’s not thrilling me.  I’d like to like it, I like those people and Paizo and Golarion and Pathfinder but it doesn’t seem compelling.  Connect the dots with me.

They are fanatically against making a “themepark” MMO, which sounds to me like a code word for “a MMO we have to make content for.” Eh, OK.

It’s set in Golarion, in the River Kingdoms, which is good.  But they contend that the normal levelling mechanic that Pathfinder (and most MMOs) use is no good and they want to use the EVE Online model.  For those unfamiliar with EVE, you get better at skills in realtime (not game time), meaning that those who got into the game first end up being the best.

This is combined with their plan to not let many people into the game, to dribble it in stages, 4500 players a month. So those first people are guaranteed to always be better, have better skills, etc. than anyone who comes later, no matter how much they play or kill or earn or whatever.

This sucks and it’s why none of my friends played EVE Online for more than a month. In their first blog post they say they want to avoid the spike and crash pattern, but the fix to that is to make sure anyone joining after start gets a progressively worse deal? Sounds to me like the “little bump then whimper” pattern.

So then also, it’s a PVP game, and when someone kills you they can loot your corpse.  They don’t get everything, but what they don’t get is destroyed so you still lose everything except what you had equipped.

So goody, you get to act out a paranoid fantasy, fanatically avoiding other people because it’s likely that they are part of a huge roving Lord Humongous band out to kill you and loot your corpse. That’s some bullshit right there. There’s a bounty system and guards in towns to slightly mitigate this but it’s really pretty awful.

Dancey came onto the Paizo forums to defend this as “not being theme parkey” and “well you just have to be in a party all the time, soloing is for WoW lovers” and some of the fanboys are behind them “catering to the niche” and “not selling out” but… really? Great, I can only do things rolling 12 deep for self defense and then also competing with everyone I’m with for resources.  Forget it, let’s just hunt PCs!

They claim to be against griefing but this basically sounds like a custom recipe for a big non-fun game.

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Alternity Campaign Retrospective

Posted on February 6, 2012 | 1 comment

Well, we finished out our long term Alternity campaign, The Lighthouse. Set on the eponymous space station in the Star*Drive setting, each player had two characters – one on the Concord command staff and one who was a diplomat, rogue, or wanderer of some sort.  Very Babylon 5.

You can and should go read all our session summaries!

I asked the GM and players about their favorite memories of the 57-session long campaign, and they were many.  Here’s a list!

From Chris (Ten-zil Kem the playboy, Rokk Tressor the undercover spy, Drest Talorgin the Pict warchief):

  • The outrageous swimsuits worn by the players the first time they vacationed on Bluefall.  The funniest was Dr Zelnaga’s “Borat thong one-piece.”
  • Angela Quinn, who went from naked volleyball player to Bluefall intelligence to CIB deep cover agent. I’m just sad she didn’t appear in the finale.
  • The Red Queen, the crazy alien AI who was stalking Ten-zil Kem, in her diminished but crazier “Alice” version.
  • Ten-zil Kem declaring, “Those cute, cuddly bear creatures are going to go mad and rip us to shreds!”  And they did!
  • Ten-zil Kem ordering a whore (dressed as “that hot Mafia security chick”) on Penates and nearly blowing the mission.
  • Lambert Fulson getting ko’ed 3 game sessions in a row.  I was being to think the GM hated him.
  • Captain Takashi’s hatred of the “donut priests” (Hatire mind knights with a donut tattooed on their hands) and their on-board pope.
  • Taveer’s unnaturally close relationship to MINA the AI.
  • The early bruiser duo of Markus and Haggernak.
  • Finding out Lenny the t’sa is also an intergalactic cat burglar.
  • Dr Zelnaga’s ability to set fires with his mind being purchased at the cost of his medical skills, giving him a Dr Zoidberg-like reputation in the medical bay.
  • Finally destroying an enemy fleet.  It was the Klicks above Meribel.
  • The dhros were a plot twist that got a lot of mileage:  loldhros, dropping them off in enemy vessels, dropping them off in the Thuldan research ship, putting cameras on them as way to watch the Lighthouse for weirdness our own security was missing… I’m betting the last one netted us lots of footage of dhros drinking out of toilets and eating garbage and little useful intel.
  • The t’sa grenades activated by licking. Plus Lenny’s wide-eyed belief that that was completely normal… And that the way human grenades activated was completely crazy.
  • ” I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.”

From Bruce (Taveer the freaky mechalus, Banoor the slightly less freaky mechalus, Lambert Fulson the guido):

  • Captain Takashi’s steadfast refusal to sign off Taveer’s purchase requests.
  • Taveer’s whole relationship with MINA, from the beginning right until the big bang at the end.
  • The great juxtaposition of Ten-zil Kem as ambassador of VoidCorp, but also a dissipated hustler on the make.
  • Poor Martin St. John, the “pilot”, who had so few official responsibilities at the start that Captain Takashi had no concerns of sending him into ventilation ducts to hunt dhros.
  • Gerard Peppin in his role as Cancer Jesus with a Space God in his Head.
  • The ongoing notion that Peppin (for all of his weird appearance and weirder behavior) was constantly followed by a film crew for a program incredibly popular back in Old Space.
  • The Kadarens, spastic science roach men aliens (“Be careful with these guys – they Ice 9’d their homeworld due to a mathematical error…”).
  • The great mystery attached to the nature of the I-krl and the entire Externals threat – it took us an awful lot of time to figure out what they really wanted…
  • Haggernak, playing “Show me far…”
  • The slow development of Lambert Fulson into a slimy Jerseyite who ran a rattletrap flotilla of least-common-denominator cargo ships.
  • Ten-zil Kem’s performance at the VoidCorp presentation, early on – he did a remarkably good job of improvising to a sequence of random images.

Tim (Haggernak the weren security chief, Gerard Peppin the dissipated academic):

  • Everyone wearing “I survived the thunder hole!” t-shirts in reference to the place Rokk Tressor died.
  • The psychic dhros.
  • The tribe of seshayans living in conference room B.
  • Takashi opening his fridge and asking “Zuul?” after alien agent Alex Racine appeared and disappeared in his kitchen.
  • Lenny’s reptilian flirting rituals (“licks his eyeball seductively”).
  • The donut monks.
  • Threatening the kadarens with boredom.
  • Finally seeing the ship that had been lost in drivespace.
  • Figuring out what had happened to the populace of Bluefall.
  • Re-purposing the assassin ship as Peppin’s replacement pleasure yacht.

Me (Captain Takashi, Markus Orozlan the warlion bartender):

  • Takashi’s nighttime hobby of making “loldhros” pictures of the station dhros and posting them anonymously on the Grid.
  • Insisting that the gardh’yi are “space vampires” based on their illustration looking like something from Warhammer 40k.
  • Ten-zil Kem’s great Tony Stark impression. And that his name changed spelling all the time.
  • “Taveer isn’t a member of the Concord Military, so he can’t be awarded a medal, but he isn’t forgotten. Captain Takashi sends a recommendation through channels to the Administrator hierarchy about his valiant acts. They award him with a “STAR Award” and a $50 gift certificate to the restaurant of his choice. He discovers this when a Concord HR administrator shows up at his cube and drops off the certificate and a nice plaque made out to “Thomas”.”
  • Markus being Pict king for a week after killing King Steel.
  • Markus shouting out, “Alien collaborator says what?” and flinging a pulse grenade into the midst of a bridge full of bad guys. Bang!
  • Peppin dressing up like the Miner ’49’er and phasing through the wall into a mining exhibit completely by chance, terrifying the intruder there, who “hadn’t eaten solid food in a long time.” Ha!
  • The little nervous Medurr groundhog slave race with exploding collars.
  • Our squad of Concord Recon Marine helpers, Sgt “Animal Mother”, Cpl “Klinger”, LCpl Wierzbowski, Pfc “Ludafisk”, and Pfc “Motorhead”.  Hoo-ah!
  • Takashi writing out a formal promotion for Martin St. John to be Captain of the Lighthouse.
  • Takashi getting to declare VoidCorp “enemies of humanity.”
  • Drest talking to a Concord Marine, saying “I sense the war is winding down. The I’krl are hunkering down in their stolen systems building their strength back up. The ambassadors are talking. Planetary populations feel safe. But we haven’t killed enough of them to fill our Hell and their Tentacle Heaven. God loves us when we send him fresh souls. We need the political will for the next war.” “Amen.”
  • Finding out the Ancients were a bunch of stoner mollusks.
  • Our main boss foes falling to Markus’ chainsword.
  • Takashi getting to yell “Prepare to fire the primary weapon!” and using the Lighthouse’s doomsday device.
  • Admiral Takashi’s memoirs, “Space Vampires and Donut Priests – Or, How Everything In The Verge Tried To Kill Me“

All well done, and thanks to our GM Paul!

Two bonus links:

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D&D 5e Coming Along… Nicely?

Posted on February 4, 2012 | 23 comments

I think it’s no surprise to anyone that WotC has burned every bit of their credibility with me over 4e. And I am a little dubious about the “multiple coexisting levels of complexity” plan they have espoused for 5e.

But so far what I’m hearing about the specific for 5e are really positive. At DDXP they had some seminars, let’s evaluate what they’re saying!

Class Design

The Good

  • Taking Vancian magic back to casters from everyone – in other words, removing “dailies” and crap from fighters
  • Not using so much “jargon” like the power keywords in favor of natural language (thank you!!!)
  • Quick chargen
  • Power not escalating as quickly, for example the fighter BAB not going up so fast, instead just getting more other options, so iconic monsters like ogres are interesting longer
  • No mandatory magic item economy!!!  YAY!
  • Including all the PHB1 classes from all editions, 1-4
  • Easy 3e style multiclassing, which obviates the need for too many variant classes that should just be multiclassing (like every gish ever).

The Questionable

  • Although they are talking about balancing classes not strictly on DPS, which is great – like if the bard does 70% of the damage of a fighter, they get charm and stuff as compensation – but those sample percentages still seem to say that everyone needs to be a combat guy.  That’s not very 1e.

The Bad

  • Nothing? I have to admit except for me being dubious about the true effectiveness of mixing various complexity levels in one game I don’t see anything here that makes me crap myself in rage, which is more than any 2 pages of the 4e PHB can say.

Skills & Ability Scores

The Good

  • Removing rolls in favor of “yeah, your stat is high enough, you’re good”
  • Use of stat checks for saves
  • 4d6 drop lowest as basic stat gen method
  • skills as smaller tweaks to ability scores
  • interaction first, checks come second
  • No set skill list, something can give you +2 to opening jars
  • non-adventuring skills sound like they work kinda like 2e NWPs, which is good
  • Bringing the Great Wheel cosmology back
  • Maybe stat boosting magic, but with caps
  • Silver standard
  • Wider categories of weapon specialization (e.g. axes, not “battleaxe”)
  • Less scaling while leveling
  • Quick prep
  • More power to the DM
  • grittier low levels (not quite 1e, but not superheroes like 4e)
  • skill challenges should “die in a fire” because they mess up the narrative
  • grid-based combat optional in core books

The Questionable

  • Both race and class give you a stat bump, which is fine in the abstract but I worry about it feeding the bad, below.
  • Themes.  They seem to be focusing a lot on these new themes, which is fine, kinda like 2e kits which I liked – but I worry they’re going to put too much power in them (some 2e kits were quite unbalanced too). But later they talk about them limiting class sprawl which is nice.

The Bad

  • I’m worried about the intense stat dependency.  Stat min-maxing wasn’t so important in 1e but it’s all super important in 3e and that sucks. It makes people cry about rolling stats and makes them too min-maxable as they stack their race/class/point buy/etc on top to give themselves +5 to hit and 20 dps at first level.
  • NPCs not being built like PCs. That’s 4e-ism and it sucks.
  • Still talking about their “virtual table” and hedging about PDFs.  Sigh. They’ll never write good software but they need to wake up and join the 2000’s in terms of digital content.

Summary

So… Awesome? Bringing simulation back to the game? Making sure you can do iconic 1e things? I have to admit, I am not convinced they can wean themselves off rules-heavy and take it to more of a 2e-ish approach. But I like 90% of what they’re saying!  If they can restrain their impulse to write 500 pages of fucking rules, and keep the stat dependency in check so there’s not the big hassle of min-maxing and stat dumping, this has potential. Maybe even potential to be better than Pathfinder – I love Pathfinder, their flavor and art and everything is nice, but  it suffers from its 3.5e legacy of being so rules heavy – people try “cap at level six” variants like E6 to try to avoid the worst of the power inflation and craziness.  Will 5e be the best yet? I still am not to the point where I’d bet money on it, but it seems like WotC has learned the lesson that Microsoft learned with Windows Vista – giving people what you want them to have instead of what they want never works out well for you.

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Twenty-First Session

Posted on February 4, 2012 | Leave a comment

Twenty-First Session (18 page pdf) – “Monster Island” – Their ship missing in action, the crew heads to the nearby island of Nal-Kashel, which bears Azlanti ruins of the “demented World of Warcraft” design school. Then the mutation comes.

This was our new year’s day session! Another year, more Reavers. They really didn’t want to go to “Monster Island,” as they have named it, but in the end they decided that their ship and loot and girlfriends and all were worth the danger. (They had to think about it, though!)

Sindawe cuts to the chase and beats, strips, and interrogates a local, finding out that they have the “Innsmouth look” for a reason – that they are all part fish-man. So then it’s off the the island!

And boy it’s demented.  This is still from the From Shore To Sea adventure. The island is surrounded by the Cliffs of Insanity and has an Azlanti city that was all cool but now it’s degenerating and there’s weird magical stuff going on, like ripped-off tops of towers swooshing around in the air and intelligent will-o-the-wisp powered floating streetlights. The PCs even ended up talking to them! Investing in learning Aklo from Samaritha and Hatshepsut has really opened up new worlds for the otherwise non-intellectual group.

I had fun playing the pirates. It’s harder when they are shipboard – there’s a lot of NPCs for me to juggle and there’s usually work to be done. Once pirates get out on trips like this, though, their more chaotic nature comes out. They screw around a lot.  Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s dangerous, but it’s never quiet!

They lost another crewman, though, and they have all started to get mutated by something going on with the island. Alas! Will they figure out the island’s ancient secrets? Tune in next time…

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Jade Regent Chapter 1, The Brinewall Legacy, Session 1

Posted on February 1, 2012 | 2 comments

Welcome to the first chapter of our Jade Regent campaign, The Brinewall Legacy! Our neophyte adventurers in Sandpoint are drawn into long-hidden secrets by their friends, relatives, and loved ones, all linked to Sandpoint inn-owner Ameiko Kaijitsu.

That’s right, it’s a new adventure path! Paul is GMing, having just finished GMing a couple-year-long Alternity Star*Drive based campaign. We have six players – Tim, Matt, Patrick, Chris, Bruce, and myself. Matt has been in the other games our large loosely affiliated group runs but hasn’t gamed with us on the Sunday games since a Savage Worlds campaign in 2009.

First Session (14 page pdf) – We meet our intrepid crew of adventurers, and are immediately dispatched to the swamp to fight goblins.  Oh, joy. We run right into the Licktoad Goblin village and carnage erupts.

It was a charge starting out in Sandpoint, because that’s where we started our Rise of the Runelords campaign (most of the same players, also run by Paul) so we had a lot of familiarity with the place. And of course they used one of Paizo’s signature monsters, the wildly popular insane goblins.

My idea for my character Hiro’s arc is for him to be a glory-seeking cavalier who over time realizes the true calling of service and becomes a samurai. That was off to a rollicking start as he charged his horse right into the goblin encampment and into a big mud pit that the others had to haul him ingloriously out of. There were plenty of hooks; as Ameiko Kaijitsu’s little brother all the Kaijitsu family historical secrets made motivation a no-brainer.

Also, Hiro was trained as a cavalier in Cheliax.  I liked how the halfling swamp guy got all offended when Hiro called him “peasant” or “farmer”; Hiro thought he was paying the guy a complement – a farmer’s a much higher status job than “dumbass living in a swamp” in Cheliax at least.

And we got two badges, the Halfling Rescuer badge (optional, though we never can pass up a home invasion) and the Goblin Killer badge (fairly required, I think, or else no pointer to the next part…).

Then there was some confusion that we use as an in-joke in many later sessions.  There was a shack in the swamp, with a shed outside it.  We were trying to investigate both as rat-creatures came from each. Paul kept mixing up the two words to the point where we kept thinking we were near the shack but were near the shed, or the squeaking was coming from the shed but we thought it was coming from the shack (which got me enveloped in a rat swarm, so it wasn’t that entertaining initially).  So now whenever a shack or a shed is encountered ever after we say “Wait… Is it a shack, or is it a shed?” Perhaps we should nickname Paul “Two Sheds” as a multi-level homage.

We got a lot done, and a lot of role-playing, it was a very long first session and we were going on all cylinders.

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Twentieth Session

Posted on January 28, 2012 | 3 comments

Twentieth Session (18 page pdf) – “From Shore To Sea” – The crew drops into the village of Blackcove to check in on their old buddy Jaren the Jinx. Apparently his jinxiness has gone nuclear as tentacle horror erupts shortly after they arrive.

We had fun with Sindawe’s plan to land an “away team” posing as an adventuring party to scout out good marks. We basically dressed each member like one of the Paizo iconic PCs, which is to say they all look like murder-strippers.

It’s funny that since they are pirates, not adventurers, their opinion of adventurers is mixed contempt and pity.

After a little more random shipboard encounters and weather, they get to Blackcove! Which is basically like Innsmouth. Now we begin the Paizo/Open Design module From Shore To Sea!

After dealing with some locals and a spooky mostly abandoned town, it’s tentacle attack time while holed up in a lighthouse in a storm at night. They were having a hard time of it and Sindawe was getting sick of the locals being in the way, so for a while he started throwing townsfolk to the tentacles hoping that perhaps they had a preset kill limit.

When the storm cleared – the Teeth of Araska was nowhere to be found. What to do? Surely there’s somewhere to go other than the nearby “Monster Island…”

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Jade Regent Character Creation Rules

Posted on January 27, 2012 | 7 comments

Here’s the rules we are using for our Jade Regent campaign from our GM Paul, with some explanations from me.

Allowed Rulebooks

APG is in, the Ultimate books are out (although during the campaign you will have the chance to pick up Japanese-style weapons and maybe even to get trained for levels in ninja or samurai).  [Ed: Paizo has been overwhelming us with new rules over the last  year, and frankly a lot of it isn’t well balanced.  We haven’t been allowing Ultimate Magic or Ultimate Combat in any of our games so far. In my Reavers campaign it’s core only, anything else by specific GM inclusion or asking me.]

Chargen Methods

Stats are 4d6 drop the lowest, arrange as you will. If your stat block sucks you may use the point-buy method, this time around I’m setting point-buy at High Fantasy, 20 points. Standard races are all in, but if you want something other than that let me know and we’ll talk about it. No evil races or monster races will be allowed though.
Evil characters are not a good fit for this particular campaign.

FATE Aspects and FATE Points

Aspects! Please write 3 aspects for your character before you reach the gaming table, we will create 2 more for each character when we get together for the first session. The first three should be as follows:The first aspect should be a description of your character’s archetype, such as “Half-orc sorcerer in tune with nature’s fury”, “Physically perfectionist elven wizard”, or “Charming Sunderer”. Try to make sure your character’s core competency makes it into your first aspect.

The second aspect should describe your character’s trouble, the main weakness or stumbling block that keeps causing trouble for the character. It can be a personality trait that causes trouble for the character, or it can be something bad that just keeps happening to him for some inexplicable reason. Examples: “Why did it have to be fairies?”, “Vengeful over hurt pride”, “Family Man”.

For the third aspect, think about what motivates your character, what shaped him to become who he is, and what pushed him to the life of an adventurer. The best aspects are ones that can be used both for or against your character. ex. “Must protect my friends at all costs”, “People are not always what they seem”, “I Heart Forbidden Lore”, “There must be some way I can find a profit from this…”

Each character will get 3 fate points. When you level up, they will be refreshed. You can get more fate points whenever your character suffers due to one of his aspects (depending on the situation, this could result in failed skill rolls, damage, or just social humiliation). Spending a fate point allows you to either reroll the d20 roll you just made, or add +4 to it, your choice, but you can only spend a fate point when one of your aspects applies to the roll you’re making. For instance, “I Heart Forbidden Lore” could help you if you’re doing research or trying to recall facts about some kind of demonic monster, but it wouldn’t help you on a to-hit roll against a goblin. Regardless of aspects, a fate point can always be spent to stabilize you if you’re dying.

Character Advancement

There will be no XP awarded or spent.  Level advancement will be declared by the GM when it needs to happen. [Ed: XP are frankly one of the most annoying things to deal with – useless bookkeeping that promotes uninteresting behavior. None of our campaigns use them.]

Multiclassed Spellcasters

We will use our usual multiclassing house rule for spellcasters.

Badges

We’re not using experience points, but I wanted a mechanism that allowed me to give rewards for completing side-missions. Thus I created the badges; each one can be earned by completing one of the side-missions in the adventure path.

As soon as I introduced them the players started plotting to find a way to collect them all! Besides the pleasure of collecting, they each also get one fate point when the group gets a badge.

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Pathfinder Spellcaster Multiclassing House Rule

Posted on January 26, 2012 | 9 comments

Our GM Paul’s multiclassing house rule for spellcasters in Pathfinder, in case you find it of use.

The problem: Multiclassing in D&D works fine for the martial characters and skill-based characters, the abilities of the various classes stack together well to make a stronger character. The rules are very punitive for primary spellcasters. None of the spellcasting classes build on each other and none of them stack well with the abilities of any other class. Various fixes have been attempted for this in the game (prestige classes like Mystic Theurge and Eldritch Knight etc., Practiced Spellcaster feat, variant class features, and so on), but they all seem kind of specific and kludgy to me. Why can’t I just make a fighter/sorcerer and have it be effective? These rules are intended to address that.

The rule: To take advantage of this rule, you must have at least one level in a primary spellcasting class (bard, cleric, druid, sorcerer, wizard). For every two class levels you possess that are not in that class, you advance your spells per day, effective caster level, and spells known as if you had advanced one level in the primary class. You do not gain any other benefits (like channel energy, wild shape, extra feats, class powers, etc). However, you may not take your total caster level higher than double what it would otherwise be.

You may use multiple caster classes to feed into each other (a Cleric5/Sorcerer4 would cast as a 7th level cleric and a 6th level sorcerer, but would only have channel energy and domain powers of a 5th level cleric, and bloodline arcana and bloodline powers of a 4th level sorcerer).

Any prestige class that adds caster levels to a primary spellcasting class (such as Arcane Archer or Dragon Disciple) only adds the caster levels specifically listed, you can’t count it (for the class it adds to) for the purposes of this rule.

This rule replaces hybrid classes like Mystic Theurge and feats like Practiced Spellcaster, so those are no longer available.

Examples:
A Fighter2/Cleric3 would cast spells as a 4th level cleric (but channel energy and have the domain powers of a 3rd level cleric).

A Ranger4/Wizard2 would cast spells as a 4th level wizard (but have school powers of a 2nd level wizard). Ranger is not a primary spellcasting class, so ranger spells would be unaffected.

A Fighter6/Druid1 would cast spells as a 2nd level druid (but have class features as a 1st level druid), because you can only double caster level at most.

A Paladin4/Sorcerer1/DragonDisciple2 (Dragon Disciple adds +1 caster level to Sorcerer) would cast as a 4th level sorcerer (1 for the sorcerer level + 1 for Dragon Disciple + 2 for the 4 paladin levels). Because Dragon Disciple adds to the bloodline abilities, the character would have bloodline powers as a 3rd level sorcerer. The paladin spells would still be cast as a 4th level paladin.

A Rogue3/Sorcerer1/Wizard2/ArcaneTrickster2 (Arcane Trickster adds +2 caster levels to sorcerer) casts as a Sorcerer5 (1 from sorcerer + 2 from Arcane Trickster +2 from the other 5 levels) and as a Wizard4 (2 from wizard + 3 from the other 6 levels, but maxes out at 4 because you can only double the caster level).

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