Pathfinder 2E I feel at peace

[kenada]

In addition to my take on Serpents skull for PF2E, I am still running kingmaker (pf1e), though it’s finally reaching its conclusion. I have decided I don’t like the mass combat system so I am going to swap it out for die, men, die! From REIGN and see how that goes. I am pretty worn down by the pf1e system at this point but I am looking forward to the epic conclusion!

Kingmaker was the only PF1 AP that we finished. I was a bit down on it at the time, but I’ve come to view it at the best thing we did in that system. The ending was epic. I had Nyrissa spam prismatic spray like it was going out of style. After a few rounds, over half of the party was dead or on another plane of existence. It eventually came down to Nyrissa versus the PC with Briar. He was hurt pretty badly. If he’d missed, she’d kill him on the next round. He landed the killing blow, and they won.

I’m only running one game right now. It’s WWN. If you’re looking for sandbox stuff, WWN’s got a lot of really good sandbox stuff that’s system neutral. We spent several hours today going over the setting I created. I don’t think my players have ever gotten into the setting like that before.

 

[!DWolf]

First of all thanks for all the suggestions! I looked through the reviews and I will probably save necropolis for mummy’s mask (if I ever get around to running it). I will be acquiring the other two to look at as soon as my wallet recovers from the seventh I am also going to use the faction system from wwn for adding texture to the world.

I also completed Kingmaker today. It took us exactly 3 years and ten days playing biweekly for approximately 300 hours of play!

Spoiler: “the ending”

I heavily modified the adventure path of course. From the very beginning I wanted the end to be resolvable through dialogue like Planescape: Torment or Shadowrun: Hong Kong and was aware of the problems of Nyrisssa’s sudden appearance as the end boss, so I changed her motivation. In my version she was stabbed by her lover through the heart with briar and her blood soaked into the land - and she wanted it back. And I then made this the overarching story of the campaign seeding references everywhere - they found prophecy’s relating to it in candlemere tower for instance. I also made Gyronna the true villain and set up basically two bad endings and one okay ending where Nyrissa is redeemed but the kingdom is destroyed in the process (and Gyronna won in all three of these endings). And then the players thought of a “good” ending and went for it - it was fantastic.

I also got to try out Greg Stolze’s Die, Men! (from 2nd year of our Reign) mass combat system. I made some slight modifications (limited use abilities that negated the trolls threat threshold and letting characters use sets for heroic actions with a command (profession or knowledge) check. It got rave reviews from everyone at the table. Like seriously, it is head and shoulders above the others we have tried. I wish I had know about it earlier in the campaign.

Finally, the previous Saturday I ran Serpent’s Skull and though the campaign is going well (they are still working on investigating the mystery in Kalabuto), I once again experienced my major reoccurring problem with Pathfinder 2e: I look forward to it all week, finally get to sit down and play, and then five minutes later four hours have passed and I have to wait another two weeks to play again!

 

[MaskedGuy]

I've finished running fourth book of Wrath and put it on break until we decide how to run final two books(since default mythic Wrath has gotten fairly boring to party overall by now. Options involve converting to 2e or even cypher x'D Someone was joking about converting it to starfinder, so decided to run starfinder level 15 one shot just to demonstrate party what that game is like at similar level. Either way hoping that after oneshot I get chance to play in shorter campaign)

Other shenanigans I've been getting up to is that I've made my own homebrew 2e version of 1e Jade Regent's caravan mechanics x'D

 

[Nilbog]

Sorry if it has already been mentioned, but what is WWN?

 

[Retreater]

Sorry if it has already been mentioned, but what is WWN?

Worlds Without Number

 

[kenada]

Sorry if it has already been mentioned, but what is WWN?

Worlds Without Number. It’s an OSR-adjacent game with a ton of system-neutral tools for running sandbox campaigns. I’m not sure it would have stopped my burnout, but that stuff would have been really useful to have when I was running a sandbox hexcrawl in PF2.

 

[Eltab]

I’m trying to find good Arabian or desert themed adventures to weave into it.

There is a trilogy of LFR modules (D&D 4e) set in Calimshan involving a noble seeking his family's heirloom (and magical) cloak then leading a liberation effort. I've forgotten the module names but they were still on the LFR heritage page last time I looked. The first one drew you in to the situation: I never got the chance to play through the other two.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

I'm in that multigame boat too. I've got a brand new Pathfinder 2E game about to start this weekend, a sequel of sorts to the epic campaign that started at level 1 in 2019 and closed out at the end pf 2020 at level 20 (fitting), easily one of my best campaign experiences in ages. The new game will pick up in a different region of the same campaign, and some of it will deal with the fallout and consequences of the level 20 gang's decisions.

On Tuesdays I have rotating biweekly games, both in D&D 3.5 of all things --for inexplicable reasons* we dug out the old stuff, dusted off the covers and started playing again. One of the games is level 2 and slow paced, the other is at level 5 right now. We'll keep playing those until we're tired of them or I feel sufficiently prepped for some Mythras at some point.



*Well, not that inexplicable.....I like playing and running D&D 3.5/PF1E so not really a mystery.

 

[MaskedGuy]

Not sure yet if I get to play in a module post wrath being on break, but I'm certainly hopeful! I have lately missed being on player on longer game more than usual

 

[!DWolf]

Thanks for the suggestions on adventures. I will look into them when I have money (I just dropped over a hundred dollars on all the pf2e releases).

And now for a long, rambling, stream of consciousness game update:

I did run my jungle game on the 4th of July weekend. I had one less player than normal (two players missed but a new player joined) and after a bit of investigation we got to a fight: a bunch of worker zombies (with forced movement abilities to throw characters off catwalks, into vats or furnaces, etc.) and a necromancer in a factory. I didn’t scale it for the missing player so there were eight zombies and a necromancer who summoned more zombies. The air in the factory was also horrible and sickened and slowed (which everyone critically failed against, though fortune points let one of the characters act normally and another just regular fail). Consequently, the resulting fight was brutal and took about two hours and I was a little worried about a TPK for a second. But ultimately they prevailed when the champion dropped his sword, grabbed one of the chains dangling from the ceiling, kicked off the wall and swung around behind the necromancer, and grappled him - instantly putting the frail old man into an inescapable hold and effectively ending the fight. I gave him panache for it

I also ran session zero of Legacy of Fire. A lot of people were interested: I had to waitlist a couple . The session did go well though, despite Archives of Nethys being effectively down. We are using a bunch of house rules: automatic bonus progression w/ shield hardness and temp hp added along with elements of Numenera, relics, free archetype, modified leadership (adding elements of REIGN), custom armor and shield tables (to make them more “realistic”, I decided to do this last minute because of the custom hyperthermia rules I implemented, I am especially proud of how I did a buckler/targe split: bucklers are metal and take up the hand but give agile and finesse on shield bash), and fortune+fate points instead of hero points, and I was worried I used too many but it seemed to go over okay. I did give everyone folders with the custom rules, a cheat sheet, and a character sheet so maybe that helped.

We also used Decuma (from Golden Lasso Games) to build character relationships. I used the tower and relationship only variant though in retrospect I should have used locations to build up the players mercenary company. It still worked fantastic: in addition to the standard relationships stuff we ended up with a Spider Princess that the PCs are taking care of out of guilt, a desert “ship” that they travel in, three different shady/criminal enterprises that they are running on the side, a rival mercenary company, and a quest to create “shoes of wife finding”. It was a lot of fun and I am going to be using this for every campaign I run from now on: especially if I run Mage: the Awakening 2e or Eclipse Phase again. In fact it makes me want to run those games as I am interest to see what people would come up with in session 0! Four stars (the only drawback is the price).