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The State of My Zeitgeist Campaign (help appreciated!)
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<blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 7906096" data-attributes="member: 63"><p>Hm. Wild stuff.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Okay, here's some quick spitballing. I'm going to assume you've read the entire AP, but if anything doesn't make sense, just ask and I can clarify.</p><p></p><p>So, what's the goal?</p><p></p><p>1. Continue the Obscurati conspiracy despite a lack of colossus.</p><p>2. Make sure the second GM's plotlines aren't mooted.</p><p>3. Have compelling revelations and twists along the way.</p><p></p><p>What are our assets?</p><p></p><p>1. They don't know about the Axis Seal ritual or the Ob's ultimate goal.</p><p>2. They don't know what Nicodemus's deal is, nor Kasvarina, nor the Sacrament of Apotheosis.</p><p>3. They don't realize the Voice of Rot is, well, trying to destroy the world.</p><p></p><p>---</p><p></p><p>I figure this isn't as hard as it might seem. Having an airship doesn't really counter any plotlines; it just speeds up the party's travel. Like, here's the overall plot from this point:</p><p></p><p><strong>6. Revelations from the Mouth of a Madman.</strong> Spies report Lya Jierre is taking a warship to Ber. A Risuri royal diviner used magic to learn that Lya seeks “the godmind urn,” and checking RHC archives revealed that a gnome named Tinker Oddcog found an item which was catalogued with that name, buried under Slate. (If the PCs didn’t actually meet Tinker in adventure 5, then interviews with people captured from the Flint Ob base corroborate that Tinker was there working on the colossus.)</p><p></p><p></p><p>King Aodhan sends the party to Ber to try to locate Tinker.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Now, what is the titular ‘revelation’ from the mouth of Tinker? It’s kinda the same thing. He explains that the colossus was built to lift something giant and heavy, and to withstand planar fluctuations. <strong>But the plan was for a powerful mind to possess and control it!</strong></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>In this version of the plot, we’re playing up the <strong>Godmind Urn</strong>. Tinker’s just been using it to make amazing technology, but Nicodemus’s plan was to use it to place his consciousness in Borne. Since Borne is gone, he wants it so he can sort of generically have ‘more power.’ He’ll be channeling the collective power and secrecy of the entire Obscurati, which is flavorful, but doesn’t have to mean anything mechanically. If Lya manages to nab it at the end of this adventure, it doesn’t <em>really</em> change the plot; it just provides some flavor to his actions. Maybe if Nic has it, waaaaay down the road in adventure 13, the party gets back to Flint and discovers that the Ob have shipped all the pieces of the colossus to Axis Island, and Nicodemus could be using it as a body.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>But if the PCs get the urn themselves, you can have it offer small perks:</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>In adventure 7, while they’re in the bodies of Ob officers, the PCs’ minds can call upon the power of the urn once each to auto-succeed a check to avoid messing up.</p><p></p><p>In adventure 8, the urn could let them one time pull an item out of a memory event, and maybe offer Kasvarina one free stabilization even if something goes wrong.</p><p></p><p>In adventure 9, you could have the whole city falling under the sway of a lantern on Stanfield’s island, making people obedient, and the urn can break people free.</p><p></p><p>In 10, it can help break people out of the actual Godmind in Cherage.</p><p></p><p>In 11, maybe the Gidim leviathan assaults them psychically and the urn protects them.</p><p></p><p>In 12, you can have it act weird when they get to the Gyre, constantly changing shape.</p><p></p><p>In 13, when the party approaches Axis Island, the urn shatters and their memories return.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Like, all that stuff is <em>basically</em> flavor. If they don’t have the urn, you don’t have to make things harder on the group if you don’t want to. But if they do have, you can invent things that would f--- over low-level people normally, and say that the urn helps protect the party.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>As for the rest of the adventure, the plot’s pretty much the same. Go to Ber, look for Tinker, save Brakken so he can introduce you to the Bruse, (move the t-rex encounter to either the railroad challenge or have Merton send them at the party when they go look for the goblins at Marrajado del Oro), do the Bruse’s challenge, Pemberton does his coup, go attack the island.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Now, the island already is under a malfunctioning portal to the plane of air, so you could have the ship’s connection to Gale falter, and limit the ship to flying only 20 feet above the ground until it gets away from the island and can go back to Flint for repairs. Maybe work in a way for Gale to sense the broken ziggurat – you could send the party there on a mission between adventures 6 and 7 to do a dungeon crawl, perhaps parking their ship outside the “weak flight” radius and sending over a hot air balloon or something.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p><strong>7. Schism.</strong> We don’t have Leone, and we already have Grappa with the party. But you still need to follow clues to the whereabouts of some Ob bigwig who is gathering people for the convocation at a rail station. Instead of Leone with magneto powers, you might bring back Kaja Stewart the gun summoner (though her stats in adventure 13 are probably too high). Possibly Glaz du Sang Magie (from the start of adventure 4, powered up) doing ice magic, or just an expert golem maker with a variety of armed constructs. Whoever it is, the party needs to keep him alive so Grappa can get a proper body when you get to the frost giant rift at Knutpara.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>You can have <em>ghost</em> Leone as the head of the ghost council if you really want, and put some metal things on the island for him to throw at the PCs.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>This adventure’s plot doesn’t change much. You still go to the convocation, learn about the planar arrangement stuff, figure out that the co-founder of the conspiracy Kasvarina is missing, and escape.</p><p></p><p></p><p><strong>8. Diaspora.</strong> Find Kasvarina. This is actually harder now that Borne isn't going to her, so you have some leeway to add stuff to their search. As others have said, if you make Kasvarina be a PC, that could maybe work, but you’d need to do a lot of thinking and make sure the players are all on board. If you do it, instead of ‘find Kasvarina’ it becomes “seeing Nicodemus awakens a bit of memory, giving her an urge to find Sentosa, where the party is advised to go to the temple of Ingatan to get the Arc of Reida.”</p><p></p><p></p><p>The real hurdle here is that we don’t have a colossus to make the climax at Methia really pop, or to put it on a timeline. You could create some new threat for the big fight – maybe all the hierarchs of the Clergy in the memory event attack the party.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I might suggest, instead of making Ana be Kasvarina, make her a sister. This might be too much tinkering, but what if Ana and Kasvarina were in the same village? Ana was Dala’s mother, Kasvarina was Launga’s. When the group finds Kasvarina in Sentosa, she recognizes her sister. During the memory event in their home town you can show them happy together with their daughters.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Both women go off to war, but when Kasvarina is thought killed at the walls of Alais Primos, Ana goes home to deliver the news to Launga. The two of them eventually go on a small journey to some pocket dimension or something, and aren’t affected by the Great Malice. When the Clergy hierarchs bring in Dala, they mistakenly think it’s Kasvarina’s daughter. She’s still used for the sacrament to become Srasama, and dies.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>In the wake of the Great Malice, Kas, Ana, and Launga reunite and pledge themselves to fight the Clergy. Invent some new memory event, though, where Ana is getting in Kasvarina’s way, maybe like 200 years into the whole project, and Kas lures her into a trap in the icy wastes of Drakr, intending to kill her. Ana survives, but her memory is wiped. (You could easily tie this to the lich in adventure 7, who might recognize Ana.)</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>So now we’ve got some added twist/drama that oldKasvarina was responsible for much of Ana’s woes, but maybe newKasvarina will be different. Maybe Ana befriends Kasvarina, and they reconcile. Maybe Kas's mind fractures over all the memory events, and turns to a nemesis again.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p><em>What about the colossus?</em> If you do it this way, you can pull off a trick that you can’t do if Ana <em>is</em> Kasvarina.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Borne thought of Kasvarina as a mother, right? So throughout the adventure, during memory events with Kas, sometimes she’ll look off in shock, and there’ll be a faint image of a colossus in the distance, which vanishes when the memory event ends. If you go to the Ob facility in Flint, a memory event there could show her being a mother to Borne, commenting about how she lost her child and wishes she could raise him.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Then when the Arc activates in Reida and interacts weirdly with the dead magic zone, that, like, imagined memory can manifest as a possible Borne. Maybe a bit wonky. Not sure.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>If you don’t do that, perhaps instead in Methia you just have the Arc conjure a bunch of history at once, including a thousand years ago to the Demonocracy, and you just have demons approaching? Less interesting, I think.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p><strong>9. The Last Starry Sky.</strong> Escape the Dreaming. Save the king. Stop Stanfield from turning on a pacification field in Flint.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>This is basically the same as published, but I suppose the twist here can be that when Catherine Romana tries to usurp the king, she’ll mention that it is critical to the Obscurati’s plans that the Risuri monarchy remain intact, to keep the fey titans under control.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>And when the group defeats Stanfield and he’s dying, he can notice that something is wrong with the stars, and he’ll look at the group in horror. He’ll ask, “Did you let loose the White Serpent? Oh no. Without the colossus, we won’t be able to stop him!”</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>So yeah, in this version, the Ob can lift the Axis Seal just fine using, like, magic and a bunch of cranes or something. But the colossus was meant to physically hold the Voice of Rot at bay. Without the colossus, VoR interrupts the ritual, causes the sun to vanish, slithers through the central crackling energy field, and drags the planet and all its bonded worlds toward the Gyre.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>And from there, um, I think you’re golden.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>---</p><p></p><p><em>Airship Insert.</em> Invent a new NPC in the Risuri military, who's at this briefing too. He says the airship should be handed over to the military for research, because it's too valuable of a long-term asset. Moreover, flying around in a once demon-possessed, not fey-bonded airship seems perilous and unpredictable. The king gives the PCs the choice, because he understands how useful it could be in their pursuit of the Ob.</p><p></p><p></p><p>If the party keeps the ship, no worries. We can deal. Unless they are foolish, the ship should survive adventure 6. But they'll end up having to ditch it at the end of adventure 8, when they go into Methia. The crew can fly it back to Risur, and it will end up in Flint, under guard instead of the Coaltongue.</p><p></p><p></p><p>If the party hands the ship over, it can be waiting for them in Slate after they rescue the king, with upgrades, and they can feel like they made the right choice.</p><p></p><p>Either way, the PCs are advised not to fly over any cities directly, because a nation that overthrew dragon tyrants would likely have a bad first impression of something big flying overhead.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="RangerWickett, post: 7906096, member: 63"] Hm. Wild stuff. Okay, here's some quick spitballing. I'm going to assume you've read the entire AP, but if anything doesn't make sense, just ask and I can clarify. So, what's the goal? 1. Continue the Obscurati conspiracy despite a lack of colossus. 2. Make sure the second GM's plotlines aren't mooted. 3. Have compelling revelations and twists along the way. What are our assets? 1. They don't know about the Axis Seal ritual or the Ob's ultimate goal. 2. They don't know what Nicodemus's deal is, nor Kasvarina, nor the Sacrament of Apotheosis. 3. They don't realize the Voice of Rot is, well, trying to destroy the world. --- I figure this isn't as hard as it might seem. Having an airship doesn't really counter any plotlines; it just speeds up the party's travel. Like, here's the overall plot from this point: [B]6. Revelations from the Mouth of a Madman.[/B] Spies report Lya Jierre is taking a warship to Ber. A Risuri royal diviner used magic to learn that Lya seeks “the godmind urn,” and checking RHC archives revealed that a gnome named Tinker Oddcog found an item which was catalogued with that name, buried under Slate. (If the PCs didn’t actually meet Tinker in adventure 5, then interviews with people captured from the Flint Ob base corroborate that Tinker was there working on the colossus.) King Aodhan sends the party to Ber to try to locate Tinker. Now, what is the titular ‘revelation’ from the mouth of Tinker? It’s kinda the same thing. He explains that the colossus was built to lift something giant and heavy, and to withstand planar fluctuations. [B]But the plan was for a powerful mind to possess and control it![/B] In this version of the plot, we’re playing up the [B]Godmind Urn[/B]. Tinker’s just been using it to make amazing technology, but Nicodemus’s plan was to use it to place his consciousness in Borne. Since Borne is gone, he wants it so he can sort of generically have ‘more power.’ He’ll be channeling the collective power and secrecy of the entire Obscurati, which is flavorful, but doesn’t have to mean anything mechanically. If Lya manages to nab it at the end of this adventure, it doesn’t [I]really[/I] change the plot; it just provides some flavor to his actions. Maybe if Nic has it, waaaaay down the road in adventure 13, the party gets back to Flint and discovers that the Ob have shipped all the pieces of the colossus to Axis Island, and Nicodemus could be using it as a body. But if the PCs get the urn themselves, you can have it offer small perks: In adventure 7, while they’re in the bodies of Ob officers, the PCs’ minds can call upon the power of the urn once each to auto-succeed a check to avoid messing up. In adventure 8, the urn could let them one time pull an item out of a memory event, and maybe offer Kasvarina one free stabilization even if something goes wrong. In adventure 9, you could have the whole city falling under the sway of a lantern on Stanfield’s island, making people obedient, and the urn can break people free. In 10, it can help break people out of the actual Godmind in Cherage. In 11, maybe the Gidim leviathan assaults them psychically and the urn protects them. In 12, you can have it act weird when they get to the Gyre, constantly changing shape. In 13, when the party approaches Axis Island, the urn shatters and their memories return. Like, all that stuff is [I]basically[/I] flavor. If they don’t have the urn, you don’t have to make things harder on the group if you don’t want to. But if they do have, you can invent things that would f--- over low-level people normally, and say that the urn helps protect the party. As for the rest of the adventure, the plot’s pretty much the same. Go to Ber, look for Tinker, save Brakken so he can introduce you to the Bruse, (move the t-rex encounter to either the railroad challenge or have Merton send them at the party when they go look for the goblins at Marrajado del Oro), do the Bruse’s challenge, Pemberton does his coup, go attack the island. Now, the island already is under a malfunctioning portal to the plane of air, so you could have the ship’s connection to Gale falter, and limit the ship to flying only 20 feet above the ground until it gets away from the island and can go back to Flint for repairs. Maybe work in a way for Gale to sense the broken ziggurat – you could send the party there on a mission between adventures 6 and 7 to do a dungeon crawl, perhaps parking their ship outside the “weak flight” radius and sending over a hot air balloon or something. [B]7. Schism.[/B] We don’t have Leone, and we already have Grappa with the party. But you still need to follow clues to the whereabouts of some Ob bigwig who is gathering people for the convocation at a rail station. Instead of Leone with magneto powers, you might bring back Kaja Stewart the gun summoner (though her stats in adventure 13 are probably too high). Possibly Glaz du Sang Magie (from the start of adventure 4, powered up) doing ice magic, or just an expert golem maker with a variety of armed constructs. Whoever it is, the party needs to keep him alive so Grappa can get a proper body when you get to the frost giant rift at Knutpara. You can have [I]ghost[/I] Leone as the head of the ghost council if you really want, and put some metal things on the island for him to throw at the PCs. This adventure’s plot doesn’t change much. You still go to the convocation, learn about the planar arrangement stuff, figure out that the co-founder of the conspiracy Kasvarina is missing, and escape. [B]8. Diaspora.[/B] Find Kasvarina. This is actually harder now that Borne isn't going to her, so you have some leeway to add stuff to their search. As others have said, if you make Kasvarina be a PC, that could maybe work, but you’d need to do a lot of thinking and make sure the players are all on board. If you do it, instead of ‘find Kasvarina’ it becomes “seeing Nicodemus awakens a bit of memory, giving her an urge to find Sentosa, where the party is advised to go to the temple of Ingatan to get the Arc of Reida.” The real hurdle here is that we don’t have a colossus to make the climax at Methia really pop, or to put it on a timeline. You could create some new threat for the big fight – maybe all the hierarchs of the Clergy in the memory event attack the party. I might suggest, instead of making Ana be Kasvarina, make her a sister. This might be too much tinkering, but what if Ana and Kasvarina were in the same village? Ana was Dala’s mother, Kasvarina was Launga’s. When the group finds Kasvarina in Sentosa, she recognizes her sister. During the memory event in their home town you can show them happy together with their daughters. Both women go off to war, but when Kasvarina is thought killed at the walls of Alais Primos, Ana goes home to deliver the news to Launga. The two of them eventually go on a small journey to some pocket dimension or something, and aren’t affected by the Great Malice. When the Clergy hierarchs bring in Dala, they mistakenly think it’s Kasvarina’s daughter. She’s still used for the sacrament to become Srasama, and dies. In the wake of the Great Malice, Kas, Ana, and Launga reunite and pledge themselves to fight the Clergy. Invent some new memory event, though, where Ana is getting in Kasvarina’s way, maybe like 200 years into the whole project, and Kas lures her into a trap in the icy wastes of Drakr, intending to kill her. Ana survives, but her memory is wiped. (You could easily tie this to the lich in adventure 7, who might recognize Ana.) So now we’ve got some added twist/drama that oldKasvarina was responsible for much of Ana’s woes, but maybe newKasvarina will be different. Maybe Ana befriends Kasvarina, and they reconcile. Maybe Kas's mind fractures over all the memory events, and turns to a nemesis again. [I]What about the colossus?[/I] If you do it this way, you can pull off a trick that you can’t do if Ana [I]is[/I] Kasvarina. Borne thought of Kasvarina as a mother, right? So throughout the adventure, during memory events with Kas, sometimes she’ll look off in shock, and there’ll be a faint image of a colossus in the distance, which vanishes when the memory event ends. If you go to the Ob facility in Flint, a memory event there could show her being a mother to Borne, commenting about how she lost her child and wishes she could raise him. Then when the Arc activates in Reida and interacts weirdly with the dead magic zone, that, like, imagined memory can manifest as a possible Borne. Maybe a bit wonky. Not sure. If you don’t do that, perhaps instead in Methia you just have the Arc conjure a bunch of history at once, including a thousand years ago to the Demonocracy, and you just have demons approaching? Less interesting, I think. [B]9. The Last Starry Sky.[/B] Escape the Dreaming. Save the king. Stop Stanfield from turning on a pacification field in Flint. This is basically the same as published, but I suppose the twist here can be that when Catherine Romana tries to usurp the king, she’ll mention that it is critical to the Obscurati’s plans that the Risuri monarchy remain intact, to keep the fey titans under control. And when the group defeats Stanfield and he’s dying, he can notice that something is wrong with the stars, and he’ll look at the group in horror. He’ll ask, “Did you let loose the White Serpent? Oh no. Without the colossus, we won’t be able to stop him!” So yeah, in this version, the Ob can lift the Axis Seal just fine using, like, magic and a bunch of cranes or something. But the colossus was meant to physically hold the Voice of Rot at bay. Without the colossus, VoR interrupts the ritual, causes the sun to vanish, slithers through the central crackling energy field, and drags the planet and all its bonded worlds toward the Gyre. And from there, um, I think you’re golden. --- [I]Airship Insert.[/I] Invent a new NPC in the Risuri military, who's at this briefing too. He says the airship should be handed over to the military for research, because it's too valuable of a long-term asset. Moreover, flying around in a once demon-possessed, not fey-bonded airship seems perilous and unpredictable. The king gives the PCs the choice, because he understands how useful it could be in their pursuit of the Ob. If the party keeps the ship, no worries. We can deal. Unless they are foolish, the ship should survive adventure 6. But they'll end up having to ditch it at the end of adventure 8, when they go into Methia. The crew can fly it back to Risur, and it will end up in Flint, under guard instead of the Coaltongue. If the party hands the ship over, it can be waiting for them in Slate after they rescue the king, with upgrades, and they can feel like they made the right choice. Either way, the PCs are advised not to fly over any cities directly, because a nation that overthrew dragon tyrants would likely have a bad first impression of something big flying overhead. [/QUOTE]
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