Improving Serpent’s Skull

Seeing Serpent’s Skull on sale for the Paizo 10th Anniversary Sale got me thinking about the campaign again, and gave me some incentive to finish this post.

Along with Second Darkness, Serpent’s Skull is probably the worst official Adventure Path written. That doesn’t mean it’s terrible or unplayable, but that it has more requirements and needs more tweaking to get a successful and fully enjoyable campaign out of it—in other words, as-written, it’s got problems. Major problems. As a GM who’s ran it, and ran/played other Adventure Paths, here are some of my thoughts on the subject. There’s a lot more helpful info on the Paizo forums, including many variants, charts, and GM aids from some awesome posters.

The meat of the Path is the last four modules—three and four connect to make one big environ (the lost city of Saventh-Yhi) with connected plot-points, while five and six connect to make another large environ (Ilmurea) with connected dungeon crawl. This leaves the first two modules as crude appendices tacked on: they exist as vehicles to get the players to the interesting part of the game (modules 3-6) and to get them leveled up enough for decent challenges. Looking back from modules 3-4, and looking ahead at 5-6, they are the links that don’t really connect.

Don’t get me wrong, both of them have merit, but their purpose in the overall campaign is marginal compared to the last four. Module one is a nice island to play sandbox in, but the only plot-related elements are in the last dungeon, consisting of one character and some notes leading to Saventh-Yhi. Module two is a lot of running around doing unrelated side-quests to get XP, then a lengthy linear trek through the jungle; again, the only elements related to the plot occur in the last dungeon. They also have some very awkward elements, and their issues can kill a campaign in its infancy. YMMV, but I find the last 2/3rds of the Path the most plot-centric, and the most interesting parts to plan for and run.

Besides that, there’s too sharp a divide between the Path—half of the modules need GM-generated content/proactive players to become interesting, while the other half are the usual “canned”/pre-packaged adventures you’re probably looking for when you buy an adventure module. If you’re the GM who doesn’t have ANY time to play, look into any another Adventure Path and leave this one behind. If you’re the kind of GM who loves tweaking things and running wild creating new content, or have players who love going after their own goals and going off on their own quests, you’ll find Serpent’s Skull the ideal goldmine.

Some more thoughts after the break.

Pathfinder – Distant Worlds

One thing’s for sure, Paizo has kept up an impressive quality level on its world-building supplements, keeping its Chronicles/Campaign Setting books on the same bar as the best 3.5 supplements—and often raising that bar. I found the various 3.x “fluffier” books hit or miss, and got into the habit of avoiding them. So it’s been a pleasant shock to find some of the best (e.g., my favorite) Pathfinder supplements have been the “fluff” ones: Guides to Darkmoon Vale and Absalom, Cities of Golarion, Dungeons of Golarion, Lost Cities of Golarion, and now… Distant Worlds.

A lizard-riding lashunta woman on Castrovel beset upon by a Shobhad giant from Akiton – awesome art by Karem Beyit

If you haven’t guessed from the title, this softcover deals with the other planets in the same solar system as Pathfinder’s core world, Golarion. This include’s Golarion’s moon; Castrovel and Akiton, analogues to the pulp Amtor (Venus) and Barsoom (Mars) of the 1930s-40s; the apocalyptic Eox the Dead, which turned to undeath to survive its evaporating atmosphere; Triaxus the Wanderer, a planet whose slow orbit takes several centuries, seeing the rise and fall of many species and cultures in one planetary year (ala Brian Aldiss’ Heliconia Trilogy); and several gas giants with a multitude of inhabited moons. There’s a couple other planets, and the book even touches on the sun (!) and an asteroid belt (remnants of demolished planets).

Lizard-riders!

Right from the start, the book has a more science-fiction feel, through quantifiable realism—the planets have mini stat-blocks noting their rotational speeds, relative size to Golarion, etc. And that’s something I really enjoyed: seeing the fantasy world, complete with its magic, gods, and monsters, under a slightly more realistic and logical approach. Keep in mind, this is still Pathfinder, and still fantasy. There’s no rules for spaceships, computer networks, netrunning, or other modern technologies, though there are some robots, and a few of the races use guns or other magi-tech style “advanced fantasy” devices. Thus, while it deals with inhospitable gas giants and other astronomical features, they have things like space whales and energy creatures living on them. Science fantasy is a good descriptor.

The Introduction jumps to attention, dealing with how the gods and the multiverse affect and exist on other planets, and covering why most species on these foreign planets are bipedal humanoids.

From there, we have the lengthy Chapter One, going over each planet in brief. Distant Worlds is done in the gazetteer style, giving each planet’s major cities and adventuring locales, then a brief overview of its terrain, flora, and fauna. Add in some planetary history and some info about the planet’s humanoid life-forms, and touch it off with a map showing the planet’s two sides. There’s enough here for GMs to get the general idea of the setting, a firm baseline and plenty of room (and ideas!) to build adventure hooks out of.

Chapter Two takes us back to short chapters again; it details more of the “rules” style stuff, including vacuum and void, gravity, and most important of all, some hooks and ideas of how to get players to the stars. It has a few spells and one piece of equipment to help characters survive in the void. Chapter three moves on to monsters. There’s a nice list of Pathfinder monsters that would fit into the space setting, and the straightforward hint to re-skin monsters. It rounds the book out with six monsters, including Pern-esque dragons, blue Barsoomian giants, titanic space whales, and modular robots.

SPAAAAACE WHAAAAALES!

For a gazetteer, this is doing well: 64 pages isn’t a lot to work with, but Distant Worlds feels packed. Yet it’s still missing key pieces: there’s no playable races yet, many of the species introduced aren’t detailed, and the stellar bodies are wide-open, their overviews brief. It’s also lacking in landscapes and scenery art; I like seeing characters and monsters up close, but I’d kill to see a view of tidally-locked Verces, with its sustaining life-belt trapped between the planet’s dark and light sides. If wishes were horses; the book does an amazing job at what it’s doing. It will hold me over until the release of a Distant Worlds hardback (or, better, one for each planet, or in small groups/pairs), where those “key pieces” would be better suited.

I’m a bit biased as a pulp SF junkie, having waited impatiently for this book’s arrival since I saw the solar system overview in the 3.5 Pathfinder Campaign Setting. Not only did it meet my expectations, it surpassed them. Without a doubt, this is one of the best RPG supplements I’ve bought all year, one of the best Pathfinder supplements in 2012, and my favorite Pathfinder softcover. James Sutter did a remarkable job packing 64 pages with material while leaving enough to inspire GMs. Since it’s mostly fluff—there’s around ten pages with rules—I can also see using it with any system, making it a more of a utilitarian reference work for my space opera/sword-and-planet needs. And the wheels have been turning on that front.

Now, if only someone can convince the Paizo staff (James Jacobs cough) to let James Sutter loose on a larger version…

Edit 6/21: Apparently the Distant Worlds stock has almost sold out, according to James Sutter… so get it while you can.

“Why Did It Have To Be Snakes?”

Turns out this will be my last, or second to last, post about the Serpent’s Skull adventure path. The reason the last recap took… three months to type is because the game’s been slipping away for a while now.

Part of it is on the player end. We started with a large-ish group, six, went down to five after three sessions, back up to six for another three, down to five for three months, and ended up at four for the last half-dozen sessions. This would all be work or school related time conflicts, thanks to the power of scheduling. Four would have been doable, but there’s been a recent spate of no-games because half the group is missing, and in the next few months, we should have one player going on an extended vacation and two others busy at conventions.

But a large part of it is on my end. After soldiering on for two and a half months, I realized I just wasn’t giving the game the effort it needed, not keeping up the wiki, writing up props/handouts, or spending time planning. So after some thought, I decided to take the sickly thing out behind the shed and put it down. Something I should have done back in February, but since we had just reached the “good” part of the Path, I figured to keep pressing on and trying to find more players, maybe switching the game’s time slot.

Between all the constant changes, the group feeling that had been built on Smuggler’s Shiv started to shrivel up and die on the vine, and so we never had a great case of party cohesion or unity. This is the first game I set up with random strangers I met on Pen & Paper or Meetup.com, and in many ways it showed—in the lack of cohesion or tactics, which eroded into brief spates of inter-party conflicts, in and out of game. Not how D&D is supposed to operate, since it leads to TPKs; the D&D game is designed to work with each party member pulling their own weight and operating like an effective (killing) machine.

Instead, we had a division between the optimizers and the people who “just made characters” and called it good. Several of the players were critical of everything—someone roleplayed too much, someone roleplayed too little, someone was stat-crunching, etc. One guy ended up as little more than a chair-warmer, talking twice as much before the game started than he did during a given session. Working to entertain the party began feeling like work.

Meanwhile I grew critical of the players. Few players bit on the roleplay hooks, and I got bored with generic, repetitive combats existing in a void; not much happened outside encounters, and those didn’t have the same texture or tactical dynamism as in the earlier sessions. Things had been more interesting back on Smuggler’s Shiv, then fell into a rut during the next two modules that bored the hell out of me.

And by the time I found more eligible players, the game was all but dead. Not that I should have considered installing fresh blood into the toxic environment, but still.

So here we are, finally getting to the part of the Path I’ve done the most planning for, the parts where I figured to start divorcing it from the canned adventure and expand out a glorious excursion against the Serpentfolk empire taking the players to level 20 or higher… and it’s just not worth it. When I’m only running once a month, I stop caring, not doing the planning or prep I should have done, and that’s not something an invested GM does.

So a big disappointment that the game collapsed, considering my hopes for the entwined third act—modules three and four, plus change. I don’t take it personally, since game death happens often enough, and the ICONS game I’m running has been some of the most fun I’ve had behind the screen in years—and the players have given very supportive feedback. I still hope to use the Serpent’s Skull notes and plans I’d worked out, but at this point, I’m taking it as a learning experience and putting that far on the back-burner for a while.

Serpent’s Skull: Racing to Ruin (3) The Terrors of Taizon

The last act of module two turned out to be the shortest; surprisingly, the first part (in Eledar) was nearly as long as the race, which just seemed to buzz by in a couple of sessions.

Taizon was a letdown for the players. Part of the problem was that they confused it with Saventh Yhi, because they never read our damn wiki, so they wandered into an abandoned Azlanti outpost with four encounter areas. A bit underwhelming, but still, it ended up going over fairly well over two sessions. The players opted for a direct assault, scaling the walls and cleaning out the charau ka when they met them.

I made some changes to the end-battle locale, the ancient Azlanti temple within the ruins. As written, it’s interesting, but not Indiana Jones enough, so I borrowed a homebrew replacement posted on the Paizo forums. The puzzle it contained was interesting; the players managed to figure it out with only a little prodding, though they were fine with constant screw-ups and trial-and-error, so I’d make the fail results more extreme next time—if someone loses an arm, they’ll think about it for more than ten seconds, right?

Challenges!

Earlier in the module there were some harsh encounters. Several evil outsiders with high CRs (7 and up) were brutal enough to kill the eidolon and give the party something to think about. Plus the aforementioned ape-bears, which for CR 4s hit like a Mack truck; that was fun. After those high benchmarks, a host of CR 2/4 monkies is laughable. This is the biggest problem I have with Paizo writers: mooks are never a threat if your players are halfway decent with tactics and build.

So, I doubled the number of monkies, and they still weren’t that much of a threat. See, they’re all small. And though there were tons of them (I think eight for the final encounter, including the leveled boss), there was just enough to fit into an aqueous orb with room to spare. The ones that weren’t slain instantly or grappled by the eidolon. That’s about how it went for all of those stupid things, even after increasing their number by 35-50% and giving them max hit points… and the players were a level or so below where they should have been.

The Adventure Locales

The ruins have a couple of awesome locales; the main charau ka encounter is in a ruined temple falling into a tar pit, which makes for some interesting tactical choices. The end-target is a large dungeon ruin, another temple thing, nicely laid out and with a lot of variety.

The only locale that didn’t do much was the tower, which lead down and not up, into a sewer system that didn’t work for my group. It’s there in case the party needs/wants a stealthy access route; in my case, it was more set dressing since it was found after all the monkies had been slaughtered. The players considered the tunnels pointless and moved on.

Anything Else?

Nope, that’s pretty much all there is to Taizon. While interesting, I thought it was way too easy, even after I ad-hoc’d the difficulty up (yay GM fiat). My players getting confused over “Taizon as a waypoint” and “Taizon as Saventh Yhi, El Dorado of Golarion” didn’t help, since some of them had worked themselves up only to find… a large empty city.

I didn’t bother showing the map to them; I think that’s wasted opportunity. To be fair, there’s not much room left in the module—there was a lot to squeeze into this one, two bookend cities and a major freaking race. Taizon is left as this sprawling ruin area, something like 1800 ft. x 1400 ft., surrounded by a tall wall… and there’s two buildings, a pit, and a ruin with a tunnel in it. Huge overgrown walled area with nothing in it but easily slain monkies.

Also, as mentioned earlier… there’s no way the player characters won’t win the “race” without serious mistakes on the player side, and a lack of GM prodding to get them back on the rails. I get the need to make the PCs win—they are the heroes of this tale, after all, odds should be weighed in their favor—but there’s no sense of accomplishment since the faction calculations are only known to the GM. For all they knew, they were the last ones there, or another group was just over the hill. (They were something like nine days ahead of the next party slated to arrive.) Hence why I’d run a mini-Kingmaker hex crawler, tracking the various factions’ progress on a big ole map, if I ran it again.

Things I Would Do/Did Different

The challenge level here was subpar. Whatever else I said about the rest of the path, Smuggler’s Shiv through Seven Spears, I take it back; Taizon was a cakewalk in comparison. If I was running this again, I’d replace the charau ka with serpentfolk—there’s three of them, leveled, in the homebrew puzzle, and those were a decent challenge that could still be overcome without serious issues by the PCs. Unless the group was underpowered—pick two: four or less characters, none optimized, a level under the adventure guideline—I wouldn’t use the monkies. Leveling them up is too much trouble, doubling didn’t work, and serpentfolk are more evocative (and fit with my evil plans).

This is also a problem I tried to circumvent in City of Seven Spears—a mob of 7,249 vegepygmies may have a CR high enough to beat down a demon lord, but they can only kill a demon lord statistically, because they will be mown down like wheat .

Depending on how much incentive/time I had, I might also add more stuff in Taizon. Or make it smaller. The map is great, with this varied terrain, an overgrown ruin sinking into the tar pits. And while the locales it has are awesome, there’s a lot of dead space on the map. Just a personal thing.

I would re-use the puzzle, because it was kind of fun, and the players got somewhat engaged with it… even though they kind of shrugged and started mashing gems together immediately. It got good feedback, which was a plus.

Addenda: Other Things I Did Different

Since the players were a bit behind the curve, and as part of my expanding the serpent subplots (with Yarzoth as the BBEG), I threw in some additional combat with serpentfolk raiders and their Young Fiendish T-Rex mount, following a dream sequence vision. To note my group’s power level, the party (down to four around 6th level; fighter, wizard, druid, monk) took on something like a CR 10-11 encounter and beat the T-Rex into a coma. I gave them enough extra XP to bump them to 7th.

Granted, it nearly wiped them out—the druid had one of his many near-death experiences, something that happens more than you’d think to a huge mondo-statted bear. Things were going surprisingly well for them until there was a lucky (unlucky) crit on my part for the Rex; without a few lucky rolls and quick thinking on behalf of the druid, they all would have bought it. Of course, when half the party decided to run off and leave their huge bear druid to die, focusing on a single enemy already locked down via hideous laughter, the near-death part starts to make sense… sometimes it takes two for a TPK.

The Bottom Line

A bit of a letdown ending to an otherwise decent adventure module. Again, I don’t blame Tim Hitchcock; he had enough material for half a campaign and had to squeeze it into one book. The setting has a lot of promise, and for a group closer to the suggestions—four players, med track, not as optimized—it would have been fine. Between their confusion and letdown over Taizon’s emptiness, and my letdown over the lackluster obstacles, Taizon was rather forgettable.

Oh, Conspiracy Cayden.

Oh, Cayden Cailean. Thank you for taking the Test of the Starstone in order to ponder your cruel Objectivist reality whilst drunk.

Serpent’s Skull: Racing to Ruin (2) The Race

Leaving Eleder begins the first major railroad section of the Path—choo! cho0! Racin’ the Rails! It’s a linear segment involving a number of set-piece encounters, and however many random encounters that you choose to insert. The goal: get to the ruin (har) of Taizon before everyone else. As written, that’s not as hard as it sounds.

While it didn’t look that bad at start, I forgot to consider that unless you’re up for rehashing various scenic descriptions and making a running travelogue, this kind of thing doesn’t convey either time or distance very well. It broke down into “Okay, so you travel for X days and then something happens” despite some attempts otherwise; from behind the screen it looked pretty tedious and dull, but apparently the players liked it.

The scripted encounters have a very nice blend of challenges, a few roleplay encounters, and some butting of heads with the rival factions. They’re also wide open to modification and customization, which I would highly recommend; merging set-pieces with random encounters, random encounters with random encounters, and adding more faction encounters—finding their old campsites, bumping into them, getting assaulted by rival faction hit squads—is a must.

Scripted encounters of note:

• The first is a mini-dungeon, a salt mine full of wights, that the PCs plowed through; I changed its Loc-Nar knockoff to channel negative energy every few rounds to make the end combat more challenging. (Even without a cleric, ghouls weren’t a problem at this level, even with some tweaking.)
• My players went hog-wild on one of the roleplaying encounters, a traveling cockfighting ring that’s weighted against the PCs. My group almost passed it on, but a few last-minute bets initiated by the new guy started a spree of competition; when nobody was looking, they buffed up the chickens, and had one of the most intense fights all campaign.
• There’s a nice opportunity for a hippo ambush sometime later; if you want to put the fear of god into your PCs, there’s ample chance for a bull hippo to swamp their raft. I tried to point out the lizardfolk involvement in the affair—foreshadowing, you see—but I think that was lost on them.
• At one point, they are attacked by a group of CR4 bear-apes, name of “Chemosit.” These hit like a friggin’ Mack truck, so pull punches (or only use one) if your PCs are in a small group or aren’t up to snuff. If they are: throw in a third. I did, everyone survived.
• My group decided that the shrunken monkey heads with near-auto dispel evil, which I was pushing on them at all turns, were worthless, so they sold the one they won. Which made the fight with the possessed demon TOUGH AS ALL HELL. It killed the eidolon, almost killed two of the party tanks too; between is incorporeal (50% miss chance) and DR, it’s more than a challenge for the PCs. (Granted, if they had used the monkey heads, it would have been over in three rounds: Round One, ape attack, Round Two, ape dead, Round Three, dispel demon.)

There’s also one scripted faction ambush, which came just a little too late to be effective—druid wildshapes, maul/maul/maul/crunch. I was throwing them in at a constant basis, or having other encounters involve the desiccated remains of an earlier expedition’s scouts. They learned soon enough not to trust traveling merchants who didn’t have more than fifty feet of hempen rope and no rape whistles.

Challenges!

Things are starting to heat up, partly because the slow track dragged the PCs down a level from where their power levels exponentially (Bear Shaman was okay at 5th, brutal at 6th; Monk of the Sacred Mountain was worthless at 4th, highest damage output of the party at 6th). Three Chemosits gave them a headache—the monk lost 75% of his HP in the first round—and the shadow demon was a long, drawn-out, and bloody fight, ending with the death of the eidolon. The faction rogues all have solid poison that can paralyze, leading to a few coup-de-grace attempts on the Monk; he was probably the only one who realized just how damn close to dying he’d been. Later on, there’s a nice roleplay/combat involving some sirens and another demon which was interesting, if only because a third the party ended up charmed or dominated; it wasn’t as close as the earlier two fights, though.

The Adventure Locales

There’s some cool ideas in here, but to be honest, they’re all “Well I could have thought of that”-level. Kinda vanilla. The salt mine was cool, as was having a lost Chelaxian treasure shipwreck; the rest are mostly deviations on “native village,” “jungle,” “a different part of the jungle,” “jungle river,” etc., but with some new or interesting monster to fight. Hence why I saw spruce it up; some unique encounter locales would have rocked: a trail running under a waterfall or a bridge running over a gorge; a lost ruin campsite of some kind, maybe a rubble tower or a small ziggurat, some way station between Taizon and Saventh-Yhi.

(Also, there’s a heavy emphasis on demons here—makes sense, all the demon-worshiping stuff in the Mwangi, but that doesn’t fit with the other modules’ more varied, less-”stereotypical D&D” monsters.)

Why Did I Say It’s Dull?

Because the title implies “Race,” and as written… there ain’t no freakin’ race, Charlie. At best, the party can cut two days off their travel time from encounters, or add one day from another. Without Nkechi, they add a week to their travel times… but what group’s going to pass on orders to get a guide, which is effectively “go get some guy and XP”? If they go pell-mell for Taizon, and you assume the standard travel times as written on the chart, they’d have to sit in Taizon for something like a week before the next faction’s scouts arrived. There’s no challenge to it, which makes having a druid, or someone with high Survival, or mounts, or whatever, no advantage whatsoever to getting to Taizon first.

There are many ways to spruce up this adventure, and I’d recommend doing all of them. Stop, think, plan, look at the Paizo forums, Google, whatever. The race needs flavor that the module just ain’t got. Those 3-5 sessions spent on the trail were the dullest “race” I’ve ever been a part of; part of the problem was our roleplaying contingent had dropped out, so we’re left with chair-warmers and some “hurry up to get to the combat” folks, which didn’t help. About the time they got to Kalabuto I realized it wasn’t working, and no matter what I did to spruce it up, it just didn’t feel right.

V.P. Corbella's art is pretty hawt.

Random Encounters!

For the love of god, roll those ahead of time. Think of some that are entertaining, too, that combine well with the other encounters you rolled and/or the prefab ones in the module. I kept getting Rival Faction Team, so I’d combine them with things like “Natives” (killed some traveling merchants, tricked the PCs into moving as a group “for protection”). Or I rolled them into animal attacks. I also combined some of the set-pieces; namely, the murder-tree and the Geiers, along with some more (dead) faction members.

Also, have the faction teams show up every now and then, to try to make it feel more like a race. I think the Sargavan government was coming into Kalabuto as the PCs left, and the Pathfinders arrived at the sirens’ hut as the PCs were leaving in the morning.

Faction Roll-Call

My group went with the Pirates because they paid the most. The Red Mantis were the clear rival from very early on, though the Pathfinders haven’t seen eye to eye with them either; after knocking Gelik and the Pathfinder faction leader off their mounts, I have the feeling that bridge has been burned.

The Sargavans and Aspis Consortium have been out of the scene; I’ve figured they have more pressing goals, and are more interested in expanding their control/loot, respectively, to pay attention to the other factions’ infighting. Though I have the feeling the Sargavans might turn out to be racist pricks, given the natives’ feelings about “Chelaxian” rule.

(Sometimes I wonder about designers, given Sargava’s polemic bipolarity of “White Man’s Burden” colonials versus “Stab Whitey” natives.)

Things I Would Do Different

If I had to do it over again, I’d go all-out stupid with planning. I’d hash out a map of Sargava with a hex grid in Photoshop, then run a miniaturized variant of Kingmaker for the race: give the hexes terrain features which reduce/increase travel speed, divvy out the set pieces (and add some more!) between the areas, then have the party tell me where and how they’re blazing forth. I’d track the other factions’ progress to emphasize the race angle, maybe even open to the players. And have them take various routes; maybe the Pathfinders would pole up the river, while the Sargavan government would trek across the plains, and the Red Mantis would strike hard and fast through the Screaming Jungle.

I’d also have the major factions take routes with high overlap frequency over the players’ course, so that they’re stumbling into each others’ trails and abandoned campsites, seeing their campfires every few nights, maybe setting each others’ herd animals loose or scaring their native bearers away… all while the clock ticks down to discovering Taizon. It’d give an oppertunity for the other factions to get to Taizon. (Such as the serpentfolk, led by Yarzoth, who I took as the recurring villain.) Or at least have multiple factions make some progress, or make the PCs’ pull all-nighters through the jungle or something else disadvantageous to stay ahead. Granted, it should be weighted towards the PCs, but it shouldn’t be the cakewalk as written.

Kind of like those madcap race movies they had back in the ’60s mixed with… a real race, with everyone running neck-and-neck to Taizon. Yes, this is a helluva lot of work. And given how my current group’s going, it could be a lot of work for naught. But that’s what I’d do, dangnabbit; the module promises a race, and this is how I see a race being delivered. This module was just too railroad-y, too linear a race; I don’t mind the plot being a railroad, but I’m starting to see that “Sandbox-Railroad-Sandbox-Railroad” whiplash people talk about when Serpent’s Skull comes up.

The Bottom Line

All in all, this section has a lot of potential, but needs a lot of GM handwork to have that spark of awesome that other Path modules have. Work which I didn’t put into it, because I wasn’t expecting it (bad. move.) and because I’m sinking most of my time into City of Seven Spears. And Seven Spears demands that you do work GM magic and expand the module, running all over the place solidifying the existing Geo-political sphere, fleshing out encounter sites, beefing up monsters and hazards and diplomatic encounters. Otherwise, if you don’t, it’s the most fucking banal exercise in Vegepygmy genocide I’ve ever read.

Pathfinder Conversions: Pack Alpha Quickplate

Continuing on with some simple conversions of the “quick” templates at the back of the Monsternomicons (by Privateer Press, which were awesome, and I wish they’d either made more or updated them for Pathfinder).

Next up, the alpha leader. Pretty standard staple template, it’s a good way to make a creature a semi-unique boss or leader monster. Unlike our previous template, this one beefs up its creature quite a bit, hence why I said boss/leader. Also, it gives it a variant of leadership, which is pretty rad.

Pack Alpha

The pack alpha is the dominant leader in a pack, pride, flock, pod, or other group of hunting creatures. This template is usually applied only to animals and magical beasts, though it can be applied in special cases to primitive humanoids or similar savage races. The pack alpha is often, but not always, male; it gained its dominant position through a combination of strength, size, and smarts.

Hit Dice: Double the creature’s Constitution modifier to hp.

Speed: Add 10 ft. to creature’s speed.

AC: If the creature has a natural AC bonus, that bonus is increased by half.

Saves: +2 to all saves

Abilities: Add +5 to Strength, +2 to Dexterity, and +2 to Charisma.

Skills: The creature gains enough bonus skills points in Intimidate to give it maximum possible ranks in Intimidate.

Feats: Improved Initiative, Leadership*

Special Qualities: *Leadership: The pack alpha uses its HD as its level for determining its Leadership score. It may apply its Intimidate ranks + Strength modifier as a racial modifier when leading creatures of its own base type. Penalties for things such as cruelty do not apply to a pack alpha’s score. (Note that in many cases, the cohort/follower relationship is very rudimentary.)

Restrictions: Can only be applied to creatures that hunt in groups (e.g., more than solitary or pair), and have some basic forms of communication.

CR: Increase by 2.

Sample creature: Chimera Pack Alpha. I wanted a magical beast, and Chimeras came to mind; it’s got that wild animal vibe from its leonine features, and I could see an alpha Chimera leading a pack of chimeras across the savannah. Running down dinosaurs and giant sloths, blasting herds of antelope with their breath weapons. That kind of thing.

Its leadership score would be 9, plus any modifiers depending on how legendary/powerful this creature is; I’d rank it at 10, giving it a 7th-level cohort (conveniently, another Chimera) and five 1st-level followers (Chimeras reduced to 1-HD as cubs/pups, some low-level Great Cats, another Chimera modded to be a CR5, whatever works).

Chimera Pack Alpha

CR 9

XP 6,400
CE Large magical beast
Init +6; Senses darkvision 60 ft., low-light vision, scent; Perception +10

DEFENSE

AC 23, touch 10, flat-footed 22 (+1 Dex, +13 natural, –1 size)
hp 109 (9d10+60)
Fort +11, Ref +10, Will +8

OFFENSE

Speed 40 ft., fly 60 ft. (poor)
Melee bite +15 (2d6+7), bite +15 (1d8+7), gore +15 (1d8+7), 2 claws +15 (1d6+7)
Space 10 ft.; Reach 5 ft.
Special Attacks breath weapon (usable every 1d4 rounds)

STATISTICS

Str 24, Dex 14, Con 17, Int 4, Wis 13, Cha 12
Base Atk +9; CMB +17; CMD 29 (33 vs. trip)
Feats Hover, Improved Initiative, Iron Will, Leadership, Skill Focus (Perception), Toughness
Skills Fly +3, Intimidate +10, Perception +10, Stealth +5 (+9 in scrubland or brush); Racial Modifiers +2 Perception, +4 Stealth in scrubland or brush
Languages Draconic

SPECIAL ABILITIES

Breath Weapon (Su)

A chimera’s breath weapon depends on the color of its dragon head, as summarized on the table below. Regardless of its type, a chimera’s breath weapon is usable once every 1d4 rounds, deals 6d8 points of damage, and allows a DC 17 Reflex save for half damage. The save DC is Constitution-based.

To determine a chimera’s head color and breath weapon randomly, roll 1d10 and consult the table below:

• 1-2: Black head, 40-foot line of acid
• 3-4: Blue head, 40-foot line of lightning
• 5-6: Green head, 20-foot cone of acid
• 7-8: Red head, 20-foot cone of fire
• 9-10: White head, 20-foot cone of cold

There you have it. By comparing it to the chart in the back of the Bestiary, it’s got the correct HP and AC for a CR9, though its attacks are two lower (15 instead of 17). That’s made up for by its higher damage output in my opinion; chimeras punch way above their weight. If all its attacks hit, a normal CR7 chimera hits for average damage equal to a CR9, according to the Bestiary Average Monster Stats chart; this one, assuming all hit and do exactly average damage, is closer to a CR13.

Its special ability DC is a little on the low side; it has a good-but-not-great damage output, and at that level several PCs should have Evasion anyways. Lastly, its good saves aren’t as high as they should be. It’s about on target, though with a properly spec’d party, this would be more of a CR8 in terms of challenge.

Pathfinder Conversion: Deep-Dwelling Quickplate

I loved how Pathfinder simplified templates into the “fast template” format at the end of the book; it freed up a lot of space by compacting the more banal ones (celestial, fiendish, advanced, etc.). I loved them even better when Privateer Press was putting them at the end of their Monsternomicon books. Those were technically “Quickplates,” and weren’t condensed to quick and rebuild versions like in the Bestiary, but they were still fantastic ways to make new and unique monsters.

Of course, the big flaw with OGL content was that it often didn’t include monster names; the exceptions are the Advanced Bestiary, Tome of Horrors, and one or two others. Granted, it’s hard to copyright something like “Red Devil,” or a name from real-world history/mythology, but it’s annoying as sin when you have to come up with witty replacement names for Dracodiles and Nerubians. Never mind that most of the monster manuals is verboten.

For the most part, I changed the names to be something different (unless it was banal, like “Tough”), but if they’re notably awkward just make them whatever the heck you want. Besides, it’s not like the players should ever now.

I realize this one is somewhat similar to the Cave Creature template from Advanced Bestiary, but I think they’re two sides to the same process. Cave creature is an inherited template, representing an evolutionary change in a species: its offspring becoming modified to the subterranean environment. Deep-dwelling, by contrast, is more representative of adaptations in an individual creature: it’s been living underground for a while and has honed its senses to survive in a light-less environment, but it hasn’t, for example, evolved past eyesight and replaced it with echolocation (blindsight).

I’m also half tempted to rename the quickplate “subterranean” since that’s both accurate and unrelated to the original, but whatever. If Privateer has a problem with the name, I’ll change it.

Deep-Dwelling

A deep-dwelling creature is one that’s adapted to subterranean life: its eyes have adapted to near darkness, its senses of smell and hearing have been honed. This is a gradual development, but it can happen to any creature—even groups of creatures—that have either wandered underground or been trapped there.

Speed: The creature gains a climb speed equal to half its base speed.

Senses: The creature gains darkvision 60 ft., lean, scent.

Saves: +1 to Fortitude.

Abilities: Add +2 to Constitution and Dexterity.

Skills: The creature gains a +4 racial bonus to Perception and Stealth checks.

Restrictions: This quickplate is not typically applied to creatures Large size or greater, and it cannot be applied to creatures which are native to subterranean environments.

Special Abilities: Lean (Ex): Food and water are harder to come by in a subterranean environment, and the deep-dwelling creature adapts to having less of these. It requires half as much sustenance as its base type.

CR: No change, or increase by +1.

Sample creature: Cave dinosaurs came to mind, so I picked a nice big one, Allosaurus from the Bestiary 2. Dinosaurs, like most monsters, are easy as heck to template, since they don’t have a lot of special abilities to repeat, giving them short stat blocks. And besides, it has a nice Hollow Earth/Center of the Earth flavor to it. I could see some dinosaurs getting stuck beneath the earth (or dragged down by some serpentfolk/drow animal wranglers, and ending up loose somehow) and adapting to subterranean life, stomping around and eating whatever it bumps into.

Deep-Dwelling Allosaurus

CR 7

XP 3,200
N Huge animal
Init +5; Senses darkvision 60 ft., low-light vision, scent; Perception +28

DEFENSE

AC 20, touch 10, flat-footed 18 (+2 Dex, +10 natural, –2 size)
hp 103 (11d8+55)
Fort +14, Ref +9, Will +7

OFFENSE

Speed 50 ft., climb 25 ft.
Melee bite +14 (2d6+8/19–20 plus grab), 2 claws (1d8+8)
Space 15 ft.; Reach 15 ft.
Special Attacks pounce, rake (2 talons +14, 1d8+8)

STATISTICS

Str 26, Dex 15, Con 21, Int 2, Wis 15, Cha 10
Base Atk +8; CMB +18; CMD 29
Feats Alertness, Improved Critical (bite), Improved Initiative, Iron Will, Nimble Moves, Run
Skills Perception +30, Stealth +10; Racial Modifiers +12 Perception, +4 Stealth SQ lean

I juggled two of its Perception ranks into Stealth since it’s a class skill, giving this big guy a snowball’s chance in hell of sneaking up on something. Other than that, it’s a very minor bump: +11 hp, +3 to Fort, +1 to Ref, +1 to AC and Touch AC, and darkvision. Probably not the best choice in hindsight, since it already had scent. And now it has a climb speed, for no well-defined reason. I’m not sure it’s up to the snuff of a CR8, like the template implies, since the only thing on-par is its health and saves, so I left its CR alone.

I’m used to competent, optimized characters in large groups who would make mincemeat of this thing, so I tend to lowball CRs in general; if your group isn’t optimized, or has few members, bump the CR back up.

So, let’s try another monster, one that doesn’t already have several of the template’s features. How about a lower-level threat? For some reason I was thinking of trogs, except those guys are already subterranean. So what about something bounding across the savannah plain? And no, what came to mind wasn’t a lion, but megafauna in everything but name.

Deep-Dwelling Axe Beak

CR 3

XP 600
N Large animal
Init +3; Senses darkvision 60 ft., low-light vision, scent; Perception +9

DEFENSE

AC 15, touch 13, flat-footed 11 (+4 Dex, +2 natural, -1 size)
hp 26 (3d8+12)
Fort +9, Ref +7, Will +1

OFFENSE

Speed 50 ft., climb 25 ft.
Melee bite +5 (1d8+6)
Space 10 ft.; Reach 10 ft.
Special Attacks lean, sudden charge

STATISTICS

Str 18, Dex 19, Con 18, Int 2, Wis 11, Cha 10
Base Atk +2; CMB +7; CMD 20
Feats Run, Skill Focus (Perception)
Skills Perception +9; Racial Modifiers +4 Perception, +4 Stealth

SPECIAL ABILITIES

Lean (Ex)

Food and water are harder to come by in a subterranean environment, and the deep-dwelling creature adapts to having less of these. It requires half as much sustenance as its base type.

Sudden Charge (Ex)

When making a charge attack, an axe beak makes a single bite attack. If successful, it may also attempt to trip its opponent as a free action without provoking an attack of opportunity. If the attempt fails, the axe beak cannot be tripped in return.

Great, both of my choices have had climb speeds at the awkward 25-foot increment. At any rate, giving a creature +2 Con and +2 Dex is a lot more noticeable at lower levels, though it’s not going to ruin the characters that much more as a CR2 than a CR3. Its damage output and attacks remain unchanged, making it a passable foe, but probably not a major one. Unless it uses its Sudden Charge to stack with its climb speed, which, while hilarious sounding, probably doesn’t work RAW. Up to the GM at that point.

Looking at both of these, I’m going to put the template’s CR modifier at “CR: +0 or +1,” since I’m not sure it does enough to make monsters that much more deadly. It’s kind of like the Celestial/Fiendish templates put on a low-level monster; it just doesn’t feel like it’s advancing things enough to take on four average characters at a level above the creatures’ base stats.

There you have it.

Serpent’s Skull: Racing to Ruin (1) Eleder

I’m having a hard time keeping up with the blog posts I assigned myself; losing my computer for a month didn’t help, so now it’s finding the incentive and momentum to catch up on everything I should have posted. Such as my gaming liveblogs.

Welp, the first half of Racing to Ruin, the second module in the Serpent’s Skull adventure path. Since it’s the second module in the line, it’s main purpose is grinding the characters up to the effective levels of play (the 6-10 sweet spot), and building upon the adventure hook at the end of the first module. (It’s sad, but I’m starting to see Adventure Paths less as the awesome adventures as they appear on the surface, and more as their metagame flowchart cores, the semi-formula they tend to follow—I really need to play more than I run.)

Racing to Ruin starts the characters out in Eleder, after escaping the horrors of Smuggler’s Shiv. Besides giving the players a chance to do some much-needed shopping, it triggers the first major plotline of the Path: the factions seeking the lost city Saventh-Yhi, each of whom sends a representative (last module’s NPCs) to hire the players as trailblazers.

The PCs’ time on the Shiv kind of pigeonholed their NPCs. They didn’t want anything to do with the Pathfinders; I’d made Gelik kind of an odious little shit since he kept failing morale checks and nobody wanted to cheer him up (or talk to him), and besides, I get kind of tired of everyone making Pathfinders into absolute badasses, so I tend to screw with them, like the eccentric old guy in Legacy of Fire who ran an inn (Roderous?) outside Katapesh proper.

Eando Kline, for example, is a badass Pathfinder. Not everyone is Eando Kline. Case in point, the rogue Pathfinders in Entombed with the Pharaohs; yep, one of the groups’ first prime-time appearances, and it’s rotten members abusing the system. (A system which is kinda rife for abuse, too.)

Anyways. Ishirou and the Aspis Consortium didn’t interest them enough—”they’re evil! waugh!”—and as much as they liked Sasha, they didn’t like the Red Mantis. Besides, Sasha isn’t too keen on the Red Mantis, which they knew, and so I had her dragging her feet and only doing it because she had to. Between Jask, another favorite NPC, with the Sargavan Government, and Aerys with the Shackles Pirates, they went pirate because they paid better.

First, postcolonialism in action. Reinforcing the weird geo-politics of Sargava, we end up with a small rebellion of native terrorists. (Yeah, the way to avoid dated “white man’s burden”-style ethnocentric tropes is totally to deal with the issue by having natives who want to stab whitey.) These thugs were easy XP for the party; after fending off some arsonists, they freed a hostage down at the whaling company, where they ended up taking some heat.

Next, their duty was to find an eccentric cleric of Gozreh living as a hermit off on a cliff (Nkechi by name) for the expedition to use as a guide/healer, and perform some tasks for him. Party is leaning very good-ish, since they avoided killing a number of animals/natives that didn’t have to be killed. Of course, this came right after they were berated for killing a bunch of giant crabs.

Nkechi’s dream sequence was pretty hawt. I’d planned to have the PCs’ animal totem stats written up on flash cards, but never got around to it; even with twenty minutes of frantic scribbling and some ad-hoc as to a porcupine’s stats (stupid thing’s now in Bestiary 3) and it went pretty well. I managed to cue my description of the dream-fugue rise and fall of Saventh-Yhi to my background music, which astonished and enthused most of the players. (Ah, the student has become the master.)

From there, they set out on the trail, which I’ll cover next session.

Besides losing and gaining an oracle, who happened to be some of the more interesting PCs, things had already settled by now. I’m finding most of my players are more on the hack-n-slash than roleplay side, despite what I’d advertised/been told; no bonus roleplay XP awards here I guess.

The Slow Track

It’s actually going very, very nice; Smuggler’s Shiv was essentially an XP gold mine, with all its crabs and cave fishers and other vermin to exterminate, so they ended ahead of schedule there and stayed on track for the first section of Racing/Ruin. Not that they’d have had much problem regardless; CR 2′s are only threatening to 1st-level characters and bad builds.

Class Effectiveness

Of course, this is also the low levels of the game; the fighter and druid with bear cub companion were the power characters here. (Druids, power class, ducking fuh.) The party monk was still having trouble hitting and dealing damage, and the summoner was banally weak, though his eidolon was on-par with the party tanks. The new oracle was a pure healbot, which made me feel a little sad inside—play a cleric, I say, so you can cast all sorts of awesome buffs!—though he saved multiple people from being brutally murdered, and thus his life’s mission was complete. The wizard was just starting to get into his own spell-wise.

Hypnotism is still an awful spells—particularly if you’re lazy in using it. Though in the next section, he took scorching ray, which gave the party some much needed artillery, and had been dropping enlarge person on the fighter.

The Adventure Locales

Even though they’re just screwing around in Eleder, I thought the locations were solid. The whaling company was particularly cool; it’s a nice seedy location, and some of its environment became challenges (the machine-trap, flaming blubber). Nkechi’s cliff and quest areas were basic, but made good use of the environment.

The Challenges

The first half is mixed: the whaling station was hardcore, but the rest of the module was standard fare and didn’t push any near-death experiences. The average mooks weren’t worth noting; the Nkechi-based challenges were either out-grappled or dealt with without resorting to bloodshed. (Save the aforementioned mook crabs.)

I thought the kelpie would thrash the druid, since he went in solo and it was several CRs above him. He summoned a squid, which resulted in the kelpie getting pinned as the eidolon swam in, and that was the end of that.

The whaling station, though… the autobot druid transformed and rolled out as a raptor, heading for the hostage, who happened to be Sasha (punishment for talking the PCs’ out of siding with the Red Mantis). The rest of the party slogged their way through the mooks, while raptor druid took the leveled boss in the teeth. Quick work from the oracle saved his bacon. Meanwhile, the monk investigated the side buildings, looking for snipers he couldn’t find (who perpetually shot him in the ass). It was a lot tougher than the combats on the Shiv, and the druid almost bought it. (Well, save for his backup points and that scroll of raise dead the party’s probably forgotten about.)

I made the dream-serpent into a form of Yarzoth, who is becoming something of a recurring villain in this piece. I was hoping she’d pummel at least one PC back into the waking realm, them being just in animal form and all; while several PCs were cutting it close health-wise, she was soundly thrashed.

Things I Would Do/Did Different

To be honest? Not much. The first half of the module is smooth and simple, and fills its duty of setting the PCs on the trail towards Saventh-Yhi. And giving them a bunch of cake challenges on the way. I did add a few more encounters with the revolting natives, which was about it on that end.

The biggest problem I see here is trying to get the PCs to bite on the whole “expedition to Saventh-Yhi” thing, which may thwart other groups. (To be honest, I didn’t pick up the rest of the path until after my players had consigned themselves to a faction.) I had the NPCs’ pitch it as El Dorado with dollar-signs in their eyes; between that and a general malaise that they were hooked on the Canned Adventure Railroad, they decided to bite and soldier on. Though I’d rather it had been more of a natural “Well shit, let’s go do that” kind of thing.

Sadly, despite all my assurances and needling, not one of them took the plunge and bought a loot donkey for eight damn dollars. I’m going to need to look at their loot inventory and make sure their accumulated wealth/ill-gotten gains aren’t slowing them down.

[d20] Thoughts On Experience

Continuing on from yesterday, a topic somewhat related to leveling: experience, how it’s attained and how it’s balanced.

The oddity I find with experience is that D&D is the only game on the market where you’re rewarded more for what you kill than what you do. It actually baffled me when I first ran across a non-D&D game, Alternity: wait, you’re not rewarded for each thing you’re killed? Right; there’s no incentive to kill everything then, other than the stereotypical gamer reason of “to take their stuff.” Which, I think, is part of the reason most other games don’t base their rewards system solely on what you’ve defeated in combat.

I can’t remember where it was—it’s been a dog’s age since I opened one of those books—but I swear Spycraft (2nd Ed) had a system which blew me away in its superiority. It still gave rewards for what you killed, but they were minimal—Spycraft’s use of mooks and all meant that the PCs should be outnumbered, but by baddies with no Wounds. (Only having Vitality Points and no Wounds meant mooks insta-dropped to crits, didn’t have action points, and had “minion” levels instead of real PC/NPC class levels.) A proper action movie has the protagonists outnumbered, but not outgunned—see any Bond movie—and Spycraft did a damn good job with that. Much better than d20 Modern, at any rate.

Instead, Spycraft rewarded you with a chunk of XP based on whether you succeeded on your mission objectives or not. It made a lot of sense for mission-oriented style of play, and was a helluva lot more interesting than going out into the killing fields to shoot some ultra-nationalist commies or neo-Nazis or mafiosos or whatever, to get the 300xp you needed to get another level in Ace Pilot. The downside is that it required the players to know what got them a reward: to use a bad pun, it took plot agency out of their hands and put it into the hands of the Agency. In short, it was built to reward established GM-devised missions, not so much player-directed ones.

It reminds me a lot of AD&D, and isn’t as far off from the game’s wargame roots as you might think. First Edition gave you XP for finding magic items/the amount of gold you found, which fit with the game’s mindset: in 1e AD&D, finding gold and magic swords was your mission objective. 2nd Ed had a bit emphasis on story awards, a stack of XP doled out once the group met story objectives or advanced the plot… of course, that might have just been my group, but I’d note it also showed up in the Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale games.

Spycraft 2nd still feels too crunchy to me, but I love it for some of the ideas it added: for starters, its XP rewards and damage saves for items, two things I want to add into Pathfinder. It’s the kind of d20 hack I wish Paizo had made into a core Pathfinder rule, trying to strengthen the actual mechanics. It might have distanced the game from 3.5 more, negating the “backwards compatability,” but Pathfinder as written drifts away from 3.5 enough to make it a separate game… yet one with many of the same flaws.

I think the concept might be a bit too “military” for a fantasy RPG, even with one wargame roots. Heck, I was reminded of Spycraft’s system when I was reading the rules to Force on Force, a new set of wargame rules built for ultramodern insurgency warfare, which tries to get away from note-taking chores and point-buy armies to focus on the scenario and mission goals. A storygame wargame, if you will. And the mindset, shared by both FoF and Spycraft, reflects proper military wargame doctrine: it doesn’t matter how many of the enemy you kill if you can’t achieve your goals. It’s also a lot less gamey in the traditional sense; instead of the traditional IGOUGO alternating turn-based rounds, it divides between the side with initiative, and the side that takes reactionary actions. Something I think D&D and Pathfinder could learn from.

I really want a tweaked D&D game that’s less kill-oriented and more goal-oriented like that, though it sounds like a lot of work to rebuild. (Damn, apparently I’m more narrativist than I thought.) Which, ironically, brings me full-circle to 2nd Ed AD&D and its story awards as a method for rewarding attained goals.