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KirbyJ posted:My friend is gearing up to run Eyes of the Stone Thief and he's lamenting that there's not a lot of documentation of people's experiences or actual plays for him to get a real idea of how it goes. Has anybody done anything with Eyes of the Stone Thief? He's looking for real experience moreso than reviews based on readthroughs. Appreciate it! My group (of which I'm the GM) is starting their final dive now and while I haven't done a proper survey among them, I can share my own opinions on this: On the whole, I'd say running EotST as a campaign on its own is an idea that looks better on paper than it is in practice. It's neat, don't get me wrong, and it has some brilliant set pieces in there (we just had a blast with the Pyramid of Skulls), but it's also a microcosm of some of 13th Age's worst excesses in terms of encounter-building and pacing: - It's a sentient dungeon that eats other places and adds them to itself, which is their way to handwave the usual "random encounters for no reason" bits, but it doesn't take away that 90% of the module is nothing but a jumbled pile of random, unrelated encounters. - Encounter balance is all over the place. Certain encounters are marked as "killer" and are supposed to be very nasty, which does usually check out. In practice, some regular random encounters are even more murderous than the killer ones with no warning for the GM whatsoever. - It starts at level 4 and ends at level 8, so unless you slow-roll the level-ups (never, EVER do this), you're going to have to skip either about half the zones or half the areas in every zone, more if you want to do the revisits with a twist. This is assuming you want to end at level 8. - 90% of anything in this book has no real foreshadowing, proper wrap-up or gets any sort of mention whatsoever outside of its own paragraph. The strongest entity in the entire book has no build-up, is never alluded to, and gets sprung on the players quite literally if they choose to go right instead of left at a random junction. I'd say EotST functions better as a scrapbook to occasionally pick an appropriate set piece from to add to your own campaign than as a campaign unto itself. There's quite a few gems in there, but it's a horribly unstructured mess. That said, if your friend is prepared to roll up his sleeves to do some liberal cutting and can keep a watchful eye for any difficulty spikes, it's definitely doable to hammer this thing into an enjoyable campaign. And from what I've gathered among my players, they've overall had a good time during the campaign. For the record, here's what our EotST runs have looked like ("T" stands for topside stuff from the book). This obviously contains some minor spoilers, like area and encounter names: 1) Maw and Gauntlet (notes: Medusa fight should be "killer". Skip this on their first run. Minotaur can instagib softer PCs at full HP.) T1) Glacier's End and getting an Eye. 2) Sunken Sea and Ossuary (notes: Sahuagin Host encounter should be "killer", we never fought the Flesh Sculptor so I can't comment on that.) T2) The Brazen Comet and the Inverse Observatory. 3) Gizzard, Deep Keep and most of the Maddening Stairs (notes: skip Magical Throne Funtimes unless you're players know drat well what they're doing in combat and even then, you should've been foreshadowing the hell out of it during previous runs/topside stuff.) T3) Escaping the Clock of Hellhole (WOOPS I ROLLED A 2), gearing up for the last run. 4) Being run right now. We just went through a short revisit of the Gauntlet (Medusa still wiped the floor with them), and I'm going to send them through the Onyx Catacombs and the Heart (with a pit stop at Deep Keep since they own it now). It's been just over a year since we started the campaign (weekly sessions with the occasional hiccup), if you want a feel for the time scale. Hopefully this information helps.
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Jul 5, 2016 19:25
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 21:45 |
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Captain Walker posted:Quick Seeker update, mostly phrasing, formatting and layout, nothing especially exciting. Biggest change is probably the legal info on the first page which I hope to use one of these days when I get around to publishing the class. Vice of Lust doesn't actually do all that much, since fear auras only work against engaged enemies, and stop the moment they disengage. It's going to make people waste a bunch of move actions, but at that point you might as well keep using Sloth.
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Jul 28, 2016 07:40
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