ZEITGEIST Deathwyrm's Zeitgeist Campaign - Clockwork Eclipse

[RangerWickett]

Good luck with the online gaming, congrats on the inspired mannequin prop, and thanks for the refresher on the party.

And yeah, Pathfinder combat gets kinda crusty at mid- to high-level. I ran a campaign up to 17th level, and eventually got good enough at winging the minutiae that I radically simplified my statblocks. Foes were basically labeled one-rounders, three-rounders, or bosses, and I'd often pre-write specifically what interesting dramatic things they'd do each round, caring more about memorability - and about creating interesting dilemmas for the PCs - than about whether it was 'correct' according to the rules.

 

[Deathwyrm]

Full agreement there. I'm sure most systems get really weird and unwieldly around the high level mark. Not only are the PCs sitting on what could be average-to-large amounts of wealth, they're probably also more established in the setting with allies and other NPCs. The entire system of GMing gets a lot more abstract in order to keep things interesting.

Usually by the time one of my groups reaches a higher level and challenges start to become trivial, I contact a couple military friends I have who play a ton of Warhammer 40k and delight in the gritty mechanics of tactics. I give them the stat blocks, what the likely environment is, and any relevant information.

"Okay, here's a sheet for a level 20 halfling wizard. You also get this dragon, couple of storm giants, some other minions too. The party should be 25% wounded by the time they reach your sanctum. You've beeing scrying on them for months, so you know these are their most used spells and tactics."

Odds are very likely I'm going to do the same thing with this campaign once it truly gets to reach those absurd regions of broken-physics and superheroish capabilities.

 

[Andrew Moreton]

Making a good fight is a challange sometime, but my group and I enjoy the high level fights. My players optimise well above the base assumptions for any module I have used so I always redesign encounters with different stats to increase the threat. A particular challange in this campaign is that a lot of fights are one offs which lets the pc's Nova so you need even stronger threats.

If it is useful to you I can probably provide Hero Labs files or PDF's of many of the later encounters with my upgrades.

 

[Deathwyrm]

I have aimed for that as well. Fewer encounters, but allow the players to explode all their awesome abilities all over the place. Makes for more memorable encounters. Plus, modules are really kind of loose guidelines. No two parties will tackle it the same way.

In the coming months, I'd be curious to see the PDFs of what you drew up. The party is hitting their combat capability stride. They had their buttocks whomped repeatedly in the Ziggurat of Apet so long ago, but these days they can handle 5 large mobs with CR 12 NPCs as a "moderate" challenge.

Good thing hitting them right in the ethics and philosophy bypasses all challenge ratings and equipment.

 

[Andrew Moreton]

Let me know which encounters you are interested in and I'll track down what I have and put them in a shared folder people can access on Google Drive. At the moment I have stuff for books 6-9 , and will add the later stuff as I get to it.
Some of the particularly weird npc's did not get a formal rewrite as fitting them into Hero Labs was too much pain , they just got pencil notes (Nicodemus and Tinker Oddcog spring to Mind)

 

[Deathwyrm]

I'd be curious to see regarding book 6, since that's what I'm doing the most prep for at current.

The current thing I'm working on is the replacement to the railroad challenge mini-game. Not getting rid of the railway race entirely, but instead of allocating resources and stuff, more dealing with the myriad problems involved with such an ambitious project.

That, and as soon as I read that they are being sent somewhere to help with building a railway... I immediately thought "I need to totally rip off The Ghost and the Darkness here". Probably a couple advanced dusk kamadans with some weird abilities.

Odds are I'm going to remix the Keepers of Cheshimox thing into kind of a The 13th Warrior style story, with lots of misdirection about what the true nature of the assailants are.

 

[Andrew Moreton]

I used the minigame but more to frame the problem for the players, in practice their schemes and problem solving won them the competion and the minigame just formalised it.
As my players ended up with a pre-emptive attack on the Keepers of Cheshimox and beefed them up enough so that they were dangerous in a stand up fight against the pc's . I believe I put a Lich in charge and some sort of Eskimo Skeleton creature.
Ripping of the Ghost and the Darkness does sound like a good idea , bit not one I thought of, the dusk Kamadans look a bit weak but they are smart enough for a few levels of Barbarian on top of the advanced template , or maybe Rogue if they are going to ambush a lot.
Otherwise I boosted Lya and her henchmen, Pembertons daughter and boosted some of the Gnolls . I will look for the files tommorrow.

 

[Andrew Moreton]

My files for book 6 are in
10RegLsCLOxLCSYqctgBoEc10VmuKk2K2

The stats for Pemberton are there just in case I decided on a TPK for fun
Let me know if the link works I seem to have problems with it but it is hard to tell for me. Linking to the folder does not work, so I will try something else tommorrow

 

[hirou]

My files for book 6 are in

EN world forums auto-translate links to google drive to... something that doesn't work. Try inserting spaces in the link or using link shorteners.

 

[Andrew Moreton]

Thanks Hirou. I assumed it was a mistake by me and would have wasted time looking for it

https:// drive.google.com/open?id=10RegLsCLOxLCSYqctgBoEc10Vmu Kk2K2

If you take out the spaces at the beggining and before Kk2k2 the link works.