The NPC gallery from the legacy GMG wasn’t reprinted in GMC. No more generic “bandit” “mad scientist”, “assassin”, “priest”, “necromancer”, “gang leader”
These had a lot of value for telling the sort of stories I like to tell in my games, which are less about killing unequivocally evil “monsters” and more about regular people who may be morally complex and provoke more interaction from the players.
I’m well aware one can simply use legacy content, but that ignores that some of these had mechanics that have been revised in the remaster, and they were an important part of the toolkit provided to GMs in the GMG. Right now, the GM Core feels very lacking in terms of providing support for creating a cast of NPCs in adventures. There’s literally a half a page dedicated to NPCs and it basically just says “make 'em up”. Saying “You can use legacy content” is not a valid point when these new books are supposed to serve as a foundation for the system standing on their own.
Additionally, the official Paizo FoundryVTT bestiary portraits module, which I paid good money for, appears to have removed the portraits for these generic NPCs when the remaster content was added to the system. The realization of that was actually the thing that prompted this post. I was setting up an encounter for my players and was confused as to why the “Antipaladin” art was this instead of this. I am almost certain that before the remaster it used the art from the GMG for those tokens.
I will look into if there’s something that can be done with the PDF module. If not I’ll post to the forums. Another user mentioned the reason these statblocks have been removed is actually because Paizo is planning on releasing an NPC Core book next year. That does calm my more system-related concerns.
BTW, are you planning on running AV? I have been running it for the past year and my players just finished the first book of the adventure.
An entire book full of NPC creation ideas and pregens does sound pretty cool!
I am planning on running AV! I was trying to use PDFtoFoundry to import it but I couldn’t get it to work with the single file PDF or the pdf per chapter version. However I did see that I could buy the official paizo AV module for foundry for only $21 since I already own the PDF. Which I think I will do anyway to support Paizo a little bit more (especially since I got AV and all my other Paizo PDFs from a humble bundle deal around the time of the OGLfiasco.) and also because that one will have the updated detailed maps and all the sound effects and things already setup. I’ve heard that the official Foundry Adventure modules are incredibly high quality and I would hope so since the other adventures I would be interested in like Blood Lords are like $34 per book.
I would be super interested to hear any tidbits you’d like to share about your experiences running AV. I have listened to about the first 50 episodes of Roll for Intents playthrough and about 20 episodes of another AV podcast called Stemming the Tide to get a feel for the adventure. Are you running the optional research system by any chance? AV seems like a great AP to use it in and I think a couple of my players would really enjoy the extra facet of gameplay. The stemming the tide pod uses it and it seems like a great way to drip feed the heroes background lore and info on Otari, Gauntlight, and Belcorra.
If you want an actual play podcast recommendation I can’t recommend Tabletop Gold highly enough. It is fantastic and they play the adventure fairly close to as written. I listened to it before starting the adventure and it gave me a really strong sense of where the key moments are.
I also recommend you use the official AV module rather than the PDF to Foundry. The official module is amazing. Blew my mind coming from 5e. They do all the dungeon prep for you.
I’m not using the optional research system, but you’re right that it’s good to find ways to drip feed info to players. There is a journal they get at the end of book 1 which explains some stuff, and the NPCs in town are a great source of info. There are a couple who explicitly have lots of info about some narrow topics like the Roseguard or the town history. The research system always struck me as not being particularly fun.
One thing that worked really well for me at the beginning was I gave my players two rules for character creation:
The first rule makes the motivations for the characters to want to go on the adventure more natural, since the adventure is all about an existential threat to Absalom. The second rule provides easy fodder for how the players arrived in the town and what would put them on the path to exploring the lighthouse in the first place, as well as how to hook them into the adventure.
I do have some other tips but I don’t want to spoil the adventure in case someone else comes into this thread since it’s not tagged as having AV spoilers. Feel free to DM me though.
I highly recommend picking up the Abomination Vaults Expanded as well to help flesh out both Otari and the Vaults themselves. A lot of good material in the 80+ pages, as well as how to integrate AV with both the Beginner’s Box and Troubles in Otari. I’ve been running a group for about 1.5 years and they’ve just hit level 7 and are on the sixth floor of the vaults. We’ve had a TPK as well as several partial ones, but it’s been a lot of fun. Second on the official Foundry module as it makes prep so much easier.
Yeah I have AV expanded, as well as Ron Lundeen’s GM guide to the AP. I’m not using all of the stuff in either of them, but they were great jumping off points. I also came up with a lot of the same stuff people have suggested adding to the adventure on my own. For example, the party just finished the fourth floor, and the next major task on their to do list is to go to Absalom to meet a collector who is in possession of the spellbook they need to proceed. Also, when the party hit level 2, I integrated the adventure from Troubles in Otari that gives them a home base near the town.
I’m curious how you handled a TPK. I personally have come up with this idea for a party of rival adventurers who can get the PCs out of a sticky situation before that happens (see my post history to see what I mean, my last post was about the rival party)
The party actually came up with their own reasons why their follow up characters had come. One was the sister, another was a bounty hunter, the third was an apprentice, etc. Made my job easy. I had considered trying to prevent the TPK, but it happened earlier enough that the party weren’t too attached to their characters. It also helped reinforce the deadliness of both AV as well as 2E in general.
Thank you for the recommendation! I will certainly be checking that out as we are about to wrap up the beginner box soon. I’ve told my players it is a dangerous adventure in a dangerous system so I’ll be interested to see if I’m the first GM in our group to get a TPK.
Thank you for the detailed response! I did try Tabletop Gold as well but didn’t make it very far in that one, I will give it another go though. Thank you for the recommendation! My favorite actual play is MnMaxxed which is a little different vibe than Tabletop Gold.
Done deal then! That’s exactly what I’m looking for prep wise lol. I will definitely be getting the official module.
The research system does seem a little tedious in actual play, but I would probably give the players a little something every single time they pass a check instead of making them pass 3 or 4 to hit a milestone for new info. Even if what I tell them is just a piece of information from a monsters stat block that they know they will eventually come up against, like the water drake. I really just want to encourage them to arm themselves with knowledge about the strange foes they will encounter at places like Odd Stories and the libraries on the 3rd level of the dungeon. So I may try to achieve that without the research system.
Those sound like excellent guidelines! Thanks for sharing them. I’m going to go ahead and send those to my players right now. One of them was floating the idea of being a goblin cleric of Zarongel with a dog killing edict and… let’s call them pyromaniac tendencies lol.
We are about to wrap up the beginner box soon so I will definitely be reaching out for more tips! Thanks again!
No problem!
The system itself will definitely encourage that kind of behaviour. The encounter math and creature balancing rules say that if a creature has some specific weakness, then it can have much higher HP and defenses, so you get these encounters where by-the-numbers they are fair, but if the players never figure out the gimmick, the fight will be pretty unfair and probably hit them like a truck. Just be sure to ease off a bit the first time. And then when they come back to that fight later you can take the gloves off because they should know better what they are getting into.
For monsters I would say just use the basic system of the recall knowledge action, but be generous with when players can use it and how much info they get on a success. It’s actually pretty fun and realistic for players to get their asses handed to them, find out how to kill a thing, and then go back prepared. One thing I’ll do as well is encourage them to recall knowledge on something they’ve seen even if they are not actively looking at it, since that encourages downtime investigate activities.
Oh ok! We have all played 5e for years now so we never remember recall knowledge in combat. As a matter of fact I think I may have forgotten to mention it at all throughout the beginner box so I should certainly do that for the next session. Getting your ass kicked and then coming back and stacking bodies after learning some new vital info about the enemy sounds like a really satisfying gameplay loop and I hope I’m able to emulate that in our campaign.
Yeah it lends a real Dark Souls kind of flavour to things where in addition to characters levelling up, the players actually feel like they are getting better simply by virtue of slowly learning more about the system.
When I ran the beginner box, the room where Recall Knowledge ended up coming out was when the players nearly got TPKd by the fire rat. At that point I was like, “you know, you guys can learn about creature’s weaknesses with this one-action ability that anyone can do”
It’s funny you should mention that rat! Lmao in our last session they fought that cinder rat and were getting absolutely stomped by it while rolling garbage on their flat checks. It downed two PCs and set them all on fire before they managed to kill it. And I made them all rage quit at the end of the session when I thanked them all for letting me “smoke their asses.”
I would definitely use that as a teachable moment for your group. If players feel like encounters are just sometimes bullshit, they won’t have a good impression of PF2e. But instead if you do a bit of a postmortem on the rat fight, you can help them understand that one of the great things about this system is that some encounters are less of a slugfest and more of a puzzle to solve using the combat mechanics of the game.
The whole point of the BB is to introduce players to the system, so don’t be afraid to stop things and explain what lesson should be learned.