@T.J.L. Wow. In my second ToA group (the chatizens) they took the "Dyeing Man" hook and escorted him up to Ft. Belurian. They didn't inquire at all about his "errand" nor did they notice him sneaking out in the night to kill Shago, so got swept up in the reaction by Liara. They handled themselves well so ended up only getting banished from Ft. B.

Then, a few hexes away, ran into an FF patrol demanding a charter.

They're pretty torqued. I'd say it's going well =)

@nitsua60 I've never gotten much traction with those mini-quests. I'm running under AL rules, which only allow me to give out the published rewards, and there isn't enough of a reward to any of them. My people were looking for things to finance their expedition. The only one with decent cash (the pirates) is half way across the peninsula.

I did have some fun with a couple of random FF encounters, though. I rolled one early, the day they were heading into the jungle. I had them show up as the group was getting ready to push off into the river. The party was outnumbered like... 3:1, but they cleaned house. I rolled FF again later, and hit them at night with a smaller group mounted on dinosaurs. They still won, but it was much less one-sided.

@T.J.L. This was their session-1 material. (I'd given each of them a different "side quest" hook in their intro handout. If they took none of them that'd be fine, but they were happy to jump on one of the "obvious miniquests" to start things off.

Where are yours now? My punchspace group just snagged the last cube from Ras Nsi then took an hour to kill the King of Feathers before (tonight, presumably) cracking open the door to the Tomb of the Nine Gods. They're level 7.

=D

I've got one group that's around L9, and should be finishing up the 4th floor and starting on the 5th tonight.

My second group is around L7, but they're the ones that didn't leave Nyanzaru until L5 (by my design). They're in the Mistcliffs, heading for Hrakhamar.

One group I play in is L6 or so, and they're going to visit the Heart of Ubtao before they head to Omu.

The other group I play in is around L7 or so (I'm L9, because I joined late with an existing character). We've got eight cubes, so we're going to hit the Fane next week. We know about the back door, so I suspect it'll be a commando raid. :)

You've got 4 ToA groups you're running/playing in!?

Yup.

When I finish running the furthest along group, I'll probably stop playing in the further back group. They have some common players, one of which I don't care for.

I kind of got stuck with him because he was new to the store I was running in. He's not a new player, though. He's a loot-stealing advance-reading jerk. I'm going to wait until I'm done DMing for him to drop the other, to limit the potential drama.

One of the players in that game is the DM of the other game. He invited the distasteful player to join.

He read ToA so he knew about the whole no-teleportation thing. His girlfriend of all people used Dimension Door in an effort to rescue his character. Despite the fact that it was not being used in an effort to escape (it was pure line of sight, just longer than Misty Step could handle), it does trigger the wards. I'd forgotten it, because it wasn't actually be used to get out.

He felt it appropriate to correct a GM-error-in-his-favor, which resulted in his character's death and his girlfriend's character's death. What kind of putz does that? That's the kind of thing you bring up after the game.

I mean, in theory... you could say he was trying to keep things "fair". However, when you combine that with all the more subtle microaggressions, his motivations become clear - it's a power thing. He needs to be right.