The Story So Far…

Technology is pretty neat.

I’m currently running a Pathfinder 2e campaign that started as the Strength of Thousands Adventure Path, but is now something all my own.

A little background, I run Pathfinder 2e for a number of reasons. First, the character options available are so much more interesting than you’d find as compared to DnD 5e. Two people can play the same class and have drastically different characters.

I also liked the crunchier combat rules. Combat is more about maneuver and involves more decision making than with DnD. I will say that it is more complex, but we are assisted by technology.

I play virtually using FoundryVTT which makes playing Pathfinder 2e and running a game an absolute joy. Playing 5e on Foundry is difficult as you are limited as to what’s on the 5e SRD, but all the Pathfinder stuff is Open Game License and so everything is open source. And we have a great community of developers working to make playing Pathfinder 2e on FoundryVTT truly a first class experience.

I mentioned previously that I’ve been doing modified Strength of Thousands Adventure Path.

I was previously running a West Marches style campaign in 5e and had taken a break because I was interested in transitioning to Pathfinder because of its improved mechanics. So as soon as we wrapped up a story arc, we transitioned to a new campaign to test out Pathfinder. We liked the system, and that’s when Strength of Thousands came out.

I loved the idea of a magical high school, and immediately thought of Harry Potter, Mean Girls, Fantasy High, any John Hughes movie as inspiration.

So we started to run Strength of Thousands as sort of a prequel to the West Marches campaign that was taking place “present day.” It’s been fun letting them see younger versions of NPCs that they all had previously encountered. Seeing their reactions when they realized that the NPC they were talking to was the BBEG they had vanquished previously was probably my favorite moment so far.

But here’s the thing. I learned that I don’t really like running prewritten adventures. I have my opinions about things. So midway through the first adventure path book, we took a detour. Perhaps detour is too strong of the term. I used it to start the campaign and now it’s essentially going to be homebrew from here out.

I think that things took a turn because I was a bit low on creativity at the start of the campaign but a month in, I started to watch more actual plays again and do more reading and got a lot of ideas and inspiration. I had the players leave the school on an adventure, and the first town they came across, I ran the introductory scenario from Call of the Netherdeep. Adapted to Pathfinder, of course.

So this campaign will be a bit of Empire Strikes Back. A bit of Rogue One. My players know that its not going to be a happy ending, that they will be facing a foe that causes a calamity.

But the biggest lesson I’ve learned so far is that I am incredibly creative so long as I keep fueling by reading and watching creative works.