RangerWickett
Legend
Dude, you type super fast.
G'night.
G'night.
ZEITGEIST [Spoilers] Arkgeist Chronicles
arkwright
Explorer
How very interesting hearing your thoughts on the convocation, Ranger. Perhaps I misread or misunderstood the book, but my feeling was that Nicodemus entered the convocation entirely open to other proposals, and it was for very shaky reasons that he attempts to institute MAP in Book 9. I'll be honest and say that, at the time, I felt the preeminent reason for instituting MAP in 9 is to make Act 3 easier to write.
If you intended to convey that Nic was insistent on the Pyre from the beginning, then I think perhaps you should have done a few things differently. Allowing for the various systems to be mixed together and redesigned- Colossal Congress, MAP- and then having Nic be on board with MAP undercuts the idea that he came into the convocation with preset ideas. Linking directly to the ENWorld forum debate where different configurations were proposed and you the authors went with one choice and were open to many, is confusing if you mean to convey that Nic instead has preset ideas. And... well, I have half-formed thoughts that something on the Pyre handout should be different, perhaps something related to how much Kasvarina is mentioned, how Cula is used rather than someone with a relation to Miller or the Crisillyiri.
Adslahnit has requested that I post some material from Arkgeist.
First, Graves of Elfaivar, small epitaphs/last words from Ascetian souls of women who died in the Great Malice.
Secondly, the 'sheets' I created for the various convocation factions, including what specific planes they seek to invoke, and then some new ones that cropped up.
Planes of the Obscurati
Miller's Pyre, Arboretum, Watchmakers, Colossus, Panarchists.
Minor Factions, Radical Factions.
MAP, Colossal Congress, Watchmaker Watchmen, Miller's Clock, Colossal Conquest
SPS 2.0
If you intended to convey that Nic was insistent on the Pyre from the beginning, then I think perhaps you should have done a few things differently. Allowing for the various systems to be mixed together and redesigned- Colossal Congress, MAP- and then having Nic be on board with MAP undercuts the idea that he came into the convocation with preset ideas. Linking directly to the ENWorld forum debate where different configurations were proposed and you the authors went with one choice and were open to many, is confusing if you mean to convey that Nic instead has preset ideas. And... well, I have half-formed thoughts that something on the Pyre handout should be different, perhaps something related to how much Kasvarina is mentioned, how Cula is used rather than someone with a relation to Miller or the Crisillyiri.
Adslahnit has requested that I post some material from Arkgeist.
First, Graves of Elfaivar, small epitaphs/last words from Ascetian souls of women who died in the Great Malice.
Secondly, the 'sheets' I created for the various convocation factions, including what specific planes they seek to invoke, and then some new ones that cropped up.
Planes of the Obscurati
Miller's Pyre, Arboretum, Watchmakers, Colossus, Panarchists.
Minor Factions, Radical Factions.
MAP, Colossal Congress, Watchmaker Watchmen, Miller's Clock, Colossal Conquest
SPS 2.0
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EarthSeraphEdna
Explorer
Arkwright's particular method of revamping/expanding the convocation and the Ascetia has indeed led to some of the most well-written sequences in the campaign thus far, and I appreciate the intense amount of effort that went into doing so.
Also, throughout our interlude between books #11 and #12, and all throughout book #12, hiveminds have been of significant importance, between my character's ambitions and the DM's method of accommodating them. Indeed, one of the major, custom NPCs in the campaign so far is a hivemind.
Since Zeitgeist's plot threads on the various gods of the Clergy, Elfaivar, and the rest of the multiverse were almost all dropped by the adventure path itself, the DM has been diligent enough to expand on the topic themselves. I have been heavily impressed by the DM's method of filling in the gaps on Zeitgeist's deific lore.
Also, throughout our interlude between books #11 and #12, and all throughout book #12, hiveminds have been of significant importance, between my character's ambitions and the DM's method of accommodating them. Indeed, one of the major, custom NPCs in the campaign so far is a hivemind.
Since Zeitgeist's plot threads on the various gods of the Clergy, Elfaivar, and the rest of the multiverse were almost all dropped by the adventure path itself, the DM has been diligent enough to expand on the topic themselves. I have been heavily impressed by the DM's method of filling in the gaps on Zeitgeist's deific lore.
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gideonpepys
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
All fair enough, of course. I wonder how much these differing perspectives and approaches are a factor of the manner in which our groups game. A text-based game is bound to allow for and encourage more focus on detail, while our pub-based tabletop group is a lot more broad brushstrokes.
EarthSeraphEdna
Explorer
It is true that our game is of the purely text-based variety, so our roleplaying can more readily afford to focus on the nitty-gritty details of the setting, and the many gaps left open by the adventure path. It is simply the nature of the beast that is text-based, heavy roleplay.
If anyone here has any questions on how we have handled certain plot threads, or expanded upon them, they are certainly free to ask.
If anyone here has any questions on how we have handled certain plot threads, or expanded upon them, they are certainly free to ask.
All jokes aside,
Hello there! One of Arkwright's players here, playing the bunny eared Ruri Eccles.
I think we've had a unique experience with Zeitgeist, due to having had one and a half very inquisitive players determined to "100%" the campaign, along with a permissive GM who has allowed a lot of free rein to explore themes, concepts, and eventualities, except where it conflicts with the hard coded events of the AP.
After playing through the vast majority of it, the adventure really is broad and deep in scale, with an impressive combination of allowing the players to enact significant change in the overall state of the world and both allied and enemy plans, while also looping back to the structure of the AP taking into account the changes.
I would also note that the majority of the frustrations of the GM and fellow players were from the fact that some of the plot threads were not followed through on; essentially, they were sad there was not more of those factional lore and story that we could play through. The fact that we were 100%ing this made the shortcomings more evident, in comparison with the overall structure.
The standout highlight moments for me -
The Coaltongue incident
The Intrigue aboard the Railway
The Reunification of Ber
Stanfield's Betrayal
And, TVisiting Every Destroyed Plane in the Gyre, or What We Did On Our Holidays.
I myself had touched on the technological and ethical treatment of the many changes going on, and am sad that I was unable to have been able to spend more time getting involved that Adslahnit had put in.
Overall, it really has been a blast to play, and from the moral and philosophical queries of hiveminds and use of religion for the greater good, to touching on the plight of "common folk" in a Zeitgeist (title drop) of culture, of technology and more. Both in thanks to the writers and the GM and other players.
And we still have one more book to go!
Hello there! One of Arkwright's players here, playing the bunny eared Ruri Eccles.
I think we've had a unique experience with Zeitgeist, due to having had one and a half very inquisitive players determined to "100%" the campaign, along with a permissive GM who has allowed a lot of free rein to explore themes, concepts, and eventualities, except where it conflicts with the hard coded events of the AP.
After playing through the vast majority of it, the adventure really is broad and deep in scale, with an impressive combination of allowing the players to enact significant change in the overall state of the world and both allied and enemy plans, while also looping back to the structure of the AP taking into account the changes.
I would also note that the majority of the frustrations of the GM and fellow players were from the fact that some of the plot threads were not followed through on; essentially, they were sad there was not more of those factional lore and story that we could play through. The fact that we were 100%ing this made the shortcomings more evident, in comparison with the overall structure.
The standout highlight moments for me -
The Coaltongue incident
The Intrigue aboard the Railway
The Reunification of Ber
Stanfield's Betrayal
And, TVisiting Every Destroyed Plane in the Gyre, or What We Did On Our Holidays.
I myself had touched on the technological and ethical treatment of the many changes going on, and am sad that I was unable to have been able to spend more time getting involved that Adslahnit had put in.
Overall, it really has been a blast to play, and from the moral and philosophical queries of hiveminds and use of religion for the greater good, to touching on the plight of "common folk" in a Zeitgeist (title drop) of culture, of technology and more. Both in thanks to the writers and the GM and other players.
And we still have one more book to go!
EarthSeraphEdna
Explorer
The Coaltongue incident was run mostly by-the-book, since the DM was not changing much then. Arkwright did change up the way the duchess and Sokana were introduced, how Sokana made it to the engine room, and how difficult it would be to repair the engine room.
Book #4, the train adventure, was among my favorite books. Arkwright presented the material therein reasonably faithfully, though expanded it with scenes and dialogue of their own creation.
I talked about this in another thread, but the "reunification of Ber," as Lily Fae puts it, played more towards book #6's sidebar on shaming Bruse Shantus than actually playing along with his game. It definitely took some extrapolation of events, and the DM had to revamp several events and drop the railroad-building minigame entirely. Still, it was quite entertaining.
Roland Stanfield's betrayal was one of the more heavily-revised plot arcs in our DM's run. We felt that it did not make much sense as presented, particularly the nonsensical speech in book #9 and why the Flint lighthouse was even necessary in the first place. We were deeply confused by what the lighthouse was supposed to do, because the lighthouses' function was established back in book #7, and book #9 tossed that out of the window while simultaneously contradicting book #10's outcome of events. This entire plot arc is why I really, really prefer for magic in this type of "scientific" setting to have consistent rules. So this plot arc was entertaining, but I would say that it was despite what the book presented, not because of what the book presented.
Book #12 had the most amount of custom content from the DM thus far. More than half of it was custom content, or expanded content. The metaphysics behind the Gyre were confusing and did not make all that much sense, but the DM was diligent in filling in the gaps of the lore and creating many new planes of their own making. Book #12 has been a great testament to our DM's level of skill and commitment.
Due to our rather unique style of playing through this adventure path, we already know what book #13 is about: coming back to Lanjyr delayed by months, liberating a mind-controlled world from the Obscurati (with some planar lantern/lighthouse mechanics that do not actually make much sense compared to how they were established in previous books, and some vaguely-handwaved "Ghost-Council-stabilized" hiveminds), splitting up to rescue four or five key locations via duplicants (we will likely be skipping the duplicants part, since we can teleport around with ease due to the planar configuration), and performing the Axis Seal ritual while competing with Nicodemus. We will be revamping a fair bit of this.
We have also already reviewed the mechanics of the final battle as a group, and we are dreading how janky and nonsensical much of it is. The final battle, as presented to the DM, is very naïve and ambitious. It reads more like how the author would want a Zeitgeist movie's finale to play out, while completely neglecting the turn- and round-based structure of RPGs and woefully underestimating the capacities of a max-level party. This section was definitely written by someone imagining a more cinematic and "rule of cool" battle, rather than the way, say, the epic Living Forgotten Realms adventures pay meticulous detail to providing intriguing mechanical and tactical challenges to a high-level party. In all likelihood, we are probably going to rewrite the mechanics and flow of more than half of the final battle, preserving only a few key statistics blocks.
On top of that, the details of the Axis Seal ritual itself are confusing, like the inexplicable double-slotting of planar icons, or the levitating Axis Seal that contradicts how the colossus was design to set the seal back down. (Never mind that the book #10's plot thread of Borne 2.0 being built in Cherage was completely dropped.)
The epilogue scenes have been described as "weaksauce." We will most likely be discarding them in favor of custom-written epilogue scenes. We have been very ambitious in changing the world, shaking up the status quo, introducing new magics and technologies, and making contact with the inhabitants of distant worlds and stars, so more down-to-earth epilogue scenes likely are not going to suit our needs.
Book #13 still seems very promising, however, and it looks like an epic finale to the best adventure path that we have ever seen.
Again, if anyone has any questions for how we have been handling some things in our game, or some of the more puzzling features in the logs, I am free to offer some clarifications. For example, my character (mostly) drops the annoying speech habit some time into book #8, and we are so engaged in the tactical and mechanical side of 4e combat that during fights, our text-based roleplaying in the in-character channel tends to be on the sparser end.
Book #4, the train adventure, was among my favorite books. Arkwright presented the material therein reasonably faithfully, though expanded it with scenes and dialogue of their own creation.
I talked about this in another thread, but the "reunification of Ber," as Lily Fae puts it, played more towards book #6's sidebar on shaming Bruse Shantus than actually playing along with his game. It definitely took some extrapolation of events, and the DM had to revamp several events and drop the railroad-building minigame entirely. Still, it was quite entertaining.
Roland Stanfield's betrayal was one of the more heavily-revised plot arcs in our DM's run. We felt that it did not make much sense as presented, particularly the nonsensical speech in book #9 and why the Flint lighthouse was even necessary in the first place. We were deeply confused by what the lighthouse was supposed to do, because the lighthouses' function was established back in book #7, and book #9 tossed that out of the window while simultaneously contradicting book #10's outcome of events. This entire plot arc is why I really, really prefer for magic in this type of "scientific" setting to have consistent rules. So this plot arc was entertaining, but I would say that it was despite what the book presented, not because of what the book presented.
Book #12 had the most amount of custom content from the DM thus far. More than half of it was custom content, or expanded content. The metaphysics behind the Gyre were confusing and did not make all that much sense, but the DM was diligent in filling in the gaps of the lore and creating many new planes of their own making. Book #12 has been a great testament to our DM's level of skill and commitment.
Due to our rather unique style of playing through this adventure path, we already know what book #13 is about: coming back to Lanjyr delayed by months, liberating a mind-controlled world from the Obscurati (with some planar lantern/lighthouse mechanics that do not actually make much sense compared to how they were established in previous books, and some vaguely-handwaved "Ghost-Council-stabilized" hiveminds), splitting up to rescue four or five key locations via duplicants (we will likely be skipping the duplicants part, since we can teleport around with ease due to the planar configuration), and performing the Axis Seal ritual while competing with Nicodemus. We will be revamping a fair bit of this.
We have also already reviewed the mechanics of the final battle as a group, and we are dreading how janky and nonsensical much of it is. The final battle, as presented to the DM, is very naïve and ambitious. It reads more like how the author would want a Zeitgeist movie's finale to play out, while completely neglecting the turn- and round-based structure of RPGs and woefully underestimating the capacities of a max-level party. This section was definitely written by someone imagining a more cinematic and "rule of cool" battle, rather than the way, say, the epic Living Forgotten Realms adventures pay meticulous detail to providing intriguing mechanical and tactical challenges to a high-level party. In all likelihood, we are probably going to rewrite the mechanics and flow of more than half of the final battle, preserving only a few key statistics blocks.
On top of that, the details of the Axis Seal ritual itself are confusing, like the inexplicable double-slotting of planar icons, or the levitating Axis Seal that contradicts how the colossus was design to set the seal back down. (Never mind that the book #10's plot thread of Borne 2.0 being built in Cherage was completely dropped.)
The epilogue scenes have been described as "weaksauce." We will most likely be discarding them in favor of custom-written epilogue scenes. We have been very ambitious in changing the world, shaking up the status quo, introducing new magics and technologies, and making contact with the inhabitants of distant worlds and stars, so more down-to-earth epilogue scenes likely are not going to suit our needs.
Book #13 still seems very promising, however, and it looks like an epic finale to the best adventure path that we have ever seen.
Again, if anyone has any questions for how we have been handling some things in our game, or some of the more puzzling features in the logs, I am free to offer some clarifications. For example, my character (mostly) drops the annoying speech habit some time into book #8, and we are so engaged in the tactical and mechanical side of 4e combat that during fights, our text-based roleplaying in the in-character channel tends to be on the sparser end.
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gideonpepys
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the final battle. Haven’t analysed it too closely myself. What specific issues have you run across?
I was thinking myself of making the ancient seal site truly huge, because it doesn’t seem big enough to me. The thing in the centre is supposed to be 300 feet across isn’t it?
Anyway, that might create more problems than it solves. But it would mean that the sky ships would fit on the ‘map’, and it would take several round to travel from stone pillar to stone pillar. Separate groups or individuals would effectively be cut off from their allies by sheer distance.
I’m also thinking of having Pemberton’s gnolls in dragon fliers supporting the Ob, because I think there need to be more bad guys!
I’d love to hear your ideas.
I was thinking myself of making the ancient seal site truly huge, because it doesn’t seem big enough to me. The thing in the centre is supposed to be 300 feet across isn’t it?
Anyway, that might create more problems than it solves. But it would mean that the sky ships would fit on the ‘map’, and it would take several round to travel from stone pillar to stone pillar. Separate groups or individuals would effectively be cut off from their allies by sheer distance.
I’m also thinking of having Pemberton’s gnolls in dragon fliers supporting the Ob, because I think there need to be more bad guys!
I’d love to hear your ideas.
EarthSeraphEdna
Explorer
Funnily enough, the Axis Seal is stated as being 100 feet in diameter in the campaign guide and in book #6, 200 feet later on in book #7, and 400 feet in book #13 and the actual battle map. In other words, the Axis Seal has doubled in diameter each time.
From what I understand, you are running the Cypher System, which is decidedly more narrative-oriented and loosey-goosey in its combat than, say, the nitty-gritty grid-based tactics of D&D 4e that our own group is using. I dare say that book #13's ambitious and heavily aspirational prescriptions on how the final battle should play out will actually be applicable to you, since you are running a system that supports more cinematic- and narrative-oriented combat. It is less likely to work smoothly for a group heavily entrenched in the thick mechanics of 4e, which are heavily gamist and have a tough time supporting more loosey-goosey, cinematic combat.
From what I understand, you are running the Cypher System, which is decidedly more narrative-oriented and loosey-goosey in its combat than, say, the nitty-gritty grid-based tactics of D&D 4e that our own group is using. I dare say that book #13's ambitious and heavily aspirational prescriptions on how the final battle should play out will actually be applicable to you, since you are running a system that supports more cinematic- and narrative-oriented combat. It is less likely to work smoothly for a group heavily entrenched in the thick mechanics of 4e, which are heavily gamist and have a tough time supporting more loosey-goosey, cinematic combat.
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