the murder nerds

This site is massively overdue a blog post, so I thought I’d do a quick recap of my current campaign, and adaption of the ‘Iron Gods’ Pathfinder adventure path.

Setting the Scene

As you can see in my older post, I wanted to set this campaign somewhere warm and sunny after the darkness and oppression of Barovia. So my campaign is set on the continent of Joltan, which is essentially fantasy-Africa: scorching deserts, treacherous jungles, and many forgotten civilisations and ruins.

I actually had two rough options for the campaign: one which staying in and around the main city (Shallal) and focused on its political and social turmoil, which some cosmic horror thrown in; and the one we ended up going for – a journey across the continent to uncover a strange new power. Hopefully I’ll be able to run the first option some other time.

So if you’re in any way familiar with Iron Gods, or you’ve read a some of my previous posts, you will know the campaign revolves around Sci-Fi things in a fantasy setting. Spaceships quite literally crashed into your typical D&D world, so the players have to deal with robots, aliens and radioactive hazards, but they also get to play with ray guns, grenades and ‘skymetal’.

It’s a rule of fantasy RPGs that they must all contain meteorite metal, it must be called Skymetal, and it must be somehow different to ordinary iron. Hey, why not? We already have mithril and adamantium.

I Meant To Do That

I have a metric shit-ton of adventures and ideas, stored in various folders, saved as pdf’s and on random bits of paper. I also own Storm King’s Thunder, which is essentially 6 loosely connected dungeons and a bunch of wilderness encounters. And there were quite a few bits of the Iron Gods adventures that I thought were a bit crap, and didn’t fit with my ‘vision’ for the world. So I smashed everything together, and created something loosely coherent, while still allowing the players plenty of room to go in a different direction if they wanted.

The campaign ‘structure’ was as follows. Several of the sections were taken from published adventures, so I’ve included them in bracket afterwards:

1. The party come together in Shallal, hired by a group of talking cats(?) to find their king. [King of the Cats by M T Black]
2. Making friends in town, the party come across an old diary, that might lead to incredible treasure. [Cryptic Entry by Dan Coleman]
3. Exploring deeper into the caves, the party rescue a group of treasure hunters from the insane Kuo-Toa, who have created their own goddess! The treasure hunters direct the party to the town of Torch. [my very own creation!]
4. Travelling upriver and across a desert, the party arrive in Torch to find the town in crisis and the mayor missing. The caves beneath the town contain strange, and technologically-advanced ruins. [Fires of Creation, chapter 1 of Iron Gods adventure path]
5. From one crisis to another: the party find themselves defending the peaceful agricultural town of Mahih from giants. [Storm King’s Thunder]
6. Following the trail of the sand giants, the party head to their home to ensure they will not threaten the ‘small folk’ further. They find the giant’s behaviour and the events in torch are linked. [Storm King’s Thunder]
7. The party head to Scrapwall, a hive of scum and villainy, to find answers and confront a new ‘god’ [Lords of Rust, chapter 2 of Iron Gods adventure path]

Over the next few weeks I’ll aim to get my shit together do a post on each section, with a review of the adventure I used in the process.