How Gruesome is "Rise of the Runelords?" [spoilers]

[GoblinArchmage]

SPOILERS for Rise of the Runelords below:

Hi all. I will be running a Pathfinder 1e game in the future, and while I will probably be starting off with a one-off like Crypt of the Everflame I may want to eventually run an adventure path. I've heard good things about Rise of the Runelords, but I am worried about the first half of that campaign. I am particularly worried about the third adventure, which I understand is pretty gruesome. Does anybody have any experience with this adventure path? Would it be possible to re-flavor the ogres to be less ... um ... rapey? Any tips would be appreciated. I am also open to choosing a different adventure path. I am only considering RotRL because people seem to really like it.

[Arkain]

Anything is possible, sure. The particular horror you seem to be struggling with is however kinda the point of the Pathfinder ogres. They are mankind at its worst, humanity gone wrong, off the deep end. Ogres are all the fears and taboos of "civilization" and "culture" in one package. If you're not up for that, maybe you could either rewrite that part of the adventure path or skip it altogether, maybe adding something else to other parts in order to keep up with experience and such (if you use exp at all). Be aware though that there are also other parts in RotRL that may be slightly uncomfortable, such as indeed the first two chapters. If you wish to stay with ogres, but want to change their general flavor, you could simply go back to D&D ogres. Not dissimilar, but more an entry level to the whole "savage giant" trope that is also found with e.g. hill giants than straight up horror.

[Aotrs Commander]

Eh, not really hugely, I wouldn't have said, and not really anything you couldn't play off like Warhammer Fantasy Chaos mutants, really. Running it myself (to end of book 4 so far, we wil move on to 5/6 after out current SF game comes to a stop), I can't especially recall anything that was gratutious - you might tone down (as the module itself suggests) some of the bits in book 5 for lust-sin-content, but I haven't found it to be, like, especially gruseome myself. Sure, there's more of an overall horror vibe than something like, say Shackled City (whoich we're also playign through), but not anything that necessarily would require more than some flavour text.



Also, though I cannot recommend enough looking through the community resources on the appropriate RotRL forum at Paizo itself - for both RotRL and Shackled City there have been some AMAZINGLY useful player resources (you want to play out the Swallowtail Festival at the start with some carnivale games? It has you covered!) Some of it may be less useful now Sandpoint has a whole sourcebook to itself, but it is still worth a look.



It also might be worth askign this question there as well.

[Efrate]

A few things stand out. In ch. 1 of rise the town loose woman goes after a pc pretty sexually aggressively then cries foul when they are interrupted by her father who thinks she is a perfect girl and you are forcing yourself on to her innocent self.

Ch 2. Is okay. Ch 3 and some of 4 have the ogrekin play pretty significant parts. If you use milestone leveling, you can safely skip the entire ogrekin farmhouse, or just let the ranger pet pursued by say a hill giant vs. and ogrekin fighter 5, lead you to the barn and just have the spider there, the npcs damaged by venom and just in webs instead of cells.

The ones occupying the base can easily be refluffed as hill giants and have less of the creepy rape vibe. Still violent and awful but not trying to assault you.

My group has not gotten to parts 5 or 6 so I do not know how they hold up but should be pretty straightforward. Karzog is the Runelord of Greed, not lust.

Funnily enough curse of the crimson throne deals with leftovers of the runelord of lust and not near as bad.

[GoblinArchmage]

Thanks for the help, everyone. I'll have to think some more about it. I'm not averse to horror in general; it's just that the slasher genre isn't my thing. There is a copy of RotRL at a local used bookshop (which I have store credit for!), so I might thumb through it a bit before purchasing.

[Efrate]

Check to see if its the 10th anniversary edition or the original. The 10th anniversary adds a lot to the original and is worth it.

[Coidzor]

SPOILERS for Rise of the Runelords below:

Hi all. I will be running a Pathfinder 1e game in the future, and while I will probably be starting off with a one-off like Crypt of the Everflame I may want to eventually run an adventure path. I've heard good things about Rise of the Runelords, but I am worried about the first half of that campaign. I am particularly worried about the third adventure, which I understand is pretty gruesome. Does anybody have any experience with this adventure path? Would it be possible to re-flavor the ogres to be less ... um ... rapey? Any tips would be appreciated. I am also open to choosing a different adventure path. I am only considering RotRL because people seem to really like it.

When we ran through it with our DM, I never got even a hint that there were any rape scenes that they had to excise, so, I assume that yes, you can run the adventure without ogre rape involved without too much difficulty.

There was still more than enough gore from burning a building full of them to death, the bodies they had strung up in the trees surrounding the fort, the cannibalism, and the ones that painted graffiti in human blood. So if you and your players don't really like things like piles of dismembered bodies or literal buckets of blood or meathooks interacting with humanoid bodies, that would require some re-writing of the various room descriptions and adjusting what the ogres are doing, as well as the nature of the ogrekin farmhouse.

Indeed, the only sexual horror that I remember at all was from something that the DM optionally revealed about the BBEG of the first arc's backstory that we shouldn't have been able to have learned normally, but learned about as part of generally learning about our foe as a reward for roleplaying and having a super devout Desnan in the party. And that wasn't so much sexually transgressive as it was just kind of gross, because Lamashtu is inherently gross. Though the DM didn't go into graphic detail about it, either.