Introduction
Order of the Amber Die here, still going strong as the years roll on! In case you aren’t familiar with our work from past projects, we’ll repeat the staccato version. We only play published adventures. We use the complete rules set. We’ve had the same GM since our founding: 1987. We like to push the envelope of tabletop roleplaying. We only play marathon sessions—days at a time. We play on location. Our GM isn’t afraid to kill characters or TPK us; he’ll do it in front of the community, too. Imagine us like a roleplaying team, complete with a Captain and Ref position to help the players. We revere one d20 above all others, and that is the Amber Die. It doesn’t roll more 20s than it should, but it chains them when it does, and doubters have always been converted. After more than 170 adventures, we’ve even gotten rid of RPG absolutes: yeah, we’ll split the party.
Past Pathfinder Projects
The Emerald Spire Project, 2014
The Giantslayer Endeavor, 2015
The Strange Aeons Experiment, 2016
The Azlant Odyssey, 2017
The Pathfinder Playtest, 2018
The Slithering Salve, 2020
The Abomination Arsenal, 2022
The Sky Scions, 2025
The Scions
In our previous projects we’ve always put our own spin on things. For The Abomination Arsenal, we tried to reach the bottom of Pathfinder’s largest megadungeon with a party consisting entirely of gunslingers. With The Strange Aeons Experiment, we assembled a team of Pathfinder players who knew nothing about Lovecraft or the Elder Mythos, and sent them through the Strange Aeons AP to see what would happen. The list goes on, but we’ll let you check out each project as you may.
The years have gone past and we’ve come far enough to be able to look back across the ground we’ve covered. We’ve grown older together, added new members, said hard goodbyes, and finally stopped to look back at ourselves. This has been a personal journey for us as members of Order of the Amber Die, just as much as it has been a journey through adventure paths in front of the community.
This project won’t just be a playthrough of Sky King’s Tomb Adventure Path , it will focus on appreciating time and family. The Sky Scions is about a dwarven family in-game, and Order of the Amber Die as a family ourselves. For this project, Adam has dialed up some of the oldest members of the Order. In each marathon you’ll see a cameo from as far back as 1987, when three 10-year-olds sat in mom’s basement and dreamed up a club centered around their favorite die.
We’ve always stuck to the complete rules set, never deviating. As the years went by, our inbox filled with messages asking what house rules we would employ if we ever chose to. With the release of Pathfinder Second Edition and Remaster, we also received requests asking which optional rules we would utilize from the GM Core if we ever chose to. The answer was always simple and quick, but the Will DC increased with each passing year. Around the fire pit at our headquarters, Fort Rannick, we looked at the time visible on each other’s faces and finally decided to go for it.
As our house rule for this project, age modifiers from Pathfinder 1E will be adapted to Pathfinder 2E. A player’s age in real life determines their age category (and thus their adjusted attribute modifiers) in-game. We broke down our membership by decade, so the “venerable” age category in-game consists of players that are 50-59 years old out of game, as those are our oldest members. 40-49 in real life is considered “old,” and 30-39 is marked as “middle-aged” for modifiers. While we acknowledge that there are plenty of exceptions to these modifiers in real life, we wanted to create something that distinguished us by age at the table. Each marathon will feature different rosters of dwarves (therefore ages) from the clan. Still, it’s our first house rule across all these years. We must be getting old.
As a variant rule in addition to our house rule, we will be employing the “free archetype” from the GM Core. After reading through the Highhelm hardcover, we were reminded of how faith is one of the fundamentals of dwarven culture. We wanted to feel the dwarven pantheon as an ever-present part of our story; thus, we all have the same free archetype: Blessed One. We purposely spread the deities among the characters, so we’ll have a variety around the table at each marathon.
Meet Clan Firecask
We are all playing strong-blooded dwarves of Clan Firecask, a Goldhilt clan from the greatest of the dwarven sky citadels: Highhelm. Our main colors are orange and green, and amber features in various ways, of course. Our accent color is blue topaz, and each of our clan daggers is adorned with the matching stone.
We’re not just members of Clan Firecask, we’re directly related to Clanleader Perhill Firecask herself. Which in turn means we’re related to one another, of course. On your left at the table might be your in-game grandparent, and across from you could be your own child or even a sibling. This should make for some interesting roleplaying, and we’ll include a section in each blog to let you know how it goes along the way. When it’s your great-grandchild who just dropped to dying 2 across the battlefield, you might make different decisions than you normally would. As for family spats? Expected.
While the Ironhilt and Steelhilt clans of Highhelm might consider us “soft hands,” our dwarven hands are always busy—busy making beer! This wouldn’t be an Order of the Amber Die project without a high level of immersion, but it was a bit tricky trying to figure out how to approach this vital piece of Clan Firecask’s identity. We came up with this: what if we brewed our own beer out-of-game, and learned the process together as a group the same way our dwarves have spent their lives doing? We ran it by one of our friends, Brandon Gillam of Runehammer, since he was joining us periodically throughout the adventure path. Brandon offered to up things a notch: what if we contacted a brewery and had our own unique beer for this project, label and all? This is where Sacred Vice Brewing in Philadelphia got involved. Brandon drew the label, Sacred Vice made the beer, and our GM dropped the release of Clan Firecask’s newest beer—Battle Axe—right into the actual storyline of our campaign!
Highlights from Preparing Sky King’s Tomb:
- Knowing that Highhelm would feature heavily in our launch marathon, our GM worked closely with Black Bard Studios to make sure the city appeared as one of our best setups over the years. We’re excited to show you more!
- Some of our friends from over the years will make an appearance. Ready to see Joe O’Brien of the Glass Cannon Network as a dwarf from Clan Firecask? How about Brandon Gillam as Renck, the wise bard and keeper of clan recipes? You might even recognize Brandon’s expert hand as the artist of the portraits in this blog. Stay tuned.
- Elemental Stones is one of the most popular games of Highhelm. Our GM has already told us to learn it, as he’s making sure it will feature directly in this campaign. You know us by now, so we’ll stop the session and play a real game every time it comes up.
- Another thing we still love about being around the table is our props. Dwarven coins from Norse Foundry? Pile ‘em up. A dwarven helmet, some quality wooden mugs, and custom clan daggers? Yup. Beard extensions for those of us who dare? Let’s go for it. Growing your actual beard for a year in advance? Jody did it.
- It’s been a while since we played on location, and how awesome would it be to experience the Darklands in an actual cave? Pennsylvania has quite a few caves that are managed for tourists, so our plan is to find one that will let us spelunk in and set up our Pathfinder game!
What’s Next
We’ll drop a blog for every marathon we play, with a plan to finish this AP in six or seven marathons. As Adam likes to remind us, a TPK ends the project. Expect to hear from us again soon with part one!
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Our table was brought to life with the help of Blue Table Painting for our miniatures, and our marathons would have faltered long ago without Critical Hit Cookies.
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