drowsy kettle
In the brutal tundra of the Realm of the Mammoth Lords, only the hardiest folk have what it takes to withstand unsparing weather, track down big game, and fight back hostile followings. The Broken Tusk following has survived another winter, but a new year just began, and signs of danger foretell a year unlike any before.
https://paizo.com/store/pathfinder/adventures/adventurePath/questForTheFrozenFlame
sudden osprey
GM'd this one fully, would be happy to answer any questions
supple breach
Been running this for several months, near the end of book 2. It varies a lot in quality and needs a good bit of effort to make it work. Adjusting the loot is nearly mandatory if you dont use ABP, or else the characters are just crazy loot starved the whole game. The first book was pretty good with the recurring characters, encounters, and vibe, 8/10 overall, but the second book has been significantly less good on several fronts. There are like 2 dozen encounters in the second chapter, which is most of the playtime of the book, and you get very few maps for all of them. The first chapter has a brutally difficult fight right at the start that could very, very easily tpk your players through no fault of their own, and the one vulnerability it has is incredibly weird and not something I even realized would work until after the fight (I nerfed it heavily and it was still rough). Not nearly as much interaction with recurring characters, the third chapter is crazy rushed, and overall much weaker book
8/10 first book, 6/10 second, though both benefit a lot from some relatively simple polish and reworking
supple breach
This is nominally an ideal setting for being a good crafter, with very limited access to markets, relatively long time spans, and easy access to raw materials, but crafting still seems so weak. I houseruled that crafting just works 4x faster, and also gave my crafter player a portable workshop that let's her craft stuff at 1/3 speed even when doing hexploration, and it still seems just ok
sudden osprey
i didn't adjust treasure at all, and it was generally fine
i let the following caravan craft a bit for them i think?
bk 2's masses of maps is terrible
supple breach
There's a notable plot hole at the end of book 2: ||the players fight an advance group of Burning Mammoths not all that far outside of Lyuba's swamp, and like a dozen prisoners get released to go back to Lyuba. So Ashen Swale should know that there is a sizable group coming to attack his, if he didnt know from other sources already, but then... nothing is done with this. They're not preparing for an invasion or anything, it's just business as normal. It's weird, and so easy to hook into the overall plotline||
supple breach
bk 2's masses of maps is terrible
Yeah you have easily over a dozen maps, some of them the site of boss battles, but you get almost nothing. You dont get the map for the blood geyser, not for the chimera fight, not for the elder tree, but you do get a map for a forest clearing of a gimmick fight against 2 unimportant demons
sudden osprey
there's 50 locations iirc
supple breach
this thread is designed for spoilers for GMs
Ah alright, wasn't sure of the policy
sudden osprey
and lots of em can have enc in em
supple breach
Anyways, I worked in the BM assault as what gives Ashen Swale a kick in the pants to mobilize forces to meet the army, which gives a prime opportunity for the assault to happen against the glacial palace. The whole situation provides a lot of tension because the players need to: get Venexus away from the palace, convince the townspeople to follow them through the passage to the east, position the Broken Tusk, and time the assault so that they strike while AS is weak but the Burning Mammoths haven't arrived yet. Last session they staged a false flag attack to force AS to mobilize his forces outside the city
supple breach
Book 2 done. There are some good points, but on its own merits, run strictly as written, it's not great
To start with, the caves, generally ok, though the roru fight is absolutely brutal and could tpk your party with no forewarning or chance to prep. I think the main thing it's lacking is any kind of time pressure. This is a simple fix, just say that the mammoths are getting antsy in the confined space with nothing to eat, or some other issue with the tribe, and the players have at least a reason to try to do things quickly. I know PF doesnt subscribe to the adventuring day model of resource attrition, but many classes do have some resource that only replenishes per day, and with how short the distances are there is little mechanical reason not to spend a day of rest between every encounter. Vare is a good character and sets up some stuff later on, the only weird thing is that she spends time in the caves at all. She has an actual place to live not far away.
Incidentally I screwed up a bit in trying to establish the threats the players would face in the coming book. One of the Sutaki was talking about Ashen Swale and said "and even his underlings are horrors on their own" which sounds fitting for a bunch of coordinated necromancers who rule over a valley, but then the players find the place where one of said necromancers got killed by a small group of beavers. This was not helped later down the line with the necromancers kind of being chumps in a fight, though against lower level npcs it still kind of makes sense that theyre threatening
supple breach
Ch2 is just a ton of encounters, which is fine on its own and we had fun running across demons and dryads and various other evil dudes, but I think the narrative suffers a lot from the tribe not being anywhere nearby, so you never interact with any of the characters you got to know in the first book. I think this is fixable but it would naturally be all homebrew content, and if youre doing that I'd recommend skipping a number of the less memorable encounters on the map. I liked a lot of them but some are just not engaging or relevant to the plot. I ran the majority of encounters as written, but the Burning Mammoth encampment near the end of ch2 really benefits from Ivarsa giving a small speech to her scouts before teleporting out, as recommended in the GM binder pdf for this AP. You can establish a number of things, like the plan to invade Lyuba, that Ivarsa has no idea where the PCs are, stuff like that. You just really need to make sure that the players dont try to attack her before she leaves, because that's an assured TPK
The lack of encounter maps is really annoying here, you get almost none of them, and what ones you do get are not great quality. The top of Ashen Swale's tower in particular is weird, because the zombie brutes noted as being there dont actually fit. Instead of a map of a forest clearing, I really wish I had something for the chimera fight, or the blood geyser, or the corrupted elder tree fight. The chimera fight in particular, it's on a cliff, the terrain makes a huge difference here depending on what the players do. Related, lots of tokens are missing art entirely, which is even more time spent whipping things into shape, though you should be familiar with this from book 1. I would recommend throwing a handful of really big battlemaps in for the undefined ones, most APs dont have big maps for page space reasons, which can hamper ranged characters. A bow wielding ranger can finally shoot things from >100 feet away
supple breach
Ch3 is both really short but also has the weakest writing. It really wants to railroad the players into joining the blood owls, but it's so jarring for a secret rebellion to advertise its existence and later headquarters to these handful of people who they basically just met. I scrapped most of the "hey we're the blood owls, want to join?" stuff from the previous chapter, and just had Nukiak tell the players to seek out Zedak and mention her name. But you should really be prepared for the players not to join the blood owls in the first place, either through not finding them or not wanting to be subordinate to this random rebellion, and the book really does not account for that happening.
Again on the writing front, there's a huge plot hole in this chapter: if the PCs freed the sutaki from the BM scouting party, they return to Lyuba. Ashen Swale should know that the Burning Mammoths are coming, and that even their scouting parties are strong enough to capture a dragon. Thats super concerning news to a tyrant of what should be a nearly totally isolated valley. But no, nothing actually comes from it as written, which is just crazy weird
Another thing, which one of my players pointed out, is that the uprising as a whole is really, really dependent on Venexus being killed, and the players are the only ones who can do so. Which means the blood owls need to entrust the entire fate of their people on these nomads. Without the imminent threat of Ivarsa coming to enslave them, this seems pretty crazy, and it's kind of hard to justify an uprising at the present moment. And if you go with what the book says, with Ivarsa having already met with Venexus (I recommend dropping this bit entirely, it makes very little sense), then Ivarsa is probably just going to kill AS and Venexus within a few months, and the sutaki could flee east, or at the worst just be enslaved by someone else
The whole rebellion plot is kind of underbaked. Ch3 is just: Enter Lyuba-> fight some dudes who picked a fight with the players -> fetch quests -> start the rebellion. There's just not much setup or plot, and for all that there are like a dozen new named characters that the players are supposed to interact with, none of them really do much, because all there is to do is fetch quests.
As a whole, I think book 2 is a 6/10. There are some good moments, but so much stuff is either underbaked or missing entirely, so even with a whole prewritten adventure and possibly even foundry imports, you still need to finagle a lot of stuff to actually be usable or good. A number of the changes aren't hard, but that just means that the writers of the book didnt do that work either
supple breach
As for what I did with chapter 3:
The starting bits are mostly the same, though as mentioned above I changed how the party joins the blood owls a bit. It ended up working largely as the book planned out. Once theyre settled in Lyuba, things diverge. It's common knowledge that the Burning Mammoths are approaching, and it's a matter of weeks before theyre at the gates. Additionally, Venexus hasn't left on a hunting trip in 2 weeks, and everyone knows she gets her food one way or another. So the players are faced with a number of different objectives: get enough food to sate Venexus, prepare for the eventual rebellion, figure out how to get Venexus out of the city at the right time, and position the Broken Tusk to be able to leave the valley after a passage east is made but before the Burning Mammoths arrive and kill everyone.
So the players leave Lyuba to go hunt some long horned bison, the ones detailed in the book but not used, to feed Venexus, also meeting up with the Broken Tusk to exchange information and plans and to bring the stronger members into Lyuba for the rebellion. Entering through the front gate won't work, so they need to drag a gigantic bison carcass through the swamp, facing down undead patrols and defending the people and the meat. Venexus is sated for a while, and the people of Lyuba hear of these heroes who managed it.
Waiting on Ashen Swale's timeline to fight the BM isn't great for the Broken Tusks, so the ant's nest needs to get kicked. The party stages a false flag operation where they ambush the captain of the guard (mechanically an upscaled bone warrior with retributive strike instead of reactive strike), and make it seem like the BM have infiltrated the city and are now killing off AS's forces
The day after, Ashen Swale calls the town into the howling square for an announcement. He and Idovik walk out the gate with what looks to be a tied up Burning Mammoth. Ashen Swale is large on the battlemap, with an aracana/religion check to determine that someone had cast enlarge on him before he walked out. AS talks about the tragedy of the captain being killed, but worry not! One of the suspects was apprehended. AS then strangles the bound "Burning Mammoth" guy to death, silently making eye contact with the townsfolk while he does it over the course of a few minutes. After the guy falls limp, AS announces that his forces are marching out to meet this new threat within a few days, then turns and leaves the corpse in the square. A perception check shows that the guy who was strangled had his markings applied incorrectly, and the branding was likely done and healed into scars only a few hours ago
The players then have a few days to prepare, gather information, drum up support for the rebellion and convince the people that there is a way out of the valley to the east once the rebellion has been completed.
After those few days, the players watch as the bulk of AS's forces, headed by Desiak, march out the gate to fight the BM. With the compound weakened and an army approaching, it's the perfect time to launch a rebellion
sudden osprey
You can always write a review on the paizo store btw, it'll get seen by more ppl too
supple breach
The assault went more or less according to the book, a few tweaks but nothing huge. I scrapped the whole thing with Ivarsa meeting AS and Venexus, it raises way too many problems, so when the party confronts AS he thinks that Ivarsa and some of her goons launched the assault and have come to kill him (this does rely on one of the PCs being a woman who might plausibly match a description that AS got of her)
After he's dead and Venexus returns, Venexus spits out Vare, who was the one sent to start the forest fire to distract Venexus. Vare is barely clinging on to life, though I had the players flip whether she started out dead or not.
The fight was played as normal, but I highly recommend trying to get it so that Venexus uses Sunburst from the primordial flame as a suicide attack, when it's clear that she won't win. The shock of a level 7 party getting hit by a 7th rank spell is something to see.
Afterwards, the rebellion concludes, but instead of just waiting for the palace to melt, they use the primordial flame to melt it, clearing the way to the east
supple breach
You can always write a review on the paizo store btw, it'll get seen by more ppl...
Yeah I might do that
woven scarab
what creatures got a remaster and which others can be replaced with a similat creature?
sudden osprey
you'd have to look on AoN after seeing MC2 on there
remote dust
Hi, Id like to run this adventure for my players
Id like to know what are some GM tips
From people who played it
cunning lance
@supple breach what did you do for the final encounter of book 3? I’m near the end of book 2 and looking at that final dungeon… the space seems so tiny for the epic conflict they want esp with all the megafauna companions.
supple breach
Entirely new map, the book one is unusable
cunning lance
I got pretty lucky btw with the sutaki in that one of my players is an ex crusader sarkorian
Was very easy to justify the rebellion.
Dude even chose living vessel as an archetype, which let me also use him as a foil for Metuak
cunning lance
Entirely new map, the book one is unusable
This was my thinking too lol I’m just gonna have to build from scratch
supple breach
It's not super hard to justify but if the players dont want to join the rebellion or fail to get any of the segues in, the story grinds to a halt
cunning lance
Oh yes by justify i meant narrative buy-in.
Do you still have the dungeon map you built for the finale?
supple breach
This was my thinking too lol I’m just gonna have to build from scratch
I can share the maps I used later, if you want yeah. If I dont have the actual map with the walls drawn in I can at least share the jpegs I drew over
supple breach
Also if youre interested I can talk about a few differences/additions to the book that I think worked well
cunning lance
I’d love to hear it.
I was reading through all your critiques earlier
And although I heard some of them from other sources, certain changes you incorporated I did as well
Such as burning mammoth presence in the ch 2-2 valley
supple breach
Oh I guess I wrote the above thing before book 3, once Im at a real keyboard I can write up something substantial
cunning lance
Yes your blog ends at book 2.
supple breach
I think a lot of what I did for ch1 of book 3 wont generalize, like I had a new player come in at that time and had them fill the guide role of Yana who I didnt think would actually work as intended for my party anyways
cunning lance
My players willingly fall into traps or ploys like that for the purpose of dramatic irony and tension
So I will probably play Yana straight.
supple breach
Part of the problem I think is you need your players to care about 2 new characters who dont really have much to offer them. A guide to the city is just not very valuable when everyone knows they won't be there long
cunning lance
Hmm, I appreciate the insight
I will definitely need to inject some serious pathos into that chapter then.
supple breach
DM sent to you with maps
supple breach
The assault went more or less according to the book, a few tweaks but nothing hu...
Continuing with my much beloved review of QftFF, here's book 3:
It's a hot mess.
There's a lot of stuff to go into, but on almost every level it's sloppily done, and needs a good bit of work to make enjoyable.
It starts out strong by saying that 3 months have passed since the events of the previous book. Why? No clue. Getting a heavenly superweapon and then spending the same length of time as the entire previous book doing effectively jack squat is a wild start, and really doesn't make sense on any level. The finale of the book is supposed to take place at midwinter, aka the winter solstice, aka December 21st. The first book started in spring, the story so far took approximately 6 months, ending approximately in October. 3 months of timeskipped travel makes the timeline impossible. I said 2 weeks to preserve my own sanity, though I never put too much importance on the calendar.
Oh, I should probably talk about what happens to the BM, since they should have been nearly hot on the heels of the players. The book naturally doesn't address this genuinely fairly important plot point. With a successful warfare lore or society check, the players deduce that the melting of the glacial palace flooded swamp around Lyuba, which naturally delays the BM army substantially. Ashen Swale's forces, if you did the thing I recommended where they went out to meet the BM horde, got routed pretty much without issue considering their entire reserve force and supply lines were cut out underneath them overnight.
Anyways, more dumb stuff from the book. It asks the players for a RK check for Hillcross's lore. If any of your players has Hillcross lore they should simply auto-succeed, and I'm not a huge fan of the check in the first place. Any character that had previously been to Hillcross as an adult in their backstory should just know this stuff, and the rest of the tribe should know if the PCs don't.
supple breach
The book then... forgets... that the players have the FF, because it describes the players entering the veil of the summerland spell, but the FF already does the same exact thing for miles around the players. It's the whole thing with the unnaturally temperate climate in the valley. Book 3 continually forgets that this is a thing that the FF does passively and in a large radius around the PCs, and the best 'resolution' I found was to make fun of the book when I was reading out descriptions that didn't make any internal sense.
Adding more cars to the train wreck: if you've read ahead or looked at reviews of this book, you'll know that the fate of the Broken Tusk at the end is dependent on a flat check with a modifier for how large the following is. Put simply, this is horse shit, and I really don't recommend doing it, since the players can be totally triumphant against Metuak and then come back and half the tribe is dead due to things almost entirely out of player control. This is an issue with the current chapter because half the events revolve around growing the size of the tribe. There's no given reason why the PCs or players should particularly want this, so you're left with the burden of coming up with some actual motivation for the players to participate in half the events of this chapter, if they aren't simply nosy busybodies who insert themselves into stuff just because.
Outside of all of that, ch1 is mostly fine, I guess. I didn't include Yana at all since I didn't think my players would really care about him or the betrayal, and the guide role was filled with a new player. The book didn't even bother to give art for his human form, which is a big ??? if you did want to run him. The weykoward fight was boring as sin, but the fights against the giants were fun, and you have an excuse to have them target whoever is holding the FF. Don't abuse this though, it can be a feels bad moment for the player.
supple breach
The spell Object Reading comes in clutch here and in the rest of the book, give it to the players if they don't already have it. It almost immediately became my favorite spell from one player using it
Transitioning from ch1 to 2, the book kind of glosses over how they actually get to the tar forest, how long it takes, etc. I gave my players more time in Hillcross than the handful of days suggested in the book, so they could do stuff like craft, retrain, etc., which is sorely needed but means the players need some reason to stay in HC for a bit without immediately heading on to the next thing. So, part of the recompense for helping with the summerland spell is travel arrangements by one of the witches who knows the Shadow Walk/Umbral Journey spell, and who will arrive in HC a bit after the fight with the giants.
Ch2 is less of a mess in terms of plot but is mostly a series of fights without much connective tissue. I think I ran precisely 1 random encounter, but mostly because I had better ideas for what sudden fights the players should get into. I think the only transferrable one is a night ambush by a coven of naga who want to magically compel whoever is on guard to follow them into the woods.
Hegremon is overall an interesting character with a backstory that the players have basically no avenue to seeing at all. As written, they get ambushed several times by this random ass ice giant who is stronger than any of the ones at the siege, and then he dies unless the players try to capture him alive. This is where Object Reading comes in clutch, since you can lore drop quite a lot of stuff if they use the spell several times in a row on his bow. Meetings with Ivarsa, talking with Bulrakun about how he must lead the frost giants in the siege while Hegremon tries to head off the PCs, scenes of Hegremon setting traps for the players, foreshadowing any other fights in the tar forest, just so many opportunities.
supple breach
In my game the players saw (through OR) Hegremon encasing the T Rex in ice and then baiting the trap with a healing potion, and then when they came across a block of ice and a health potion in exactly the same configuration they previously saw, they debated for a long while whether to try to get the potion or not, and nearly tripped the trap by accident despite literally seeing Hegremon setting it up for them.
Mechanically, Hegremon is too strong overall, especially when attacking from ambush, and really needs to be tuned down. Additionally, the book says that he escapes from the players chasing him, but he does not have any real ability to accomplish this aside from direct fiat, which is lazy. I gave him scrolls of Meld into Stone, so he basically hides whenever the players get near and hopes that they are gone by the time he has to come out again, which I liked as a very mediocre escape mechanism that only someone in desperation would rely on. If you can come up with something better, keep in mind that your players have mounts, spells, extra senses, flight, etc., and also that if they kill Hegremon before he can escape then they can potentially use whatever Hegremon would have tried.
The stone witch fight is actually really good as written, trapping everyone in walls of stone then having the tar trees casting cloudkill was incredible. Super tense fight, even had my first PC death (he got better). One thing I did prior is Adalemma implies she has sent several adventuring groups to try to kill Calcifda before, which really makes her seem threatening, and she can live up to it.
The stone behemoth needs some tuning btw, its petrify ability can be a nightmare if it petrifies someone.
Adalemma and Everbright are essentially fine as written. I had Everbright be a "shopkeeper" who collects shiny things, including coins, and is willing yet very unskilled at trading with them.
supple breach
When Adalemma told the players what was up with Metuak currently, one of them pointed out that if Ivarsa is out of the picture there's not really any reason to try to handle Metuak right now, and can just wait until the demons and stuff go away. Genuinely didn't have a response to this, and still don't.
I added a whole thing at the end of ch2 here, based on stuff the GM binder notes gave. While on their way to castle Grimgorge, a devil (not a demon) approaches the party and asks for help in seeking revenge against Ivarsa. They make a deal that in exchange for help in binding the devil to the body of Ivarsa's dead brother, the devil will help to kill Ivarsa. The backstory, if a player asks, is that Ivarsa nearly killed it years ago at the Worldwound while the devil was working for Cheliax, which was in defiance of treaties. Being a devil is important since devils can be relied on to honor a contract, where a demon couldn't.
The party then proceeds to find the temple where devil and demon binding was attempted several years ago (~10 or so, not decades) by the Burning Mammoths in an attempt to recreate something like Metuak. Ivarsa's brother, along with many others, were effectively sacrificed in attempts to refine the binding ritual of demon and human. Ivarsa's brother is an ideal host for the devil currently because his body has already been prepared for the binding, and also personally meaningful to Ivarsa, so it hurts worse. The players find clues from a burnt library that Lomok, Pakano's grandfather and an elder of the BM, burned the whole place to the ground when he found out about it, ending the whole project overnight.
My players were naturally pretty skeptical of making an actual literal deal with a devil, but he genuinely has no interest in betraying them. He cares about revenge against Ivarsa, and doesn't give a fuck about the PCs except as a means to accomplishing his revenge. He's lawful evil, not stupid.
This whole sidequest does several things narratively, in addition to being an opportunity for loot:
It gives some backstory to Ivarsa that otherwise doesn't really come up. She was kind of terrible during the war, but she came back to the Burning Mammoth afterwards and her whole family was dead, with some implication that she never knew why. Lomok gets introduced as a character before he appears to the players at the very end of the book, and if the players figure out what he did, they get to see an indication of the good that once existed in the BM before Ivarsa took it over. It gives an avenue to talking Lomok down, rather than being yet another fight to the death, because the players can see the BM as having some good left within it that is worth saving.
It also ties into what happened (in my version of the story) to Pakano, which I'll get into shortly.
supple breach
Anyways, on to chapter 3. Naturally, the map is entirely unusable for half a dozen reasons, the primary one being it's way, way too small. It just makes 0 sense, and to work at all you absolutely need to find a new map online and make something usable. I ended up with 3 maps for the castle as a whole, with a ground floor where most of the stuff happens, a dungeon where Metuak is trapped, and the second floor of the castle where the Burning Mammoth have secured and are using as a staging ground to try to clear out threats and break Metuak out.
In many ways I ran this as written. Of the minor encounters, my favorite was the Cassiodor, but it needs to actually leverage the demon to be interesting. If you read its stat block it has a lot of stuff for disguising itself, but if the players see a hulking demon with a good perception check, then it's just s straightforward fight with nothing interesting. What the book somewhat suggests and I leaned into is that it imitates Ivarsa. It knows what Ivarsa looks and sounds like, generally, it knows she commands all the humans around here, so when it sees a group of humans it does the sensible thing and turns into the human commander and then tries to order them around until only 1 or 2 players are left with it, at which point it just attacks. That's the intent, based on its incomplete knowledge. What the players see is Ivarsa, commander of the BM, sitting in some random ass closet all alone, who then starts ordering them around as if she isn't their mortal enemy. The players have seen the real Ivarsa before, and she has seen them, probably knows all their names. So when someone that looks like Ivarsa starts ordering them around as if the PCs are BM, there's this huge sense of mutual incomprehension, which is great. Hopefully the players don't attack immediately, since it would be lame.
It gets much better if the player with the FF brings it out, and "Ivarsa" doesn't react at all. The Cassiodor doesn't know what the FF is. If the players hadn't clued into what's going on, that will come as a mind fuck.
supple breach
For the loose plot of ch3, I think you just need to emphasize what the BM are actually doing: trying to free Metuak. Aside from general placement of people, I showed this by having a custom group of BM people in a loose adventuring party in the dungeon, with environmental hints that they had been fighting stuff down there for a while. Mechanically I liked including enemies that are nominally on par with the party, but specialized to fight demons and dispel magic, not fight the PCs, though this is somewhat hard to convey naturally and was mostly done for my own amusement. A cleric is great for fighting demons and ghosts, with Holy Light and multiple max rank Heals, much less so for fighting humanoids.
Jessari can be run as written, but I had him leave the morning after being freed, with a cryptic "when you see Ivarsa, do not judge me for my shame" said just before leaving. Will get to that in a minute.
The book has Everbright just... be there.... when the party finds Metuak's prison. This is sort of dumb and unnecessary. My party used a scroll of sending to contact Everbright, but I had planned that if they touched the glowing magical walls of his prison, it would send out a signal to Adalemma and Everbright would fly all the way over within a minute. Metuak is underground here, but Everbright is really fucking fast, so she just blasts through the ground leaving a glowing tunnel to the outside, appearing in front of the party chipper as always. Everbright then gives the party an undescribed magical buff (more in a minute) and dismisses the magical lock around the prison, then leaves, blasting through a different portion of wall and leaving a second glowing tunnel.
supple breach
So the book commits what I think is a cardinal sin of heroic fantasy: not letting the villains talk. For both Metuak and Ivarsa, it basically says "talking is dumb, the fight starts immediately" which is laaaaaammmee. The party has been chasing this guy for forever, what do you mean you can't even talk to him? So I had some stuff for him to actually say, especially since Metuak doesn't have any particular reason to fight the people that freed him. Even if he sees the player with the FF, would he not just think they were bringing it to him? He's corrupted by Xeleria but he's not entirely insane, and someone entirely insane isn't interesting.
Anyways, this presents a bit of an issue, since the party is probably pre-buffing for the fight, before they first see Metuak, but you don't want to punish them for talking instead of immediately shooting at him. Hence, Everbright's buff: all durations of effects are paused until the effect starts being used.
Mechanically, give Metuak more health. He dies too quickly as written imo. Also, if you have an alchemist in the party, you need to rework Metuak's resistance to non-magical attacks, it's way too strong against alchemists.
This is a bit out of order, since my party actually fought Metuak after Ivarsa, but I said that once Metuak dies the FF both becomes usable to anyone holding it, and also you can cast fireball at will. I think I said 3rd rank, might have been fifth. If Metuak is the last encounter of the campaign it just gives something cool to the party that makes the FF seem more special without impacting balance (since the campaign is over). It's probably still fine if Ivarsa is still alive, but that's up to your judgement
supple breach
2 plot things left, Lomok and Ivarsa. I had Lomok be a social encounter with a combat fail state, since the party doesn't have any particular reason to hate him, and as mentioned previously he is one of the last remnants of what the BM were prior to Ivarsa. So if the party can come up with the right words and right rolls, they can sway Lomok and his retinue to leave. The combat encounter itself is kind of lame as written too, add some spellcasters.
Now, Ivarsa. Again, I gave her a chance to talk. Crucially, if she never talks, the players never find out that the worm is Pakano. The book offhandedly mentions Jesseri resurrected him, but is this reveal supposed to happen when they're talking with random witch lady that they are meeting for the first time? There's no prewritten dialogue for it. Once again, laaaammmmeeee.
So, back to reason for the demon temple: Pakano wasn't resurrected by a normal ritual and got fucked on a die roll to become a worm, Ivarsa purposely brought him back with a ritual that fuses demons with humans. It didn't work all that well, but so what? She got a magic worm mount, and next time she can do the ritual better than Jesseri did to get something more like Metuak.
In this way, Ivarsa is perpetuating the cycles that caused her pain in the past. Her family was all killed trying to make stronger warriors, and now she's unwittingly doing the same to others. Lomok doesn't know that the big worm is his grandson fused to a demon, but it's not a secret that will go undiscovered forever.
In the middle of the talking the devil inhabiting Ivarsa's brother's body comes in, and her facade breaks at the sight of her long dead family member. He starts talking with her, trying to get her to repent for what she has done, and right as she hugs him and starts questioning her decisions, the devil brings out a dagger and stabs her in the gut. This starts the fight, though the devil is content just to watch rather than actually participate.
I think I had the devil unbind with the body of the brother, leaving the corpse at Ivarsa's feet, and fly a bit away to watch the fight play out.
That's pretty much it for the plot, unless Metuak is still alive to go after. One thing you should include in Ivarsa's loot is her spell book, with Teleport in it, so that the party can immediately go back to Hillcross once they're done with everything. Maybe it's a single scroll of Teleport if you don't have any prepared caster who can learn it and prepare it easily.
I'll once again say that having the fate of the Broken Tusk get determined by a single die roll is dumb and lame. Don't do it. Just let the players win.
That segues into a general criticism with the AP: the tribe doesn't matter after the first book. You barely interact with them, they don't do anything for the players, they're just not a part of the story in any meaningful way.
Overall, I'll somewhat charitably give this book a 5/10. I focused on the pain points and how to resolve them, but there's some good stuff in here. You just need to work to make it shine, and hopefully divert around the bad parts well before your players get any hint of them. There are some truly baffling decisions in the plot, but there are some cool setpieces and things that can work pretty well with just a bit of adjustment. The maps are, largely, pretty bad, and as said the final map is flatly not usable.
@cunning lance
cunning lance
Thank you. I appreciate it. I’ll be sure to really read over part 3 before we get into it bc it seems like it needs a decent amt of effort
The way I am playing Ivarsa is that she is trying to unify the mammoth lords under one banner. As places like Mendev get their internal politics and consolidate after the world wound etc, they will be looking elsewhere. This is also illustrated in book 1 by the dead irrisen invasion force from centuries past.
Therefore, to prevent a colonizing force from gaining a foothold, Ivarsa believes that the mammoth lords must unite into a strong authoritarian system.
Of course, since the Broken Tusks share a history with the Burning Mammoths, their very existence contradicts Ivarsa’s regimes own interpretation of their history, so they must be eliminated to preserve the noble lie.
supple breach
Thats a pretty good motivation and lines up with her actions up to this point, it's just kind of opaque to the players
cunning lance
I utilized their dialogue with Pakano plus the random encounter with the tied up burning mammoth guy
So far, I have distanced her from actually being demonic, and instead utilizing their iconography and tactics based on what she saw in the world wound. Hence her fixation on teleportation and logistical magic.
The demonic scarring is inspired, but it’s essentially a way to strip her soldiers of individuality and get them to perform in a unit. Similar to dress codes in military with buzz cuts etc.
It’s a method of transfiguration for her in other words.
As far as the final conflict, I envision that when we get to the final battle, she won’t care who wins or who loses, bc her objective of a unified Mammoth Lord society is accomplished either way.
halcyon chasm
I was a player in Empiricist's campaign, we were asked to add any extraneous info we remember from a player perspective.
It really felt like the author forgot that the flame affects nearby weather. The entry to Hillcross was the most egregious, but there were a lot of other things like navigating a frozen tar area that should have thawed as we walked through and trapped us probably. Snow and ice really do not last long in high heat.
If you change any flavor text at all, please please change the stuff near the very start when the party sees hillcross, seriously it was really dumb.
Um aside from that
When Adalemma told the players what was up with Metuak currently, one of them pointed out that if Ivarsa is out of the picture there's not really any reason to try to handle Metuak right now, and can just wait until the demons and stuff go away. Genuinely didn't have a response to this, and still don't.
Empiricist had Adalemma say that the seal was also weakening naturally over time and would degrade in a decade +/- a decade, so it was best to deal with now if we could I think? It was at least enough to paper over the issue.
The devil sideplot was by far the most interesting sideplot, so it was a bit funny to learn it was unofficial content.
We had a whole running joke about how retrieval prisms interacted with the flame where we could in theory get an npc to take the flame and run and then have the holder retrieval prism it back. Empiricist was gracious enough to have someone try it at least once, which was greatly appreciated and very memorable even if it's not the kind of thing that generalizes well.
We considered trying it on Ivarsa too but ultimately decided not to and also she barely managed to do anything before dying because she was a bit of a glass cannon.
I thought Hegremon's ambush would have been a really funny place to use snares, e.g. you try to run up to him and get tripped or something.
Snares were a joke the entire game, but they could have really fucked us up there since he was so threatening when given space to breathe. They also could have helped secure an escape, and he does trap stuff anyway.
Even with empiricist providing forewarning worm!Pakano felt so out of left field that it was more confusing than horrifying.
Like, none of us even remembered that the giant worm existed in the first place (apparently we saw it in the distance at some point?). And then the fact that it was also Pakano was just very over the top and hard to suspend disbelief on in the moment.
although there at least the devil side quest provided a lot of valuable context.
supple breach
I was a player in Empiricist's campaign, we were asked to add any extraneous inf...
Empiricist had Adalemma say that the seal was also weakening naturally over time and would degrade in a decade +/- a decade, so it was best to deal with now if we could I think? It was at least enough to paper over the issue.
So this was a joke more than anything, on the meta level. She said something like "I bid you hurry, the seal will fail entirely within the next 20 years. Do not delay!" The joke being she's immortal and has ~fuckall sense of how quickly mortals do things
Empiricist was gracious enough to have someone try it at least once, which was greatly appreciated and very memorable even if it's not the kind of thing that generalizes well.
Actually the flame getting stolen is a canon event in Hillcross, it's just intended to be done by a character I wrote out of the story. I hadn't actually intended the retrieval prisms to be used this way, but as soon as it was brought up that they would be used for the FF I decided it would be funniest to not change my original plans, have the guy (a returned BM mook who escaped the party in a previous encounter) try to steal the flame, and fail immediately because of preparations he had no way of knowing about. In the story as laid out in the book, this would work exactly the same, it's just that Yana would be the one trying and failing to steal the flame.
The trick with giving the flame to an enemy then retrieving it back would have worked entirely fine on anyone except Ivarsa and Metuak, the former because she's smart enough not to fall for tricks like that, the latter because he's already under the effect of the curse
We considered trying it on Ivarsa too but ultimately decided not to and also she barely managed to do anything before dying because she was a bit of a glass cannon.
This is in large part because the "reward" for the devil subplot was Ivarsa getting stabbed and instantly losing half her health. The GM binder guide suggests it as a way to kill Ivarsa without a fight, but I didn't go that far
And yes it was half her health. Did I increase her health on the stat block beforehand? Yes. Did she end up with less health than she has in the book? Still yes.
I suppose I should link the GM binder I've been referencing:
https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-N3pz80sBL25ZEBIcxuf
Some good stuff in here, it was a real resource for the campaign. You can see I didn't come up with the devil binding thing entirely myself, but almost none of the details are the same
vocal holly
I basically agree with the review of the campaign. It was fun but we were aware that the DM had put in significant effort to improve a lot of things.
The funniest part for me was when we became mammoth lords, because that gives you an animal companion mount and access to some feats to buff it. The mount is larger than usual and it can only spec into strength or fortitude, not dex.
I'm a ranger with more than half of my feats already specced into a dex animal companion (cat).
So without DM intervention, picking a build that seems really appropriate for the campaign (a ranger with an animal companion in a campaign about scouts who become mammoth lords, of which having a mount is a key component) gets punished by the campaign awarding feats that basically don't synergize or do anything at all. (I could have gotten a second animal companion, but you can't use them both at once, and, you know, I'd already picked the one that made sense.)
cunning lance
I plan on allowing my Druid and Commander Cavalier player a small respec when we get there
supple breach
Oh and naturally an untamed order druid cannot possibly work in the provided ch3 map of book 3
supple breach
Huge in smol spaces
vocal holly
You can always just double the scale!
What was the die roll you mentioned, that you removed, that would have decided the fate of the broken tusks?
I went back but if you said it I missed it twice
supple breach
With 15 foot reach you could genuinely just strike at other encounters from the current one
vocal holly
With 15 foot reach you could genuinely just strike at other encounters from the ...
So what's the problem
supple breach
What was the die roll you mentioned, that you removed, that would have decided t...
Theres a table for turning following size into a modifier. You roll a d20 and add that modifier. Pretty standard 4 degrees of success thing then determines whether approximately everyone survives the attacks on Hillcross by the BM, or on a crit fail I think half the following is dead along with around the same number of named NPCs
vocal holly
Yeah that's pretty low-resolution lmao
Just a one-die-roll campaign
You are sent on a quest. Roll to see if you succeed.
supple breach
Keeping in mind, there's never any particular incentive for the players to grow the size of the following directly. It happens pretty naturally, but up until precisely the very end of the campaign, it never actually benefits you, at which point it is the sole determinant of whether you get the happy ending or if Hillcross is entirely destroyed and your tribe nearly entirely eliminated
I never really focused on the BM siege on Hillcross because I knew from the instant I read this that I'm not doing this stupid roll, and there's no great way to have it come up
cunning lance
My plan is to have a couple mass combats with the following using the battle cry rules as a denouement after Ivarsa
Probably going to have the BM turn on whatever Giants remain and have broken tusk and burning mammoth fight as a unified front in the end.
plucky forge
So I'm looking at using this AP and running it. I've had a rough read over the AP plot books 1 and 2 and considered some tweaks:
Let me know what you think:
||>Have the original reason for taking the flame that frost giants were going to attack the BM from the east, pincering them between giants and demons. The non Broken Tusk BMs didn't believe this threat.
The Flame curse will instead slowly transform a humanoid character into a Morlock, which ironically hate the sun ofc. Hobji in Red Cat Cave was a BM soldier who went with Metuak and Metuak knocked him out and stole the flame from him
Xeleria can only 'save' Metuak from this fate by possessing him
Ivarsa never aligns the BM with demonic forces, it weakens her writing as a villain.
No silly roll to determine the fate of Hillcross offscreen. Base it off a measure of Following strength||
supple breach
So I'm looking at using this AP and running it. I've had a rough read over the A...
You don't need to spoiler anything, this thread is for GMs or players who have already completed it.
Have the original reason for taking the flame that frost giants were going to attack the BM from the east, pincering them between giants and demons. The non Broken Tusk BMs didn't believe this threat.
I think this weakens the story immensely. Since this happened 100 years ago, there are 2 outcomes: The frost giants did in fact attack, in which case the Broken Tusk were objectively right all along, or the giants didn't attack, in which case the the Broken Tusk did factually remove the best weapon the BM had based on unfounded fears.
The Flame curse will instead slowly transform a humanoid character into a Morlock, which ironically hate the sun ofc. Hobji in Red Cat Cave was a BM soldier who went with Metuak and Metuak knocked him out and stole the flame from him
Xeleria can only 'save' Metuak from this fate by possessing him
I think this is a lot of stuff that is both entirely unnecessary and factually contradicted by Venexus holding the flame for a century
Ivarsa never aligns the BM with demonic forces, it weakens her writing as a villain.
How so? Using the tools of the enemy against them and becoming corrupted by the power on offer is absolutely solid writing. And to be clear, in my writing Ivarsa never aligns with demonic forces, she makes demonic powers subservient to her own. This is a callback to Metuak gaining power through binding to a shadow demon, a story that Ivarsa canonically admires. The Burning Mammoths call him Metuak the Hero, this is their foundational mythos with Metuak as basically a messiah figure, why would she think that binding to a demon to gain power in an hour of need is in any way a bad thing?
No silly roll to determine the fate of Hillcross offscreen. Base it off a measure of Following strength
Still has the issue of follower size not mattering prior to this, but overall this is ok
plucky forge
Yeah fair points for the Giants I just wanted to try and integrate them more into the legend of the Flame. For the changed curse Venexus hasn't at any point lost possession of the Flame, and feels a strong compulsion not to.
supple breach
Oh I see. But then you're including this whole part of the curse to justify this really minor enemy?
plucky forge
Its more that I found the current curse not super interesting. Its a nasty debuff but it is just a debuff.
supple breach
The curse as outlined essentially makes the character unplayable if they want to do anything related to rolling a die, and because of how the curse works you can simply not justify handing the flame from one PC to another, so anything on top of that is superfluous. A PC can never be under the effects of the curse for a prolonged duration. In roleplay, when someone came under the effects of the curse, I said it felt and looked like your soul being sucked out of you, all strength leaves your limbs and you become a husk of yourself until you get the flame back. You could add some mental stuff to that if you wanted, idk. That's all just filling out the outline defined by the mechanics, justifying it in roleplay. Adding in a whole morlock thing seems a bit silly
plucky forge
My concept was the curse came from syarstik who was an awakened beast. So the curse does the opposite making a humanoid more bestial.
supple breach
Actually, related to that, but something I did which the players didn't end up running into: I made a second statblock for Metuak in case he ever regained possession of the Flame. Named "Metuak the Hero, Unleashed", he was a level 17 version of Metuak, because the curse effectively reduces your level by 4 and the base Metuak statblock is level 13. This implies that the Metuak that the party fights has been under the curse the whole time, he never shrugged it off, and the end of campaign boss is a shadow of his original power.
If the party didn't have a way to get the flame back from Metuak, which I knew they did, it would be a near instant TPK