Last weekend was the first installment of our latest attempt to figure out Pathfinder. We all sat down and finalized things with the characters for the first hour, including a name change for our rogue (I refuse to call a girl "Frank"....). The role call for this adventure included the following:
- Elania (corrected spelling from last post), female elven cleric 1
- Ludo, male half-orc barbarian 1
- Axel Pine, male half-elf fey sorcerer 1
- Nicky, female human rogue 1
- Kruhnk, male half-orc barbarian 1
My prep for the game was doubled on Saturday afternoon when I inadvertently erased the map I made the previous week in Game Table! I had to hastily remedy this before the game and skipped dinner as a result. The lack of blood sugar probably affected my DMing a bit....
I had the module set along the coast east of Sandpoint. Kruhnk was working as a longshoreman at the docks and hung out a lot at the local tavern with his drinking buddy Ludo, an out-of work mercenary from the area. Kruhnk himself was from out of town, having rowed into port in a dinghy from a shipwreck offshore. Kruhnk spent his money like water and when he needed healing for an injury, he would always visit Elania's shrine where she performed healing for the sick and injured. Meanwhile, Nicky was trying to get out of town after a few heists in the marketplace went badly. She was living in an abandoned home in town and spent most of her free time chumming around with the "dreamy" sorcerer, Axel Pine. All of the party members were aware of each other and all applied for a job as caravan guards heading east along the coast road.
The party was 5 of 8 guards hired and they set out in the middle of the week to a fishing community known as Awad. There they were to reprovision before heading inland to the next largest town. However, they encountered a number of refugees in wagons on the route, all claiming to have come from Awad where an elven curse had descended upon the village in the form of a plague! The caravan master, put out by having to let the refugees pass along the narrow road, eventually came to see that something was clearly wrong. He decided to head back to Sandpoint and find another way to the inland markets. However, Elania had already promised some of the refugees to seek out the source of the elven curse (being an elf, she felt it was her duty to do so). So the party left the caravan and got paid 25 gp each for their services. The caravan followed the refugees back to the west while the party continued on eastward to Awad, making it there by evening.
In the village they found a mob in the process of accosting an old man. While Nicky snuck around investigating the mostly abandoned village, the others made a beeline for the center of the community. Elania and Axel moved into the crowd and showed that they were elves - this caused an uproar of panic and pleading among the people. The old man, Crommard the Sage, pleaded for them to save him. The half-orcs took up defensive positions at Elania's side and the group moved forward to discuss things with the lead guard. Negotiations went decently, and Crommard was released into their care, but they were told to leave the village as the guards would not guarantee their safety during the night. So the party took to making camp outside the village to the east. Luckily no one accosted them during that time.
The next morning, after some scrounging for sea bird eggs for breakfast and some scouting in the village by the rogue, the party made a hasty advance towards the ruins on the eastern cliff. These ruins, they learned from the sage, were the site of an archaeological investigation by Crommard, his associate Sethus, and their work crew. Sethus had apparently contracted some form of plague and stumbled back to the village to warn the others before staggering off to die in the wilderness. Crommard hoped he was still alive and that he could be saved. The trip there was mostly uneventful except for a run-in with a mamma skunk and her kits. Luckily, Axel was able to identify the threat and steered the party clear. They arrived near the ruins by late afternoon and Axel noticed there was a humanoid standing outside the entrance to the place.
Nicky stealthed over to the wall and hid by a dead tree. There she saw a warty large orc with immense arms and stunted legs dressed in furs but otherwise unarmed (an ogrillon). He was apparently casually watching along the western cliff approach, alternately cracking his huge knuckles or picking his nose. Nicky returned to the others to report.
Ludo, acting as a drunken decoy (they had bought a bottle of fine wine from one of the refugees earlier), wandered off towards the cliff in a stagger, and stopped near the edge to relieve himself. The rest of the party used the distraction to run for the wall and the dead trees. The humanoid at the entrance noticed Ludo and hid partially behind the ruined gate wall to see what was happening.
* * * * *
We ended here at around 12:30 am Sunday morning. The players seemed entertained by the scenario although it did drag a bit when individual characters tried to hog the spotlight. The problem with a 'sandbox' approach is that sometimes the players wander about aimlessly. The system is a bit different from our usual D&D fare and the scenario was only hastily explained, so I guess that's partly my fault. I hate railroading, but sometimes it's necessary to drive the module on. Such a device will be used in the dungeons below (written into the module) to keep the players from dilly-dallying at every empty room (bad air may cause characters to lose Str/Con every 30 minutes). The barbarians have not yet been tested in combat so I'm not sure how two great-axe-wielding, raging half-orcs are gonna work here (the dungeons are very tight space-wise). I'm hoping to build some sort of 'party rapport' for when the 'bad stuff' starts happening. The half-orcs are going to be challenged the deeper this goes, and the elves are going to be taxed magically. Even the rogue will have her hands full with all the traps involved. I just hope they remain a GROUP and don't go all 'bazinga' on me.
If played to its conclusion, the adventure can be very rewarding (or very deadly), depending on how cautious and smart the players are. My greatest fear is that one of the half-orcs will turn evil and kill one of the elves with the treasure found (an intelligent evil weapon whose purpose is to slay elves). At this level of experience they may not have the magical means to do away with some of the conditions they will encounter (disease, poison, mental compulsion, etc.). Since this is a one-shot adventure I'm not too concerned with the outcome and they can make new characters as required on their own time. My concern is with running the system as designed and exposing the players to all the rules in order to compare and contrast with the other editions. The players are very enthusiastic about these rules and I see that they are very robust. My only complaint thus far is a lack of carrying capacities listed for containers. Cubic feet listings are useless if one has no conversion data and some of the items have even less info! The GM guide is very informative on running games and all the tools used to make things work. However, I would have preferred to have the magic item information in the GM Guide, not the Core Rules. If players want to make such things, they should have to research established formulae, not automatically know how to do something because they leveled up and took a feat....
No comments:
Post a Comment