We finished our third session of the Pathfinder adventure path, Kingmaker, today, which also concluded the first volume of the six-volume set. It actually took a little longer than I expected, a little over three hours, which is not how long it looked when the group were finishing off the last of the exploration of map hexes; that proceeded fairly quickly, mainly because there were few actual combats to get through (and little role-playing).
Most of the excitement in the early stages came from random encounters. Upon finding the dice indicated a faerie dragon, it proved an opportune time for Perlivash to return. A group of grigs (insect faeries) were unknown to the party, but they’d heard of the party, and so we got brief vignettes of role-playing as a result, which I mostly used to give feedback to the party that they were having an effect, and that their efforts against the bandits were appreciated by the forest folk. I wonder what Perlivash will think when the settlers start moving in…
The group also escorted Jhod to the reclaimed Temple of Erastil, fulfilling that quest, and found the fangberries for Bekken, with the spiders being defeated with Tim’s first attack (although not before they poisoned most of the group, though somewhat ineffectively. I like how Pathfinder is dealing with resolving poison, even if most of the group (with the exception of Lee) weren’t affected.
On the other hand, Dave wanted to craft some poisons. As we’re using the Advanced Player’s Guide for this campaign, Dave has taken the poisoner option for his rogue (losing trapfinding to be effective with poisons). Unfortunately, nothing will make the Pathfinder crafting rules good. They were stupid in 3E, and they’re stupid in PF. To get one dose of poison, he’ll need to spend three weeks making it. Yes, Kingmaker will be a longer campaign than most D&D games I run (it’s already spanned 7 weeks of campaign time), but 3 weeks for one dose? Yes, far more effective to just “buy” the poison.
(But from whom?)
Give me the Ravages from Book of Exalted Deeds any day.
One of the more important encounters, although possibly not seen that way by the group, was the discovery of a unicorn’s body with no explanation as to how it died or who killed it. Foreshadowing. Woo!
The final battle against the Big Bad Bandits was fun. The group got ambushed on the way up to the lair, but did manage to get into the lair through a back door. That led into a battle with the bandits attacking in waves and the group getting aid from an unexpected source. And finally the Big Bad appeared and did some damage before going down. All of this just reinforced to me how pathetic NPCs are in Pathfinder as villains.
I’m just going to do a comparison of the baseline with the Big Bad’s stats. I think these shouldn’t be that far off… while noting we’re talking about a CR 6 threat here (allegedly):
Big Bad: AC 19, F+4, R+9, W+1, hp 67, Atk +8/+3 (10) plus sneak attack +10
Suggested: AC 19, F+5 R+9 W+5, hp 70, Atk +12 (25)
Well, defensively on par, but definitely underpar (and a fair way) offensively. I don’t like Pathfinder rogues as enemies. They’re generally crap – they get one sneak attack and that’s it unless they have some magical way of hiding. Stealth +12 is *not* enough. At least this Big Bad has a magic item allowing a second sneak attack. Not that it helped once Greg and the others got up into melee.
The last encounter was with the guardian of the bandit’s treasure, and here was an unfortunately brief and fairly pointless battle, all over in one round.
With the bandits all dealt with, I wrapped up the details of the first adventure and laid some groundwork for the next, explaining a few things about the kingdom-building rules. We’ll cover the details of the rules next session. Actually, I’ll give them all copies of the rules prior to us getting fully underway. I’m really not sure of how much time we’ll devote in-play to the kingdom.
A couple of points on the staging of this adventure: first of all, I managed to acquire a copy of the Dungeon Tile product DN2: The Witchlight Fens the other day, with a lot of swamp and river terrain. It proved perfect for the fight against the Tatzlwurms, which was a lot of fun as Lee’s Ranger tried to use Animal Empathy on them, not realising they were dragons. After the group killed the one that mauled him, the combat was only two rounds long. Pathfinder doing lengthy and significant combats? Not so much so far. (The bandit combat I dragged out by introducing them in waves). I really, really love the D&D Dungeon Tiles, particularly the ones for the wilderness, and they have proved very useful so far.
Second, I drew up the bandit camp on my Flipmat before I came to the session, and so was able to deploy it without any hassle and such saved a lot of time. D&D Miniatures made the bulk of the miniature action this session, with Tim and Michael providing unpainted Reaper metals for their characters, and Lee having a Pathfinder mini for his ranger.
We’re not running every encounter with minis (mainly because a lot are so damn inconsequential), but I have them available if they become important.
Kingmaker is playing nicely from the player’s point of view, though I’m very curious to see if it manages to give us challenging encounters. The final encounter with the bandits was quite challenging, although mainly due to Auchs, the big brute bandit, not so much for the rest, and once Michael got his oracle’s healing online, the damage being dealt was less than the healing on offer.