Carrion (up the) Crown

Finally we have started a campaign that I have wanted to play/ run for some time.  Admittedly it is not the sandbox game we really want to play - although I intend to bring to it as much sandbox as possible.

I love my gothic horror - and with Carrion Crown, we get this in spades.

Kingmaker was great fun at lower levels - and at higher levels, the game had evolved into a different kind of game: tactical - with awesome fights - but sometimes we could play out the session with some big fights and the roleplaying had sometimes gotten pushed to the wings....

Nicodemus?

Or is this a better image of Nicodemus? ;)

Not with Carrion Crown at level 1. 

This image doesn't quite fit the scene El Kel created for us!

I have to say that El Kel's entrance as Nicodemus Eldritch, the playboy & rich Necromancer, in his big fur coat, gold chain/ medallion, and escort of 2 beautiful women, turning up like this at his mentor's (Professor Petros Lorrimor) funeral, was one of the most memorable & insane moments in my relatively long gaming experience!  Fantastic!


After the funeral, at the wake the pcs made each other's acquaintances... and they are a mixed bunch. An interesting dynamic is that between the LG Paladin of Iomedae, (the goddess of valour, justice, and honour) and the LN cleric of Abadar (god of protecting the First Vault, wherein are perfect examples of items).... at the moment they are colllaborating - with the Paladin and Cleric each having one important key, one key to the chest in which are the Prof's dangerous (and evil?) tomes, and the other key to his study and library..... much to Nicodemus' annoyance!

The adventure is following a classic Call of Cthulhu investigation/ murder mystery which of course is about to present them with some classic problems, including do they exhume the body of their dead friend to speak with his spirit?  Investigating the haunted prison on the hill over looking the village of Ravengro of course is a no-brainer.  ;)

Can't wait to the next instalment on Friday.  :)

Triskaidekaphobia

After a bit of a summer hiatus, my gaming group has been meeting again, and we've decided to return to Pathfinder and the KIngmaker campaign, sorry, "Adventure Path"; we've only been playing together a few years and already we've scattered many an abandoned campaign behind us, so we all agreed to try and finish at least one of them off. It's been a while since we last played Pathfinder so it's taken a while to get used to all the fiddly bits again after the blissful simplicity of WFRP. We've also welcomed a new player into the group, someone who's never played a role-playing game before, and we've started him off with a thirteenth-level character.

Oh dear.

I'd like to say that his lack of experience didn't matter, that Paizo's rules are elegant and intuitive enough that even a novice can pick them up, but if I did I'd be lying. In all fairness to the new chap, he didn't give up or switch off and he'll be back next time, but perhaps we should have given up on Kingmaker after all and started off with a new campaign, sorry, "Adventure Path". We shall see.

Musings on Ian & the use of pre-written materials.

Kelvin's neat little article on Ian Livingstone on his soapbox got me thinking this morning.... and being on my summer holidays, with a brief window of TIME, I put fingers to the keyboard and got typing!  Here are some follow up thoughts from a busy GM!

The question was - do prewritten adventures aide in the roleplaying experience or hold people back?

Me at work ;)

As someone who is normally up to their eyeballs in work/ doing stuff....... my general view has always been to laugh at the 'snobbery' of the 'purist'..... but I have never been a diceless rpg-man/ LARPer or desired to be on stage as an actor...... and whereas in the past I loved intricate plots, red/dead herrings and spending hours on a backstory etc (running Masks of Nyarlathotep every week for over 2 years).... that was WAY BACK THEN when I was obviously insane, had tons of energy.... now I am knackered most of the time and need a decent bit of killing in a session to stay conscious! But I digress.  ;)

Prewritten modules, if well chosen (afterall there are plenty of duffers out there - so I am careful), and appropriately adapted in advance (thank you paizo message boards for kingmaker!!), IMHO, can help a busy GM!!! Without using such things, I sometimes would have run nothing...for ages!  Pathfinder is a stat heavy game and thus it has been great to have that side of things handled in the Adventure Paths Paizo churn out.  Moreover their stories, NPCs, flavour etc in the APs are top-notch.

Eg: The Carrion Crown Adventure Path.


I have been slowly amassing resources to run this at some point in in the not too distant future. Each scenario has advice on music - which I have gone and bought various cds.... as well as the appropriate map tiles....minis.... The message boards, like for Kingmaker, are chock-full of advice on problems in enounter design, or on motivational issues etc...  I really liked the ideas of the path - and having read the whole thing and have a solid overview of where this thing is going helps you, as a ref, set up the game from the beginning with pc and party design... There is still tons of work to do to bring the games to life - to breathe life into npcs, to make sure there are options for pcs so they can achieve/ fail at things and there are consequences for that.... and in the case of Carrion Crown, to reflect on, with the players, the horror mechanics and sanity loss in the game and other 'touches'..... especially since Carrion Crown will be a big change from the current sandbox style of play we are liking in my current WFRP Marienburg game El Kel has flagged up on this blog, in his Tales of the Jolly Butchers.  ;)

But I am prepared to admit that pre-written adventures can get in the way of a good game.

I played in a brief game of a game that will not be mentioned by name or genre....but some of you may have fond memories! It quickly became apparent that the GM not only had no understanding of the rules system (only one player did since it was new), but that they had not read the massive 100 + page adventure!! The gang quickly got bored, started sand boxing  away from the attempts to show horn us into a fixed path, and eventually destroyed the 'set', ending the game. Classic!!  I don't to say any more since I don't want to bruise any egos :S

Having believed for ages that I didn't have the mental space to create my own stuff, with work being insane, I realise now that I have used published materials as a prop... And that I have let this prop at times ' wag the dog', do to speak.... In that by relying on them, I was limiting my roleplaying possibilities and experiences.

I have always been aware of this...but the complexity of some systems always put me off writing my own material....

Take Deadlands. Great ideas. First edition Deadlands was a nightmare system...manageable if you were a player - but an act of love and dedication to make work as a GM.... But I loved it still... But the scenarios were utter garbage!!! So we never managed to play more than a mini series of games before time to stat up and create stuff ran out!





Same for Fading Suns: I loved the setting, the writing, the art..... like Deadlands it is a fantastic game - BUT-  for me, their in-house Victory Point system sucked!! & thus was tricky to create material for


All of these games have encouraged me to run pre made stuff.......






HOWEVER....more recently running Pathfinder at 12th level.... Nightmare!!!! So much prep for the poorly designed encounters in Kingmaker (loved the idea of Kingmaker- it falls apart in books 3-5)...... plus...interestingly... we have been having this debate about how Pathfinders Kingmaker was not a real sandbox, my gang got talking about creating our own (which started and then stopped)...although we couldn't agree on a system....in the meantime, I got worn out by the poor design of the high level scenarios in pathfinder's Kingmaker (which were not designed with the powers of pcs of that level in mind!!), as well as the general intensity of rules at that level and stuff you have to know in your head (eg all the spells of witches, mages and clerics to level 7, & what all the short hand terms in the bestiaries mean!!)...involving tons of prep every week..... I thought s#d this....I need a rest!!

& somehow, by chance, I thought let's try my bonkers "GTA meets the Sopranos" game and set it in WFRP (since I love the game, as I realised the others did - and for some reason we hadn't played any together!!) and Marienburg it was....to play a proper sandbox, not Kingmaker's faux sandbox - thus there was to be no over-arching metaplot.... And, without any premade material, other than the Marienburg book from which I have used a rough map and some names.... It has been my own work needing minimal prep because the system is so much easier than pathfinder! Thus the stories and adventures of the Jolly Butchers was born! & born in a busy time for me... despite the madness of life, I found the energy and joy to create and run stuff for it.....


Admittedly I now need to do some more homework on the sandbox and flesh out the next possible npcs, locations of interest, and random tables and stat them. But I am loving it. But also, having said that, I look forward to running Carrion Crown in late 2011, if there are enough players in my gang, and if I can tear them away from the Mean Streets of Marienburg ;)  Especially since I intend to run a seperate sandbox in the same city, with new pcs as detectives.... possibly ones with 'the gift', as in spellcasters, rooting out deviltry, occult, and all things chaos to keep the streets and canals of Marienburg safe (or probably make them less safe after they have accidentally opened up a chaos gate and sucked the city through it!  ;)

Oh dear..... where did Marienburg go? Can I re-roll?

Show Me Your DIce

We're all dice fetishists to an extent, a tendency Tim over at Gothridge Manor has identified and decided to celebrate. So without further ado:

These are the contents of the bag I take to our regular games. There are a couple of full seven-dice sets in there, a d30, a d16, a bunch of two-tone d10s, a handful of d8s, a couple of twenty-sided d10s and some twelve-sided d4s. There's also a tape measure in case of wargame-type activity, a decent rubber because the ones you get at the end of pencils always smudge the character sheet, and a plastic tengu from the D&D miniatures line; this is Wu Ya, my character in Ben's Kingmaker game. He's a monk with the potential to bust out seven attacks a round, so I have quite a few d20s in the pile; there's one for each colour of the rainbow, in case order of attack is important, and a few extra just in case.

This is everything else. It may not look much bigger than the other lot, but this is a pile that's a couple of inches high in the middle. The bulk of it is made up of a Chessex Pound o' Dice bought by a sympathetic relative one Chrimble, but you've also got a few seven-dice sets -- including one still in its case for no apparent reason -- and then a fair number of odd dice. There's a Zocchihedron, an inkless precision d20, a set of FUDGE dice, some of those funky third edition WFRP dice, a set of HeroQuest dice and a spare set of Blood Bowl blocking dice acquired from the NAF. Most of these dice go unused -- we haven't played WFRP3 yet and a Zocchihedron is to be admired, not rolled -- but I doubt I'm the only one with such a reserves pile. There's something satisfying about tipping them all out then putting them back in their box, akin to when I did the same with my Lego as a child.

Sandbox D&D gaming (with Pathfinder): some reflections

I have been running a Pathfinder ‘sandbox’ campaign for about a year now (I think – have lost track of time – I believe we started it late June 2010)….. and until last week I had been running it virtually every week…… Looking back on the game, I threw out some ideas to the guys on the email group we have for our gang…. Having gibbered on and off all day between three of us, I thought maybe our collective musings would be worth sticking on this here blog, if only as a warning to y’all about what not to do if running a sandbox. ;) Here is the transcript (with a few typos/ changes to make sure it makes sense!)

Me (BenTheFerg)
I think running the Kingmaker path has told me a lot about how to run - and not run - a D&D game.... Here are a few reflections.....for the next one we ever do (as in playing a sandbox game in which you clear out an area to create your own kingdom)....

1) You would have no backer/ patron. You'd be on your own, as your own mercenary band/ reclaiming your ancestral lands/ seeking your fortune in the 'wild west'

2) SLOW progression tracker - to make those low levels last a little longer... to keep up the sense of challenge

3) PC death. I wouldn't wish it, but I sure think it should happen. To keep the game with a level of realism, there would be need to be a supply of npcs who were affiliated to the pcs, eg a base camp of folks in your group (as in more npcs in your team - who remained at base camp whilst the pcs investigated. When a pc dies, you take an npc and they are seamlessly involved in the adventure. That's one solution anyway!)

4) a little more attention to rules on manufacturing of magic items...... I guess this would necessitate a discussion of Iron Heroes for the next such sandbox, or Pathfinder, but with class variants of spell casters which boosts them in other respects but tones down magic item creation.... (Kingmaker had massive time spans, allowing for the mage to create customised gear at half price – magic items lost their uniqueness, and the team are buffed to the hilt! Moreover, the rules on magic item creation are overly generous we now realise, and can be game breaking, like the permanent strongjaw gloves the monk uses)

5) more attention to smaller details, eg to your stronghold, npc guards, etc (for small skirmish warfare scenarios, assassination attempts, creating a feeling of threat and the need to counter that threat)

6) likewise more attention to various rival npc groups, local politics, local environments, hazards.........

7) level cap at 5th or at 10th? (when the pc has to retire and their kids take over?) or is that too arbitrary? :)

8) more small dungeons. More pot-holing and under-dark exploration. More difficult terrain situations, more environmentally hazardous battles. Diseases. Midges. Slavers. Traitors. Revenge. Mistrust.

9) disfigurement rules for massive blows/ physical traumas. A discussion on the limits of healing for damage from one blow above a certain value...... to make it more gritty. :) I think there are some in the GRR Martin d20 Game of Thrones rpg I still own. :) (and maybe in Black Company d20 rpg too.)

Just some thoughts……… I am thinking of running it as a homage to all things old school D&D (Keep on the Borderlands, etc etc)......

Kelvin (KelvinGreen), from now on called K:
The only problem with Kingmaker was that it had a very clear plot, and for all the hexmaps in the world, if you have a plot, it's not a proper sandbox.

Me:
Yes. This is something I would want to change – as in having rival groups all with their own agendas, who pursue their agendas, and try and find ways (through diplomacy, war, assassination etc) to get the pcs to do their dirty work (without you guessing of course – not that that would work!!)

Stuart (from the Great Game) – now called Stu.
Greg's old SLA Industries campaign was a bit like that. You could choose from a variety of missions (BPNs), but in addition, the team became increasingly embroiled with a number of competing factions, including Dark Knight and the Mob. At one point we even carried out a hit on another Slop (SLA Operative) for the Mob, believing we were on a legitimate mission!

We were constantly navigating the murky waters between what SLA wanted us to do, and what we could get away with in the interests of lining our own pockets and promoting the interests of our team.

But the key thing was there was not pre-scripted plot: after each session Greg would go away and decide what the various shadowy players would do in response to our own actions. We seemed to be constantly under investigation by internal affairs, always looking over our shoulders, characters took to sleeping with weapons under their pillows...all great stuff!

Thinking back, it WAS a sandbox campaign. Some missions were pushed at us, but we were not obliged to take them, and we had a number of sub plots (for instance the hunt for the serial killer Exsanguinator) running throughout the campaign.

K
Yes, it's one thing to have a plot develop through play, but what Paizo did was release something with all the trappings of a sandbox -- the hexmap, the wandering monsters, etc -- but then overlaid a standard adventure path plot on it, as I feared they would. There's nothing wrong with a plot, of course, but it's not a sandbox.

Stu
The question is, how does the sandbox evolve to keep pace with the increasing power of the PCs, particularly in Pathfinder, where the leap in power from 1st to 4th is pretty substantial. You want to avoid the "Oh yes, well, there is indeed a dragon in your basement, only he's been keeping very quiet up until now....because...er..."

Kingmaker does this by adding new territory to the campaign, with bigger challenges, like the more serious encounters to the south of the main map, and the undead cyclops empire on the second map. BUT, if the PCs by-pass something - like the derro lair - with the intention of returning to it later, the GM will need to do some buffing of the original encounter while keeping it credible.

(me: sadly every front cover had an image of what the Big Bad would be - as in the lich-cyclops opposite)

A sandbox dungeon is probably easier to manage in this respect, with some areas hidden, or only accessible once a boss is defeated, etc.

K
Well, the simple answer is that the players know from the start that the dragon is there, but they avoid it until later. If they leave it until they're much more powerful, then they'll probably squash it, but one could argue that this is just sensible -- if a bit dull -- play.

I don't know if we can make a proper judgement on the power levels of Pathfinder at this point. Our current characters are rather overpowered, as we know, but that may not be the case for the game as a whole. Similarly, Kingmaker was a pretty poor sandbox setup, so I don't think we've had enough useful sample data, as it were, to decide if a Pathfinder sandbox can work.

Me
Thing is, I want there to be various plots (npc goals which they try to achieve) and for pcs to find ways around these…. And Kingmaker has done a great job I think in trying to do these. I have enjoyed running the game, where you have a good idea of possible threats and have used your resources wisely to circumnavigate the threats. As a player, this is what I prefer as well. It is not much fun to be stumbling around in the dark for long. Yes – pc strategies may fail (may have poor intel) but pcs can have a go.

I think there is a balance to be struck between narrative (which gives plot dynamic, motives, time pressures, cinematic material, great locations) and sandbox…..

I let us down by not understanding the delicate nature of Pathfinder, and thus the point buy has skewed the game (FYI I allowed a dice pool mechanic at pc generation which led to pcs having, by pure chance, awesome attribute scores, which made them tougher, I’d say potentially – by 2 levels) – and add that to a lack of prudence on the magic item creation front (mentioned earlier the issue of allowing for unique one-shot items to be made, which really made the pcs buffed up nicely, esp when the kitted out their cohorts gained from the leadership feat) (all newbie Pathfinder DM errors) and it made the sandbox too easy and not threatening enough. I have learned from my errors (I hope).

Paizo in publishing the setting have managed to create a scaled level of threat to higher level pcs, with the expanding map, and with events happening to trigger the exploration of those areas….. given space constraints, this was the best way forward given the market demand for a certain kind of look to a module.

Having teleportation, pegasi, and a Roc have made the hex map irrelevant in so many respects. Higher level play makes sandbox in such a limited setting pointless. Wilderness exploration is fine for lower levels. At your levels it should be more pc driven – we want to explore X, travel to the plane of Y to speak to Z to find where B is. Etc Planar adventuring is well suited to high level sandbox play.

Hopefully we have all learned a lot more about how to make Pathfinder work – and whenever we finally run Carrion Crown (or something else), I think we will all be keen from the outset to avoid errors we made with Kingmaker. Kingmaker is not over yet though- you have the tournament, and shadowfell left. I will abandon most of the sandbox from here on it- the tournament will be the last sanboxy part – in that who knows what you will do!! - let’s enjoy the ride of the story I think and hit that cinematic ending.

For your homebrew sandbox, one wants to use the approach of Vornheim – but for Wilderness exploration – to generate settings/ ideas on the fly, to complement other stuff.

Other things Kingmaker could have done better:
- rivalry between npc adventurers and yours
- more persistent npc foes
- foes who become allies against a bigger bad…
- more locations in a smaller area.
- A more claustrophobic feel

Will work on a setting starting this half term. Don’t know what sandbox wilderness ideas appeal….
1. Mythic wood (sentient) – emphasising the fey
2. a northern wilderness adventure (giants, northmen, dragons, and other mythic Viking/ norse creatures), with viking boat exploration, castle building etc – or of adventurers carving out a kingdom in the wilds in the north…..(beyond the wall/ somesuch)
3. an Al Qadim style game, of jungles, deserts, island hopping…

The smaller the setting the easier the task – so for 2) the idea of playing a bunch of pcs questing into the wilderness from a fort on the edge of civilisation (ala Keep on the Borderlands), to tame it, take it, would be easiest. BUT this is similar in premise initially to Kingmaker…..

Stu
Old school sandbox was a simple explore and purge mission, particularly in the first 10 levels or so. After that, the class descriptions seemed to assume players would start using the conquered lands as the basis for their domain - e.g. building castles, temples and thieves' guilds. But AD&D tended to skip over much of this - it could tell you how much an iron grill over a window would cost you, but not how to work out the tax base for a rural hex with eight farms and a human population of 150.

Plus, how did you run a dwarf domain? An elf one? The D&D Companion rules did address some of this, and the launch of Battlesystem did provide scope for bringing miniatures gaming into AD&D.

But once PCs get past 10th level, the scope for a sandbox wilderness and/or dungeon adventure becomes somewhat reduced, particularly if people start taking the Leadership feat. Then they begin plotting the downfall of other kingdoms, empire building or possibly planar adventuring. Is it still D&D in the classic sense of the word?

Much of the daily work of running a domain can be outsourced to NPC allies, of course, and the PCs can still expose themselves to danger in the form of high level adventures to meet threats to their own realms - e.g. a barbarian invasion like the one we had in Kingmaker.

"A pox upon the business of kinging it! It drained every last drop of a man's tissues, leaving him a querulous old hairsplitter without enough red blood in his veins to swing a broadsword. Surely, after twenty weary years of wearing the crown, a man was entitled to throw over honours and titles and set out toward dim horizons for one last gore-splattered adventure before Time's all-felling, implacable scythe cut him down..."

CONAN OF THE ISLES, L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, Sphere Books, 1974

K
Ah, the wisdom of King Conan!

Well that's another case of plot developing through play, which is absolutely in keeping with the sandbox ideal. The key is to have lots of this going on at once, so there's a meaningful player choice; where Kingmaker went wrong was in a lack of alternatives, so our choice was a binary one of choosing between following the plot or not following the plot, when it should have been between following Plot A, following Plot B, following Plot C, and so on.

The other issue it had was that its plots were more interesting than the alternative, so the campaign presented us with a barbarian invasion, but then said "or you can go and explore some hexes instead", and of course that's not really a choice at all.

As such, it became a scripted campaign with a hexmap, which is not the same thing as a sandbox.

Stu
Keep on the Borderlands was great for levels 1-3, and Isle of Dread for 4-6, but the key is what happens when you have a 12th level party....? I'm really enjoying higher level play to be honest. It's been fun taking characters from lowly 1st level novices and ramping them up into Schwarzenegger-like uber-heroes. The key is devising a sandbox that can challenge at 1st and at 12th, when people may indeed have flying mounts, the ability to teleport, etc. This is less an issue of points buy, and more what players are able to acquire through innovative thinking, class features, etc.

PCs will still be able to manufacture magic items; it may take them longer, but they'll still be able to come up with a magic carpet or find some way of winning the loyalty of a flying monster like a pegasus. Plus, you can't really ban spells like Invisibility, Haste, Fly, Enlarge, Summon Monster, Entangle, etc. all of which play a key role in our strategy.

I guess the solution may be a bigger sandbox, something the size of North Africa rather than East Anglia.

K
Well, as Ben suggested, you can also expand beyond the mortal realms into the other planes. You're still running around in a sandbox, but it's not about clearing forests any more.

Stu
That is definitely one way forward, because ultimately the planes can really be whatever the referee wants them to me. The PCs can do a bit of library research on them, but at the end of the day, it is another great unknown for the level 15+ character.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There you have it. I have really enjoyed Kingmaker. I would concur with K’s gripe: not enough positive options. Not enough dynamic forces jostling for the same area – with possibly different reasons to be there…… Moreover as a ref I found the Kingmaker Path badly designed in combat terms for the team. Yes the pcs were more powerful than most – but generally speaking the fights were not designed well – this meant I had to work very hard to try and make them more challenging. The fight with the trolls in the troll lair was the most challenging, and only because I gave them all 2x their hps, and had them all converge on the pcs after they were discovered in the troll lair – so they were taking on quite a few at once…. The barbarian was nearly downed during that combat.

‘Owlzilla’ (a giant owlbear) was another dangerous one (I gave her 4x the hps) – she managed to pick up the rogue and use him as a club. Fun. 4e (which I know the boys don’t like) has a better encounter design philosophy. In future I will stick more to the 4e design philosophy, and make sure I have a buffer and controller type, as well as brute and artillery for every major encounter. Without a spell caster, my critters were doomed from the outset! However, these gripes are of another nature –not sandbox issues in themselves – although the very nature of wilderness encounters means that one encounter in the wilderness will often not stretch the party’s resources like 4 encounters in a dungeon will – making designing wilderness encounters that bit more challenging.

TTFN

Ben

Straying From the Path

I have been surprised with how much I've been enjoying Pathfinder. As I may have mentioned before, I've never really been a D&D player -- because, you know, Call of Cthulhu is better -- and I'd parted ways with the gaming hobby during D&D3's lifespan, so all I had to go on was stories of how popular the third edition was, how annoyed people were by the seemingly-opportunistic move from D&D3 to D&D3.5, and how the whole thing got a bit unwieldy under the increasing pile of rules supplements.

So when our group made the decision to move from D&D4 -- hereafter referred to as The Unmentionable -- to Pathfinder, I was wary, but I thought it was only fair to give it a try and see what it was like for myself.

The Pathfinder core book is a massive thing -- bigger than Rogue Trader, which was intimidating enough -- and the rules have a lot of working parts, and yet it remains quite fun to play. I suspect that this is because I've been playing as a monk, a relatively simple class; the two players who chose spellcasters are often wrangling with specialist rules and long periods of spell list preparation, all of which would be beyond my feeble mind. It's also perhaps significant that we've been playing for a while now -- we must be coming up for a year -- and we're still getting rules wrong, so it's fair to say we haven't mastered the game. Even so it has been fun, and I have no complaints, whereas by now I was ready to mutiny in our The Unmentionable game.

Paizo have just begun publishing a new Pathfinder campaign -- sorry "Adventure Path" -- called Carrion Crown -- I feel there should be a definite article there -- which owes more than a little to the old TSR Ravenloft setting, and as a horror fan, it did pique my interest just a tad. It was suggested that once we finish the Kingmaker cam... Adventure Path, we move on to this new one, and furthermore that I run it. This seemed like a fair idea.

Then I ran Carrion Hill.

What I discovered was that while I enjoy playing the game, I do not like running it in the slightest, as there's far too much stuff in there. Now, one might say that you don't have to know or use all that stuff, and that's true to an extent, but there is an undeniable feeling of obligation when you know that the rules are there, just waiting; what you get as a result is a tendency -- despite the best of intentions -- to pore through the massive four-billion-page Pathfinder rulebook to discover the correct procedure for applying fire damage to pickled gherkins, and then the game falls over dead. In other words, you could concentrate on getting the core mechanics of fighting, skills and magic right and just handwave the rest, but you'd know you were doing something wrong.

As such, while I would like to run (The) Carrion Crown, I would rather run it with something simpler like Swords & Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord -- the difference between them and D&D3/Pathfinder is more one of detail than mechanics -- but alas I know my group would never go for it, not in a month of Sundays. Not that I would use S&W -- for example -- as is; I'm quite fond of the options Pathfinder characters have, so my ideal situation would be to use the simpler game as a frame for all the major mechanics -- gherkins burn on a d6 roll of 5+ -- but front-load the complexity into the characters, perhaps even use the Pathfinder classes as they are, with minor tweaks for compatibility. I've even entertained the possibility of completely bespoke characters, so while there's no dhampir race or rogue class in S&W, I could build a one-off dhampir rogue for the player who wants one.

This would be the best of both worlds for me: lots of options for the players to mess around with, but the minimum of fiddly bits for me to wrestle with as a GM, so I can get on with the plotting and the silly voices. At the end of the day though, it's all theory and wishful thinking, as I don't think it'll fly with my lot. On the plus side, it means I get to play in (The) Carrion Crown; I'm considering a wererat barbarian or -- if I can get away with it -- some sort of zombie.

Back to the Stolen Lands

After a few weeks of one-shots and even a couple of weeks without any gaming at all -- gasp! -- we returned to our regular Pathfinder campaign this week, with games on Sunday and Friday. After a bit of wandering about our lands dealing with what would be called sidequests in another medium, the plot has us exploring further afield, and despite some allusions to Roanoke that are about as subtle as a volcano, it's been a pleasure to return to a more sandboxy type of play. This week's sessions featured a lot of rulebook page-flipping, but I'm not sure if that's due to the increasing complexity of the game as we get to eighth level, or a lack of familiarity with the rules after weeks away.

In other news, production has begun on Savage Eberron III: The Riddle of the Forgotten Hoard. Samuel L Jackson is expected to reprise his role as diminutive dinosaur rider Galaxy Jones, and an open casting call has been put out for short, bearded actors.

Pathfinder's Kingmaker

Hiya folks, if you have been following Kelvin’s blogs of the Kingmaker story, eg ‘Living in a Box’, and likewise by Stuart on his blog, The Great Game, eg: ‘A Short Cut to Mushroom (soup)’, you may be aware there are a bunch of us playing Paizo’s Kingmaker Campaign using the Pathfinder rules. Having completed books – or as I call them – ‘Acts’ / or Story Arcs 1 and 2, I thought I’d offer up a little commentary and some thoughts on them.

Well – we decided to go ‘retro’ and return to an older edition of D&D having given 4e a go (I ran Paizo’s Rise of the Runelords for Acts 1 and 2, and Ric had run some of Open Designs ‘Wrath of the River King’ slotted into his homebrew setting). We were after a more open, sandbox game – our interest sparked by Kelvin’s Rogue Trader game that was VERY open. ;) & we were also after that retro feel where we had more options than simply killing everything, and only using powers…. A return to skills and a more open game-play. Paizo had produced the sandbox campaign Kingmaker, and with its ruleset Pathfinder, we decided to give it a go, and see where it took us!

Why I’d recommend Kingmaker (using Pathfinder):

It is a sandbox game, in which players can affect the story, and is not driven by a linear plot development. (Yes – players are limited to a certain size of the map – via their charter from Brevoy, their noble sponsors – but what they do, who they kill, who they ally themselves with in the realm is up to them)

The Pathfinder rules – they are better, IMHO, than 3.5 D&D, more like a souped up version of D&D (influence of Iron Heroes here?), and the tweeks from 3.5, although making it a little fiddly for those of us who are familiar with 3.5 and thus have to declutter our brains from 3.5 gobble-di-gook, the tweeks and changes are welcome ones, and make game play better! Stuart has written a few words here about 4e v Pathfinder – in a fair way IMHO. :)

Pathfinder rpg is well supported – with the Pazio prd, as well as a fansite pfsrd.

Paizo’s Adventure Paths are also well supported – via fan postings on the message boards. I was able to mine these posts from folks who were ahead of me in running the game, and learn from their problems, their ideas on bring some parts of the game to life, and reflecting on how to foreshadow future issues and so on and so forth. Ideas about climate, culture, names, working out some tricky points in the game, how to make sure the players have a background that will advantage them/ link them into the setting etc. Really useful to have a community of other GMs to converse with about the materials, rather than do it all on your own. This is a key advantage of any Pathfinder Adventure Path.

We have really enjoyed it. And players have responded. We have 2 bestiaries now – one for the players for their companions and summonsed creatures stats; 3 copies of the Advanced Players Guides, I have pre-ordered Bestiary 2… and we are looking forward to the new Magic book in April 2011….. None of us have played at this level before in D&D (bar me – level 9 was my limit in a game I ran – The Night Below for 2nd ed way back in 1995-1997)

I am looking forward to playing in Kelvin’s ‘Carrion Hill’ scenario for Pathfinder level 5 and our Winter BenCon all day gaming sometime over xmas – where we get together and play games (rpg one shots/ board games) all day! I am also looking forward to recharging my GMing brain, and having time to paint some minis before I get back into the hot seat! Kelvin’s turn first! Carrion Hill - & Rogue Trader?

Kingmaker: DING!

Yesterday's Pathfinder game saw the party members getting to sixth level, after a rather cynical -- on our part -- bit of wandering about the map, fishing for experience points. A common criticism of Pathfinder's rival D&D4 is that its mechanics make it feel like a video game, but I think it's fair to say that our tactics last night were more than a little inspired by the grinding of many a computerised rpg. Which is not to say it wasn't fun!

Last week, the party investigated a series of ruined elven towers deep in the woods in the western part of our realm, but we ran out of time before we could tackle the large central tower. Picking up from where we left off, the party entered the building and discovered a rather obvious floor trap, which the changeling rogue Olban disarmed with ease, allowing the group to ascend the stairs to the upper level.

There things started to get strange, as the party entered what seemed to be a wooded glade under a sky lit by alien stars, and yet it was still a room within a tower, with windows looking out onto the courtyard in which the party had fought the quickling not a few minutes before. As if this was not disorienting enough, the room/clearing also contained a beautiful elven woman -- a baobhan sith -- who began a seductive dance as the party approached.

Alas for her, the only target she managed to entrance was the party's faithful warhound Cujo, and while the poor beast panted happily for her attention the rest of the team moved in for the kill. Sensing danger, the maiden unleashed an entangle spell, which was quite successful in slowing down the majority of the party, but only delayed the inevitable. A short scuffle later, and the strange thing was killed, fading away into nothingness as it died, and restoring the room to normal.

Having come out of the experience with fewer bumps and bruises than expected, the party decided to take the opportunity to explore the surrounding area, having been prevented from doing so beforehand by matters of state. Along the way a trio of grizzly bears were discovered, but the elven druid Cassie used her secret knowledge to calm the creatures, and the party managed to pass without a fight. Later, the heroes came across the lair of some kind of huge burrowing animal and were almost caught out as the occupants -- some kind of chthonic variant of the ankylosaurus -- returned home from an afternoon's foraging. These beasts managed to split the party but were unable to take advantage of the situation, and were brought down, albeit not with ease. Despite having rested, the ongoing fighting and exploration was taking its toll on the party.

The group decided to make one last push before heading back home, and ran into a pair of shambling plant things, each a mass of mud, vegetable matter and animated roots. The tengu monk Wu Ya found his effectiveness diminished as the extra little kick -- no pun intended -- gained from his amulet of shocking fists seemed to heal the creatures so he was forced to resort to basic attacks.

(Stuart has commented on Wu Ya's increased damage output of late, but I think it's easy to forget how much of it comes from enhancements. The amulet gives the monk an extra 1d6 damage per hit, but stripped of that, he was only doing 1d8+3 with each attack, and the plant-things weren't vulnerable to his stunning fist ability either.

On a more positive note, this week Stuart's character Artemisia dragged herself out of her low damage slump of the past few sessions. It's a recurring joke that Stuart does better when someone else rolls his dice for him -- his son exemplifies this best, rolling strings of 20's while Stuart himself barely rolls above a 4 when he picks up the dice -- and it proved to be the case this session, as he was absent this week, but his character was more potent in combat than she has been when he's been driving.)

Perhaps sensing weakness, one of the plant creatures grabbed the monk and began crushing him to death -- 42 hit points to 12 in one round! -- but all the while Artemisia the barbarian was hacking away with her greatsword and Olban was darting back and forth, stabbing away with his twin rapiers, and the creature did not live long enough to crush poor Wu Ya. As it was, the barbarian's warhorse dealt the final blow, crushing the thing to so much mulch beneath its mighty hooves. Battered and bleeding, the party decided to head home, but each of them felt stronger and wiser from the experience.

Level six! There was a bit of grumbling about this at the table, to the effect that sixth level holds little of interest for the other classes. The monk, however, seems to have something funky going on at each level -- Rick observed that the reason that Pathfinder monks don't get easy access to the game's prestige classes may be because the monk is already a prestige class -- so I have no complaints. It's a long haul to the next level though, as we've got to earn around 12,000xp. Each!

Ahead of the Game

I find myself in an interesting situation. The Pathfinder campaign, sorry, "Adventure Path", is going well; we're almost to the end of the first book, and the inevitable confrontation with the mysterious Stag Lord. This fellow is the mastermind behind the local bandit problem, and is the main obstacle to the settling of the area by civilised folk.

The thing is, I think I know who he is. This isn't through having seen spoilers, or even worse, cheating, but rather that the authors of the first adventure book have laid a number of, to my eye obvious, clues. Which wouldn't be a problem, except I think I know, based on those same clues, how the entire campaign, sorry, "Adventure Path", will turn out.

So that's the interesting situation. It's almost as if I've played the scenario before, so I'm going to remain quiet about what I think I know, in part to not spoil things for everyone else, and in part because my character, the tengu monk, is unlikely to have figured it out. And yet it's not quite like having read the scenario, because it's very possible that I've misread the signs, and the whole thing will go in a very different direction. There's almost another game going on here, a bit of narrative cat-and-mouse, as I find myself trying to out-think the authors.

We should meet (and very quickly eviscerate, if our barbarian continues to prove as effective as she has done so far) the Stag Lord in this week's game, and his unmasking will tell me a lot about the accuracy of my predictions. I can't wait!

Living in a Box

Back in my youthful gaming days, I remember a collaborative game of Dungeoneer in which we'd take turns to GM the thing as the rest of the group wandered about a world map. Dungeoneer is a very broken game, but we had fun with the aimless format, perhaps because everything else we were playing at the time was quite plot-focused.

With the rise in interest in such sandbox gaming sweeping the gaming blogs over the past couple of years (which has even led to both Paizo and Wizards of the Coast releasing sandbox scenarios), I've been itching to have a go at such a freeform game again. I made an attempt to run something of the sort in Call of Cthulhu, but the players resisted it, with good reason I think, and so it didn't work out. Later, I had another go with Rogue Trader, and this was much more successful, as the game is much more suited to exploration and poking around at the corners of the map to see what's there.

That campaign's taking a break (oh, and such plans I have!), but I obviously did something right, as we moved straight into another sandbox game, this time using Paizo's Pathfinder rules. I think the plan may have been to use D&D4 at first, but we've had a good go with that ruleset, and I'm not sure it's to our tastes as a group; this suits me, as I was out of gaming for the entirety of D&D3's lifespan, so Pathfinder gives me a chance to see what the game is like.

I was a bit concerned, as I've seen and heard many horror stories about the pernicious crunchiness of D&D3, but we're about four sessions in, and it seems no more fiddly than D&D2 was, and is much less of a hassle to play than the overly tactical (to my mind) D&D4. It does strike me that something like Swords and Wizardry would be a more appropriate to a hex crawl game, but we've invested too much money and effort to switch now!

We're playing through the Kingmaker series of books (how Paizo's Adventure Path format translates to a freeform game, I don't know, so I'm keen to have a look at the books once we're done), and so far it's been great fun; we've got a proper old-school hex map, and we're wandering around the wilderness, investigating points of interest, fighting wandering monsters, and all that great retro goodness.