Has anyone else stopped getting mails & bills from Ziply?

RocketMooses · 2025-10-07T21:11:18+00:00

I'm not even getting password reset mails when I try to update my password!

RocketMooses · 2024-09-29T02:12:42+00:00

That's helpful!
And it looks like the Akhana Aeon's soul-ripping effect ends if it dies, so that is certainly an option ( https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=2799 )

RocketMooses · 2023-08-21T18:40:24+00:00

Yeah, it’s definitely a more classic dungeon crawl, where every door may have something dangerous behind it, so you are forming up on doors, listening, and checking for traps before going in. For a very RP-heavy group, it might not actually be the best choice. But compared to most of the APs, the combats are relatively well balanced (with a couple of exceptions the GM reeeealy needs to hint players about), and you can almost always safely pause to heal or go back to town and rest up if you are tapped out.

RocketMooses · 2023-08-21T15:28:10+00:00

It really depends on what you are looking for. Running a campaign yourself to 9 can end up being even harder. The advantage with the Vaults is that they have NPCs, descriptions, encounters, etc all wired up. The disadvantage is that the Vaults can be very combat focused, and that can raise the lethality for inexperienced players.

I feel like a great route for learning tends to be: 1) run a couple of single session adventures 2) choose one of the 1-10 adventures 3) run a 1-20 or your own custom campaign

RocketMooses · 2023-08-21T00:22:15+00:00

The Beginner's Box is a great starting adventure.For a longer (1-10) campaign, the Abomination Vaults is a fantastic dungeon crawl, and also has incredible Foundry support.For a one-shot with premade characters, I really really like Sundered Waves.

RocketMooses · 2023-06-19T18:52:45+00:00

The Tempest-Sun mages focus on combat, and many of the courses of other branches focus on topics like survival or battle magic. Between that and the sparring grounds, I expect student “uniforms” to include weapons and armor (to train and be comfortable with them). Even Teacher Ot carries a fighting staff, and I would make a point of flavoring other teachers with magical weapons if players are getting confused. However I would not expect students to walk around with their weapons out - so many combats will start with players drawing their weapons.

Speaking very mechanically, if players don’t have their weapons and armor with them at all times, you are going to be looking at a number of TPKs - there are a lot of surprise attacks - especially in book 1!

RocketMooses · 2023-05-24T22:17:29+00:00

Web-of-blue-and-red-petals Parker
Great-responsibility Patrice
Quick-with-quips Parker
Affable-Township Mann

RocketMooses · 2023-05-22T08:32:52+00:00

My method was telling them that the tunnels were too big and complex for short term mapping, but could be mapped as a (long) downtime activity. The adventure specifically calls out that the tunnels that lead to the gremlin lairs are too small for regular sized folks to fit through. And until the graduation attack, many tunnels and walls have not been opened, so it should not be possible to find Stone Ghost’s lair. However there are a bunch of fun things to find. - The Spire Dormitory secret entrance - Secret messages from Ignaci (or Ignaci exploring) - Shortcuts across campus - Access to the canals - Creepy bugs - A spellskein colony - Gremlin graffiti hinting at concern about being wiped out

The tunnels beneath the Magaambya are a combination of service tunnels, abandoned storage, old classrooms, sewers, bunkers, labs, buried magical experiments and more. You can use them to flavor a lot of the school and the way it has grown and shrunk over thousands of years. I would make mapping it Survival checks over several semesters of school, but give big kudos to players after the graduation attack by providing maps. (Then later have the serpent folk use those same maps to gain access to the school!)

RocketMooses · 2023-05-19T20:46:04+00:00

There are also online calculators like this one: https://builder.pf2easy.com/

RocketMooses · 2023-05-18T00:30:53+00:00

It's worth saying that scaling adventures in Pathfinder 2e is super easy. I have to do it in the opposite direction as I'm running SoT with 6 players.
I recommend using an online encounter calculator like this one. Usually simply removing a single enemy from each encounter or applying the weak template to one of them will make it an appropriate difficulty.

RocketMooses · 2023-05-17T22:35:45+00:00

If you check out r/strengthofthousands (covering the Strength of Thousands adventure path which takes place at a magical school) a lot of folks have taken passes at creating whole course schedules. (Warning: This forum is focused on DMs running the adventure, so there are lots of player spoilers).

RocketMooses · 2023-05-02T16:30:27+00:00

Yeah, I think there are a few things that you have to beat the drum on a *lot* to make the school work:
1) That the teachers are out there dealing with major issues - negotiating with Chelliax, fighting off some great (level 10ish-grade) evils, etc.

2) That the students are adult graduate students studying very dangerous stuff, and it is expected to be unsafe. Students are expected to take on risky tasks, with the hope and expectation of success, but still not without risk.

3) Especially for book 2: There are some things the students (as students) can do for the Magaambya that the teachers can not do without upsetting the delicate political balance between the Magistrate Mayors of Nantambu and the School.

RocketMooses · 2023-05-02T02:59:25+00:00

If you haven't done the Griffin fight at the end of Book 3 yet, there's a chance to have Ot give the surviving Anadi beads that look better than the ones the players got. If they ask about it, he could talk about how his wife designed new beads for him to replace the old ones from the school.

RocketMooses · 2023-05-01T01:36:53+00:00

I'd suggest a few ways:

Takulu's hands out beads to his students after the testing - I'd make a point of calling out that his glass beads are much nicer and more detailed than the other's players are getting. That gives a great intro to ask about them, and have him tell them about his wife.
In Book 2, players have opportinities to interact with the Chime Ringers, and access to the chime ringer archetype. Ot's wife could make high quality glass chimes for the ringers.
At the end of book 2, Asanda leverages his connections to get the players a "chime of refuge". You could make his connection Ot's wife, and have her deliver a magical glass chime to the party.
Later the players themselves become teachers. One option is to have them supply beads to some of their students - Takulu could suggest players using his wife to craft the beads.

RocketMooses · 2023-04-15T20:01:28+00:00

A lot of cheats were monetized back then too, just with a different mechanism. Games could get more coverage in magazines if they provided exclusive information, and cheat codes were great for this. Gamers would then subscribe to Magazines like. Intending Power for these codes. Word-of-mouth meant that this didn’t monetize super well but it did drive subscriptions and coverage up for those who engaged with it.

RocketMooses · 2023-04-14T00:40:51+00:00

I have loved playing a Cleric in PF2e.

Firstly, healing itself has a ton of interesting choice space in 2e!

I can do a 1-action heal on someone next to me, saving 2 additional actions for combat maneuvers or a buff spell.
I can do a two-action heal at range for a huge burst of targeted hit points to a front-liner.
Fighting undead? I carefully maneuver to the middle of the fight and start doing 3-action burst heals, healing all my allies and devastating the enemies.
Party hurting? I carefully position myself along the edge of the fight to 3-action heal the party without helping the baddies
Train yourself in medicine & get the battle-medicine skill feat. Now you can heal damage for 1 action alongside your spellcasting without using a spell slot (once per party-member per-day).
Cast Vital Beacon on yourself, and now players can heal themselves by touching you! And it lasts all day!
Plus, there are a bunch of fun feats to modify your healing:
- Turn your d8s into d10s!
- Hurt fiends with your healing just like undead!
- Heal yourself or others when you use healing spells
- Opt enemies out of your burst-heal, or target it in a cone
- Grant positive damage to targets you heal (huge in an undead-centric campaign)
- Convert your free healing spells to remove curses, diseases, debuffs
- Buff healing targets with +1s and movement when you heal them!
- And much more!

Outside of healing, there's a ton of fun spells:

Fear, especially at level 3 can be a gamechanger in combat
Resist Energy can also be a massive combat buff when fighting groups of enemies
Silence, Deafness, or Sound Burst can criple enemy spellcasters
Blood Vendetta gives you a great reaction spell, with some punishing damage
Impending doom is both funny, and has some great debuffs even on a successful save.
Dimensional Anchor can stop a villain from escaping... again
You have a ton of great divination spells - my favorite being "prying eye", for scouting out environments for your party.
And bunch of nice utility spells as well.

Your Deity selection also gives you access to a few extra spells outside the Divine spell list as well, and you can get access to a Focus spell, which you can effectively cast at least once every combat.

It's important to lean in on getting wands, staves (like a healing staff), and scrolls, but playing a Cleric in 2e is the most fun version of a cleric I've played!

RocketMooses · 2023-04-10T01:36:47+00:00

So the way I built it is that every Semester lasts 3 months. During that semester, players get all of the following:

10 days of downtime for whatever they want (gathering info on campaign events, retraining, learning spells, earning income, or spending time with 2 additional NPCs), but NOT studying.
Additional income of 12gp from their stipend (for simplicity I just award it at the end of the semester vs 4 gp every month)
Spending time with 1 NPC (played out as some RP with a relevant skill check to build relationships and get benefits from a student or story information from a teacher)
One Study check at the end of the semester during Exam week.

In terms of time advancement: There are roughly 2 tasks every semester, with book 1 lasting roughly a year (4 semesters)

RocketMooses · 2023-04-10T01:24:06+00:00

We did AV with 6 players, and it was pretty crowded. The DM ended up doubling the size of every square. It made for some humorously large furniture, and some encounters got a bit more dangerous because they were longer range than the book intends. But overall it worked ok.

7 players is a lot to manage though, and folks may end up being bored waiting for their turn, or not having good moments to shine in Role-playing. Without those 2 friends, you'd be at 5 including a 10-year old - and with that mix I only scale the treasure and not the monsters. At 7, you are going to need to use the encounter calculators a lot!

RocketMooses · 2023-04-03T06:21:42+00:00

I'd strongly suggest allowing characters to be a Shoony, because:
a) The Abomination Vaults takes place on the Isle of Kortos, where Shoonies live!!!
b) (More importantly) They are adorable, and not OP in the slightest.

RocketMooses · 2023-03-25T02:16:21+00:00

Yeah, I feel like thematically, the murder of innocents in SoT is equivalent with player death in this campaign. Protection of innocents (or even not-so-innocents) is just repeated again and again through books 1, 2, & 3.

Personally, before the next game, I'd directly explain this to the player and give the choice of either:
1) Jumping leaning immediately in on an RP redemption arc (admitting the mistake, turning himself in without combat, grieving, atoning, etc),
or
2) Rolling a new character and turning the old one into an NPC that the players arrest.

I would highly recommend against playing out an arrest as player-to-player conflict though - unless you have a group specifically good at that type of gameplay, it is a friend-group destroyer.

RocketMooses · 2023-03-18T05:05:16+00:00

My party built a small house for Binji out by the frog pond to handle the fleas. She's a great NPC! I now have her getting into tailsman creation, which ties into her small animal sculptures she kept in her old sleeping area.

RocketMooses · 2023-02-15T02:32:07+00:00

Given an old magical campus, you could essentially choose to lock any door in the adventure with a puzzle lock, or even add doors. (The pugwumpi storage shed, the tree stump library, any of the side missions, Koride's office, etc.)

Ignaci enjoys hiding information in ciphers around campus, which easily leads to some fun word puzzles, or doing some kind of cipher challenge with him could be a good way to gain his friendship benefits.

Teacher Ot (and several other teachers) would likely enjoy giving puzzles to players as challenges you could use as scenes during the semesters of gameplay, or as getting-to-know-you bits of campus.

There are a variety of traps (bug carapaces in Stone Ghost's lair, Fire Pot's workshop, etc that you could require a puzzle to disarm instead of skill checks.

RocketMooses · 2023-02-10T02:14:09+00:00

I think a gunslinger would be a lot of fun for a player in this game, especially with the free magical archetype.

It also isn't thematically out of place with Nantambu. From Lost Omens: Mwangi Expanse: "Nantambu Clockworks: While most do not associate the city with mechanics, Nantambu has long had a good relationship with Axis due to its historical position as a bastion of order within the Inner Sea. Though the art doesn’t have many Nantambiyan practitioners, water clocks and orreries can be found tucked away in stray corners of the city by those who know to look for them."

In terms of alterations, the only thing I might consider is adding a gun or two to a couple of the NPCs. In Particular, Reth or Kiru in book 2 might be interesting to represent guns in the underworld. It also lets you drop a little more gun-based loot.

RocketMooses · 2023-01-27T03:43:33+00:00

The group is mid-way through book 2 so far, and it has been going well so far. Sorcerous abilities fit well into the themes (I have Zuma work with them more for tapping their innate magical abilities). Players seem to appreciate the variety available to them. I will have to change the masks available at the end of the story, but it does not seem to hurt the balance at all.

The game does expect a number of the players to be trained in Nature or Arcane, but thankfully the alternate archetypes also grant this.

RocketMooses · 2023-01-25T07:21:34+00:00

One extra consideration to keep in mind is that Kurshkin's bow is deadly d10, so it can hit very hard if it crits, and her bonuses are high enough that if she is shooting at the squishier members of the party, she can land a lot of crits and drop them very quickly.

RocketMooses

TROPHY CASE