Council of Thieves: Stripping it for Parts

Council of Thieves was the first Paizo Adventure Path to be released fully under PF1 (the ones before were for 3.5), and it holds a special place for me as the first AP I ever ran. I ran it for my home game over nearly two years, and the campaign is one we still talk about today.

While the AP has its faults, it also has some great elements that could work at any table. In fact, I’ve stripped it down for parts several times, and I’ve broken out some scenarios multiple times. Hell, I ran one scenario multiple times for the same people because they wanted a chance to run through it again.

If you strip CoT for parts, what should you grab?

Book One: The Bastards of Erebus

One of the biggest things to steal? The town of Westcrown. It’s a city of decaying glory, run by thieves with noble titles, kowtowing to a demon lord they think they control, filled with citizens who are scared to challenge the status quo. It’s made for a group of adventurers to come in and set things right… somehow.

Also, there’s this fantastic table for randomizing tiefling features! I still break this out when I need to generate a description for a tiefling on the fly. It has random cosmetic features and random abilities that could be ported over to PF2 reasonably easily.

Finally, there’s a dungeon just the right size for some low-level characters. If your players need to break into a hideout, the Bastard’s lair is just big enough to be a challenge but small enough not to run on empty by the end.

Book Two: The Sixfold Trial

THERE’S A PLAY! Y’all, this is the reason I wrote this post in the first place. The freaking play is fantastic. The premise is that a director wants the action on stage to feel ‘real,’ so he hires people to fight against real challenges rather than actors fighting against special effects. There’s even a real play with lines to read out!

Cover for The Sixfold Trial, featuring an opera diva in the foreground and a fight on a stage in the background.

If you run the play, I highly recommend running through the audition because you can end up with some hilarious castings when the fighter whiffs and ends up as the romantic lead or the druid accidentally crits and ends up as the seductress. Also, audition for the succubus part rather than having it played by an NPC since you don’t need that NPC going forward.

There’s also a dinner party, which can be a terrific set piece if you need your players to hobnob and get some plot hooks. There’s a system for impressing various NPCs, and you can easily change out the AP-specific clues for your own.

Finally, the Asmodeon Knot is a bizarre dungeon built in the Ethereal Plane that can be put anywhere since it’s built in the plane between planes. It has lots of unique challenges that are better solved by brain than brawn, but also some things that just need to be punched in the face.

Book Three: What Lies in Dust

Cover for What Lies in Dust. Shows a woman holding some sort of magic dagger. In the background, an adventuring party fights big cats.

This book has another terrific set-piece: The Devildrome. A famous (think WWE) summoner accepts all challengers and has been undefeated… until now. The prize can be whatever suits your plot best, from a MacGuffin to a meeting with someone important yet out of reach.

Also, another favorite that I’ve used several times: DELVEHAVEN! An abandoned Pathfinder lodge filled with haunts, mysteries, and traps just begging for a group of idiots to run in and check it out. I got several sessions out of this, and completing it felt like a real accomplishment. Also, at the end, the players had a fabulous lodge all to themselves!

Book Four: The Infernal Syndrome

As you get further into an AP, there’s less to grab since many scenarios are heavily intertwined with the plot. This book, though, has a vast dungeon that’s a bunch of fun and would be easy enough to put under any questionable individual’s house. There’s a mix of straight-up fights, social encounters, and traps to give everyone in the party something to do.

Book 5: Mother of Flies

Walcourt is a big ol’ abandoned mansion where several vampires have settled in. It’s well worth reading over their motivations because they all have interesting backgrounds and motivations, and it’s possible to do more than just stab your way through the mansion.

Book 6: The Twice Damned Prince

This is a good book, but I couldn’t find anything to grab from it since it’s very much caught up in resolving all plot threads. This is fairly normal when pulling apart APs for content: The further in you go, the less there is to grab.

Final Caveats

The maps… hoo-boy. These were made before VTTs were omnipresent, and people either printed them or drew them on flip maps. The baked-in gridlines don’t always line up, and the quality if you extract them isn’t great. You’ll want to upscale them (my handy guide here) or see if someone else did updates. You’ll also need to edit some of the images to remove references to secret doors, which are baked into the image.

As for conversion, don’t stress out about 1:1. Take a step back, look at the theme and level for each encounter, and grab your Bestiaries for something close enough. Even the “special” creatures only need a half-assed paint job to get by. The most important thing is that the fight is reasonable and fun.

And that they befriend the wee constructs living in Delvehaven. Just LOOK at them! How could you not adopt them into your party?!

A collection of creepy poppets: A dragon, a teddy that looks rough, a creepy doll, a tiki statue, and a scarecrow with a noose around his neck.

Larg(ish) combats take two: Off-screen fights

In my Council of Thieves game, the PCs lead a group of lower level rebels. They’ve used them throughout the AP, sending them off on side missions, using them to make up for skill gaps, or bringing them along when the PCs have a large combat.

Recently, the group decided to use them as a distraction. The rebels would keep part of the guard engaged while the main group orchestrated a jailbreak. Due to the layout of the prison, the players wouldn’t be able to directly communicate with the rebels, meaning I would have to simulate what was going on above ground.

True, I could have hand-waved it, but I try to avoid that when it comes to plans like this. Also, the dev in me can’t resist a chance to whip up a script to make things interesting.

The simulation

At first, I thought about writing up something that would take into account hit points, AC, chances of hitting, damage, etc. I decided that was going to be too high effort, especially for a single combat.

Instead, I went with a ‘wound’ system (Note: not the alternative rules from Unchained). I figured a wound would represent a bit of fortitude or luck, like access to healing or a chunk of hit points. Losing a wound point would be akin to getting hit and not having a potion / healer on hand or getting hit especially hard. Running out of wounds would mean your luck had run out.

Combat would work like this:

For every two levels an NPC has, they would get one ‘wound’ level. This would be the max number of wounds they can take.
Every round, half a wound would be dealt to a random NPC on each side.
Once an NPC’s taken their max number of wounds, they are out of the combat and can’t receive more wounds.

For this combat, I decided that being out of wounds didn’t mean the NPC was dead: They’re just unable to fight anymore. Anyone who was at zero wounds would have some sort of injury that would require a heal check and time as well as some magical healing to overcome (like a bone fracture, a bruised rib, a deep wound, etc). While a bit harsh, I wanted to simulate what it was like to be in a combat where you can’t run when it seems dangerous: You have to stick around until you can’t possibly fight anymore.

I also decided that the rebels would scatter as soon as they were down by half. If they waited longer, they may not have enough hands to help the seriously wounded escape with them. In my simulations, this took somewhere between 25 and 30 rounds. I liked that range because it would make things interesting for the jailbreak team. If they took too much time, they might have a second wave of guards descending upon them. If they moved quickly, they might be able to completely take over the prison and guard house.

I decided that the guards wouldn’t retreat as quickly. After all, they’re right by their stronghold, and the ones in the street are working off the assumption that they have back-up coming any second now.

Because it was possible that the main party might come upstairs and clean house, I decided that I’d simplify combat for those left standing. Rather than worrying about hit points, I’d just worry about landing hits. One hit means dealing half a wound (or maybe a full wound if the damage was high enough). When it comes to mopping up, I don’t generally like to split hairs.

The script

In theory, I could have just a rolled a die every turn and kept track of wounds on paper. I wanted to be able to run the simulation a bunch of times, though. This is cumbersome if doing it with pen and die, but trivial when running code. Running the script a bunch of times helped me adjust the numbers so that the fight was interesting without being impossible.

In fact, the multiple simulations are why half a wound is dealt out rather than a full wound: It made the numbers work how I wanted. It also helped me brainstorm how I might interpret the end results.

This script requires Python 3. Also, you need two CSV files, which I included examples of in the repo. Each line is the NPC’s name, how many wound points they have, and how many wounds they start the combat with (generally zero).

[Script] – [CSV file 1] – [CSV file 2]

How’d it go?

When it came time for the combat, I warned the players that I had a script going that would be simulating the battle above, so they should keep that in mind. I felt it was fair to give them a heads up, since I’d been hand-waving much of the off-screen activity of the rebels.

When the combat started, I fired up the script, advancing it at the end of each round. The players mowed through the combat downstairs, and around round 17 ran upstairs and mopped up the guards the rebels had been fighting. By that point, there were two wounded rebels.

Because they knew time was of the essence, I felt like the players pulled out all the stops to end the combat quickly. At the start of the combat, they had no idea if my script was going to hurt people or outright kill them, which seemed fair. They’d never been in this sort of combat with the younger rebels before, so they couldn’t really predict the outcome.

Afterwards, I explained the mechanics of the script. I felt that the PCs could get a rundown from the rebels as to how it went, so a bit of meta-gaming was fine. They didn’t push back on the consequences, and accepted that the rebels that were wounded were going to be down for a day or two. Heck, one even pointed out that one should be out longer!

Future plans for the script

The script was written for a specific combat, so I knew the damage flying back and forth would be somewhat close. In the future, though, I may want to vary the damage output, making one group weaker or stronger.

I also may want the damage dealt to shift as the groups change. Because my simulations showed the groups always being about the same size, I didn’t worry about this, but I could see a future combat where this might vary quite a bit.

Finally, I may have make the script lethal, especially if my players decide to overthrow all of Cheliax…

Council of Thieves: Book Five (as book four)

Fair warning: This post is a long one, since I had to completely rewrite the book twice. Buckle up.

One of the most common suggestions to people who want to run CoT is that they run the books out of order. Since books one, two, and three focus on stopping the shadow beasts, it only makes sense to continue with that thread rather than take a break for a different adventure.

That said, Book Five took quite a bit of reworking before I felt like it was usable. Besides scaling down, some events had to be removed, and a lot of blanks had to be filled in.

Book Five is also like Book Three in that it’s totally possible to take on the end game right after the first session, skipping over the middle part of the AP. If you’re someone who does Just In Time Prep, you’ve been warned.

What I changed (Part One)

Oh, quite a bit. For pretty much the whole book, I figured out what the absolutely vital piece of information / action for each scene was and then re-wrote everything. I knew I had to hit certain beats, so I focused on those:

Finding out about House Drovange and the Council of Thieves from an insider
Getting some sort of introduction to the Mother of Flies
Rescuing the Mother of Flies so the party can learn about Walcourt
Taking on Walcourt so the party can kill Ilnerick and create / destroy the Aohl

Re-ordering AP events

Due to swapping books four and five, this meant that the fall of the mayor and Senior Drovange couldn’t have happened yet. Therefore, I had to remove any reference to riots or chaos and save those events until after Ilnerick is take care of. Oddly enough, this wasn’t that hard, since most of the book ignores the events in the Crown Sector.

The Kick-Off

The inciting incident involves dealing with a ‘trusted’ new NPC who the players have never met. My group leans towards paranoia, so the chances of them biting were slim. Instead, I pulled out what absolutely had to be introduced with that scene:

Confirmation that Ilnerick is in Westcrown
Some information about house Drovage (including their involvement with the Council of Thieves)
The involvement of the hags in whatever went down when Eccardian was born
The fact that there’s a splinter faction within the CoT

Rather than a new NPC, I used the interlude with the Children of Westcrown to deliver an alchemist to the heroes for questioning. Rugo is a bastard son of Senior Drovage, kept around because he’s utterly loyal, fairly useful, and good to have in case the house is left completely without heirs. With some threatening, he should reveal everything the players need to know in order to move on with the plot.

Mother of Flies

In the book, the players are ambushed while seeking out someone the contact knows, and a follower of the Mother of Flies steps in to help. Instead, I decided to condense things a bit, making the scene where the heroes interrogate Rugo the same scene as the ambush.

To make this work, I moved The Mother of Flies from the Hagwoods to the sewer, reworking her backstory. After her sisters were killed, she fled, but has made her way to the city, hoping to take revenge on the Drovenge family. Unfortunately, her lair was discovered and she’s currently under siege by the Council. At the moment, she’s holding them off, but every day they lose ground.

Some of her agents are still free, and have taken to roaming the sewers, killing reinforcements when they can and looking for a chance to break the siege from the other side.

So, I have two moving parts in the sewers now: Siege reinforcements and Mother allies. As soon as I’m done with the PCs interrogating Rugo, they’re stumbled upon by the reinforcements. As soon as that ruckus is underway, the Mother’s allies come to see what’s going on. After helping out with the combat, the allies can offer some information about the Mother of Flies:

She was chased out of the Hagwoods after her counterparts (Sister and Daughter) were killed
She came to town to enact her revenge
The CoT figured out she was around and have her under siege
Rugo was a part of the massacre and was a target for the Mother. The allies that are behind enemy lines are there because they were doing reconnaissance

The main ally is the from the book (Dog’s Tongue), and will give out enough information to hook the players into at least checking out the Mother of Flies.

If the players help end the siege (which is likely, since the siege is also going to make getting around in the sewers harder if they ignore it), they find out where Walcourt is, the history behind Drovage and the Mother of Flies agrees to hole up away from them and leave town once they enact her revenge for her. After that, the players are free to plan an assault on

And then things went to hell

A good plan never survives contact with the players, but I hadn’t expected them to completely wreck them before we even got to the first session.

I was in the middle of planning Book Five when the players finished Book Three. After clearing out Delvehaven, the players decided to resurrect one of the vampires. She was previously a vampire hunter, so likely to be good or neutral, and probably had information they needed. This obliterated the need for half of next book.

I was weirdly delighted with this turn of events. I was losing an interesting NPC (Ailyn, the Pathfinder Bard) soon, so this would give me someone new to introduce the story. Also, it felt a bit more elegant, since even with reworking, the siege felt awkward. Still, it required some scraping of my plans and figuring out if they even needed to deal with the titular Mother of Flies. After all, they’d have the plans for Walcourt and hints about Drovage being involved with the Council of Thieves. They’d be missing some backstory, but that could be inserted later.

What I changed (Part Two)

I decided to create four plots for this book:

Reviving Vahnwynne (and dealing with the fallout)
Potentially dealing with the Mother of Flies
Doing a favor for the temple of Calistria
Taking on Walcourt

Reviving a slayer

Reviving Vahnwynne comes with three complications: Finding someone to do the resurrection, acquiring a diamond worth 10k, and dealing with the fallout.

As I wrote before, the Temple of Calistria is the only game in town when it comes to doing a non-evil resurrection. The Temple won’t simply take payment for their services (in fact, they’ll refuse it). Instead, they’ll require a favor. They won’t force the players to carry it out before the resurrection, but when they come calling, they’ll most certainly have a window in which to get it done.

Acquiring a diamond is less of an issue, especially since one of the Children of Westcrown happens to be the daughter of a prominent jewelry merchant. The biggest problem there is finding the cash, since much of the previous spoils have gone into buying property or outfitting the rest of the rebels.

Finally, the fallout. I’ll write about this more in another post, but in short, Vahnwynne comes back with emotional scars. She was a CG person who was forced, via the nature of vampirism, to commit evil acts. Coming back, the memories of such events stay with her, haunting her days and nights. It also doesn’t help that she’s brought back by a group of strangers. If they want her help, the PCs will have to invest some time in getting to know her (and her issues) and helping her recover.

The Mother of Flies

With the resurrection of Vahnwynne, the Mother of Flies becomes unnecessary when it comes to pushing the plot forward. She has some interesting information about the backstory of the Drovage family, but that’s about it.

Rather than use her as an arbitrary stumbling block, I decided to make her optional. I also opted to place her in the sewers of Westcrown (as suggested in a Paizo forum thread) in order to tighten up the plot. She fled from the Hagwoods with a band of followers and has resettled in forgotten part of the sewers, plotting her revenge against Drovage. At the time of the AP, she’s been discovered and is currently under siege.

Vitti, the rebels’ druid, can clue the main PCs in on her existence. In my game, he’s been mapping the sewers, and would note that there’s some strange activity going on. The usual signs of life are disappearing and they’re running into more groups of humans. The players can opt to follow this thread if they want, with the reward being information and a possible alliance, either against Walcourt or for one of their more long-term goals. It also doesn’t hurt that a victory would mean taking out a good chunk of the Council of Thieves standing forces.

I also changed the hook, since the players rarely use the sewers to go anywhere. Instead, two of the CoW (Vitti and Larko, for my game), barely escape an encounter with a band of Council thugs. They tell the PCs what happened and leave it up to them what to do next: Investigate, delay, or ignore the threat.

The Siege

Moving the Mother of Flies underground meant I had to redo the siege. The book lays it out as a rather linear experience involving a lot of enemy fey, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, so I redid it to make it feel more like a group of people being penned in.

The center of the siege is the Mother’s hut, which she placed at a very specific point in order to draw on its power. There are three open areas around her hut, which were originally intended as space for their camp to grown. The Council’s thugs now occupy those spaces, however, blocking her and hers in.

The thugs, at this point, have tried a few pushes, but quickly found that the Mother’s crew can do some serious damage to them. Mother’s side, however, has found that they can’t make a move without the two other sides falling upon their back line. Even if they coordinate with Dog’s Tooth’s group, it still leaves them vulnerable. Both sides are at an impasse.

Each side has about 15 people in it, though several of those people are slaves (something the fey don’t recognize as different than any other enemy). Each group is comprised of one lower level magic caster, one lower level priest, a mix of fighters and rogues, a ranger, and a skald / bard / some other force multiplier. The highest level enemies will be whoever escaped from the fight in the sewers.

Calistria

I’ll be detailing this subplot in another post, but the short version is that the players are tasked with recovering the body of a murdered temple priestess and punishing those responsible in whatever manner seems fit. This will take the crew out of town to a manor, allowing for a nice change in scenery and a chance to use some of their more esoteric skills.

Walcourt

I wasn’t a huge fan of Walcourt as it was in the book. It looks like a fun romp… for any other game. The tone of my game had gotten a bit grim, so I decided to remove some of the goofier elements and play up the corruption of Ilnerick. Rather than being a standard hive, I fashioned it to mimic a Pathfinder lodge, specifically, Delvehaven. The motifs and decor will be familiar to the PCs, and some of the vampires will be former Pathfinders who were tempted too close to his lair.

I ended up using the wonderful Village to Pillage: Murder Mansion as my map. I left most of the levels furnished, only bothering to customize the basement. In game, Walcourt formerly belonged to a noble house that fell during the Chelish civil war. The manor and its lands have never been rehabilitated, in spite of the fact that it sits in the middle Crown Sector. The official reason for this is that the matter of ownership is unclear since many houses could possibly lay claim to the land and the house, but the leaders of Westcrown have made it clear that whoever claims the land must also pay the back taxes on it. Unofficially, Walcourt is kept empty so that the Council of Thieves has a secure location on the island.

Also, you have to keep your pet vampire somewhere, right?

How did it go?

The kick off

Session one was basically set-up for the entire book, What Lies in Dust style. The players got all the hooks during this session and were given no particular order in which to do them. Vahnwynne was raised, they found out about something going on in the sewers, the deal with the temple of Calistria was struck, and they learned the location of Walcourt.

The players immediately accepted that their newly risen party member was traumatized and set about ways to alleviate it. They dug deep into their various tricks to find spells, skills, concoctions, and treasure to figure out ways to help her, which is always nice to see as a GM.

Dropping all the hooks on them at once also seemed to work well, since it gave them freedom to prioritize. The book is very linear, so I’m glad I reworked the plot so that they’re not dependent on each other.

The sewers, the fey, and the siege

The players decided to go into the sewers first, reasoning that if the sewers were now off-limits, the CoW were going to have a harder time getting around.

I set up a crew of Council reinforcements for them to stumble upon. I made it a CR 13 encounter, figuring I’d let the players get into a dangerous situation and then have the red cap Dog’s Tooth step in. He could help turn the tide and get the players moving on the Mother of Flies plot.

One misstep I made: I underestimated my players. They actually did fairly well against the reinforcements, even if the encounter was running long. I had meant to get them to the fey hideout this session, but I ended up having to stop right after introducing Dog’s Tooth.

Meeting the fey

In the third session, the group met Dog’s Tooth and his camp, and it confirmed my suspicions: If the PCs started with common ground with the fey, they’d have no problem making a deal with them. They figured out that many of the fey in the camp were evil, but knowing from the start that they had a common enemy and that the fey intended to leave town after their revenge was had, they decided to play ball.

The PCs got some rough details from Dog’s Tooth about the siege, letting them know that the battlefield had three areas, and that each one held ten to fifteen mortals. This was where I ran into a small problem.

If you give your players some rebels…

…They’ll want to bring the rebels to the fight.

After hearing about the number of potential combatants, the players immediately started planning on bringing all of the Children of Westcrown with them. All of them. I choked at first, since that meant I’d have fourteen friendly NPCs to control.

I almost said no, but then I decided to think about it. After some discussion with my husband (who’s also one of my players), I worked up a solution that would, hopefully, keep combat moving and keep me from having to control an absurd amount of mobs.

The system ended up working quite well. The combat never got bogged down, and while it was still a long fight (around two hours), it never felt slow or drawn out.

The fallout

The players were happy that they were able to clear out a chunk of the Council and got to learn a bit more about the Drovage family. They were also interested in forging an alliance with the fey, though I decided to delay that a bit. The fey informed the players that they had to relocate, and that they would be in contact once that was done.

The players also decided to take a few prisoners from the siege so that they could find out where the other hideouts for the CoT were… which involved maps I totally did not have. Between sessions, I threw together a few possible encounters: A main gathering place for the CoT thugs, a tavern just outside of town (used as a secret entrance to the city), and a warehouse in the docks (mostly for smuggling goods into and out of the city).

Calistria

I had major worried about this side-quest, since there was a chance that the players could seriously foul it up. I decided to heed the advice of Matt Colville, though, and not worry about how the players would get themselves out of a jam.

In the end, the players did perfectly fine: They got out with everything they needed and even made few new allies along the way. It was also a nice break from a combat-heavy book.

The warrens

In the end, the only place that the players ended up hitting up was the Warrens. Once again, I grabbed one of the awesome Village to Pillage maps, tossed in a ton of NPCs, and let the players go nuts. They captured a few guild members, allowing me to toss some more information at them.

The most important discovery was a coded note with instructions to watch certain people. While the players were able to decode the text portions of it, the names of the actual people were left as a mystery. They did manage to get a few names out of the captured thieves, but they didn’t manage to grab the ones who would have been able to tell them that they, the PCs, were on that list.

This was fully intentional, as I wanted to make the players a tiny bit paranoid without sending them into a frenzy of self-defense. Sometimes, a GM needs to be a bit evil, okay?

Delvehaven

Finally, after getting their insider (resurrected Vahnwynne) better and raising some hell, the group descended upon Delvehaven.

Honestly, while this encounter looked super tough on paper, the group breezed through it. They used their insider knowledge, planned the heck out of what they were going to do, and brought all the higher level people with them. Illnerick never stood a chance.

If I could do it again…

Looking back, I’m not sure I’d change a thing. I liked how the book played out, I figured out how to run large-ish combats, and the players seemed to enjoy themselves.

One thing that did bug me: Downtime. With this book, I offered a ton of downtime, spreading out the major events over months. There was nothing especially pressing. Even the request from Calistria didn’t have a due date (as long as they didn’t put it off too long). This lead to the number of sessions doubling, which wasn’t a bad thing, per se, but caused the tension to ease up a bit too much.

I decided that was fine, though. After all, it just made removing all downtime in the next book more distressing…