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A sort of meta-purpose of the encounter is that sidelining the party in Nem for a bit gives Ottavia and Luc a chance to evade the party, so it's easier to get off the train and start heading to Odiem. But if that's going to work out, I wouldn't try to railroad them into an encounter they...

I suppose in hindsight you probably shouldn't have let them spot Luc doing that, but what's done is done. The adventure still works if the party doesn't get off in Sid Minos, but you lose some really important groundwork for later revelations if they never go to the isle of Odiem and the...

Oh, and a few years before I ran the inspiration for WotBS, I ran my first ever 3rd edition campaign as a freshman in college, which covered events of Coaltongue and Shaaladel linking up and toppling the predecessor Seren Empire. PCs there included Rhuarc and 41 (played by the same players who...

The original party was Diogenes, Rantle, Rivereye, and Kathor. Rivereye ended up getting murdered when he tried to assassinate Shaaladel, and the player tried out a couple new characters but none of them survive in my memory 20 years later. At some point a new player joined as Fayne (in...

I agree with W'rk, though I'll add that for the sake of timeline canon, don't show the statblock to your players unless you remove the Merciful Wind reference to Caeloon, since that's a plane that show sup in adventure 12 and then ends up part of the assumed default cosmology twenty years later.

Are you running standard 5e, or A5E? At the risk of speaking ill of another game designer, I was not involved in the conversion of the adventures to 5e, and I think they often erred far too much toward simplicity and low-difficulty. I think the more complicated and powerful version is more fun...

The one from the adventure was converted from I think the Pathfinder version of the same creature into 5e, and so it was, well, very simplified. The one from AiZ was built for Level Up, which has more complexity and maybe some slightly different guidance on suggested damage.

Sidetracked discussing Saddam's fantasy art.

Oh man, I should look back at the notes one of my players makes for my games. I'm sure they'd be incoherent!

Nightlife: The second great city of Ostalin is Eshkital, which through blessings of the goddess Chebas mastered the river on whose banks it lies. One manifestation of this is a part of the city called The Rambles, formerly a sprawl of rocky islets that could be walked between during the dry...

Old Gods: The region known as the Pleian Basins was made up of numerous low mountain ridges creating dozens of small river valleys, enough to support isolated cultures but hardly worth the effort of sending caravans to for trading. They were mostly left alone and little thought of before that...

Excellent stuff with Myetharia and Shalosha.

Neat idea, but why is this image 15 megabytes? Ouch. This could have been a text file.

I ran the inspiration for WotBS back in 2003/04, and Rantle's player started his 'courtship' of Shalosha in the equivalent of adventure 3 when she showed up in Seaquen. She found him uncouth but appealing in a Han Solo sort of way. Then in the equivalent of adventure 6, the PCs were captured...

Arsonist governor versus cannibal healers.

The way I did it in Elements of Magic back in, oof, 2003 was that each level you got a number of magical effects you knew how to create, each of which had a Magic Point cost. And you could build spells on the fly, but doing so took two whole turns to cast the spell. However, you could design a...

I worked on A5E, and I dug parts of its complexity. But the combat maneuver system didn't click with me. It was too similar to Vancian magic, with a bunch of options differentiated by name and fiddly specifics, rather than a more mechanics-first system that I prefer. I favor, I suppose...

It has been a long time since I've had the opportunity to run a session longer than 3 hours. Normally we start at 8 and break a little after 11. But man, I miss the days of starting at 6 and playing 'til 2am or something. Of course, I also had a lot more time to plan ahead back then. And...

I'm not sure what to name such a class, but yeah, I'd like someone who operates kinda like, I dunno, Magic: the Gathering logic. You need to 'tap mana' from your environment to power your spells. So like, there'd need to be some system for gathering power one turn, then using it to pump out a...