Potential Abomination Vault Spoilers Below
My group primarily plays homebrewed DnD 5e campaigns but we have enjoyed playing the beginner box so much that we have decided to play another Paizo adventure using Foundry VTT. So we have chosen Abomination Vaults which I will be GMing. I figured I would make posts about our shenanigans in the Vaults both as a way to provide some content to this community and to encourage me to take detailed (read: useful) notes to document our misadventures. Our group has 3 primary GMs that trade off each week, GMing our respective campaigns and sometimes special 2 or 3 shots ( We are running a 5e converted Tomb of Horrors module in a couple weeks for our most Masochistic DMs birthday, which should be… Fun?). Which is to say that updates on our shenanigans will be few and far between.
All that said Id like to introduce y’all to the cats I’ll be wrangling. Hopefully their characters can serve as inspiration and/or be good for a laugh.
Meet the Chucklefucks
The Enigmatic Dave, Human Psychic
Dave is a down on his luck middle aged man. Who wears a greasy Cheeto stained robe. He has always peddled as a psychic giving sham tarot readings for little money. He has never really felt a purpose in life and as such has retreated into himself and fell into the bottle. Recently his wife, Susan, and “their” 2 kids left. She found another man who is 1000x’s better than Dave. I mean. He’s very rich and lives in Absalom if you’re into that kind of thing. He’s into real estate and has a ton of time to take Daves family on vacation. One time they took a vacation to Otari. Dave spotted them traipsing through the street in their fancy clothes. Susan still wanted him though. Dave could tell.
Through her leaving Dave’s psyche was irreparably fractured however. He found latent abilities within himself. He rebranded, The Enigmatic Dave, and started giving true readings in Otari’s local market. He’s made a bit of a name for himself locally. Dave hasn’t fixed any of his habits though. He instead hired a “manager” to keep him in line so he is sober and coherent enough to perform at his shows and readings. One day he will be known the world around. One day Susan will take him back.
Stove, Lizardfolk Beastkin (Were-goat) Kineticist
Stove grew up as a feral were-goat child in the Otari Hinterlands with nothing but a small scrap of flesh (birth certificate?) with the name “Steve” poorly tattooed on it, so poorly in fact that when Stove had someone literate read it to him for the first time they misread it as Stove. Stove has been curious about proper living for a while now though and has lurked on the outskirts of the town creeping and learning. One day he found Dave and started going to his shows. Finally started talking to him and learned that Susan had left Dave and now he was going to have to live with his mom again. Stove excitedly jumped at the opportunity and said he’d live with Dave and be his manager! Dave, desperate to not live with his bitchy mother again, begrudgingly accepted. Now Stove has a room at the very back of Dave’s place that’s very poorly lit, smells terrible, and has bones of small animals littered about the place. More like a barn at this point than a guest room. It goes fairly well with the rest of the house which has takeout boxes and empty liquor boxes littered everywhere. Dave never visits Stove in his room… he always just waits for him to come out if he needs something.
GM note: Without any prompting from me, The Enigmatic Dave (T.E.D. as we now call him in the discord) took the Market Runner background and decided to tie his backstory in with Stove who is a weird looking lizard goat dude who manipulates elements. Keeleno Lathenar is going to be incredibly distrustful of Stove since he is a druid adjacent animal person. So naturally I decided that Keeleno will be T.E.D.’s landlord of a small flat adjacent to the Otari Market and I’m going to let them decide if they try to hide the fact that Stove lives there or not. Shenanigans will surely ensure.
Kolbold, Goblin Warpriest/Cultist of Zarongel
Kolbold is a cultist dedicated to Zarongel the hero god of dog killing, arson, and travel. Moving around otari mounted atop his goblindog and generally being a menace setting fire to adventure camps and killing stray dogs when he isn’t scavenging the city. Kolbold was sent by the tribe Oracle to go join a group and raid a dungeon for shineies.
Edicts are Dog killing, arson, and beast riding.
Anathemas spare the dog, not burning your enemies buildings, not having/seeking a mount or riding a horse or dog.
GM note: I’m going to try and make this PCs tribe the same former tribe of “The Scribbles” from the AV expanded document. How that plays out, however, is anyone’s guess. This player is a bit of a wildcard.
Kenji Ito, Human Magus/ Time Traveling DnD 2e character
Kenji Ito: The Stray Fox After Rengar the Demon Core was once again sealed by the Blitz Brigade and the Pensive Protectors (DnD 2e Campaign he plays in), Kenji sailed back home to Shidekima to reconnect with family. His plan was to take a few dozen years of his new extended life as a vampire to live and protect the ones he cared about most before turning back to his mission. Life had other plans. While out for an afternoon ride with his grandfather a shrill sound started to fill his ears. His horse made no indication it could hear it too, so he glanced over at Ojisan and suddenly he felt a familiar sensation of his body being ripped from the time stream. He went hurtling through the void; silver threads extending far in the distance each one the lifeline of a person he had saved mere months ago. Kenji realized he was falling, his control slipping from his mind as his connection to Faerun was fading. What felt like hours passed before he could see anything: the bright light. First a pin prick, then it grew to surround him until he was out of the void. He looked back and saw the hole quickly closing as he fell further away, toward a strange new place. His instincts kicked in as he reached out to the weave to arrest his fall, but he found something else. New magic, just as ancient as the one’s he studied before but new to him connecting the essence of the world. With the ground quickly meeting him a sudden gust of wind changed his course, sending him sideways and landing him in a large haystack. Curious and thankful, he crawled out and realized he was stark naked, and hungry for the first time in years. The farm he was on had a large barn, so he went there first to try and make himself decent. Opening the barn door, he was met with an old figure that was made out of vine and plant material, Alder Twig. After their initial embarrassing encounter Twig and his partner Magnolia (plant Leshies) took him in and helped acclimate Kenji to his new surroundings. He worked for the Twig’s, and they paid him in room, food, and a silver here and there. Kenji would travel to the nearby town of Absalom to buy books and study the new Arcane connection he felt, finally learning to wield some of the simpler cantrips. After a few months, he could afford a sword and some decent travelling supplies, so he said his farewell to the Twig’s and went forward to follow the only lead to get back home he could think of, this strange new magic and the mystics that control it.
Rogath Treesplitter, Orc Barbarian
An orc that immigrated to Otari with his mom’s and pops when he was young. Turns our that even at a young age, orcs are still pretty useful at felling and moving trees so that’s where he has made his money. He likes to explore the surrounding areas and every now and again go to the city to see what kinda weird shit they have out there.
Wrin is a friend of the Treesplitter family.
Robin Thorne, Human Nephilim Ranger
Robin Thorne, monster hunter. Her dad Murdoc was more involved in her life than Thalomin (Player’s character in another 5e campaign we play in) was in his. Thalomin was a good dad, but he stayed busy with the whole “saving the world every time it’s asked” thing. Murdoc later goes on to live a similar life, but had a daughter and wanted to be more present for her. But she would hear stories about Thal and the Untamed, and his helping the Flaming Rose crusade (Avernus reference), and she wanted to be like her grandpa. Old grandpa Thal is a grumpy old man but a teddy bear to his grand daughter.
Preparing for the Adventure
Ive decided to add several elements from the AV expanded document, including: Starting the campaign at level 2 with a festival celebrating killing the dragon from the beginner box, The Scribbles, Rajani’s daughter, as well as the ritual to release the original Roseguard heros from the gem lenses. But most of these things will come later. Right now I am trying to decide how best to balance encounters for a party of 6 experienced and creative ttrpgers. Right now ive decided to use the Elite versiom for encounters against mostly one creature and just increasing mobs by about 50%. But I would love any advice in this regard!
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Be careful with slapping the elite template on single creatures, particularly at lower levels. Fights can be very swingy starting out with low HP pools relative to damage output. For a single creature higher level encounter, I’d recommend adding a couple of low level adds as it’ll make the fight a challenge and more dynamic. For fights that already have several monsters, making one of them elite can work as a sort of squad leader. Or you can try and replace one or two creatures with another that’s a level higher. The XP budgeting and encounter builder rules are pretty spot on I find.
Thank you for the advice! I hadn’t considered making individual lesser mobs elite “squad leaders” as you suggest but I really like the idea. I have heard that the math is very tight in this system. I just hope this system is ready for how bad I am at math lol. I will certainly be looking into XP budgeting and encounter building rules more in depth now. Thanks again!
These are some pretty goofy characters lol. Honestly some of them are to the point where I personally would veto some of the players choices because they are bleeding into a style of fantasy that I don’t like to include in my homebrew, but I’m not gonna yuck your yum. I know lots of groups enjoy really zany fantasy. I really like that you tied some of the characters into the town by making them residents of Otari.
As for how to deal with such a large group, I think it will be a bit trickier than just ticking Elite on some of the monsters. I run for a group of 5 players and I usually find some way to level up the encounters. Sometimes this is just making the one monster in the room an Elite, sometimes it’s adding more enemies (this one works pretty well in any room with exactly 4 enemies by the book, since you can assume the designers intended for even numbers on both sides). Sometimes you can do a combination of both.
There was a fight on the fourth floor where I Elite’d two enemies and also added two enemies, and it still didn’t pose much of a threat to the PCs. More PCs add exponentially more power because more teamwork and action economy become available.
The tricky thing with adding more enemies though is that this adventure suffers the same problem that I’ve heard a lot of published Paizo adventures have, which is that the encounters are often extremely claustrophobic. Adding more enemies will really exacerbate that, since suddenly any sort of maneuvering will be tricky with 12 characters trying to elbow their way through a 20 square room (lots of the rooms in the early floors are only like 20-25 squares).
The other option of course is to simply play everything by the book. This will mean that the PCs will earn less XP in the beginning, but fights will be easier. Then, as things ramp up in difficulty, their XP scaling will begin to catch up naturally. Foundry supports this quite well, as the encounter tracker will tell you how much XP a fight is worth based on the enemies and allies included in it. I use this particular method when my players return to a lower level area to mop up something they missed. But I could actually see it working well across-the-board for a big party since the combats are naturally going to take longer since there are more people. You don’t necessarily want encounter balance right out the gate since balanced encounters are naturally slower to play out. It might be better if the heroes feel like badasses squashing bugs at the beginning and then once they start delving deeper the danger ramps up naturally. I suspect that’s something you are shooting for anyway since you’re starting them at level 2.
We are certainly an odd group lol and zany is exactly how I would classify the majority of our antics, we like to get a little silly with our war crimes. I followed your advice from a few weeks ago and required the players to have some personal connection to Otari or Absalom which is how they came to be residents. I even offered them all a free extra hero point for the first session if they tied their backstory to Wrin in some way. Only 2 of them took me up on it however.
I started on the first floor of Gauntlight keep by increasing the number of metflits and bugs by anywhere from 50-100%. However I do plan to make the Metflits more likeable to encourage the PCs to work with them. In the adventure text Boss Skrawng is having his tribe train large insects to invade Otari. Which is very silly in my mind. Like, how would they know there is this coastal town a mile away through the fogfen, first of all, if they have been pushed up out of their previous lair by Morlocks? It seems more sensible (to me) for the Muddlickers to be preparing and training to retake their previous home from the group of Morlocks that killed their homies than the entire town of Otari lol. So I plan to paint the Metflits as neutral toward Otari so that the PCs can either aid them in their assault or if the PCs piss them off Boss Skrawng could order his dudes to attack with their new monsters to “blood” them, so to speak. Hopefully this makes the Metflits more 3 dimensional as a faction.
I hadn’t considered the issue of overcrowding the maps when adding more enemies, but now that you point it out I will certainly try to be cognizant of that going forward.
Taking your advice into consideration I think I will run the first Gauntlight event with the teleporting Scalathrax by the book and just see how they do. This will be the first combat encounter since the AV expanded document recommends running this encounter at the very end of the festival as the big hook to get the party to explore Gauntlight. I’m still unsure if I will actually be using XP progression or milestone progression. I might do a hybrid type deal and just keep track of their XP so I don’t over or under do it by a large amount.
I really appreciate your help! I’m very excited to run this adventure.
I really like the change you’re suggesting to the mudlickers. I totally agree that it doesn’t make a ton of sense for them to be plotting against a town so far away.
That’s a good idea to start them off with an unmodified encounter just to get the sense of how unbalanced things will be. I’m a bit confused about it being the Scalathrax though. Shouldn’t they fight zombies and skeletons first in the “dead tide for Otari”? The Scalathrax is meant to be like a final boss for that event.
Thanks, I can’t really take credit though. In the actual play podcast Roll for Intent they took a diplomatic approach to the Metflits and made them a pseudo-ally, which inspired me to make them more likeable in my game. If my players decide to aid the Mudlickers I was going to have Boss Skrawng offer to allow the PCs to come and go freely provided that they pay a toll when crossing through their territory. I figure something like 1 gold for the whole party when entering Gauntlight and 2 gold when they are leaving, payable only when the Metflits notice the PCs coming or going. After all, Boss Skrawng has an invasion to finance lol. Plus I think that will encourage my players to explore different ways of entering and exiting the megadungeon. I bet they will make some very questionable decisions in an attempt to avoid paying those little fey freaks 2 gold. Plus it will be funny, once they’ve located a secret exit, to have a Metflit surprise them by popping out of a pipe or something and demanding their gold lol.
Sorry, yes Deadtide for Otari does have the skeletons and shamblers pop up first and the Scalathrax is supposed to be teleported in after the party cleans them up. It states in the book that Belcorra is watching the events as they happen and in my mind she is a tactician and even if this is just a test of Gauntlight’s function she is still going for some shock n’ awe. So I am modifying the encounter slightly so that after 2-3 rounds of fighting the skeletons and shamblers the Scalathrax gets teleported in (AV expanded mentions doing this if the players deal with the skeletons too handily). Even still I do not know if this encounter will be too difficult for them so I will have Wrin and Vandy nearby in case they need a helping hand dispatching the threat.
I expect your players will do fine in the dead tide event. The Scalathrax fight depends a lot on whether they can figure out its weakness. If they pack fire damage, which most casters usually do, then you should be okay.
In my case, the dead tide was actually when one of my players was introducing a new character. He decided he didn’t like the class he’d been playing for level 1, and decided to switch to Kineticist who was travelling with a group of performers as a fire eater. So I created this scene that happened before the graveyard scene where the whole town goes to the performers’ show on a stage by the beach, and right before the big finale, the lighthouse turns on and attacks the graveyard. Everyone was on the western beach at the time, so they were close enough to the library that I was able to really depict for them how a majority of the undead were walking off the edge, landing on the library’s domed roof with a thud, and then sliding off and landing on the rocky shore below.
Once they actually got to the graveyard, the new kineticist character was able to shine and have a really badass introduction since his fire attacks ended up making quick work of the Scalathrax.
Lmao if fire is the answer then I’m sure the lizard goat kineticist and the pyro goblin are gonna eat this things lunch.
That sounds like a super cool character introduction! Out of curiosity, which class was the player not enjoying before then?
I might move my festival to the beach near Dawn flower library now that you’ve described how it went down in your game. I was originally going to do it east of the Menhemes family plot since the AV expanded documents suggest having The Scribbles rig up seats on the Giants wheel so people can ride it like a Ferris wheel during the festival. But I’d much rather have that more evocative description of the event, as well as to better explain why there’s only a handful of undead when they get to the cemetery proper lol
That player had been playing a Summoner. It wasn’t so much that he wasn’t enjoying the class. More that Rage of Elements had just come out and he had been wanting to play a kineticist basically since he first heard about it. It just wasn’t possible for that first level because the book wasn’t out yet.
Oh I see! Well that certainly tracks, I’m very excited to see a kineticist in play as well.
I would avoid using the Elite template. AV is often considered somewhat overtuned for its level, with an abundance of 1- or 2-creature boss fights and optional extra challenging fights sprinkled theoughout it, and particularly frustrating encounters for magic users making up the first half or more of the module.
Eliting those solo boss fights in particular is going to risk downing players quickly. The extra +2 to hit and crit at low levels is incredibly significant, even if they are starting at Level 2. If they’re not able to skirmish with the bosses, necause the party’s so large and the rooms are so small, and they’re not able to effectively waste the enemies’ actions because they’re such low level, their options are going to be limited to face tanking creatures that can one-hit them.
What you might want to do, instead, is increase the room sizes (assuming you’re not playing on a flip-mat), apply a Weak template, and then clone the enemy.
A PL+2 enemy (for example) is worth 80 XP of the encounter budget, while an elite version becomes PL+3 and worth 120 XP (which is a moderate encounter for a party of 6, but it will not remain a party of 6 for very long). Meanwhile, a weak version becomes PL+1, is worth 60 XP of the encounter budget, and cloning it makes it 120 XP encounter but with a signidicantly lowered chance of anyone being squished without even getting a turn.
Thank you for the advice! I’m using the premade foundry module so I’m not really interested in monkeying with the map sizes. I will keep this method of encounter tuning in my toolbox though, thank you for the detailed breakdown, especially the math part.