Racing to Ruin
The second adventure is now in the bag.
In Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv I liked the permanent little bonuses that you could get from the other survivors of the shipwreck. I was very pleased to see that there was another such thing in the second adventure path.
- As for why I like it so much: firstly, accruing these little bonuses from adventure to adventure is a concrete reason to hang onto a character through the whole adventure. Not that doing so should require special incentives, but all the same, I approve of rewarding the practice.
- Second, it makes for an excellent “You Been There” certificate, like a sticker on your suitcase. One duh-class gripe I’ve had for a long time is that regardless of what you write up for your character’s history, you don’t ever really get anything special to show for it; your starting gear and wealth is what it would be for a character of your level, end of story. You could write a novel’s worth of backstory when making a character that starts out at level 6 or whenever, and you can choose your skill ranks and all the rest to match, but that’s it; no extra mechanical candy. Here, you can actually point to something Unique on your character sheet (or on your character itself, as the case may be) and say, “I was trained in combat by a disciple of the Red Mantis!” or “I rescued the holy dancers of a tribe deep in the Mwangi Expanse and they gave me these mystical tribal tattoos that awaken the power of my inner hippo.” This, to me, is awesome.
This sort of thing should totally be a standard part of any adventure path. Generic XP that don’t care where you got them from just don’t have the same oomph. I have good memories of another game where abilities gained this way played a much more salient role, and seeing them in a game like D&D is great. I hope there will be more of these down the line, and I wish even more that my first character hadn’t died. Wherefore hast thou left me, Sujiu?
Other than that, in terms of story the module was a solid continuation of the first. We had an unfortunate months-long break between the last and second-to-last sessions, and I don’t remember all of it as well as I should.
In terms of play mechanics, the tale is rather more gritty. There have been some questionable encounters where the balance issues seemed skewed enough to stand out. My character, Sujiu, died in a nightly ambush against which the only reliable defense that I’ve been able to think of would have been to have high Perception skills on every character on the watch rotation. Well, our watchman failed his roll, and the result was a surprise charge from a “CR 3″ bear (my ass) that almost killed a lvl 4 Fighter with solid defenses in a single round, give or take a surprise round. The kill came on the second round, as I recall. In another fight there was an incorporeal foe that could only be hurt by the one magical weapon we had in the party. We had run completely out of healing by the time that bugger died, and three of our party of five couldn’t even have outrun the enemy if it had come to that.
We are now one session into the third adventure path, and the only reason we didn’t lose a barbarian to a similar damage overload as the one that claimed Sujiu was that our Cleric (newcomer, played by yours truly) incorrectly thought all his Cure spells were empowered. There at least the whole encounter was purely our own stupidity; the halfling went and flapped his gums at a ranking servant of Angazhan. I’m wholly on board for difficult fights, even TPK-potential-difficult ones, but I hold that they have to be fair: death shouldn’t come as a lottery. If the bear that killed Sujiu had charged our sorcerer or oracle (and possibly our rogue/alchemist), they would have died just as hard. If I had had but a few less Cure spells left upon fighting the incorporeal enemy, the casualty count would’ve been up to nothing but the DM’s discretion. And if I’d calculated the effectiveness of my healing correctly, we would have had at least one death in the party from the Angazhan-Servant encounter, probably more. Though again, the balance issues of that fight get a pass from me, because the fight did appear evitable. We’ve had one death thus far, but, no joke, we could have had more than one full TPK.
So. I miss my archer, but on the whole it was still a good module.
