Still catching up on posting our session write-ups…here is our second session with Entombed with the Pharaohs. There are, of course, significant spoilers for the module starting right below the break. As always, my GM comments in [italics].

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As part of our process to reacquaint ourselves with d20 and Pathfinder in particular, we took up a mid-level adventure…Entombed with the Pharaohs. Now, obviously, there are going to be some definite spoilers below the break but I do just want to say that this module, written by Michael Kortes, has exactly what I love to find in a pre-published adventure. Although there is something of an “end-goal” involved with the module, it didn’t feel like an overly linear adventure. Instead, Mr. Kortes provided various NPCs, scenes, and tools to reach that end-goal but with enough openness that I’m guessing different groups will find this module play out quite differently. Exactly how I like a module to be written.

Below is the journal from our first session. It was nearly a month ago so I might have a few details wrong. Oh, but first, the characters…

• Nuala, a 6th level elf rogue played by Rachel.
• Kyra, a 6th level human cleric played by Bridgett.
• Ezren, a 6th level human wizard played by RJ.
• Nasir, a 6th level human fighter played by Todd.
• Scott, a 6th level Sorcerer played by Austin.

Now on to what happened in the first session…obviously there are spoilers below for Entombed with the Pharaohs.

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I, obviously, have not been keeping up with posting here but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t still been playing on a regular basis. Our Halloween one-shot kind of fell through as one of the players had to cancel near the last minute and it wasn’t really going to work well without a full compliment of players. So instead, we did what many had been doing…we busted out the Pathfinder Beginner Box and played the included introductory adventure. We had quite a bit of fun with it. I’m not saying that it’ll ever win awards for its depth and character development but it was a fun little dungeon crawl. Some of the rule changes, of course, changed how things played a bit. For example, the lack of attacks of opportunities meant that a certain big bad guy at the “end” of the adventure could move about quite a bit without any real repercussions. I think the cleric’s Channel Energy healing did almost as much healing for the bad guy as the good guys due to this.

Like many others, I contemplated expanding upon the introductory module (especially since the bad guy got away) but I decided not to. Instead, I figured we might as well jump in and start playing–more or less–full Pathfinder. I picked up the three “First Steps” modules for the Pathfinder Society Organized play, added another player (Austin), and away we went.

I was a bit disappointed with the series. Don’t get me wrong, we had fun, but it just seemed too artificial to me. I’m sure some of this is an artifact of the format of the adventures…each designed to be played in four hours as part of organized play. It just wasn’t quite what I wanted. My players often tend to not want to just go from encounter to encounter and, at times, that is what these felt like. We took nearly three sessions (of 4 to 5 hours each) to finish the first of the three. Some of that was because we are still pretty new to Pathfinder and some was due to my players’ inclination to “dawdle.” Some, though, were the modules themselves (e.g., the dealings with the Sapphire Sage in the first module really rubbed some of my players wrong due to its overly “gamist” and artificial feel).

We played through the first two modules and started the third but stopped before we got too far into it. It just seemed like there were so many holes, inconsistencies, and little things that I didn’t like by that point that we stopped before getting too far into it. I wanted to run these modules as close to written as possible since this was all intended to give us all a good introduction to the Pathfinder system but I just wasn’t going to be able to do it. Of course, it also helped that one of the PCs attempted to cast charm person on a rather well-guarded bigwig at the beginning of the module who was kind of important to the party even beginning their third mission. I’ll just say that a certain gnome bard is still serving as a charmed attendant of Master Torch in Absalom.

Regardless, I think the modules served their purpose for us…to start to get a better feel for Pathfinder. At least at the lower levels. I’m not ready to play high level Pathfinder yet and I know my players aren’t either but I do want to play a bit of a higher level next. Actually, I had read a lot about E6 (for 3.5) and the “sweet spot” it represents so sixth level seems like a good point to try at this point.

Everyone made a sixth level character (or grabbed a pre-gen) and we started Entombed with the Pharaohs. I’ll post more about our first session with it but it was quite fun.

It is, of course, old news that Paizo is releasing a boxed set, the Pathfinder Beginner Box, of their Pathfinder rules. The box, as one might guess from its title, is directed to new players. Given that I’ve been playing since before the 1st Edition DM’s Guide was published, I don’t think I’m exactly the target demographic that Paizo is looking to hit with this new product. However, that hasn’t stopped me from being rather intrigued by it. Intrigued to the point that I want to give Pathfinder another try. See, I got burned out on 3.5 near its “last” days and so I’ve never really given Pathfinder a good try. I’ve got the core books and a number Paizo’s adventures and setting stuff but I’ve only run a few sessions of Pathfinder using the Crypt of the Everflame.

While we have a regular schedule of gaming on most Saturday evenings, we’ve recently hit one of those rare situations where multiple players couldn’t make it to multiple sessions in a row. We’ve only played our Quail Valley campaign with Myth & Magic once in the last five weeks. This weekend we’re doing the annual Halloween one-shot so it’ll be like six weeks with one session. For me, that just isn’t enough to really keep my interest in a campaign.

So, my gaming thoughts were already straying and I was already thinking about a new campaign when I started to see a lot of good reviews and good press about the Beginner’s Box (like this review). I guess I just thought, wny not? Why not give Pathfinder, initially in the slimmed down version of the Beginner’s Box, a try and dust off some of those old ideas and old prep work I did for a Golarion campaign a number of years ago. As I noted in another post recently, I think a lot of my burnout with 3.5 wasn’t the system itself as much as it was the dynamics at the table…adversarial dynamics encouraged, at least to some degree, by the rule-set. So, yeah, why not…maybe I’ll get another Company H Campaign out of it (still one of my all time favorite campaigns I’ve ever run).

Here is the campaign log from the fourth session of our Quail Valley campaign, written by RJ from the perspective–more or less–of Eoin. My GM comments, as usual, are in [italics and brackets.]

Note: There are potential spoilers for a number of different published adventures below. These include: Necromancer Game’s The Wizard’s Amulet, Crucible of Freya, and Vault of Larin Karr, Goodman Games’ Hive of Villainy, and the adventure, Through the Night, from Dungeon Magazine #29.

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We had our fourth Quail Valley Campaign session last night and although it will be a bit before the campaign log gets posted, I did want to share something that really struck me after the session. It wasn’t anything new as many, many others have discussed this issue in the past. It was just something that really struck me in the difference between how this session went and how the prior sessions had gone…all of the players trusted–implicitly–the GM and this made all of the difference.

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I’ll get to the post’s title in just a bit. First, an update.

Since I last posted, we’ve still been playing with different players taking turns running some one-shot or short adventures. After Todd’s turn running “A Keg for a Dragon,” RJ took a turn. He ran the nearly unpronounceable, “Well Met in Kith’takharos” from White Haired Man. It took us two sessions to finish it and I think we all enjoyed it. RJ did a job of going with the flow right at the beginning as my character basically picked a fight in a tavern before we really even got into the adventure. He really can’t complain as he gave me a character that was both overconfident, stubborn, and a gambler. I swear that I thought the little guy was cheating at dice!

I think that RJ was disappointed that he never really did any damage–in either session–to any of the characters. He even “cheated” at the end to try and kill one of us but with no success.

After we finished that up, Pat was visiting and volunteered to run Pinnacle’s offering for Free RPG Day this year…The Wyld Hunt. This marked quite a milestone for our group…it was the first time that we ever finished an adventure marketed as a “one-shot” in a single adventure! We did our best to drag it out but first not doing what the adventure expected but Pat got us back on the rails. Pat also succeeded in killing one of the characters.

That’s what we’ve been up to over the last few weeks.

Since we had been expecting Pat’s game to take two session, I had to find something to fill the following session since no one was going to be ready to run something then. I hit on doing a higher Rank fantasy adventure as most of our Savage Worlds games have been at Novice and Seasoned Rank. The biggest conclusion I came away with from that session is that our group is just not a tactically oriented group. We’ve joked (and lamented) the lack of a tactician in the group for most of our history playing together but it really hit home that night. A fight with some trolls turned into a long, dragged out fight that could easily have turned into a TPK.

As a result, I’ve decided that we’re not going to use Savage Worlds for our fantasy campaign. We need something that is bit more forgiving for a non-tactical group of players. I simply can’t go back to 4e or 3.5…the combats in both just take too long for my preference and I really want something fairly rules light and simple in mechanics. I also want something that doesn’t really require “rules mastery” to play well and doesn’t require the players to focus so much on character builds. I want something that is easy for me to prep (from a mechanics perspective), easy for the players to play (again, from a mechanics perspective), and just lets us get on with playing the game.

We’re going retro!!!

Tonight marks the beginning of our experiment with either one of the older editions of D&D, a retro-clone, or one of the “near-clones” that are inspired by the older editions (e.g., Castles & Crusades).

More to come…

For out past two sessions, I’ve taken a seat on the opposite side of the table than I normally do. I’ve been a player and Todd has taken over the GMing duties! I had purchased, at some point in the past, the Reality Blurs’ module, “A Keg for a Dragon.” Todd took it and ran it. I haven’t read the module so I can’t say much about it beyond my experience of having been a player. I had fun playing a knight and leading the party…as the duly appointed representative of the King.

I think it was a good experience for Todd to run the game as well. It provides some perspective. At one point last night, he commented on how hard it was to not say something as we all were discussing a particular mystery that needed to be solved. Sitting there knowing the answer and watching us buzz around the answer we needed but not actually landing upon it is something that most GM’s have probably experienced at one point or another. He also got to experience players not searching for things when they are expected to and the nearly inevitable attempts (intentional or otherwise) to derail the plot of any published adventure.

It seems pretty common for folks to talk about GMs needing to be players periodically so they don’t lose the view from the other side. The same applies to players…they should run a game periodically so they have a sense of the GM’s perspective. So, while I continue working on my Savage Greyhawk conversion, RJ and Rachel are each going to take a turn at running an adventure over the course of a session or two each.

They just better not get any ideas of “taking over” the role of alpha GM.

What?!? Yeah, I know, the last time I posted about what our next fantasy campaign might be, we were voting between Caladon Falls, Hellfrost, and Shaintar. Hellfrost got the cold shoulder from the players in our next round of voting…not because they don’t like it but because they want to try something different. So Caladon Falls and Shaintar were the finalists in our Setting Survivor spoof. The final round of voting resulted in…

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It’s not a frog or Underdog either. Nope, just another reference largely unrelated to this actual post.

As part of our ongoing discussion about a new fantasy campaign, it seemed like a good idea to establish a few definitions for the purposes of our discussion. For example, “high fantasy” is often tossed around but not everyone necessarily shares the same definition of the term. So I laid out a few definitions. None of these are intended to be exhaustive or as the “end all, be all” of a definition. Just some working definitions to help us establish some expectations about our new campaign.

Epic Fantasy: The player characters, although they may start off as “farmboys,” eventually become movers and shakers in the world or, at a minimum, a small part of it. More often than not, the player characters play a significant role in saving the world from destruction and/or the evil machinations of some sort of big, bad guy. A non-epic fantasy campaign would be one of simple survival, greed, or the like. It would lack the world saving or the heroic element.

Everyone wants a heroic, epic type campaign. As that tends to be my preference as well, it is nice that the players feel the same way.

Adventure Path vs Plot Point vs Sandbox. For our purposes, this is essentially a continuum of how structured the plot is going to be in the campaign. At one end is the Adventure Path, epitomized by Paizo’s Adventure Paths, in which one adventure follows another and each is at least partially dependent one what happens in the previous adventures. The player characters typically have to complete specific adventures in particular order because the plot is already scripted out and is dependent upon them doing exactly this. The Plot Point is less structured than the Adventure Path but there is some sort of overarching plot already laid out. Gee, kind of like the Plot Points in many of the Savage Worlds campaign settings and nicely explained here. There is a background story going on that unfolds during the game but the adventures (or even that background story) aren’t already scripted out. The Sandbox has no structured plot or even a background story going on. Instead, the world is simply there for the player characters to explore.

With that crude continuum, I asked each of the players what they’d prefer. No one was interested in an Adventure Path type campaign. One liked the idea of the Sandbox and the other two are keen on the plot point type of approach. This makes me happy. My favorite campaigns have always been ones where there is some sort of background story or plot going on that slowly unfolds but not everything is related to it. Even better are the ones where that background story is driven as much by the actions of the characters as by the general framework or ideas that I’ve established. The Company H campaign pretty much took this tact. Actually, most FRG campaigns are like this…which is why I’m happy that’s what the players picked. It fits my GMing style.

High vs. Low Magic: This refers not to the power or magnitude of magic in a setting but, instead, to the availability or commonality of magic in the setting. In a high magic setting, magic is a fairly common thing regardless of the relative “power” of said magic. In a low magic setting, magic is a relatively rare thing but could still be quite powerful. The Lord of the Rings, for example, is more a relatively low magic setting in comparison lots of other fantasy literature from this definition. Magic is rather rare thing. You can almost count the number of “wizards” in the setting on one hand and the number of magic items on the other (as long as you don’t count all the rings).

In a “higher” magic setting, wizards and other spellcasters are common as are magic items. Most of the typical D&D campaign settings are relatively high magic settings; actually, most fantasy rpg settings are high magic. Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Mystara, and Eberron are all settings where you can’t shake a stick without hitting a spellcaster or explore a dungeon without finding magic items. A good example of a non-D&D setting that is “high” magic by this definition is Glorantha. Almost everyone can cast spells of one sort or another and magic items, even if not overly powerful, are pretty common.

Two of the players want a more high magic campaign while the third didn’t really have a preference, feeling that the pros and cons of each were pretty much equal. I’m okay with doing either so still all good.

Fantastic vs Realistic Campaign: A fantastic campaign setting is one that has elves, dwarves, and other typical fantasy fare as standard races that can be played (if not even stranger or more fantastic things). A realistic campaign is more like the real world with fantasy elements added on. Player characters are human and the more fantastic races are things of myth or, at the very least, exceptionally rare. In other words, a campaign with demi-humans being both common and playable races or one in which they are rare and, most likely, not playable races.

Everyone wants to play a more fantastic campaign. I’d be good with either so still all good.

Setting vs Campaign Centered: Some campaigns put the setting first and foremost where others put the campaign itself at the forefront with the setting just being something of a backdrop on which to play out the game. A Setting-Centric campaign has a very detailed and rich setting and the players need to have at least some basic knowledge of the setting to play. It is even better if they are well-versed in the setting and characters are expected to be deeply embedded within the setting. A Campaign Centered campaign focuses much more on the PCs and the interactions that they have with NPCs and the various situations/adventures the GM tosses out. The setting is there (or not) but it just provide some flavor. It tends to not be highly detailed and characters often are not deeply embedded within the setting.

Another pretty crude continuum of sorts. All of the players want the campaign to be focused on the campaign but they also want the setting to be important too in terms of providing some context and background (but not to the point where they can get into arguments about the finer points of the setting’s history). Again, fine with me. While I greatly appreciate a well-developed setting, I don’t want one that is so developed that if I make a change (or don’t remember some detail), it will freak out a player because it doesn’t fit “canon.”

So, all of the players seem to largely be on the same page. They want an epic, high magic campaign with many options for races and fantastical elements where the “plot” hasn’t been scripted ahead of time but there is some sort of ongoing “metaplot” that can be influenced by the actions of the player characters and the spotlight is on exactly those actions.

Sounds good to me and all three of the settings that are still in the running (Caladon Falls, Hellfrost, and Shaintar) can be used for such a campaign.