Hello everyone. Back to share with you what I have learned from DMing the events throughout the journey of Aikos becoming a god. Some of it was stuff I learned, some of it is stuff I reaffirmed, and some of it were just things I got better at as a DM. Thinking about what to write here has been as helpful as when I was actually running the events. Hopefully one of you gets something out of it too!
This experience within my campaign, first and foremost, helped me learn to better listen to my players a bit. Now, I don't mean to say I didn't before or I was even bad at it before. No, I mean that listening to your players need not be restricted to what they try to tell you directly, or what they pull you aside to talk about. It should include the jokes you all make about the game and its sessions, the side comments players make about their characters or NPCs, and what-ifs.
These are often one sentence or maybe even a word or phrase. Nevertheless they can help delve into a deeper story for the game, the party, or the character. I have also used this realization to start trying to coax such things out of players. I have provided NPCs to make comments or make them myself. I have also presented situations or fluff to get reactions. Sometimes these go nowhere, sometimes I get things that has allowed me to build some depth in the game.
One example is where there was a magical barrier around a fort the players needed to enter and clean out. Without getting to into it, the fort was controlled by a group of evil god worshipers. One of these gods is Vecna (for those clever no he's not a pathfinder god but in my campaign that doesn't mean much anymore) god of secrets. Very simply the only thing they had to do to enter without any consequences was reveal a secret, out load, next to the barrier. If personally significant enough they could pass. Some of them were predictable, but one player revealed something not at all talked about in over 25 sessions. Something that could be really important to the character. It hasn't come up since, but it will. In fact it is going to be a significant obstacle to the players' main goals and the main trail of the campaign as a whole. It is going to challenge the players and distract them and hopefully explore even more of that character's past.
Allowing one of my characters to work on becoming a god also allowed for me to explore experimenting with some monster creation as well. While I have made many monsters over the years for a variety of systems, this was one of the few times I worked with existing monsters as a base model. In fourth edition D&D I often took the monster builder and renamed creatures and gave them different key words. Re-skinning monsters was easy, and design was never an issue. In pathfinder, however, re-skinning has always seemed a bit more daunting of a task.
The weird food monsters I had to create for Aikos and my general lack of time to do it from the ground up lead me to thumbing through books and the SRD for monsters I could just re-skin. At first this seemed impossible. For the taffy creatures I devoted more time than I should have looking at oozes. Eventually I gave up any directed searches and started just browsing. I focused on key abilities monsters had that would fit what I needed.
In the end I ended up using the mimic. The stats were used as is and it worked out great. A big part of the mimic though is its ambush style of attack. This wouldn't fit the taffy monster so I ad-hoc'd the color changing, resistance changing, flavor changing mechanic into it. All in all it worked out well. Similar things were done for the honey golem and frosting archons. This process also lead me to a different method of creating unique monsters for your own campaign. Its very similar but instead of looking for a base model to turn into something specific you can just take a monster and make it something unique. The chimera has an excellent way of representing this. You can't throw one anywhere per-se, but change the dragon color and make the two other heads local animals and you have the start of something very cool. For me it was much simpler. A rock caterpillar from a third party source. Instantly I knew I needed the rock candy caterpillar in that dungeon.
I got a lot of practice ad-libbing through many of the encounters involving pastry divinity as well. That is one of those things you can;t just learn but have to practice and improve upon all the time. Part of this practice was learning that things sometimes just work themselves out. The best example of this is how I did not realize how to get Aikos to wield the sickle of harvest. I nearly panicked internally when someone else wanted to take it and did. But, and I don't remember who pointed it out or how, I was reminded Aikos dealt the death blow. This miraculously allowed me to show the magic inherent in the artifact and have Aikos be the one exploring it and wielding it.
There is probably a lot more that I could talk about learning, realizing, getting better at. It's hard to recite every "eureka" moment the experience provided me as DM, but I hope these were a little revealing. I would really love to see any comments about how I handled this or that or how something did or didn't come up. I would be happy to answer any of them. Next week's post is a mystery as, sadly, I got no votes or suggestions for my next topic. Chances are I will roll a die to decide and until then those of you waiting will just have to take wild guesses.
The weird food monsters I had to create for Aikos and my general lack of time to do it from the ground up lead me to thumbing through books and the SRD for monsters I could just re-skin. At first this seemed impossible. For the taffy creatures I devoted more time than I should have looking at oozes. Eventually I gave up any directed searches and started just browsing. I focused on key abilities monsters had that would fit what I needed.
In the end I ended up using the mimic. The stats were used as is and it worked out great. A big part of the mimic though is its ambush style of attack. This wouldn't fit the taffy monster so I ad-hoc'd the color changing, resistance changing, flavor changing mechanic into it. All in all it worked out well. Similar things were done for the honey golem and frosting archons. This process also lead me to a different method of creating unique monsters for your own campaign. Its very similar but instead of looking for a base model to turn into something specific you can just take a monster and make it something unique. The chimera has an excellent way of representing this. You can't throw one anywhere per-se, but change the dragon color and make the two other heads local animals and you have the start of something very cool. For me it was much simpler. A rock caterpillar from a third party source. Instantly I knew I needed the rock candy caterpillar in that dungeon.
I got a lot of practice ad-libbing through many of the encounters involving pastry divinity as well. That is one of those things you can;t just learn but have to practice and improve upon all the time. Part of this practice was learning that things sometimes just work themselves out. The best example of this is how I did not realize how to get Aikos to wield the sickle of harvest. I nearly panicked internally when someone else wanted to take it and did. But, and I don't remember who pointed it out or how, I was reminded Aikos dealt the death blow. This miraculously allowed me to show the magic inherent in the artifact and have Aikos be the one exploring it and wielding it.
There is probably a lot more that I could talk about learning, realizing, getting better at. It's hard to recite every "eureka" moment the experience provided me as DM, but I hope these were a little revealing. I would really love to see any comments about how I handled this or that or how something did or didn't come up. I would be happy to answer any of them. Next week's post is a mystery as, sadly, I got no votes or suggestions for my next topic. Chances are I will roll a die to decide and until then those of you waiting will just have to take wild guesses.
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