Background: I’m playing Sky King’s Tomb with 6 players: a bard, a kineticist, an investigator, a sorcerer, a magus, and a fighter. Tools used include discord (voice/video/memes), powerpoint (exploration/downtime, etc.), owlbear (encounter mode), demiplane (character sheets/rule lookup), trello (shared loot), google docs (shared notes/campaign log)
I have many years of experience taking 5e campaigns from level 0-20 and this is my first Pathfinder 2e campaign.
Session 4: Blacknoon Gauntlet
It goes for other sections and books as well, but the location of art and sidebars when converted from printed book two column facing page format of the PDF to the single column flow of the Demiplane edition, a little reordering of the elements would go a long way towards helping me, the GM, to navigate the text and quickly find relevant information. Some of the sidebar/image locations are downright misleading/cause confusion (the Stickleberry Jam image and “What really happened” stand out as particularly bad offenders)
So for chapter 1 of Mantle of Gold here’s my recommendations:
- Move Stickleberry Jam image to the Stickleberry Festival heading to make flipping to the right place easily.
- “What really happened” should move to after the interactions with Dierdrali and just above the Silvercap Tavern heading
If there was ever GM articles, running this encounter would make a great article because there’s a lot to figure out about flipping back and forth between the GM Core sections on Infiltration (Obstacles, Opportunities, Complications) and Hazards, and the organization into Threats (that apply throughout) || Phase 1 Obstacles > Opportunities > Complications || Phase 2 Obstacles > Opportunities || Gauntlet Heart is its own problem || Complications (that apply throughout)
This is less a Demiplane thing than a Paizo/adventure author thing, but the presentation of Obstacles and Opportunities in Phase 1, while grouping things by kind, doesn’t give a good idea of the flow by which you are supposed to engage with them:
- the Scale Signs Opportunity needs to come earlier in Phase 1 than at least two of the Obstacles so that the success condition makes sense
- the Complications are listed after phase 3 but can occur during any phase, and the stat blocks are given separately…
- in fact, the “Threats” stat blocks are listed separately for some but not all items because the Inexorable Door Hazard is with the Load-Bearing Treasure Opportunity, but the Dart Launcher Hazard is not with the Painfully Obvious Trap Obstacle
- While it seems obvious that AP (awareness points) accumulate across the entire infiltration encounter to trigger Xulgath at different thresholds going up to 20ish, results for IP (infiltration points) gained for success at each place don’t seem to carry over as the Load-Bearing Treasure successes up to 8ish only really make sense if handled for the one opportunity by itself, so IP for this infiltration do not accumulate (and that’s not made clear anywhere)
- The Gauntlet’s Heart is confusing because it has the Load-Bearing Treasure stat block and the Inexorable Door stat block that are slightly separated and it wasn’t obvious immediately that what’s intended (I think) is that you take two to three rounds of interacting with the Opportunity stat-block and the Inexorable Door stat block is only there in case one of the players decides they want to jam it or something.
In other words… this is a hot mess unless you already really understand how this giant list of blocks is supposed to fit together, and items that could be more easily referenced if they were together are often far apart. After thorough reading and cross-referencing and weeks of thought, I think I finally ran it fine, but it really could use a guide article.
