NPCs, Take 2: Rosie Cusswell

Ah, Rosie. Rosie is almost unworthy of a mention when it comes to character mods, as she hardly required any. The only information we are given about her in the AP is that she has a short temper, a foul mouth, loves food and drink, and is obsessed with her violin. She is a fighter, and gets violent if anyone tries to relieve her of her axes. Clearly she did not come from high society.

Fortunately, being a halfling in 5e Forgotten Realms makes it easy to see how a halfling could be mean-tempered. After all: their homeland was just flooded, and many of them left homeless beggars in human slums. If she grew up on the streets, this explains why she's a rough-and-tumble fighter, and a dual wielder--a feature we associate with roguish personalities. I very nearly swapped her class to rogue, in fact, but ultimately decided I wanted the heartier flavour of a Champion fighter.

The only bit that still stood out was the violin. Even on her PF stat block, there is no mechanical representation of why she is so attached to the instrument, nor if she can even play. There is likewise no mention of an explanation in her introductory paragraph. I knew my players would be inclined to return Rosie's violin if it meant earning her friendship, and knew they wouldn't accept 'just because' as a reason for why the halfling possessed it in the first place. However, while I wanted an explanation for Rosie's musical ambitions, I also did not want to add an element to her character that did not do something to further the story. Thus, ultimately, I looked to the Factions of the Forgotten Realms setting.

The Inspiration

Gandalf! OK, not really Gandalf, but rather I decided to invoke an old story-telling trope involving a wise mentor, who usually dies early on in the adventurer's career. If Rosie's character was a rough-and-tumble street kid, and her music was the only hint of a softer side, then I decided it must come from someone who was dear to her, and who was taken from her prematurely. Perhaps someone who tried to get her off the streets and show her a better way of life. With the item in question being a string instrument, I couldn't resist using a Harper. 

The Final Form

Ultimately, this is the background I gave Rosie on her character sheet: 

"Short & fierce, Rosie was born in Luskan, where she learned the harsh realities of street life. She was a thug & a bully, & saw no need to ever aspire to be anything else. Then one night, she got in over her head. About to be pummelled, she was saved by the surprise intervention of a middle-aged gentleman who took out her assailants wielding only his reinforced bow string. The man was a bard named Gilian, a sailor who travelled the seas fighting & entertaining. He became a mentor to her, like the father she'd never had. It was Gilian who taught Rosie to love music, & that there could be more to life than fighting for survival. He told her stories that softened her heart, & made her realize a romantic side of herself. Rosie had planned to go with him on his next adventure & studying as a bard, as soon as he returned to port from a brief trip at sea. He didn't return, however, & Rosie later learned his ship was lost. Disheartened, she went on a wild spree of drinking & wasting away, which eventually landed her on the Wormwood."

I also gave her a Harper Pin as her only token of her mentor, which she wears as a necklace. I felt that this gave her a direction to grow in, should the PCs recruit her, and possible plot hooks there. I also purposefully avoided making the violin a possession of some lost love, as I wanted to use that background on another character. I also suspected that, if the PCs latched onto her for no other reason, the hint of Harpers might alone be enough to make them curious about the halfling. 

I statted her as a Stout Halfling, and a Champion Fighter. I very nearly gave her the Urchin background, but ultimately settled on Entertainer, figuring her ability to play would probably be the prevailing plot hook if she stuck around long enough for the ship to make shore. 

I gave her the personality traits of speaking her mind (loudly), and secretly being a hopeless romantic, both of which are implied in her PF description. For her ideal, I gave her a 'follow your dreams' to go with her newly-acquired back-story. For bonds, I gave her her violin, and for a flaw, I stuck with her big mouth. 

NPCs, Take 1: Sandara

On a basic level, Sandara's character was quite simple. She was born and raised in a port town by her father, who was a sailor. Here she was exposed to sailing, and learned some tools of the trade at a young age to help her father make ends meet. One day, her father went off to sea and didn't come home. Everyone said his ship was lost. So she prayed to Besmara, the evil goddess of pirates and the sea, and begged her to be merciful. To send Sandara's father back to her. The next day, her father arrived home--wounded, half-drowned, but alive. Thus, Sandara took it as a sign, and became a fervent follower of the wicked Besmara. She helped to spread the faith locally, and became a cleric. But her life took another turn recently, with the death of her beloved follower. Still in mourning, uncertain how to move forward, Sandara wasn't so terribly upset when she woke up press-ganged onto the Wormwood. 

That's all well and good, and would be easy enough to mod to Forgotten realms. 

But where does it go wrong? Well, I did say that was on a basic level. 

The biggest issue with Sandara is that, frankly... she doesn't make sense! She is statted as Neutral, and if she behaved as such, there would be no issue with the above back-story. A Neutral character can be cleric to an evil goddess, especially if they tend to be a low-hanging Neutral. One and done. 

The problem with Sandara is that she doesn't behave that way. Her first introduction to the PCs is that she sees them captured, and all their gear stolen. She therefore risks her own neck, and scares the Quartermaster into giving her some of the PCs gear, the same as she had done a few weeks back to return her own gear. She's already pulled this trick on the Quartermaster once, and this time it is obviously not even her own stuff. This is a needless risk she is taking for the PCs. 

And that would be fine for a Neutral character if she had some reason for it. Perhaps she plans to bribe the PCs, perhaps she intends to return their gear in exchange for loyalty or favours. Nope. She walks right up to one of them and gives them their stuff back--no strings attached. And she does this because she hopes to make friends. This is just one example, of course, but Sandara's biggest problem is that she continued to behave in a way that, frankly, feels Neutral Good. She is pleased when the PCs are not jerks like their captors, believes in loyalty, appreciates if the PCs rescue and befriend other crew members. She even blatantly offers her services as a healer. Which, more to the point, means she has cure rather than inflict spells in PF. Now, while a Neutral cleric can technically pick, it certainly feels like one is riding the 'higher end' of Neutral alignment if one makes that choice. The AP even addresses these inconsistancies, acknowledging that Sandara seems too nice for Besmara. How do they justify it, then? Sandara claims Besmara isn't evil, just misunderstood. 

(You may bang your head on a wall now. Heaven knows I did.)

Altogether, when my team played, we felt that these discrepancies made Sandara feel like a naive and confused individual. It made many of us not want to associate with her. Instead, I wanted to portray her differently--making these apparent contradictions in her character a plot point instead of a confusion. 

The Inspiration

Altogether, when I started thinking about this Sandara problem in a FR context, I kept coming back to this lovely lady, Viconia DeVir. She's a recruit-able party member in the Baldur's Gate series, and is a Neutral Evil cleric of Shar. Why Shar? Well, because the Night Singer's worship allowed her to escape the Underdark, and thus she turned to her worship in thanks. Viconia is a staple party member if you're going the 'evil route' through the BG series, but interestingly can be a valuable party member even if you're playing a good-aligned hero. There are even whole threads here on the interwebs dedicated to keeping her, she's so popular. 

If you recruit Viconia as a good-aligned hero, and you romance her, she eventually asks you if she should try to be a better person, and you get the opportunity to turn her alignment to Neutral. If you encourage her to do so, she retains all her powers, even though she should not by RAW, because this takes her more than 1 step away from Shar's own Lawful Evil alignment. While this could just be an oversight in the game, it has led to a lot of speculation that Viconia's powers were never coming from Shar in the first place, but from a Neutral or Good aligned power all along. This makes sense in some ways, as Viconia had never acted much like a Sharan--Sharan clergy, per lore, are sombre, show no emotion, keep secrets, do not make friends, do not associate with those outside the church. They certainly do not love. 

While it may just be a fan theory (and one seriously doubts BioWare would ever confirm anything outright in that regard), it made an interesting foundation from which to look at Sandara. 

The Final Form

First of all, I decided to make Sandara younger. How young? 20. At first, I had considered going as young as 18, but changed my mind when PC descriptions started to come in, and I realized I wanted someone else to be the 'baby' of the crew. But the point of making her younger was to make it seem a bit more obvious that she is likely in over her head. If she's barely 20 years old now, and she's got 3 cleric levels, we can imagine she would have been only 16 or 17 when she began her worship of the evil sea goddess. So, yes, we're talking about Little Mermaid levels of maturity here. Suddenly that bright-red hair makes sense.

This also did a good job of eliminating the AP's suggestion that she be forced onto a PC as an unwanted love interest. That felt cheap to me, and to no one's surprise, my player's didn't bite on that line at all. Making her younger makes her more sympathetic, instead of trying to awkwardly give her sex appeal, and works just as well to keep the players interested in her.

I otherwise kept her back-story the same, just modified the location to match the new setting. She appears pretty pale, so she could have some Illuskani blood. And that makes Luskan the perfect pirate city for her to have grown up in. Umberlee makes a perfect substitute to Besmara, and is just about as vain and uncaring, so that works nicely. I also decided to blatantly play Sandara as Neutral Good, but retained her proud faith in Umberlee. I had no qualms about portraying her as naive, nor about implying her claim of bravado and expertise was more likely covering up insecurities and un-wept tears. The players lapped it up. I gave her the Tempest domain and the Sailor background, and otherwise left her character mechanically similar to its PF incarnate.

For personality traits, I gave her 'Nothing can shake my optimistic attitude!' from the Acolyte background, and 'I'll look out for those who look out for me.' as a modification of her PF description. I gave her Teamwork as an ideal, and the the open sea as her bond. For flaws, I kept with the burgeoning alcoholism implied in her PF description.

Where are her powers coming from? Who knows. Maybe it is Umberlee. But is she likely to remain happy there much longer? Not likely. Without the threat of death, those Neutral Good inclanations are likely to catch up with her. In a religiously-charged setting like the Forgotten Realms, it's a great looming plot hook, as all of the PCs will likely have their own suggestions about how Sandara should get on with her life, and possibly who she should seek for guidance on that path. I look forward to watching the conflict unfold.

These are your NPCs

(But only Sandara is Important)

The first real issue I faced when modding the Pathfinder AP Skulls and Shackles was not actually the PF-5e conversion. That bit was surprisingly easy--just match a monster here, tweak an xp reward there, sub a skill, drop a DC. The real issue was changing the setting. Pathfinder's Golarion setting is, in many ways, pointedly opposite of that of other fantasy RPGs. In Pathfinder, most of the gods are distant, bickering jerks--and some only attained god-hood by touching a rock! In FR, meanwhile, we have the gods literally walking among us, such that atheism is nearly unheard of. Obviously some changes had to be made. 

The place I decided to start was the key NPCs. After all, the Wormwood crew is supposed to be an important part of the party's lives even after the first book of the AP. At first they're potential friends or enemies, and later they can become crew-mates or recurring villains. 

I was surprised, therefore, when I found next to no information on the crew. Most of the key NPCs have a small blurb, but it leaves a lot to be desired. Shortstone is a gambler. OK, but why is he a gambler? Why is he OK with being pressed ganged onto a ship? Altogether, the backgrounds for NPCs seemed a bit lacking. And that is odd, as the AP expects PCs to spend the first book making friends. Even the villains, I found, had rather scant explanations for their personalities and motives. Scourge is a jerk. Why? Who knows. He hit on Sandara, but he wears a wedding ring. Is he married? Maybe. Plugg is evil and ambitious, and keeps a pet human. He is perpetually angry, but feels no emotion. Is there any sense to any of this? 

Probably not. 

The only NPC fleshed out at all is Sandara, and her story makes relatively little sense. In fact, it almost feels as if she was some author's dream girl, and this is the sole reason she was given any backstory. The very fact that the AP seems to expect the PCs to blindly trust her, and the blatant suggestion she could be a love interest disturbingly seem to support this assertion. 

But Sandara aside, the problem was largely this: 

I had expected to read each character's backstory, and figure out how to move it from one setting to another. But instead, what I found was that there was little backstory to go on at all. That obviously had to change. I know my party, and knew Paizo's scant answers would not satisfy them. The villain can never be evil because the AP says so. He must have a reason for his evil ambition. Likewise, characters must have origins, reasons for being as they are presented. They are not caricatures. 

Why? 

Because players will ask. Players are the most clever things in the world, and they will not let you get away with a hand-wave. Thus, I decided the place to start my mod was to take each core NPC, gather what little characterization they were given, and flesh them out into full characters for the Forgotten Realms setting. From there, all else could be built. 

Playing Paizo in Faerun

It's a Brand New Day

Or year as the case may be. Actually, it's now nearly been 2 since the last time I decided to make use of my D&D blog. The reasons were simple: while I continued to keep close record of my party's adventures, demands of school and work eventually eliminated any free time which I had once used to convert those adventures to prose. 

The group I had meant to document is still together, having finished our adventures in the Underdark. In fact, our actions at the end of OotA ended up launching our own personal version of the Forgotten Realms setting, which we have been playing all our games in ever since. 

Why then have I returned? Certainly it's not to dominate the ranks of Blogger. 

I have returned now because I have become the second DM of the group I play with--and have been so for some time, in fact. But the niche I have fallen into, in that role, is unique at best. And, after a particularly intensive week of preparing for my weekly session, it has occurred to me that this might once again be an affair worth documenting. 

My group still plays in 5th edition D&D and, as previously stated, in the Forgotten Realms setting. That being said, as wonderful as the arrival of 5e has been for my group, the rate at which APs are produced... leaves a bit to be desired. With all the official 5e adventures going to my comrade, our primary DM, I found myself searching for other places to locate material suitable for adventuring. Eventually, I settled on Pathfinder. 

Though set in the far-off world of Golarion, and designed for a wildly different d20 system, the Pathfinder APs provided a source of unique material that I knew no other players in my D&D group would touch. This made them ideal for campaign crafting without having to worry about spoilers or repetition for my players. Having played Pathfinder in my (unfortunate) younger years of tabletop gaming, I was familiar with the system and its setting, and felt confident I could manage the APs--most of which I had played at least in part. But the problem of course was obvious: wrong setting, wrong RPG, and using rules, gold, and DCs more suited to D&D 3.5 than 5e. 

The problems would be two-fold: I would have to mod both the AP's mechanics from PF to D&D 5e, and the setting from Golarion to 'modern-day' Faerun. While this wasn't too much of a bother, it did create interesting changes in the Pathfinder APs which--coupled with my group's unique play-style--resulted in campaign decisions that I have seen detailed nowhere else. Thus, it occurred to me that maybe I should throw my group's play experiences out there, as well as my musings on PF-5e and setting mods in general. And thus, our adventures begin with the first... 

Skulls & Shackles

Though one of Paizo's more-recent (ie in the last 5 years) modules, the Skulls and Shackles adventure path was one of the first I decided to mod. The decision was made by my team, who selected it from a list of potential campaigns I had offered them. It was convenient, however, as I had actually played much of this one, and had been sad when my own S&S group fell apart. 

------Spoilers to Follow------

In its original Pathfinder incarnation, the AP is set in the wild world of the Shackles--a coastal and island region of Golarion where Free Captains rule, and there is little other law of the land. The PCs find themselves dragged into this world--literally in some cases--as they are press-ganged one drunken evening onto the crew of a pirate ship. Here, the PCs are faced with a harsh and unfamiliar world, and must eventually mutiny or die when the opportunity at last presents itself. Now, finding themselves the unexpected owners of a small pirate ship, its rag-tag crew, and trapped in hostile territory, the PCs must become pirates themselves if they ever hope to see home again. 

The AP is littered with hints of its overarching plot--a wicked attempt by the Infernal nation, Cheliax, to take over the Shackles and end its union of Free Captains once and for all. But this plot is not immediately apparent to the PCs, who are usually busier with surviving and building their pirate empire. 

------End of Spoilers------

The AP doesn't specify any particular alignment, and in fact any can be played. Evil characters obviously have a reason to remain pirates once on their own, though evil PCs tend to prevent their own problems. Particularly in 5e, where most evil PCs are banned in organized play, and the various books all declare sermons against evil characters, evil isn't really an option. And it certainly never is one at our table. So, evil aside, what's left? 

The AP seems to expect the PCs to be neutral. They are not initially pirates--or at least not the majority of them--when they are press ganged. This suggests that the characters' initial intent is probably not to become the next great pirate lords. After the PCs escape, however, the AP makes it clear that they cannot just return to their old lives. They are trapped in the Shackles, and would have to sail through hostile pirate territory to make it home again. And, without a reputation and enough power to make them feared, any attempts to return home would probably result in another press-ganging. Thus, the PCs must become pirates--and the AP initially suggests they do so by raiding merchant vessels and small villages for plunder. Perhaps they'll even sell some prisoners from the mutiny as slaves! 

The fact that the PCs did not start out pirates, but are expected to leap so whole-heartedly into the pirate's life suggests to me that the AP expects neutral characters. And, indeed, most of the blogs detailing S&S games on the internet seem to feature these sort of parties. But there is a third option: good alignment. While it may seem like an odd choice in a pirate game, in 2 out of 2 S&S games I have participated in, this was the general net alignment of the parties. When I was a player, my good-aligned group had intended to become privateers--to pirate other pirates, and the likes of the Chelish navy, while seeking answers on behalf of the Free Captains' council. 

My players, without consulting each other, rolled up 4 Chaotic Good, 1 Neutral Good, and 1 Chaotic Neutral character. Thus I found myself in an interesting situation. Not only would I have to mod the setting, characters, and game mechanics, but also some key parts of the AP to better suit a good-aligned party. Thus, I decided it would be an experience worth sharing, and will be detailing the highlights here whenever I have the time.