Pathfinder 2e
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If you want an actual play podcast recommendation I can't recommend Tabletop Gold highly enough. It is fantastic and they play the adventure fairly close to as written. I listened to it before starting the adventure and it gave me a really strong sense of where the key moments are.
I also recommend you use the official AV module rather than the PDF to Foundry. The official module is amazing. Blew my mind coming from 5e. They do all the dungeon prep for you.
I'm not using the optional research system, but you're right that it's good to find ways to drip feed info to players. There is a journal they get at the end of book 1 which explains some stuff, and the NPCs in town are a great source of info. There are a couple who explicitly have lots of info about some narrow topics like the Roseguard or the town history. The research system always struck me as not being particularly fun.
One thing that worked really well for me at the beginning was I gave my players two rules for character creation:
The first rule makes the motivations for the characters to want to go on the adventure more natural, since the adventure is all about an existential threat to Absalom. The second rule provides easy fodder for how the players arrived in the town and what would put them on the path to exploring the lighthouse in the first place, as well as how to hook them into the adventure.
I do have some other tips but I don't want to spoil the adventure in case someone else comes into this thread since it's not tagged as having AV spoilers. Feel free to DM me though.
I highly recommend picking up the Abomination Vaults Expanded as well to help flesh out both Otari and the Vaults themselves. A lot of good material in the 80+ pages, as well as how to integrate AV with both the Beginner’s Box and Troubles in Otari. I’ve been running a group for about 1.5 years and they’ve just hit level 7 and are on the sixth floor of the vaults. We’ve had a TPK as well as several partial ones, but it’s been a lot of fun. Second on the official Foundry module as it makes prep so much easier.
Yeah I have AV expanded, as well as Ron Lundeen's GM guide to the AP. I'm not using all of the stuff in either of them, but they were great jumping off points. I also came up with a lot of the same stuff people have suggested adding to the adventure on my own. For example, the party just finished the fourth floor, and the next major task on their to do list is to go to Absalom to meet a collector who is in possession of the spellbook they need to proceed. Also, when the party hit level 2, I integrated the adventure from Troubles in Otari that gives them a home base near the town.
I'm curious how you handled a TPK. I personally have come up with this idea for a party of rival adventurers who can get the PCs out of a sticky situation before that happens (see my post history to see what I mean, my last post was about the rival party)
The party actually came up with their own reasons why their follow up characters had come. One was the sister, another was a bounty hunter, the third was an apprentice, etc. Made my job easy. I had considered trying to prevent the TPK, but it happened earlier enough that the party weren’t too attached to their characters. It also helped reinforce the deadliness of both AV as well as 2E in general.
Thank you for the recommendation! I will certainly be checking that out as we are about to wrap up the beginner box soon. I've told my players it is a dangerous adventure in a dangerous system so I'll be interested to see if I'm the first GM in our group to get a TPK.
Thank you for the detailed response! I did try Tabletop Gold as well but didn't make it very far in that one, I will give it another go though. Thank you for the recommendation! My favorite actual play is MnMaxxed which is a little different vibe than Tabletop Gold.
Done deal then! That's exactly what I'm looking for prep wise lol. I will definitely be getting the official module.
The research system does seem a little tedious in actual play, but I would probably give the players a little something every single time they pass a check instead of making them pass 3 or 4 to hit a milestone for new info. Even if what I tell them is just a piece of information from a monsters stat block that they know they will eventually come up against, like the water drake. I really just want to encourage them to arm themselves with knowledge about the strange foes they will encounter at places like Odd Stories and the libraries on the 3rd level of the dungeon. So I may try to achieve that without the research system.
Those sound like excellent guidelines! Thanks for sharing them. I'm going to go ahead and send those to my players right now. One of them was floating the idea of being a goblin cleric of Zarongel with a dog killing edict and.. let's call them pyromaniac tendencies lol.
We are about to wrap up the beginner box soon so I will definitely be reaching out for more tips! Thanks again!
No problem!
The system itself will definitely encourage that kind of behaviour. The encounter math and creature balancing rules say that if a creature has some specific weakness, then it can have much higher HP and defenses, so you get these encounters where by-the-numbers they are fair, but if the players never figure out the gimmick, the fight will be pretty unfair and probably hit them like a truck. Just be sure to ease off a bit the first time. And then when they come back to that fight later you can take the gloves off because they should know better what they are getting into.
For monsters I would say just use the basic system of the recall knowledge action, but be generous with when players can use it and how much info they get on a success. It's actually pretty fun and realistic for players to get their asses handed to them, find out how to kill a thing, and then go back prepared. One thing I'll do as well is encourage them to recall knowledge on something they've seen even if they are not actively looking at it, since that encourages downtime investigate activities.
Oh ok! We have all played 5e for years now so we never remember recall knowledge in combat. As a matter of fact I think I may have forgotten to mention it at all throughout the beginner box so I should certainly do that for the next session. Getting your ass kicked and then coming back and stacking bodies after learning some new vital info about the enemy sounds like a really satisfying gameplay loop and I hope I'm able to emulate that in our campaign.
Yeah it lends a real Dark Souls kind of flavour to things where in addition to characters levelling up, the players actually feel like they are getting better simply by virtue of slowly learning more about the system.
When I ran the beginner box, the room where Recall Knowledge ended up coming out was when the players nearly got TPKd by the fire rat. At that point I was like, "you know, you guys can learn about creature's weaknesses with this one-action ability that anyone can do"
It's funny you should mention that rat! Lmao in our last session they fought that cinder rat and were getting absolutely stomped by it while rolling garbage on their flat checks. It downed two PCs and set them all on fire before they managed to kill it. And I made them all rage quit at the end of the session when I thanked them all for letting me "smoke their asses."
I would definitely use that as a teachable moment for your group. If players feel like encounters are just sometimes bullshit, they won't have a good impression of PF2e. But instead if you do a bit of a postmortem on the rat fight, you can help them understand that one of the great things about this system is that some encounters are less of a slugfest and more of a puzzle to solve using the combat mechanics of the game.
The whole point of the BB is to introduce players to the system, so don't be afraid to stop things and explain what lesson should be learned.
Yeah we certainly need to go over recall knowledge at a minimum. But the Rat fight was more so a comedy of errors than anything else. They did eventually start splashing the rat with water and using cold damage so they definitely learned something from the encounter lol Despite the confusion with the new ruleset my players are enjoying the BB. Even the player who cares least for PF2e is enjoying it and is eyeing a kineticist for AV. His biggest hangup is the vancian magic style for prepared casters though.
Yeah the way prepared casters work can be a bit more complex than in 5e. Casters do have to get comfortable with being just a bit worse at everything, but it's only because the designers of 5e have allowed for so much power creep that casters have no limits at all. I was talking to a buddy in my group about this but if you think about it, there's literally nothing a fighter can do better than a wizard in 5e. If a wizard builds for it, they can be better at killing things than a fighter. In PF2e, the delineation between martial and caster is much stronger. There are things a caster can do that a martial can't, but there are also things a martial can do that a caster can't. And casters take a bit longer to become that powerful.
You bring up excellent points! I will have to talk to my buddy who is the most outspoken Pathfinder critic about this. One of his favorite builds is a bladesinger wizard so the argument you raise will have a little extra heft when I use it against him lol
Yeah the bladesinger embodies a lot of what I hate the most about 5e. But you could point your friend to the Magus. It's a fun class but it's more analogous to the 5e Eldritch Knight than the bladesinger or hexblade. 75% martial and 25% caster.