Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Root7OneOne" data-source="post: 7830492" data-attributes="member: 6813171">I return with sad tidings.  I've had to pre-maturely end my original group's campaign.  Sometimes life, uhh.. doesn't find a way.We ended less than half-way through book 10, which gives you an idea of how much we've been able to play, as my last update was in January and we were starting book 9.Book 9 was generally quite fun, it was great to explore the weirdness of the Dreaming, and I'm actually pretty proud of how I ran it.  I think I managed to make the players really feel like they were in an alternate-fairy-mirror-realm.My party was.... very strong.  Copperhat never stood a chance of escaping enough to use the web tunnels, which was a shame, but the "trial" was still a fun scene to run.The attack on the King's Palace was suitably epic with lots of combat and lots of stress.  Again, my party was offensively quite powerful, so not many of the fights feel very dangerous to them anymore, but a couple of these got close.  I definitely wanted to kill the King and make a player the regent.  Required a little GM fiat to make sure he died, but it worked out.  Greatly enjoyed revealing Minister Lee to be Inatch the Hex Drinker, especially as this group is the one I ran through a little homebrew prequel set in Ber during the fall of the dragon tyrants (see above, "Ber Necessities").The climax of book 9, revealing Stanfield to be a traitor and fighting him atop the fortress in Flint was one of my favorite combats in the campaign so far.  Definitely handed my players their biggest challenge in a long time.As far as book 10 goes, my players set up a council to rule Flint with a few of their favorite NPCs.  One PC was quite heavily invested in Morgan Cippiano but the others wouldn't let the PC install him on the council.  The party only just set out for Bole and made their way to the center of the forest fire to find a brass ziggurat infested with Salamanders.  Unfortunately that is the last thing they'll do.****As far as overall feedback goes, this is far and away my favorite D&D campaign story I've encountered in my ten years playing and running TTRPGs, and I think my players generally felt the same.  I think it's hard to pull of a compelling and unique conspiracy/spy story in D&D, and this really pulls it off.  Pulling it off does require some railroading, but I found that the players really didn't mind.I think the fights tend to be on the weaker side for the most part.  My players were all very experienced, so that might have contributed to the feeling.  I think the most glaring issue for me is Firearms.  By far the most absurdly powerful PC was the Gunslinger/Fighter who took the unique firearm prestige class that gave him an insanely powerful force blaster.  Pathfinder lacks easy, reasonable ways to defend against firearms, so every foe from small mooks to enormous monsters got cut down like butter between hitting touch AC and doing quite significant (often force) damage.  If I were to run the campaign again, I would 100% ban the use of that prestige class.  I think it gives an already powerful character a lot of extra very powerful tools that just tip it from being very strong to far far too strong.The use of the theme feats throughout a 13 book campaign I think might be the most praise-worthy part of the whole thing.  They really make the story feel unique to the players and characters in each individual campaign.  I think I've mentioned before that Paizo tends to use their campaign traits as intros only, and they're quickly forgotten, which has always seemed like a shame to me.  But the theme feat choices determine a lot of interesting factors throughout the entire campaign, and I love that.Though I doubt this particular campaign will ever reconvene, hopefully someday I'll be able to start up again with a new group.</blockquote>

Verification