When The Sinister Stone of Sakkara kickstarter closes, I’ll be sending a word document to the backers with the current draft of the dungeon. This forum will be the place for playtesting feedback.
You can use this thread to alert me of any things you’re desperately hoping to see in our first starter module. This will help me stress out and feel inadequate when I see how many things we didn’t include. I kid, I kid. Obviously I already have a chart written that tells me how inadequate to feel.
I would love to see a bit of explicit information about the Auran Empire setting. Things like a 1-2 paragraph overview of the major nations and ethnic groups, a page on the different deities, a bit of information on what demihumans think of each other… basically a brief introduction to the kind of stuff we’ll see in the Campaign Setting book.
Backed and excited!
Something I’d like to see is little sidebar notes tying the keep, adventure and monsters into the ACKS system.
Perhaps a few notes on the dungeon (for example a short note about gold vs xp value, or ‘note that owlbear fur counts as monster pelts, and can be sold at the market’)? Speaking purely for myself, I can use a few pointers to tie the dungeon bash into the greater ACKS system of trade, domains and hijinks.
After all, this is the cool thing about ACKS, and it deserves to be highlighted as much as possible!
From the description in the Kickstarter, I can see you’re already doing this for the Türos Tem keep. Lists of revenue, building costs, etc. Cool!
Having said all that, Autarch is pretty damn good at supporting their products through these forums, so it would be equally valid to just add this type of info through blog posts and forum threads. I’m convinced it will be an excellent product either way.
I’d hope for less redundancy than that with the Campaign Setting book, but more explicit applications of the broad descriptions that we have there.
What are some architectural or ritual details of the Shrine/Temple of the Seven in the town (assuming there is one) that I can use to make it come alive for the players, and are these typical of the religion or local variation?
What are some architectural / decorative details of the town’s construction that are distinctive? What’s typical?
This is exactly the sort of detail the module currently provides. Here’s examples:
Rising from the tor, Türos Tem’s curtain walls stand 10’ in height and thickness, and are surmounted with battlements 5’ tall and 3’ thick. Wall-walks, paved with stone slabs, run along the top of the curtain walls behind the battlements. The wall-walks are accessed by wooden stairs found in the mural towers at the fort’s four corners. The curtain walls were built with local limestone, but have been rendered and white-washed, such that they gleam brightly by day. In this way, the fort symbolically reflects the glory of the Winged Sun.
The curtain walls enclose a five-acre area of packed earth containing the dozen buildings that house the garrison. Except where otherwise noted, all of the interior buildings (as well as the inn and bathhouse outside the walls) are constructed of rendered and white-washed limestone and furnished with sloped roofs of red tile. Their interior walls are of plastered and white-washed wattlework, while interior flooring is cement.
A small village nestles around the western edge of the tor. Other than the inn and bath house (buildings 22 and 23), the villages’ buildings are largely of half-timbered construction, using oak frames infilled with wattlework, with earthen floors.
11a. Courtyard: At the center of the open-air courtyard stands an 8’ tall marble statue of Mityara, the White Lady, holding up an ever-burning torch. (The torch is kept continuously aflame by an ingenious mechanism that pumps lamp oil from a reservoir inside the statue onto the torch-head.) Stone prayer-benches, garlanded with flowers, sit catercorner to the statue. The remainder of the courtyard is planted with medicinal herbs, including birthwort, comfrey, goldenrod, and woundwort. Characters with Naturalism proficiency can extract up to 10lbs of each plant with proficiency throws of 8+.
The courtyard is an illuminated pinnacle of good. Because of its effects, patients of the hospital heal an extra 1d3 hit points during each day of complete rest, provided they visit the courtyard daily. Lawful divine spellcasters within the courtyard calculate their spell effects as if two class levels higher than their actual level of experience. Lawful characters performing ritual magic in the illuminated pinnacle gain a +1 bonus to their magic research throws. A pinnacle of good is the opposite of a sinkhole of evil, described in ACKS p. XX. Pinnacles of good will be explored further in later ACKS supplements.
Priestess Genelen (see p. XX for details), administrator of the hospital, can be found here from sunup to sundown. When not attending to patients or leading prayers, she tends the garden. The courtyard is usually empty at night, though every seventh night Genelen and her hospitalists will be found here maintaining a night-time vigil before the ever-burning torch.