Intro

Looks like doing one strategic turn and one mission takes long enough that I should split each of these into a separate scene. So here we’ll do the second week of our strategic layer then find something else to do as a mission.

This took me a couple of days to play through, a bit at a time.

[GM] Mythic Bookkeeping

Let’s increase the Chaos Factor to 6.

We mark a step on Get Organized, and will consider that done once we have moved to a permanent base. And let’s give 1 CP to everyone for it. Rosalia gets a step in her Find Shensen quest, because last mission advanced this a bit. I know they already got another CP out of the associated challenge, but let’s give them another one for the step.

Threads

  • The Path xxxx
  • Find Shensen (Rosalia, Arcturus) x
  • Contacting Ms. Docur (Jania)
  • Get Organized (Jade) xx

Characters

  • The Dottari
  • The Chelish Citizens Group
  • The Red Jills
  • The Asmodeans
  • The Three-Legged Devil (location)
  • The Livery Grimples
  • The Tengu Sisters
  • Nan Comerivos & Friends

[GM] ~Record Scratch Sound~ Wait A Minute!

Looking at the recordings for last scene reminded me of something, and I want to deal with that right now.

There are many occasions where the original adventure path kinda gatekeeps developments behind level or story progression.

The first means an early book will sometimes provide an answer to a mystery the PCs are investigating, but set it up in such a way that they’ll only be able to solve it once they’ve leveled up a bit and gained the necessary abilities. For example, book 1 tells the GM Shensen has been turned to stone and is being kept in the opera house. However, the opera house is being used as Thrune’s personal fortress, and the PCs will only have the abilities they need to locate Shensen and break into the place at the end of book 3.

Other times, a bit of information is outright retconned in a later book. The later book introduces new information that was impossible to discover earlier because it wasn’t true back then.

One example of that is Shensen’s music shop! In the previous scene, which is from Volume 1, we are told that both the shop and its basement are completely collapsed. But in volume 4 we learn that there’s an entire intact section of the basement that gets turned into an eight-room dungeon by the villains of the hour. And it’s also inhabited by Shensen’s sapient dinosaur friend, who’s hiding from both the occupying villains and the rest of Thrune’s forces.

Now, Volume 4 says that both the villains and the dinosaur moved in “several weeks” before the day in which the PCs finally delve into the dungeon, but those chambers should still be there! They even have a tunnel leading from the surface to an only partially collapsed room right at the end, that could conceivably be found by PCs before then.

We don’t know how many weeks away from that scene we are yet, but it’s probably more than “several”. Let’s say they move in somewhere during Adventure 3 when the PCs are out of town. So in Adventure 1, that hasn’t happened yet.

What has happened is the Night of Ashes, when Thrune agents raided and torched the place. Some bits of description in Volume 4 makes me think they were in kind of a hurry, as there was a lot going on that night. They gained entrance to the secret basement, kidnapped Shensen, and looted the place of its obvious valuables, but didn’t stop to ritually desecrate the shrine area, figuring the fire would destroy it.

So this is how things in there should be in Adventure 1:

A1 - Tainted Reservoir : The slime naga and its oozes are already here. They’re said to have moved in shortly after the Night of Ashes.

A2 - Secret Entrance: Nothing here, as always.

A3 - Shensen’s Bedroom: The bedroom is empty of creatures. The secret compartiment in the armoire still has all the listed treasure, which belongs to Shensen and not to the monsters.

A4 - Corrupted Chapel: This chapel is not corrupted yet, and it’s completely deserted. No monsters here.

A5 - Chapel Vault: The vault is still ransacked, as that’s said to have happened during the Night of Ashes. It’s also deserted, as Hetamon Haace hasn’t been captured.

A7 - Dawnflower Font: The font is still consecrated and operational!

A8 - Ruined Chambers: Still ruined, and deserted since Gut-Tugger hasn’t moved in yet. There’s a tunnel linking it to the surface ruins, which the PCs can only find at the GM’s sufferance even in Volume 4.

Do I let them find the place? They did spend an hour searching the ruins.

In Adventure 4, all of the DCs to find hidden stuff in here are are around 25-35. PCs are supposed to be level 10 when they get here. A “party radar” character might have started with Wisdom 18, increased it to 20 at levels 4 and 8, grabbed the Alertness feat at some point, and put points in Perception all the way from level 1, meaning they have 13 ranks in the skill. That’s a +20 bonus. DC 25 requires a 5+, DC 30 a 10+, DC 35 a 15+.

According to our ad-hoc conversion for the strategy layer bits, those difficulties would be a -6, -8, or -10 to Perception or Observation, and to get approximately the same chances of success we’d need someone with a 18 in either of those. Our top scores are 14 currently, for Jania, Urist, and Rosalia. Jade has a 12, Arcturus a 10. Let’s say the passage to A8 could be spotted with a check at -8 (equivalent to DC 30). So that’s three rolls vs. 6, and one vs 4. Do any of our heroes manage to sequence break?

Nope, the best roll is a 9.

So in theory this was all just a little fun exercise that didn’t lead to anything… but maybe those penalties are too harsh? D&D scaling difficulty kind of assumes that the skill in question keeps increasing, but that might not be the case at all in GURPS.

Looking to the DF 2: Exploits a “genuinely difficult” adventuring task is a -4 or -5. Let’s do -4, the same difficulty of finding the treasure box. This is a separate, secret, and free roll that they make alongside the ones for searching for clues.

Everyone still fails when the penalty is a -4, as I’m not rerolling. But this does give me some food for thought when it comes to difficulties for future tests. We’ll get to this in Adventure 4, I guess.

[Player] Strategic Turn 2

Anyway, time for playing. Here’s our starting org sheet.

The Silver Ravens

  • Rank: 1/5
  • Focus: Secrecy
  • Members: 16
  • Supporters: 14
  • Population: 11900
  • Treasury: $9650
  • Min. Treasury: $50
  • Notoriety: 1
  • Org Skills:
    • Loyalty: 10
    • Secrecy: 12
    • Security: 10
  • Actions: 1
  • Max Teams: 2+1
  • Danger Rating: 20
  • Active Events:
  • Teams:
    • Crow Sisters (bonus team)
      • Tier: 1
      • Members: 3
      • Actions: Earn Money, Gather Information
    • Freedom Fighters
      • Tier: 1
      • Members: 6
      • Actions: Reduce Danger
  • Allies:
    • Laria Longroad
      • +2 to Recruit Supporters as long as she’s a member.
      • Leadership-12, Streetwise-12
    • Rexus Victocora
      • -1 Notoriety per Upkeep phase as long as he’s a member.
      • Administration-12, Public Speaking-12
  • Officers:
    • Demagogue: Rosalia
      • May use complimentary skills on Loyalty checks.
      • Skills: Propaganda, Public Speaking, Leadership.
    • Partisan: Laria Longroad
      • May use complimentary skills on Security checks.
      • Skills: Strategy, Leadership, Tactics.
    • Recruiters: Urist; Arthur
      • May use complimentary skills on checks for recruiting supporters.
      • Adds rebellion rank to the number of recruited supporters, and this stacks with multiple recruiters.
      • Skills: Public Speaking, Streetwise, Savoir-Faire.
    • Sentinel: Jade
      • Occupying this post gives a +1 to the rebellion’s non-focused skills.
      • May use complimentary skills on any check used to resolve an Event.
      • Skills: any of the ones listed for the appropriate category.
    • Spymaster: Jania
      • Spymaster: May use complimentary skills on Secrecy checks.
      • Skills: Intelligence Analysis, Streetwise, Administration.
    • Strategist: Rexus
      • Occupying this position grants a bonus action. May use its complimentary skills on the bonus action.
      • Skills: Strategy, Tactics, Administration.

Upkeep Phase

At the start of our turn, Rexus reduces its Notoriety by 1, to 0.

Step 1 - Unmodified Loyalty check, aided by Rosalia’s three complimentary skills. We get a normal success, so we lose “only” 1d6 supporters. That’s 3, so we’re at 11.

Step 2 - Our Notoriety is zero, nothing to do here.

Step 3 - Our treasury is fine.

Step 4 - We’re still beyond the Rank 2 supporter threshold, so we level up!

That means we increase our focus trait by +1, have 2 rebellion actions per turn, and grant the Training +1 boon to all our PCs. That means they get to put 4 CP any one skill.

  • Arcturus adds them to his Karate, increasing it to DX+1. He punches better but is still more or less dead weight in the strategy layer.

  • Jade buys Intelligence Analysis, which is bolstered by Born War Leader.

  • Jania buys Administration. The woes of command.

  • Rosalia buys Area Knowledge for Kintargo, this was already supposed to be her thing.

  • I’ll let Urist split his 4 points: 2 into Administration, 1 into Public Speaking, 1 into Religious Ritual.

Activity Phase

We have two standard actions and one bonus action from having a Strategist.

Let’s start with the Recruit Team action, to recruit a team of Sneaks. That’s an unpenalized Secrecy roll, and it gets +2 from Laria, and a total of +4 from Jania’s complimentary skill rolls. We get a critical success here, but I don’t think that has any additional effect.

The other action is Gather Information, using the Crow Sisters as the acting team. It’s Secrecy -2, but all the bonuses from team tier and Jania’s complimentary skills bump this to an effective 17. We want to know about Shensen.

And we roll a 18!

Not only was this a failure, but it also increases our notoriety by 1d6 == 4. Now I see why these jokers were run out of their former town, they draw a lot of unwanted attention.

We’ll use our bonus action to Recruit Supporters. Loyalty, +2 because Laria is here, +1 from Rexus’ Administration. A normal success, meaning we recruit 2d6+4 supporters (rank 2, 2 recruiters). That’s 14, taking us to 25!

Event Phase

Okay, we’re now in the Event Phase. Our base chance of an event is 24%, but it’s doubled to 48% because we had no events last turn. We roll a 13, so we get an event. The Danger Rating for the city is 20, so we need to roll 1d100+20 on the provided table.

That’s the Rivalry event. Two of our teams develop a rivalry and neither of them can be used in the next Activity phase. It makes sense for these to be the Crow Sisters and our newly-hired Sneaks. And this is actually super bad for our rebellion!

One of our Officers can make a social skill test to mitigate this and end the rivalry before it can do damage to our operations. I’ll say it’s a Leadership issue, and that Diplomacy or Intimidation can act as complimentary skills here. This is an event, so our sentinel Jade is going to handle it.

I’m going to say the check is at -2, but Jade has Leadership-17 so we’re still doing pretty well here. We succeed, the event is mitigated, and the doubling of the chance goes away for next turn.

The Silver Ravens (End of Turn 2)

Includes Sentinel bonuses.

  • Rank: 2/5
  • Focus: Secrecy
  • Members: 16
  • Supporters: 25
  • Population: 11900
  • Treasury: $9650
  • Min. Treasury: $100
  • Notoriety: 4
  • Org Skills:
    • Loyalty: 11
    • Secrecy: 13
    • Security: 11
  • Actions: 2
  • Max Teams: 2+1
  • Danger Rating: 20
  • Active Events:
  • Teams:
    • Crow Sisters (bonus team)
      • Tier: 1
      • Members: 3
      • Actions: Earn Money, Gather Information
    • Freedom Fighters
      • Tier: 1
      • Members: 6
      • Actions: Reduce Danger
    • Sneaks
      • Tier: 1
      • Members: 3
      • Actions: Secure Cache.
  • Allies:
    • Laria Longroad
      • +2 to Recruit Supporters as long as she’s a member.
      • Leadership-12, Streetwise-12
    • Rexus Victocora
      • -1 Notoriety per Upkeep phase as long as he’s a member.
      • Administration-12, Public Speaking-12
  • Officers:
    • Demagogue: Rosalia
      • May use complimentary skills on Loyalty checks.
      • Skills: Propaganda, Public Speaking, Leadership.
    • Partisan: Laria Longroad
      • May use complimentary skills on Security checks.
      • Skills: Strategy, Leadership, Tactics.
    • Recruiters: Urist; Arthur
      • May use complimentary skills on checks for recruiting supporters.
      • Adds rebellion rank to the number of recruited supporters, and this stacks with multiple recruiters.
      • Skills: Public Speaking, Streetwise, Savoir-Faire.
    • Sentinel: Jade
      • Occupying this post gives a +1 to the rebellion’s non-focused skills.
      • May use complimentary skills on any check used to resolve an Event.
      • Skills: any of the ones listed for the appropriate category.
    • Spymaster: Jania
      • Spymaster: May use complimentary skills on Secrecy checks.
      • Skills: Intelligence Analysis, Streetwise, Administration.
    • Strategist: Rexus
      • Occupying this position grants a bonus action. May use its complimentary skills on the bonus action.
      • Skills: Strategy, Tactics, Administration.

[GM] This Week’s Mission

What should I throw at myself this time? Let’s take a look at what’s available.

  • Mission 1, Decoding the Documents: Ongoing, we’re at week 2/7.

  • Mission 2, Investigating the Fires: We did this one on Week 1.

  • Mission 3, Prisoners of Salt: We did this one on Week 0.

  • Mission 4, Murders in the Nursery: Meaty, but unecessary.

    We have a total of three instances of “Did the Temple Hill Slasher somehow return from the dead?” missions. This one, another one in Adventure 2 where it’s a copycat, and one way into Adventure 5 where he really does return. I think we can drop this one entirely, and run the one from Adventure 2 early if it becomes necessary.

  • Mission 5, Crackdown at Clenchjaw: I want this to occur as written and since it’s far simpler than the Temple Hill Slasher caper, we can have it happen now.