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Wednesday, April 15, 2020

This is harder than it looked...

Yeah, I know.  I haven't kept to my schedule of 1 post per week.  Turns out that while the number of ideas I have for posts hasn't run dry yet, my desire to write them has.  Which is, of course, bad for a blog that you want people to read on a regular basis.  Since it's been a long time since I last posted, and since my ideas about using the tension pool for wilderness exploration and travel haven't quite solidified yet, I thought that I would spend this time writing about all the stuff I have been doing since the last time we spoke.

This is a window into the mind of a GM that probably prepares way too much for his campaigns.  It's likely that over half of the stuff I'm working on right now will never see the light of day in the campaign, or will not work the way I hoped in actual play and will be thrown into the wastebasket marked 'He Meant Well.'  But as I sit here now, writing all of this extra stuff for Mummy's Mask, I think it will add a lot of depth to the campaign; time will tell.

Customized random magic item tables
You know how Ultimate Equipment has all of those tables to generate random magical treasure, right?  You know how it has all of the magic treasure published in the Core Rulebook, Advanced Player's Guide, Ultimate Magic and Ultimate Combat, right?  As it turns out, Paizo published a few books after Ultimate Equipment. Quite a few, in fact.  Significantly, the Advanced Class Guide, Ultimate Intrigue and Occult Adventures all have lots of magic items in them, items that will never see the light of day unless they're added to the lists in Ultimate Equipment.

The random magical treasure tables include useful items for alchemists, barbarians, oracles, paladins and gunslingers, but none of those classes are core classes for Mummy's Mask.  It also has nifty items for halflings, gnomes and half-orcs, but these aren't core races for MM. Additionally, the lists don't include any useful magic items for classes like the legendary cavalier, the channeler, the mesmerist, the psychic and the fortunate, or for races like the jinnborn or gnolls.

To remedy this, I have carefully curated the random magic items tables from Ultimate Equipment, removed any item that is specific to a non-core race or class, and added in items that are.  I've also added items from third-party publications like Treasury of the Pharaoh (Legendary Games) and Dunes of Desolation (Frog God Games) that are very desert or Egypt themed.  The list for random weapon type was also altered; scimitars, khopeshes and spears are more common, swords and polearms less so.

Now, if you are playing a gnoll mesmerist or a jinnborn fortunate, there is at least some chance that a magic item specific to your race or class will appear in the marketplaces of Osirion. 

Customized random encounter tables
I've spent the last few blog articles talking about this tension pool thingy, and I needed to create a random table for complications that result from the tension pool mechanic.  I plumbed the depths of Pathfinder bestiaries, from Paizo and third -party publishers, grabbed all the desert monsters that I could find, and sorted them by CR.  Then, I searched through Raging Swan Press's excellent Urban Dressing and Wilderness Dressing publications, plucking out interesting encounters, events and hazards.  Finally, I sprinkled in some environmental hazards such as sand storms, flash floods, heat waves, quicksand, rockslides, etc.  What I ended up with was a pretty sizeable collection of complications ranging from CR 1 all the way to CR 17.  Since MM is about 1/3 urban adventure and 2/3 wilderness/dungeon exploration, I needed to tailor the encounter charts to the specific environment the PCs would likely be in at any given level.

Hero Lab support
It has been a while since I updated you on the progress I've made in coding the races and classes for Mummy's Mask that don't exist in Hero Lab yet:
Legendary cavalier: 6.9% complete
Fortunate: While a Hero Lab file for this class was created, it doesn't appear to be working very well.  I need to contact the author and request that they fix it (I paid for it, so it better damn well work!)
Adept godling: 21% complete
Clever godling: 26.3% complete
Eldritch godling: 47.4% complete
Mighty godling: 36.1% complete
Legendary rogue:  95% complete
Gnoll: Not sure how much is complete, but Steve created a good deal of content.  Probably around 50%
Jinnborn: Not started.

I am also coding the spells, magic items and archetypes for these races and classes, although time constraints may force me to ignore things that the PCs won't use.

Adventure Path deconstruction
As I read each chapter of the adventure path, I am highlighting three specific categories: People, places and history.  Each named NPC in the adventure path gets put on a list of candidates that could potentially be tied to a PC backstory.  Each named place in the adventure path goes onto a different list, which will be used partly as backstory ideas and partly as a database for those PCs who invest in Knowledge (local).  Each historical event gets entered into a timeline document, so that when I'm done, I have a chronologically complete history specific to the campaign.  This primarily will be used for narration and Knowledge (history) checks.

Does anyone remember when we talked about monster lore and the new rules created to make it more immersive?  As I make my way through reading the AP, I am noting the new DC and applicable Knowledge skill(s) used to recall monster lore, using our new system.

Lastly, I am making a note of the size of each room or area (using the size categories created for the new searching rules), along with the DC for a cursory search, and the number of rounds it would take one PC to perform a thorough search.

I am done with most of book 4, and hope to complete books 5 and 6 by the start of summer.  Based on our pacing in Giantslayer, I would expect to launch Mummy's Mask by late September or early October.