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Alex Kierkegaard's Kingslayer (PF1)

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Alex Kierkegaard's Kingslayer (PF1)

Unread postby icycalm » 19 Mar 2022 12:40

Alex Kierkegaard's Pathfinder: West Marches Player's Guide
PART I: STORY: https://www.patreon.com/posts/63789736

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Battlegrounds wrote:But then on the thirtieth night, the vision returned with a vengeance: the soaring pyramidal structure, the alien landscape, the horrifying snake pit. They called out to him from the depths of space and time, and he could no longer stand the idyllic life he was leading.
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icycalm
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Izirion's Enchiridion of the West Marches

Unread postby icycalm » 19 Mar 2022 21:38

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I will be dropping bits and pieces from the primary rulebook and campaign guide of the core West Marches design philosophy, Izirion's Enchiridion of the West Marches. It goes without saying that this book is completely off limits to all players outside of the bits and pieces I'll be sharing with you. It contains actual characters and locations and story beats that you'll be encountering, not just rules. And even the rules and tables are off-limits, because looking at them is like looking at a game's code, which can thereby be reverse-engineered.

Note that some of this stuff is applicable to other, more conventional styles of campaign, so it's worth reading it even if you aren't playing in the Marches and never plan to. But, for the most part, these passages take existing well-known role-playing conventions and mechanics and fine-tune them to the peculiar requirements of a West Marches campaign.

Pay attention to all this stuff. They will make you better players, and it will eventually take our game to a stratospherically higher level.

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Keep in mind that we AREN'T playing pure West Marches, we're playing my Ultimate West Marches, and in this design there IS a preset plot. Or rather, there are multiple of them, and the players get to pick and choose. They can also ignore them all and just do their own thing. But the plots are there if the players want to follow them, and they are quite involved plots. You'll understand more as you play the game, and later on there will be theory chapters to break everything down. I am keeping those for much later though to avoid spoiling anything.
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Re: West Marches campaign

Unread postby icycalm » 20 Mar 2022 00:25

I said that I want the mechanics to be hidden from you, but I still want you to get some basic SENSE of the mechanics, so that you won't be blithely running around and exploring at leisure as if you're in some city. The game tracks EVERYTHING you can possibly do in a wilderness, and I'll be rolling a ton of dice behind the scenes to determine what happens all around you (and this on top of running all the Pathfinder math in my head with no VTT help, which means you should expect long "loading screens" especially during the first sessions).

Take a look at this sample chapter on encounter frequency to see what I mean. P.S. A "watch" is defined as 4 hours.

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So if you want to take all day to look at a waterfall, be my guest, but I am rolling dice for encounters every 4 hours no matter what you do, so you might want to keep this in mind. These are the Marches, not a botanical garden or a zoo, and you should behave accordingly.
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Why Fantasy Grounds

Unread postby icycalm » 23 Mar 2022 19:35

An explanation of why everyone playing this will need Fantasy Grounds Unity in addition to TaleSpire.

TaleSpire doesn't yet offer any rules automation. It doesn't even have character sheets. So at first I planned to run all the rules myself, as in a tabletop game. This would force me to finally read the PF1 rulebook from start to end, and the added knowledge would elevate even our FG campaigns, because I'd be able to catch errors sooner or avoid them altogether etc. Same for the players: they too would be forced to learn the rules far better than currently, and all our campaigns would benefit.

However, we'd still need character sheets somehow. Now there are several programs online to handle this, some of them with very advanced features, even mobile apps etc. (the apps are useful when people are playing in person, so each of them has his phone on the table with all his character stats for easy access; they even have combat trackers that make your phone beep when it's your turn). But at the end of the day, why not just use Fantasy Grounds for the sheets? It would spare us having to learn a new program, the best of which aren't free anyway, while we've already paid for Fantasy Grounds. Moreover, once a character is in Fantasy Grounds he can be moved between campaigns with a couple of clicks, and characters from other campaigns can similarly move to the West Marches with ease without having to manually input all the stats with every move. And finally, I already own ALL the PF1 rulebooks, and many sourcebooks and adventures, which means all those extra races and classes and skills and feats and items will be immediately available, fully statted, for our TaleSpire game. Keep in mind that in the paid online character generators, YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR EACH BOOK FROM SCRATCH. We're talking about a couple thousand euros that we've already paid. And none of the generators have EVERYTHING, like Fantasy Grounds does.

It's a no-brainer to stick with Fantasy Grounds, basically, at which point the question arises why I can't just run the combat there too? Just add the characters and the enemies on the combat tracker, and run it all in there.

Well, there are a couple of issues with this. One is that the rolls would have to be made on FG, and it just wouldn't feel good not to roll in TaleSpire. But I found a solution with the manual dice input option we recently discovered for FG. So the rolls WILL be made in TaleSpire, and then I will simply enter the result in FG, and it will calculate what happens for us. I think that's a fantastic solution that leverages the power of Fantasy Grounds to drive all the mechanics of our TaleSpire game, with each program contributing what it does best: FG the mechanics, and TS the graphics.

The only problem is that TaleSpire is a lot heavier than FG to run, especially with the giant boards I will be building (we're talking a square mile of terrain for every board), and then on top of that you'll need OBS running. So let's hope everyone's computer can handle this. If not, there are options. The players don't absolutely need to have FG open, they can have their sheet info on paper in front of them, and just tell me to make changes to their FG sheet when needed. And as for OBS, we'll probably only be streaming the PCs' viewpoints, not the NPCs', so for starters only leccosta will need a powerful enough computer. And even THEN there's a solution if his computer can't handle it: I could set up a second computer to stream the game, from my Shadow perhaps, while I GM on my new laptop.

So it'll be a complicated business, and there are many challenges ahead, most of which I haven't even told you yet. But it's all feasible, I am sure, and we'll figure it out.
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PART II: MECHANICS

Unread postby icycalm » 08 Apr 2022 03:41

Alex Kierkegaard's Pathfinder: West Marches Player's Guide
PART II: MECHANICS: https://www.patreon.com/posts/64848977

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icycalm wrote:In fact, if asked to pick ONE groundbreaking aspect of my game that stands heads and shoulders above all others, I'd pick this. Nothing else existing or in development or even fantasized by anyone can match this.
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Pick your Follower Types

Unread postby icycalm » 08 Apr 2022 06:40

Everyone who wants to participate as follower should start thinking about which of the starting choices of NPC they want. As outlined in the Mechanics section of the Player's Guide above, the choices are foot soldier, squire, and village idiot. Check the stats and descriptions and make up your minds, then tell me about it in the #west-marches-crew Discord channel so I can assemble the final list. Note that you won't be able to change your choice until your NPC either dies, or you level. You might also want to coordinate your choices with the other followers and ultimately with leccosta. At the start, the possible squad compositions will be limited, but as the game progresses the possibilities will rise exponentially, as will the diversity of the challenges you'll be called to face, so even though coordination at first won't be crucial, it will soon become so.

Note that leccosta (and future PCs) can suggest NPC types, but they can't dictate them. They have to take what's available to them from the community they attract, and what's available to them depends on what the people who play followers feel like playing.

I will be waiting for the full list before I start setting up leccosta's character and the full roster of followers in Fantasy Grounds, as well as assigning appropriate miniatures for everything in TaleSpire.

To register as follower and get the Discord role, all you have to do is ask for it in the #west-marches-crew Discord channel. To register as full-player you have to talk to me.
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