We finally entered the Tan Sugi Monastery!
- Not really demiplane feedback but the way paizo wrote the intro to this place was kinda crummy since there wasn’t really boxed text for the approach. (I went through and highlighted the text as green… boxed text shareable… yellow, shareable conditionally and red, GM information, and you can see that the whole thing is mixed together with easy traps to overshare information).
- Again, this is more on the GM experience of running from the paizo books than on Demiplane, but it really feels like there’s no way to let the players know what they have to do here. Fortunately, I had a guest visiting from out of town who wanted to participate so I had him be a manifesting spirit to explain to the party what was going on. Here’s the information I gave the guest to share with the party:
- Welcome to the Tan Sugi Monastery. It’s been a while since we had visitors. The monastery is dedicated to Zhu Hui. She defeated a mighty fiend and trapped it herein.
- I’m alone now. Hatred and anger came for them all. My brothers, students of sangpotshi, the philosophy of rebirth, all fell to the craze called Kugaptee, led by Xin Yue. Kugaptee is a corruption of the soul manifesting as crimson moths. Now my brothers are mere husks, not unlike the monastery before you. Beware that you do not join them in undeath.
- Four guardian statues are defiled within the compound: a Kodama, a sugi cedar, the lady of graves and the stag. Kugaptee’s corruption cannot be removed until they are cleansed.
I wasn’t sure which way they would go but they chose straight and defeated the haunted water and then fought the zabutons and sugi statue and then purified it gaining their first vision and then as she faded away the guest player did as well.
In terms of using Demiplane to play, I don’t think we had many direct issues, but my main beef with the start of this chapter was the way it is presented in the adventure. I’ll follow with the image I made showing how player facing text is mixed among GM facing text and note that for other GM’s running this adventure you might want to distill the green portions into a proper BOXED TEXT since one was not provided.
Having a blast with the adventure and Demiplane made it simple and smooth to have a complete noobie player guest play with us for a couple sessions.
