Gatewalkers: Book one done!

Over on D20Saves, I’m running Gatewalkers, one of the latest APs from Paizo! From the official website:

After they walked through that glowing gateway, nothing was ever the same. A band of characters become paranormal investigators to determine the cause of a global amnesic episode. Their quest takes them to lands near, far, and outside this reality altogether. Along the way, the characters meet fellow “gatewalkers,” defeat alien monsters, and explore strange realms touched by the Missing Moment. And when it comes time to learn the grim truth of what happened to them on that fated summer night, what then?

Warning: The first part of this blog will cover what happened in the stream, so there are spoilers for Book One. Part two will include my thoughts as a GM, so there are major spoilers.

Check out the playlist here if you want to watch the previous episodes!

The last chapter opens just after the players have learned that they were all wrong: They’re neither in the First World nor in some underexplored region of the Mwangi Expanse. They’re on the wrong planet! The gate they jumped through landed them on Castrovel, the planet NEXT to Golarion. Just as they were getting their head around the problem of getting home, they accidentally inflicted the elf-killing curse on their best hope of getting back.

Thankfully, she’s only mostly dead, so they take on the task of restoring her and exploring the weird world of Castrovel, which honestly deserves its own AP.

GM Stuff

Okay, seriously, if you’re a player in my stream, DO NOT KEEP READING. Don, James, Jorge, Daton, Ricardo, CLOSE THIS TAB.

The good

The players loved the Castrovel twist. They threw themselves into interacting with the local denizens and figuring out how to get back home. Also, in what’s extremely rare with experienced players, none of them saw it coming, but didn’t feel like it came from nowhere. Bravo, Paizo.

They also had fun in the dungeons in this part of the book, which are fairly unique and evocative. There’s a long-abandoned library that’s utterly alien in every form. There’s an encounter set on the back of a mythical beast. And hooooboy, that final battle is one that no one was expecting. You could take this chapter and plunk it in any adventure for a fun bit of weird.

Oh, and that last fight? Holy cow, that was a lot of fun. If you plan on GMing this, figure out in advance how you’re going to do the transitions, because it’s well worth doing well for the full impact.

Some warnings

It’s assumed that the players hand a cursed key over to a particular elf, who will immediately be struck down. 90% of the chapter involves helping to cure her. If your players have started suspecting that the key they’re carrying is dangerous, I would think about how you’re going to rebrand those encounters. I wouldn’t skip them, because they are a ton of fun, but they do need some reworking when it comes to why the players are doing them.

Also… Hubert. I’m currently reading book three, and I’m fairly confident there’s no off-ramp for this NPC. With my group, the players ended up reworking him as a beastkin fighter, but not every GM wants tagalongs. If you’d prefer to keep the party to just players, I’d recommend either having him stay behind when they gate out of the First World, or maybe stay with the Oatia (Castrovel elves).

Other thoughts

SO MUCH HAPPENS IN THIS FREAKING BOOK. Seriously, it feels like two books worth of material. In a way, I wish they had spread it over two books, because Castrovel was a ton of fun and could have been mined a bit further.

Having prepped book two and started book three, I’ve realized that I want to do some overhauls. It’s a perfectly fine AP and could easily be run as-is, but a few tweaks never hurt.

First, I’m adding more planes. The first book has you jumping around so much that I was disconcerted to find out there were no jumps (at least that I recall) in book two. So, I’m adding one by putting Skywatch in the Ethereal Plane.

1. It explains why everything is weird.
2. It created a more focused goal: Escape the plane.
3. It explains why contact was cut suddenly (everyone got sucked into another plane).

This required fewer updates than you might think. Using Deep Dream Generator, I used Deep Style to update the maps. Uploading them, I didn’t even have to update the dynamic lighting!

The next thing I’m doing is…

Killing off Sakuachi. Kind of.

Look, before you judge me or think I’m going hard on Paizo, I’ll say the NPC godcaller is FINE. Yes, guiding her on her vision quest is a bit on the nose, but I’ll take ‘too direct’ over ‘wait, how do I get my players to this random area where all the plot is?!’ any day. It’s just that I know my players. If you give them an NPC, they’ll want to give that NPC levels and bring them into combats and outfit them, and she has BODYGUARDS.

Y’all, they made the freaking hedgehog a legit BEAST in fights.

I could say no, but I’d be saying no over and over again. So, instead, I’ll pull an Ozymandias.

They get to run around with the spirit caller, still fleshy, in the Ethereal plane, hunting for a way out and tracking down her people. Once everyone is together, they leave through a gate and…

Look back upon a wrecked city. The Godcaller and her guards are ghostly apparitions, stunned as the party is. The bodyguards fade, with nothing keeping them attached to the material plane, but Sakuachi stays… barely. She has a job to do, and less time than ever to do it. And she can’t do it herself.

The party is nudged to retrieve some items off of her body (which can be found near the telescope where they met and where the Space Elves lost contact with her) and continue her quest, with the oddly timed approval of the Professor.

I mean, they’ll probably still ask if they can give her levels as a Ghost archetype, but at least I’m not dealing with the bodyguards anymore.