Vaults of Madness (GM Reference)


Serpent's Skull

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captain yesterday wrote:
as my dad used to tell me "if there's a plot hole fill it with s!+#, no one will wanna look to closely that way"

And s!+# it would be. It makes no sense to build such a portal when:

1.) you

City of Seven Spears, p. 11 wrote:
knew that at some point in the future the serpentfolk could well gain the upper hand in the region once again, and thus ... built Saventh-Yhi’s seven spears as a weapon—with the proper rituals and magical triggers, these seven spears can drill down through the earth, boring through the 2,000 feet of solid stone between Saventh-Yhi and Ilmurea to strike at seven key sites in the city below and to leave in their passing seven pits lined with corkscrew ledges down which invading armies could be led.

AND

2.) you could also teleport people from Ilmurea to Saventh-Yhi and back as Vyr-Azul does with his Serpentfolk Seekers in Vaults of Madness (p. 36).

I might buy the argument that Urschlar built the portal as a final escape route should the Vaults not prove sufficient protection from whatever doom was coming to Saventh-Yhi. However, it would make more sense for him to place the Argental Font in the First Vault and hide there himself along with his closest allies (instead of in the Impenetrable Redoubt of Kalid Shah). But then again he was insane so maybe that's the best answer...


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Double posting, because it's time for me to eat some humble pie with a side of crow...

City of Seven Spears, p. 52 wrote:
The ancient Azlanti originally created the portal to Ilmurea as a route through which they could send periodic scouting missions down into the ruins below to ensure that the serpentfolk had not returned to rebuild.


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We just started VoM last week.

One 4.5 hour session took us through The First Vault. My players said they really enjoyed it. I think after the exploration and set pieces punctuated by role playing and faction intrigue, the players were ready for a good 'ole mini-dungeon.

Some changes I'm making to VoM:

1.) No Endo Kline or Juliver. Juliver is replaced by a new PC that joined a few sessions ago. He's an Azlanti Wizard who was born after the founding of the city and placed in a temporal stasis in Ilmurea as back-up before the city fell. Endo is now another Azlanti (assumed to still be in stasis in Ilmurea) known to the PC as "the Engineer."

2.) I had General Havelar assassinated while the player's were in the First Vault. Looking forward to the "who done it?" element and the power vacuum it will create in the PCs faction (Sargavan Government).

3.) The PCs teleport to Senghor to buy goods so I drop rumors for them every time they go. So far its been rumors of the Maka-Yika and how they are being driven out of the Kaava Lands. Next it will be about how Usaro is closed and thought to be mobilizing for battle/expedition.

I think I will keep the Apsis Consortium attack on the PCs base, but replace Ivo Haigan with an NPC named Dyshkun who one of my PCs wrote into his back story as an Apsis merchant who enslaved him and his mother.

I never pulled the trigger on the Aboleth or the Green Hag and the PCs didn't venture to close to their abodes. I am looking for a way to integrate them into VoM to break up the grind of the vaults.


Did anyone try to move the Argental Font? I mean, if you have to go back into a spore infested vault every time someone needs healing, more might become insane. And, technically, shouldn't someone who just was healed, have to save against insanity on the way out as well?


trellian wrote:
Did anyone try to move the Argental Font? I mean, if you have to go back into a spore infested vault every time someone needs healing, more might become insane. And, technically, shouldn't someone who just was healed, have to save against insanity on the way out as well?

I know this is going to happen in my campaign... One of the PCs is Cavalier who turned Paladin. I decided that Iomedae (whom he sort of worshiped as a Cavalier) is a reincarnation of Acavna (after he found a shrine to her in the Anghazani Fortress [now their base] and cleaned it up). He's on a mission to help restore her lost memories and they learned more about her and the font from exploring her temple in the Temple District. Now, thanks to Urschlar's Lab Journal they know the font is in one of the vaults and the Paladin is dead set on moving it back to her temple.


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber

Could someone give me an estimate on how powerful a character has to be to defeat the Gorilla King in hand-to-hand? I've never been good at that sort of estimate.

I haven't begun running the Adventure Path, but I think one of my group is going to play a Gorilla-man. The background on the Gorilla King makes it sound like another strong gorilla could take over from him. That's going to make things interesting if the character ends up becoming King of the Gorillas.

Another question, the adventure path background says you can set up a trading system to get supplies from the outside. Does that make sense to anyone. The nearest town is weeks away at best, and who is going to wait weeks for ordering a +2 sword? I'm not sure there really are any +2 swords in all of Sagava that anyone would be willing to sell. The entire county only has 2 towns of about 10,000 people if you go by the Inner Sea Guide. One of my players has already decided to to get a spell as soon as he can to allow him to gate back to Magnimar to go shopping. The problem with that plan is that this adventure path per level has the lowest amount of loot available to sell or use that I've ever seen.


Prophet of Doom wrote:

Could someone give me an estimate on how powerful a character has to be to defeat the Gorilla King in hand-to-hand? I've never been good at that sort of estimate.

I haven't begun running the Adventure Path, but I think one of my group is going to play a Gorilla-man. The background on the Gorilla King makes it sound like another strong gorilla could take over from him. That's going to make things interesting if the character ends up becoming King of the Gorillas.

Another question, the adventure path background says you can set up a trading system to get supplies from the outside. Does that make sense to anyone. The nearest town is weeks away at best, and who is going to wait weeks for ordering a +2 sword? I'm not sure there really are any +2 swords in all of Sagava that anyone would be willing to sell. The entire county only has 2 towns of about 10,000 people if you go by the Inner Sea Guide. One of my players has already decided to to get a spell as soon as he can to allow him to gate back to Magnimar to go shopping. The problem with that plan is that this adventure path per level has the lowest amount of loot available to sell or use that I've ever seen.

1. Challenging the Gorilla King directly: probably not within the PCs capability when first encountered.

2. Nearest shopping weeks away: Yes, this does make sense. You are in the middle of the friggin' jungle. Who would put a large city there, rich with magical items? Basically, the days run by pretty quick when exploring the city of seven spears. You can make that include as much downtime as you wish, which lets the PCs 'order' items through their suppliers.

3. Teleporting back to cities to get stuff: This is probably what the developers had in mind once you were high enough level. Doing this should take about a day'ish of time though and will cost 2 somewhat high spell slots. You can make bad things happen when the characters are away as a penalty to doing too much shopping by teleport.

4. Loot issues: Add more loot! Customize it to your party. That will also cut back on their shopping trips.


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber

Justaworm, when you say a PC can't defeat the Gorilla King, I was talking just about the one-on-one combat as part of the 3 tests. He only has to get him down to 50HP for a surrender. Do you really think a listed level, he can't be defeated in that, or are you talking about a fight to he death to take over his whole camp?


Oh sorry, I likely misunderstood your original question as taking on the king and the whole gang of gorillas.

As for a 1 vs. 1 challenge, I will try and take a look in the AP, but maybe some other GMs have experience with that.

I have just been looking through this AP myself in preparation to run it one day for my boys.


So after re-reading this event you do have an interesting question.

The Gorilla King makes it clear at the start of the Test of Combat that the test is to the point of surrender or unconsciousness only and not death as he will not risk his life from a bunch of 'pinkskins'.

In a normal situation, if the Gorilla King were brought to 50 hp and surrender (or be knocked unconscious), and the PC kept fighting, then certainly the Gorilla King's entourage would jump in to help, starting an all out fight. The gorillas are going to have a 'pinkskin' rule them after all. This is pretty much certain death at the numbers of gorillas in question (~100).

If your Gorilla-man PC challenges the Gorilla King to combat, I would say that the GK still imposes the same restrictions on the test. It would be up to you to decide on whether the GK's guards and followers will let combat to proceed once the GK surrenders. Even then, would the gorillas of Usaro see the PC as their new king? I highly doubt it. The demon lord Angazhan specifically put Ruthazek in place as Gorilla King of Usaro. So, it would seem that Angazhan must put the PC in place as the new Gorilla King if that is his desire. The PC would likely be slain and transformed into a dire ape just at Ruthazek had been. Then, you have a PC, likely chaotic evil, with their own gorilla army.

To me, this is really just a big headache waiting to happen, and I would play things out as follows instead:

- If a non-gorilla-man PC challenges the GK, then things play out as in the AP.
- If the gorilla-man PC challenges the GK and succeeds in knocking him unconscious or making him surrender, then I would go a step further than what is listed in the AP and allow for the gorilla-PC to make an ally of the Gorilla King and basically treat them as a new faction camp. They could be used for trade, exploring, wreaking havoc on enemy camps, scouting, preparing the top-world for war with the serpent-folk, etc.

As for how strong of a PC it would take, that is going to highly depend on the PC and their gear.

You probably will need to adjust the test rules some if you have an arcane magic user of significant level. As written, there is no restriction against use of magic by the PC. So a witch can sleep hex for an easy win, a mage can cast fly and rain down spells, etc.

To avoid this, I would add (a) 'no offensive spells' and (b) 'no flying/ethereal-ness/invisibility/burrowing' restrictions to the Test of Combat, as Ruthazek is looking for someone to challenge him to fair melee combat clearly. Maybe some other GMs can shed some light on other things that threw a wrench into the fight.

As for melee classes, a paladin could make short work of him with lay on hands + smited full round attack every round. Other classes will vary, especially with this high crit range.


The groups 11th level sylph magus got pounced in four rounds or something. I don't think he was the best choice though. His idea was Stoneskin to protect and then use Spring Attack (he can fly) to avoid the Gorilla King. The Gorilla King simply readied some attacks and had him at -14 in three hits or something.

The best bet would have been the Witch and Slumber actually. The Will save wasn't that high, so she could have slumbered him in round 1. If not, she could have surrendered or teleported away.

I do remember reading about someone who DID make it though. My players were to honorable to even buff before the combat..

They did succeed in the strength test and the storytelling test though.


My players asked me something the other day. If there is a big army waiting in Ilmurea, why are we sacrificing our lives for fixing the portal that allows them to come through.

Good question, really.

They are getting really sick of the paranoia and other insanities in the vaults (I have different madnesses for each vault), and are thinking about getting down there any other way.

Suggestions? How far is it to a Darklands opening which allows them to get there the "normal" way?

Liberty's Edge

According to my copy of Into the Darklands, you can enter Nar-Voth via the Drowning Stones in the northern Mwangi Expanse, then take a secondary tunnel to a place underneath the eastern shore of Lake Ocota, called the Carrion Falls. This pit cuts between Nar-Voth and Sekamina. From there it should be just a primary tunnel and probably some tertiary tunnels to get to Ilmurea. Of course, the party will need someone who knows a lot about the Darklands/geography to find this out, and will also probably need to be very careful to avoid the numerous horrors of the dark. All told, it's maybe 720 miles.

I've actually been thinking about taking a similar route with my group, but I'm going to see how they like Racing to Ruin first.


OK so my players are not liking the whole Midnight Spores thing. They want to use the flexible timeline of the AP and do some spell research, specifically they want to research an 'Immune to Midnight Spores' spell. (or as it's become known round the table "Frak your 'Frak you, I don't care about your defenses, the plot says you're paranoid, so get get paranoid' dust." They may not use the word Frak though.)
Is this even possible? I mean Greater Restoration cures it completely, and several Restorations will get the job done, so it's not like it's immune to magic. The spell is obviously of limited use outside the Vaults, and the players as a group clearly hate it(for reasons ranging from the mechanical interference with healing/buffing, to the role-playing interference of 'forced introversion')and want a 100% effective prophylactic that doesn't cost hundreds to thousands of gp like the cure. Is there any reason the party HAS to be paranoid to drive the path forward?


Sure, it should be possible, but you should impose some negative of waiting that long. Also, there may be some alchemical potion that should be possible too.

However, you should think about some side effects of taking out the time to do this: loss of points (if you are using them), extra attacks, other factions gaining in power/recovering items of importance, etc.

There are plenty of solutions that shouldn't require a brand new spell though, I would think.


Sadly they've already secured the entire city, conquering every district (except the artisan, with whom they allied) and wiping out every other faction's expedition (specifically they arrived first and built a Muderhobo Battlecamp to destroy everyone else before they could even arrive in-city and even confirm it WAS Saventh-Yhi, hitting them as they made their way up the waterfall path, or at the foot of the waterfall, or back in the Jungle a ways from the waterfall, and specifically cleaning up the battlegrounds to remove as much as possible, signs of slaughter). This was done specifically to AVOID having those sorts of loose 'plot threads' laying around for devious DMs to weave into a net of entrapment. (Of course they'll regret it later, but them's the breaks).

They've only just discovered the power of prestige points, recently using them to bring a PC back from the dead (since, y'know, paranoid cleric won't help). But if I start stripping them away just for doing what they all view as necessary preparation, I'm reasonably sure they'll just shrug and say 'We got along without them in every other campaign, we don't have to have them here.'

If you mean discovery points, it's a bit too late for that. The award of 2400 XP/PC already went out. Even if I wanted pull it back, the 11th level PCs were...underwhelmed at the degree of reward for the work. I'm pretty sure they'd ultimately just shrug say 'whatever' and deduct the XP.

They REALLY don't like the midnight spores (and as you can see from the rest of this post, there's really nothing but the Vaults left for them in Saventh-Yhi). They'd probably endure it, with poor grace and as little interaction as possible, until they could get it cured by the Argental Font if I just denied the ability to avoid them with any spell, but they are never going to embrace it as 'fun' which appears to have been more the intent.

Scarab Sages

Midnight Spores ... hmm. The AP specifically states that the spores are tailored and "only affect living humanoid creatures".

So - our party does not have a single humanoid... all 5 of them are (different flavours of) Outsider (Native): Aasimar, Tiefling, Ifrit, Sylph.
So the spores won't affect the main PCs.
They affect their allies, and the secondary PCs, but the main guys will likely barge in, get covered in dust and wander home thinking they just need to clean up.
Sigh...

Charm Person doesn't work on them either. (But a bunch of useful spells don't either - like Alter Self).

Scarab Sages

caribet wrote:

Midnight Spores ... hmm. The AP specifically states that the spores are tailored and "only affect living humanoid creatures".

So - our party does not have a single humanoid... all 5 of them are (different flavours of) Outsider (Native): Aasimar, Tiefling, Ifrit, Sylph.
So the spores won't affect the main PCs.
They affect their allies,...

and of course, poor Juliver, who will only just have recovered from Feeblemind + Paranoia!

Liberty's Edge

I'd suggest modifying it slightly so non-humanoids still have to save, but with a +4 bonus. But from what I hear the midnight spores aren't fun* for any party, so you could just cut them and add in some other threat.

*Challenging fun, like fighting a monster or surviving a trap.


ryric wrote:

I have a question about the party's progression through the vaults. Maybe I just missed it on my read through, but how do the players "know" they should save the Vault of the Body Thief for last? They get the locations of all the vaults at the end of the first vault, and it seems to be up to them what order to do the vaults in. I could just move it so that whichever the last one they go to is that vault, but I hate to do those sort of fluid world shenanigans.

I understand an army of apes around the vault might be a deterrent, but I plan on stringing out the events so that the Gorilla King doesn't show up right away.

Plus, I have one of those players, that the harder you protect a thing, the more he needs to find out what it is.

I'm thinking of making the map in the first vault encoded, so they have to bring a copy back to camp and slowly decipher it, getting the locations of 1-2 vaults at a time.

Yeah, I absolutely wish I'd seen these posts before starting the book.

As it was, this is the recommended/required series of events.

  • Event 1: The party rescues and Heals Juliver.
  • Event 2 specifically says, "This event occurs at any time after Event 1, preferably after the PCs have explored at least one of the Vaults..."
  • So, the party explores Vault B, which is the only vault they can find. At the end of Vault B, it is a DC 15 Perception check to get the map of all the other vaults.
  • So, given that the location of all possible campsites provided in Book 3 are in the northwest corner of Saventh-Yhi, and given that the PCs are in Vault B, I don't see how ANY group would do anything other than head straight for Vault H. It's on the way back to the Pathfinder camp, there's no reason to delay, and there's no indication that you need to put another faction's camp somewhere along that route in Book 3.

    And at the very beginning of Vault H: "Make sure the PCs have been through both Events 5 and 6 before they reach this point."

    So I know that the usual answer is, "You should have read the entire book before starting to run it, silly," but it was a bit frustrating to have to go out-of-game and just TELL the players that they couldn't do Vault H right now.

    Lesson learned: Read the entire book and the GM thread before starting a book. Oh, if only I had that kind of time!


    I just kind of moved them around as I needed to, if I remember right the one my players were afraid of was the one in the farming district as they were scared s+#*less of the Green God and the vampire thingy.


    Yeah, it was just an "almost no prep time" week, which is kind of why I run APs, so I was a bit blindsided by the last-minute, "Oh, they can't go here" entry.

    Hindsight is 20/20.


    Okra.King wrote:

    I also wanted to know if any of you have incorporated any of the death traps into the vaults listed in the back of this book, and if so how did it go and do you have any suggestions for running them?

    I have used the Pendulous Staircase and Philosopher's Stone thus far and they have been very memorable encounters, causing the PC's to think outside the box a little.

    As I noted above, the in the Philosopher's Stone trap, the PC's really didn't push each other out in the hall, but tried to stop the ball with a stone elemental which failed. I did not did not do the staircase right as I forgot to roll a reflex save for the PC's every round only when they broke another stair (it was about 1am at that point) so the stairs didn't fall. The PC's did get smacked around a lot though. In the end, the PC's did cut the chain at the top of the main shaft causing the whole thing to come down. They will use a rope next time.

    I am going to try to use all of these traps in the halls and caves, though I may need to adjust the save DC's for some of them as my PC's are at a higher level than what is suggested.

    Kudos to Gareth Hanrahan for these traps. They are very well written and provide some different play as opposed to fighting or diplomacy.

    Where specifically did you incorporate the traps?

    Liberty's Edge

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    Ten years later, still scratching my head as to why midnight spores are not a poison or a disease in this book. Adventure designers seem to like to make things that can affect even the monk with perfect body or the druid with venom immunity, but I don't see the point. If you take those abilities you should get to use them.

    They're specifically a psychotropic substance, so my first inclination is to make them a poison.


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    Gark the Goblin wrote:

    Ten years later, still scratching my head as to why midnight spores are not a poison or a disease in this book. Adventure designers seem to like to make things that can affect even the monk with perfect body or the druid with venom immunity, but I don't see the point. If you take those abilities you should get to use them.

    They're specifically a psychotropic substance, so my first inclination is to make them a poison.

    Agree, just houserule it as poison. :)

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