Advice for GMs running Ian A. Thomson's Pavis & Big Rubble Companion (Spoilers!)

[Gary Norton]

I'm preparing to run Ian's Grand Pavis Plan campaign and I'm finding this to be the most challenging campaign that I have ever run. I can imagine this will be true for many other game masters considering this campaign.

I thought it might be helpful to have a place for GMs to give advice to other GMs. I plan to contribute my own thoughts & ideas. I would love to see contributions from other GMs, especially from any who have already started running the campaign.

The Grand Pavis Plan comprises a huge amount of material. This starts out with Ian's series that is currently projected to run to 9 volumes. The series also references a lot of other material from Chaosium and Moon Design. Some of that material is out-of-print and some is in-print. Fortunately, Chaosium is beginning to re-release several RQ3 supplements from the 1990s that are part of the campaign. Once you put all of these documents together, we're looking at thousands of pages of material and dozens of well developed adventures to run.

Organizationally, however, it's all a bit of a nightmare. Player facing material, including backgrounds and cults, is spread out over many documents (including Volumes 1-5 of Ian's series). Details on locations and NPCs are spread over two dozen documents. I'm struggling to wrap my head around all of the information so that I'm well prepared to run the campaign.

[Gary Norton]

My first suggestion is to get Pavis - Gateway to Adventure (published in 2012). While this book was published as part of the HeroQuest line, it is a fabulous resource for New Pavis (specifically) and Prax (generally). This book is my go-to resource for New Pavis as it adds many new NPCs to the campaign; many of whom are referenced in Ian's campaign. This book really helps develop New Pavis.

Even more important is the support for running adventures. The most obvious part are the four substantial scenarios, three of which are already included in Ian's campaign. I've found it straight-forward to develop HeroQuest adventures into other game systems because the HQ adventures are heavily focused on the story. As a GM, you then need to add in location maps and create or adapt NPC opponents that the PCs will face.

In addition, there are almost 40 one-page encounters set in New Pavis. These can easily be inserted as short role-playing (mostly) vignettes in the city-based part of the campaign. Similarly, there's another 50 pages of short encounters set all over Prax.

Unfortunately, this book may be difficult to find. I quickly found one copy online selling for $135.

[svensson]

Hey, if you're looking for a player hit me up!

 

I will say that one thing about the Grand Pavis campaign is that you don't end up running up against the d20 level limit of 20th level 😆

I was able to buy Sartar and Pavis books at my FLGS. Most of the material is reprints from various RQ3 sources that were relabeled for Prax, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful for on-the-fly material for the GM.

[Gary Norton]

One of my primary goals for the overall campaign is to run as many of the other adventures set in Prax; this includes adventures from the Jonstown Compendium as well as adventures from fanzines like Tales of the Reaching Moon. I also intend to include all of the optional adventures referenced by Ian. 

To make this all fit, I'm starting the campaign two years earlier than Ian's timeline. One year was added to incorporate Tales of the Sun Dome Militia. A second year was added to allow time for all of the pieces of the Borderlands campaign to fit.

1617: PCs arrive in New Pavis in Sea Season. They get a chance to explore the city, but then they have the encounter with the Fine Fellows and they find themselves in the Lunar Empire justice system. In Ian's campaign, the PCs are assigned to Draximedes for the duration of the Ghost in the Darkness adventure. I'm changing this assignment to the Sun Dome Militia for the remainder of the year. The PCs travel to Sandheart and partake in most of the adventures from Jonathan Webb's Tales of the Sun Dome Militia. A good background reference is Life and Traditions under the Sun Dome (Jonstown Compendium). I reordered the adventures to fit the seasonal references:

Fire Season: Gaumata’s Vision (Shadows on the Borderlands) and The God Skin (Volume 4)

Earth Season: Fortunate Son (Volume 2) and The Corn Dolls (Volume 2)

Dark Season: No Country for Cold Men (Volume 1) and Tradition (Sandheart 3)

Storm Season: Sins of the Father (Tales of the Reaching Moon #14) and Rabbit Hat Farm (Sun County)

Then the PCs partake in Ghost in the Darkness and return to New Pavis.

1618: The PCs begin exploring the Big Rubble. First up is Finding Nymu followed by other rubble adventures that come under the rubric of Ian's self-directed adventures. I plan to use  Insula of the Rising Sun and Insula of the Waning Moon (both from Jonstown Compendium). If there's other rubble adventures I can find, I'll try to toss them in here.

In Ian's version, Finding Nymu occurs prior to Ghost in the Darkness. I moved Finding Nymu to delay the entry of the PCs into the Big Rubble until they have some more experience under their belts. This also helps lump their initial explorations of the Big Rubble into consecutive sessions.

1619: The events of Rough Business send the PCs off to work for Duke Raus. This year incorporates the many events in the Borderlands campaign. I also want to fit in the Stone and Bone mini-campaign (Jonstown Compendium) along with Ian's expansions of Borderlands. This is also a good opportunity to find other adventures set in this area of Prax.

1620+: Rejoin Ian's campaign starting with the remainder of Volume 3. If some new material gets published on the Jonstown Compendium, I might be able to add them somewhere in the remainder of the series.

[Runeblogger]

This is a good plan to get started. My advice is to forget about following this order strictly and instead focus more on developing adventures around the goals your adventurers set for themselves.

[Ian A. Thomson]

Both times I was running the campaign I incorporated a fair few other scenarios and always adapted and tweaked them to fit my style and Players' style

I am definitely imagining at least some others will do the same with my campaign.

There are a bundle more index type documents (some from Gary) destined to be added to the free PDFs bundle any day now, so don't forget to take advantage of them

In the end we hope to have indexes of everything anyone might ever want to search for in the campaign. Already there are Cults and RGQ Stats and other things. Feel free to throw out requests

The biggest piece of advice I think I can offer, which most people might have seen mentioned in the books is to simplify mechanics, especially combat. Get rid of as many dice rolls as possible. It's a LONG campaign

When I was first a Player of RQ, combat sometimes used to take 2hrs of a 4hr gaming session, because of all the mechanics, and it meant we got significantly less adventuring done.

Fortunately I had played Stormbringer (combat also written by Steve Perrin) and it was much faster, especially once you got used to it. So when I started running the campaign I had a goal to keep combat mechanics to a maximum of a third as long as they used to take. So Stormbringer it was

These rules are still around in a different format (I forget what its called) with all Stormbringer references removed

We also simplified them even more for 'mooks'. I can't remember the details, but facing some weak foe rolls were minimal or even reduced to one roll from the Player and then Narration. "Oh, you rolled a Fumble. That's real bad. D4 is lost from your general HP and you will have an impressive scar. Plus you have a lot of trollkin blood and entrails on you."

I had tables for a lot of these things as well, expanding on the Stormbringer Combat results table/s. Making them as diverse as i could for the results of combat. This still worked very well in terms of tension and drama

Later on in the second Campaign we transferred to a D20 system, which was even slightly faster

Edited November 23 by Ian A. Thomson

[Graeme P]

Happy to chime in with how I am approaching the campaign.

I suspect I started with a similar idea to Gary - there is so much good stuff set in the River of Cradles - how can I get it all into one mega-campaign?  So I spent time trying to work out how to fit all that in, as well as how to do it in a way that the charcters interated in at least some of the Griselda stories.  I used the Pavic Story Arc that Simon Phipp published on his website and updated it for everything that had come out to that point.  All of this was abut 4-5 year ago.  I got to the point where I thought it was (a) too crowded and (b) too daunting to run as a sngle campaign.  Also, it (to my mind at least) was less believeable in the omnibus form as for a while the characters are having to be loyal to Sun County as members of the Sandheart Militia or running around doing the Sun County advantures, or the roleplaying of it is going to have a significant undertone of the restrictive societal rules of the County getting in the way. Then suddenly they are heading up the rivier doing the best they can to help the Zola Fel and after that they are loyal Pavis worshippers working ont he Grand Plan.  Given the way cults work and the commitment one makes in joining on (and rising to rune level status) the idea of doing all of this became too unweildy for me.

So iI decided that the advantures set in and around Sun Conty would be enough to be their own campaign - starting with the Sandheart series then into Sun County and Shadows etc.  Anything where the party has to leave Sun County for a while is handily filled by Borderlands.

That focusses the rest of the adventurs to be ones which felt (to me at least) more in the spirit of Ian's original campaign, and more focussed n what it ultimately the aim (some Grand Plan or Scheme, I suspect  🙂 ).  In the running of it, this has worked well. My group are Real City natives, so are about that tradition and about extending the Pavic influences.  They started out more anti-troll than anti-Lunar due to character generaton passions, but that is changing as the Lunars become more interfering.

As a broad outline, so far I have run:

• an intro inside Real City entirely based upon a GodLearner podcast idea about a market and the shenanigans that can arise;
• Rough Business from PGtA
• Troubled Waters (RoC)
• Flintnail's One Day House (TT #9)
• Raid on Yelornas (BR)
• Finding Nymu (which ended with a bunch of folk frantically running across the open ground to the river carrying a large table whilst being followed by a horde of angry trolls); and
• Ghost in the Darkness (current).

We have had 55 gaming sessions.

Filling it all out with flavour and connection to their home town, family and culture has ben included - there have been quite a few attendances at ceremonies at the Pavis Temple, and so they have seem the Priests assembled in full regalia (including three with Masks on the High Holy Days).  From this we now have particualr food - Pavisbread, which is a small flatloaf marked with the Harmony rune on top and which is only available on GodDay.  Also many dinners and drinks at the Real City Inn where they have now become trusted enough to be able to go to the 'honour' bar where you self-serve and pay into the till directly.

There have also been various solo interludes - one character has a frosty but productive relationship with Griselda, for example.  I use these for the character development aspects each player wants for their character which wouldn't work well in a group session.

All the above plus all that is to come is more than enough for the characters to reach rune level (probably at around volume 5 or 6 - I do experience rolls at the end of story beats, not just once a season).  Looking at it from what I would want as a player it would be (i) to achieve their aims in their cult - be that Head of the Watch, a Rune Level, running the zebra breeding program in Manside etc.) and (ii) be part of an epic finale where the character is powerful enough to have made an impact in (hopefully) achieving success.  Extended time spent playing essentially another campaign before getting back to the main game is someting I don't really see as necessary - I'll run it as a different campaign.

So I started with a similar idea but ended up having taken a different approach.

 

[soltakss]

On 11/22/2024 at 8:44 PM, Gary Norton said:

Organizationally, however, it's all a bit of a nightmare. Player facing material, including backgrounds and cults, is spread out over many documents (including Volumes 1-5 of Ian's series). Details on locations and NPCs are spread over two dozen documents. I'm struggling to wrap my head around all of the information so that I'm well prepared to run the campaign.

I used PDFTK to snip out pages from various PDFs and then combine them into one Prax PDF. That meant that I could have one thousand-page PDF with all the information. But, I hear you ask, how did you use PDFTK to extract information for supplements that are not available as PDFs? Nothing to see here, move along ...

My last Gloranthan Campaign started off in Pavis, where the Adventurers were part of a new street gang. The idea was to explore the Grand Pavis Campaign, partly from Ian's original books and partly from my own version of the campaign. However, they left Pavis after they had been forced into two bouts of penal servitude, one in the Big Rubble and one in Sun County, and pretty much refused to engage in the events of Pavis until near the end of the campaign.

On 11/22/2024 at 8:44 PM, Gary Norton said:

The Grand Pavis Plan comprises a huge amount of material. This starts out with Ian's series that is currently projected to run to 9 volumes. The series also references a lot of other material from Chaosium and Moon Design. Some of that material is out-of-print and some is in-print. Fortunately, Chaosium is beginning to re-release several RQ3 supplements from the 1990s that are part of the campaign. Once you put all of these documents together, we're looking at thousands of pages of material and dozens of well developed adventures to run.

In my campaigns, my rule of thumb is one-third published scenarios, one-third my own stuff, and one-third riffing on what has just happened. Using that rule of thumb, the dozens of scenarios expand to a lot more in an actual campaign.

There are some great locations and NPCs in various Jonstown Compendium supplements.

On 11/22/2024 at 10:14 PM, Gary Norton said:

1618: The PCs begin exploring the Big Rubble. First up is Finding Nymu followed by other rubble adventures that come under the rubric of Ian's self-directed adventures. I plan to use  Insula of the Rising Sun and Insula of the Waning Moon (both from Jonstown Compendium). If there's other rubble adventures I can find, I'll try to toss them in here.

You don't mention the scenarios from RQ2's Pavis and Big Rubble supplements, or Moon Design's Pavis & Big Rubble reprint. The scenarios work really well and provide some links that you can use in your campaign.

I put Hellpits of Nightfang in the Big Rubble and it worked really well, with the Adventurers contacting the dead hero and failing to integrate him into the Pavis Cult, allowing the Lunars to do that. I had him as the Bodyguard of Pavis, which worked well and fitted in with my idea of rediscovering lost powers of Pavis.

So, for me, the Grand Pavis Campaign has several arcs or themes:

• Exploring the Big Rubble
• Discovering lost Heroes or Demigods and reintegrating them into the Pavis Pantheon
• Exploring the connections between the people of the Big Rubble and the Oasis Folk
• Reconnecting Pavis with the Elements
• Integrating Trolls into the worship of Pavis (The Fifth Element)
• Finding and bringing back Pavis from the Green Age where he was lost

I managed to integrate those themes, linking them together in an apparently seamless way. One decision to be made is whether to support or oppose the wedding of Pavis to the Red Goddess, as that was important. We played through the Liberation of Pavis but with the Adventurers as the leaders instead of Argrath, and the Cradle, again with the Adventurers leading it. At one point, they needed Garrath Sharpsword and found him in the bar, sobbing into his ale, "I could have been something if it wasn't for those River Voices".

 

[soltakss]

On 11/23/2024 at 4:07 AM, Graeme P said:

I used the Pavic Story Arc that Simon Phipp published on his website and updated it for everything that had come out to that point.

Thanks Graeme. 

Here are some links:

• Pavis Story Arc
• Amended Timeline including Griselda stories and events
• Lots of Web Links to Pavis material but I have no idea how many are still available

 

Edited November 24 by soltakss

[Graeme P]

Happy to spruik useful stuff Simon.  🙂

It was the amended timeline that I used. If I recall correctly you did it back in the day because I asked you what such a timeline would look like.  Ah, there it is - about 80% of the way down the page below.

On 11/24/2024 at 8:41 PM, soltakss said:

• 
  
• Amended Timeline including Griselda stories and events

So the thanks are from me to you, really.

[Gary Norton]

Simon, thanks for a lot of input.

I hadn't considered Hellpits of Nightfang. I'll be taking a look at that one.

I've held off in terms of placing major Chaosium adventures in the campaign while waiting to see which ones Ian that uses. If Ian doesn't use them, I'll certainly look into including those. I also want to look at incorporating some of the Big Rubble encounters from Pavis: Gateway to Adventure. I intend to use them more as vignettes than full-fledged adventures. [Ian has already incorporated three of the four big adventures from P:GtA.]

I really appreciate that you brought up the topic of themes. Lots of the thematic elements you mention come up naturally as part of Ian's Grand Pavis Campaign. Those are easily incorporated into the campaign.

Another theme that I want to emphasize is the conflict of cultures in Pavis and Prax. I see six major human cultures in the region. In general, they don't like each other and certainly don't trust each other.

The first two cultures date to godtime. They are the indigenous peoples (riverfolk and oasis folk) and the animal nomads following the way of Waha. In the second age, the Pavis and Sun Country settlers arrive and establish themselves along the Zola Fel. The fall of the EWF drives both of those cultures into a long period of isolation. Then the third age brings the Dorasings (Sartarites) and the Lunars. 

These six human cultures are mixing and vying for power along the Zola Fel river valley. Another factor I'm emphasizing is the different ways that the cultures approach the role of women and men in their respective societies. In addition to the human cultures, the Aldryami, Mostali, and Uz cultures add more fuel to this volatile mix.

To help emphasize these different cultures, I very much want to have the PCs spend significant time in different cultures. Thus, the PCs head off to Sun County for most of 1617. The PCs will be immersed in this foreign (for most of them) culture and need to deal with those differences. This may be an especially trying time for female PCs. Later on, their work for Duke Raus will provide a different view of Lunars. While the Lunars remain the enemy throughout the campaign, this portion of the campaign emphasizes some of the differences with the Empire that the PCs may be able to exploit later.

[Ian A. Thomson]

More index PDFs have been uploaded a couple of days ago to the free PDFs page on Drivethru :)

These include an expanded Master Contents List for all of the books so far. Like the Contents list you see at the front of each book, but each book's list extended to include page numbers for smaller elements that were missed off the original Lists for space reasons

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/488217/pavis-and-big-rubble-companion-director-s-cut-index-pages-lists-and-other-helpful-pdfs

Plus I just thought of another potentially useful one which I just finished

It may not be uploaded for a while because I'm working out if its possible to reduce the filesizes of all the PDFs, so will wait to send all these new files off to Mr Fabian at the same time

So here it is for those who are interested. Actually I can include the Contents List piece as well

PBRCDC_BonusMaterial_File09_LocationsGuide.pdf P&BRCDC_Handout14_SeriesContentIndex_Nov2024.pdf