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I'm thinking that the AP does not really, fully, work alone after Champions Games. So far I have given my players every drop of XP in each adventure - I actually work it out ahead of time when I design the adventure and it presumes then accomplish every goal and win every fight. So they are getting the max possible XP.
Even so they have basically followed along exactly at the level the AP presumes. The problem here is I don't really want 20th level PCs taking down a God and I'd probably like to explore at least some of Epic.
I'll do modifications after Champions Games because I think that the AP runs very well up until this point. 1st to 10th 3.5 and Heroic Tier 4E are philosophically on par. You do the same sorts of things and fight the same sorts of monsters. However 11th-20th 3.5 and Paragon Tier are not really the same. Paragon Teir is more like levels 11th-15th of 3.5 and 16th to 20+ more like Epic.
So Dragotha is an Epic level threat...in fact its a great fight for 21st level PCs. Their introduction to the Epic Tier basically (even then I'll have to weaken Dragotha from the official 4E source). The AP runs pretty well again after this point probably taking the PCs to about mid epic before the final showdown with Kyuss. If I can give them allies for the final battle this should run fine.
Thus I feel that I'm going to need to add adventures to this AP. Roughly 4-6 adventures between Champions Games and Wormcrawl Fissure. At the moment the only addition I know I want to add in is I6:Ravonloft
and this is pure DM greed. I'm running fresh faced newbs...I've waited my whole life for the chance to put 'untainted' players through that masterpiece. Otherwise I'll have to add adventures and will aim to try and do some stuff that makes the whole Age of Worms feel more 'global'. I've always kind of wondered 'WTF is everyone else in the fantasy world doing while the world comes to an end?'. I hope to delve a little into that with some of the additional adventures that are needed during the Paragon Tier.
Great!. I'm running the 7th installment. But I'm sure the community will appreciate your notes.
I think Antioch made the conversion of the last part of the AP, 6+ modules, I'm starting in the 7th (the other part was played in 3.5 edition).
I will share my notes with you, they may come handy to you in the future :).
I am wondering if you still have the notes for the last part of the AP (6+). I am building maps for the last part of the AP to allow for larger rooms and more monsters whih 4e would like. Thanks for your help.
Your post is pretty confusing...are you talking to Dr. Pweent? Or some one else?
Your post is pretty confusing...are you talking to Dr. Pweent? Or some one else?Sorry. I was trying to type it pretty quickly. I read it after I posted it and it confused me. I saw on a previous post that Antioch had converted the modules from chapter 6 and beyond. I ran this AP in 3.5 and my group would like to play it in 4e. I was seeing if someone had already converted the modules so my conversion could be easier. Hopefully this is less confusing. Thanks for your help.
Do you mean to run it from the beginning or from some later point?
If you mean from the beginning I'm willing to email you what I have done but you'd only be able to use that as something of a base for your own conversion, I run with only four players and they started as true newbs plus I run in a home brew so plot points have been fed through those filters.
All of that said I actually think 4E adventures get better if built on top of some one elses conversion. In fact the bigger the chain of conversions the better. In large part this is because 4E encounters can often be improved and the combat ones are usually best if there is some interesting twist. So my straight conversion involves me adding some kind of skill challenge to a number of places and adding a twist to say every 5th encounter.
Anyone working on top of my work gets an even better product because they can ask me to point out things like Skill Challanges that did not really work - then they can tweak or scrap them and try another approach that might be better. Furthermore They might add some neat twist to 1 in 5 encounters themselves...but they are adding them on top of the ones I have done, so their players actually encounter more interesting encounters in total then mine did.
You could keep pushing this concept too. If a third person came along and did a conversion based on the work done on the second persons conversion (which was influenced or based on my work) then this third person would get even better skill challenges (if the second person told him which ones did not really work) and would add even more twists to encounters so that the third DMs players would have an even higher percentage of unique well thought out encounters.
After a long hiatus my young players finally manage to get this campaign back on track. I come to recognize why groups and campaigns often break down as the players get into the 22-26 age group...the players have no friggen time as they get toward the later stages of university or angle to get their newly minted careers off the ground. In any case as fall turns to summer they have free time again and, after inducting a new player to replace one that has moved to Germany we are off and running again.
When I last posted some comments on my 4E conversion of Age of Worms the group had just finished off Blackwall Keep. Here they move on to Hall of Harsh Reflections.
I face a couple of interesting elements right from the get go, some of this is in that the written connections between Blackwall Keep and Hall of Harsh Reflections, as written, don't feel all that strong. I'm honestly worried that the players will be really unhappy with the main adventure hook which really just boils down to Allustan saying 'well it looks like trying to find out about your Green Worms from my mage friend in Blackwall Keep was a total waste of time, how about you go see my friend in The Free City instead'? Technically this is exactly what happened with my group but it turned out I was fretting over it for nothing. Obviously I phrased it differently then the above but really my players swallow it with no problem at all.
My next problem comes with worrying about the adventure as written being hard to justify in terms of Rankolin being the primary instigator of the attacks on the PCs. Essentially its a problem in terms of how does he know about them and how come he thinks they'll visit the Free City? For my campaign this problem pretty much solves itself because the players needed Allustan to clean up the mess for them when the Overgod Foetus in Three Faces of Evil got out of the Mine and rampaged through Diamond Lake. The result is its very believable that some one among the people that Allustan talked with to smooth over that incident tipped off Ranklin and anyone staking out Allustan's abode would have spotted the PCs, realized they where adventurer types and put it together that it was the Pcs themselves that where probably behind the attacks on the Ebon Triad and hence potentially a threat to the Kyuss Cult. Other DMs may encounter more problems in these areas however.
At this point I also had a big decision to make in terms of the Doppleganger set up. Should I go with the classic 'your group has been infiltrated by a doppleganger' set up or not? Its classic D&D and that is a point for using it on my newbs but I ultimately choose to skip this element of the adventure. I just don't think it plays out very well with a new group – they need to be working on forging interparty bonds and I think I do a disservice as a DM to drop this kind of twist into such a new group of players. Another campaign maybe – when they are not newbs anymore.
From this point the adventure proceeds fairly smoothly, though they really have begun to get into that PC mentality of treating NPCs like dirt...not sure what it is with RPG players in this regard. They did not start out this way but somewhere along the line Players really start to divide the world into PCs and NPCs and their behaviour toward NPCs goes down hill. I can only hope they mature out of it but, if I recall correctly from my formative years of gaming this took, like a decade, so I guess I may have to wait a long time to get my wish. The result is a blow up with Eligos servant and a strained RP encounter. In fact they only seem to vaguely start to behave themselves when I show them a picture of Eligo's and they decide that he is 'probably bad ass and maybe we should not piss him off'. Not really how I want to have to motivate reasonable behaviour toward NPCs at my table...though I'm not really all that clear why they think he is such a bad ass in any case – I don't really imply that he could beat them in a fight...but whatever I'll take what I can get here.
So its soon off to the Crooked House for the players and here I face yet another Roleplaying challenge from my players. After a few days of dealing with the city (because we are in the capital of my Homebrew I have a lot of written material and a wall map of the city so there is always a lot going on here) including getting through the first stages of crafting a peace treaty with the Lizard Folk I stop and ask my players what they are doing for the evening at the Inn. I need locations and such for the staged murder. They immediately twig that the question implies 'something is going to happen' and then then state that they spend the whole night in full armour with their crossbows aimed at the door.
Fortunately for me I have room to manoeuvre here and respond with 'right...OK after a night without sleep your suffering from fatigue penalties...what are you going to do now'? Chastised that they can't meta-game around the issue they sleep the next night and the adventure proceeds. My newbs probably would not know what meta-game was if I told them...but they are shameless meta-gamers, I suspect that its a case of them not yet internalizing that they are playing the role of a person in a fantasy world...they are still really playing a game where they control a fantasy character and have not yet taken that step where you will actually do something you know is a bad idea just because your sure that your character would do it.
In any case the players are up in their rooms when some of them hear a commotion coming from downstairs. Now here I'm actually in a good situation because the players are in separate rooms instead of sharing rooms (as would be probably more normal for a veteran D&D group). I go ahead and have them all roll a bunch of perception checks. The groups wizard gets the information that some one went down the stairs and then came up pretty quickly just prior to, and immediately after, all the commotion from downstairs starts up. The PCs descend the stairs after meeting up in the upstairs hall at which point the crowd in the common room start shouting 'its him...the murderer'! They then start knocking over tables and breaking off chair legs to use as clubs. The party's cleric tries to heal the dead gnome but he's stone cold dead and beyond what the clerics magic can heal. The wizard makes an insight check to see if the crowd is setting them up and I inform them that they seem to sincerely believe that a murder was committed and that the party's dashing rogue was responsible. The player of the rogue is now proclaiming his innocence and I'm fervently working to sow discord in the ranks by commenting that the parties wizard did hear some one come up the stairs. The rogue was not with the rest of the group so maybe he really did commit the murder. I don't think they buy it but its fun anyways and I heighten the whole scene because its now getting late in real life so I call the session on that note. Really one of the better cliff hangers I've managed to pull off and my players are really raring to get back to the table for the next session.
The next session is another really excellent one as the scene in the Crooked House that follows is really one of the best encounters I have ever been privileged to play in...this is why I play RPGs basically speaking – sometimes they are just the definition of awesome.
The scene starts with the players deciding to flee the scene. Not sure what there plan is after that and I kind of don't want them to do that because, if they flee the scene the whole plot thread is likely to start unravelling. Being on the lamb does not easily lead to the next part of the adventure. Thing is I've kind of lost control of the scenario at this point and am stuck pretty much playing the cards dealt me.
This was a bit of a high maintenance encounter to design in 4E as it can go a couple of ways. I needed a Skill Challenge if they tried to talk their way out, I needed some basic skill DCs if they did not really try to talk their way out but just wanted information and I needed to be able to handle a straight up fight.
The Skill elements here are the most interesting. Normally, in 4E, we think of single Skill checks as something that uses the same mechanics as Skill Challenges but are otherwise seperate things. Either you are in a Skill Challenge or you are not. We often see a scenario where a Skill Challenge gets aborted part way through but here I'm more like starting off with a state of mind that the checks could either be part of a Skill Challenge or they could just be simple skill checks depending on how the scene plays out....though I suppose I could think of this as being a Skill Challenge with an unusually high chance of being aborted – which is what actually happened. The first parts of the Skill Challenge are the players determining the mood of the crowd and checking on the dead Gnome. At the moment they technically have two successes and no failures and if they can continue along this path and eventually make at least some successful checks to appease the crowd they could win the Skill Challenge and avoid a fight. That never really happens here as there are only a few more checks but really the players leap into action instead of trying to appease the crowd. Hence I suppose its technically an aborted Skill Challenge.
In any case the players seem to have come up with a plan (during the week by email I suspect) to escape the place. So the party Defender moves forward to cover the rest of the groups retreat. They are heading for a window which they plan to leap out of, lucky for me they did not flee up the stairs or I would have been really screwed. This gives me a chance to have the real doppelganger re-enter through the front door (he went out the window of the upstairs hall and is now back to incite the crowd). The result is teh parties dashing rogue, with a high initiative roll and good acrobatics pretty much gets down to the window and handsprings through it and then starts to flee down the alley. The parties cleric gets to the window as well but does not have the skills to just leap through it and will have to spend more time climbing out. The resulting delay means that there is a chance for the defender to start knocking bar patrons out by using the back half of his hammer as an improvised weapon. The bar patrons are minions so they start going down like sacks of potatoes, but the 'fat merchant' (really the doppelganger) takes multiple hits and does not go down – also he has a dagger and is clearly getting a big bonus to hit and doing much more damage then the rest of the bar patrons . The result is the players get a chance to figure out, well more then they already have, that something funny is going on here. The wizard makes an arcane check to see if he can detect some kind of magic being used in this encounter and I give him the information that the 'Fat Merchant' definitely has magical connections. At this point the players change tactics and decide they are going to stay and get their hands on the 'Fat Merchant' so they are shouting down the alley way to the fleeing rogue to come back. I quickly change tactics and have the 'fat merchant' trying to flee the encounter while the players are trying to get to him. Patrons standing outside yelling “Watch – get the Watch!” just adds to the tension and excitement. The whole scene plays out with players going in and out of windows (they are trying to get around behind the Doppelganger who has most of the crowd to protect him. Its a great scene and one of the players comments that its like some vaudeville scene from early cinema. I actually have to look that up after the game – some of my players are film study majors. In the end they kill the doppelganger and shortly after The Watch shows up.
This part plays out easily in my campaign as I have it set up so that The Watch in my 'Free City' sub contracts actual investigations to bounty hunters, adventuring parties and their ilk. A little odd as a method of law enforcement but a good choice if one wants to be able to run fantasy murder mysteries and such, Hence the players quickly 'take the contract' to hunt down who this Doppelganger was working for and determine why he murdered the gnome. I kind of gloss over the most obvious answer – that it was a frame as the players are framing their statements so as not to include that possibility and its possible The Watch might not have clued in to it which would have opened a can of worms on why they would let a group that is being framed do the investigating. Under other circumstances I would have asked for a bluff check here but I can be flexible in this regard if its better for the plot.
Next up is Sodden Hold.
From a 4E perspective the whole layout of this section of the adventure has issues (as does the next part) though I think it would present problems in 3.X as well. Essentially its too big to easily take in one go but it does not easily present itself as having good stopping points along the way. One could divide it into two parts and expect the PCs to rest between levels but its hard to justify this in the actual adventure layout. The PCs have attacked the Doppelganger Hide Out and once they give themselves away they should feel that they are under pressure to keep going before their quarry figures out what is going on and takes counter measures.
In this case the divide between the levels can, sort of almost act as a break. I mean maybe the baddies think that their attackers have not discovered the entrance to the lower part of Sodden Hold but the adventure really never addresses that and there is no feeling that the Doppelganger Gang really does anything about an assault on the upper level at all.
Thus I am left trying to decide if I should design this so that it can reasonably be taken on in one feel swoop or if I should presume that the players are going to take a long rest between the upper and lower levels.
I kind of split the difference but don't really think that was the best option looking back.
Most of the encounter layout here is really pretty much unchanged between the editions. Areas that stood out where:
- The upper level room with the slippery planks. Here I used a couple of Invisible Stalkers, not sure if I pulled them from the web or used an official source. I also set up a hazard to represent the spikes in the water and required a acrobatics checks to wander around on the planks. I felt that I had set the numbers quite low but this encounter brutalized my players. It seems many had really truely aweful acrobatics and the checks each round just seemed to shut them down. The way the room was laid out meant that the high acrobatics rogue ended up far ahead of the rest of the party and then got double teamed by the Invisible Stalkers which seemed to completely go to town on him. Three of the four players eventually ended up in the water and there was a real chance of death, only averted by the Rogue shooting the wizard with a teleporting arrow that allowed him to escape.
I was really surprised at how hard they found this encounter, even reading it afterword makes me think it sounds pretty trivial even though I have seen it play out. The Invisible Stalkers ability to fly in this situation was a big part of what turned a moderate encounter into a blood bath.
- I used a modified Kraken, greatly reduced in power for the Giant Octopi, which worked after a fashion but, since the PCs used a water breathing ritual before covering this part of the adventure it was a bit of a dud in terms of excitement.
- I wrote out the encounter in the actual hall of mirrors, I'm glad I did because this was beginning to feel like too many fights by the time the players got to this room, even though they had had a long break from D&D between the upper and lower level. The lower level is a pretty small space and I still had 5 fights in it...that is more then enough thank you very much.
- I rewrote the encounter with the PC doubles so that the room would have normal people that vaguely resembled the PCs that where dressed up as the PCs and had it so that Telekin had kidnapped these people in order to provide the other Doppelgangers a visual ID on who they where looking for.
- The PC doubles where a big hit - added fun to the start of the encounter with my players all going WTF!?!. Why are we tied to chairs? (a few perception checks later) OK WTF? Why are people that look like us tied to chairs? So this was fun. The role playing afterword was good fun as well but I dropped the ball here. I really should have put more effort into these NPCs because the players spent a fair bit of time interacting with them. Having names, occupations, when they where kidnapped and what has happened to them since that point would have been very good adventure prep that I failed to do - I wing it but we could have avoided the DM going "err, umm. his name is, umm..." if I had dotted my i's and crossed my t's here.
- I used 2 Arenea and an Arenea Webcaster for the monsters in this room. The Arenea's sucked...I need to spend more time evaluating my monsters when doing this conversion. I stuck them here because that is what the adventure module said to do if you did not go with the kidnapped by Doppelgangers theme but they blew chunks. They are a kind of support monster that will do interesting things in terms of denying the PCs mobility but really that is all they do. All alone in a cramped room there was no point in denying the PCs mobility...it was straight out boring. The only thing that really carried this encounter where the PC doubles, if not for that this would have been a pretty low point of the adventure. Also I think it was worse for me as the DM because I quickly realized that there was nothing really more too these monsters. By the time the players really clued in on that the encounter was pretty much all over.
- The scene with Telekin went down pretty well. He was a bit weak but I had the room crawling with traps and my players sprang everyone of them. The fell down two pits and got hit by both flame throwers I placed covering the stairs. Still Telekin was a bit of a push over, a weakness from me splitting the difference in encounter design between trying to make it so that it was reasonable for the players to take all of Sodden Hold in a single go. Also I went with an villian design that made it so his hits got more powerful the more rounds went by (a kind of curse mechanic that would add to the damage but which he needed minor actions to use). With no real other defenders the players got to him and piled on before he could really get this going...admittedly to do that they managed to spring every trap so it was not all bad.
- The final meeting with the Drow was good stuff. I was really excited to be using Drow. Here they represent a different approach then I normally go with in encounter design. A few creatures that are standard monsters (not elites or Solo's) but are significantly higher level then the PCs. This is really good at giving the feeling of 'Commandos' as the enemy. They don't have the staying power of an elite but their high defences help to compensate, attacks are not as good as the best an elite tends to have but its usually a standard type attack on the higher end of the bell curve. The result is a much faster paced feel to the fight. Not great for every encounter but excellent for use sometimes. I rolled crappy so this was not as tough as it could be but the fight was still a lot of fun, Drow are mobile and the players drained the water here so it became a mobile duel with lots of leaping by both sides and the PCs eventually managed to knock one of the Drow off the ledge into a 40' foot fall, she lived but was near dead and even that was fun as they had a hell of a time finishing her off, she kept dodging their ranged fire and they finally climbed down ropes to get at her.
Good to see Drow work so well because there are several encounters with them later in Hall of Harsh Reflections.
- Ultimately Sodden Hold played out fairly well, I wish I had made a more clear choice on whether the players would be encouraged to sleep or not between the levels and I wish it was clearer to the PCs themselves whether this was a good idea but that and the Arenea's was the only really weak elements I found in my conversion.