paizo.com - Dungeons & Dragons: The Shackled City Adventure Path Hardcover

memorax, Tue, Jan 19, 2010, 03:48 PM

Let me know the good and the bad elements about the adventure path overall. How easy would it be to convert to Pathfinder? Please keep it civil.

logic_poet (Pathfinder Chronicles Charter Superscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Planet Stories Subscriber), Tue, Jan 19, 2010, 06:09 PM

The good, in brief:
Of the three Dungeon magazine APs, I would say this is the one with the setting that would be the easiest to convert, especially if you intend to set it in a homebrew world of your own design with PF rules. Porting it to Golarion is a little trickier, but should be do-able. The setting is Greyhawk, but in an out of the way corner that wasn't really ever written up before this. Also, all four of the main churches in the base town have pretty close Golarion analogues. The later two Dungeon APs, especially AoW, are much more closely tied to Greyhawk and various WotC stuff, like White Plume Mountain and the Isle of Dread. For that reason, Age of Worms and Savage Tide have stronger appeal to grognards, the nostalgic, and folks who want to appreciate the roots of the game.

They do a generally B+ to A job with divinations and keeping in mind the abilities of high level PCs.

As the oldest of the Paizo APs, there are more campaign journals and fan created support material for it than the others. That makes the DMs job somewhat easier, as you have lots of playtest reports of what can come up that wasn't well covered by the included text. Even reports from running the modules from the magazine are usefull, as the compilation sticks pretty closely to them. (The main difference I saw was a bonus mod in the book, plus the removal of repeated encounters with frustrating monsters. Across one transition there were back to back rakshasa fights, and the book re-wrote them to be different. Also, Cauldron, the town in which it's set, is more detailed than the magazines.)

Over the years, there were a number of borrowings from literature to D&D. Of the many D&D adaptations of

Spoiler:

this one has my favorite by far.

Overall, I'd say it's excellent value for the price. Full color, good art, some handout illustrations and plenty of NPC portraits, good organization, and a number of interesting NPC potential allies. Also, two poster maps. Cauldron is a neat setting.

The bad:
In terms of plot cohesion and a few other details, SCAP may be the weakest of the 3. This was the first time they tried to do an AP. They worked it like a newspaper serial, in that later authors did not always have the previous month's adventure to refer to. As a result, foreshadowing and revealing the main goal of the campaign are largely left to the DM. In particular, the identity of some villains is presented with little build-up, after the party takes down one of the villains who has been built up.

It's set in a city the PCs need to care about strongly enough to want to save it. If your players prefer the roving band of mercenaries model, they are likely to revolt.

Since many fights and adventures occur in town, they sort of assume the PCs will avail themselves of spellcasting services and charged items, so many of the fights were tuned to be tough for the indicated level of v3.5 characters. Players who don't cotton on to that are in for a world of hurt.

The ambivalent:
I'd have to say the introductory adventure is the weakest of any of their APs, 3.5 or PF. Despite early indications the goal is on a clock, there is a huge dungeon between the investigation and a medium-size dungeon. If your players don't build a party that can cover all the bases, it will probably be very frustrating. On a related note, many of the dungeons across many of the component modules are big. If you like the more modern style of the Pathfinder adventure paths, were there are more and smaller dungeons, you're going to not get that here.

They weren't restricted to the SRD, so they used more WotC splat and monster books. Consequently, you'd either need to put in the conversion work yourself or make substitutions. There's an appendix of stat blocks of everything in the back, but you will probably need to do some work to make sure the monsters are a fair challenge.

Likewise, the campaign runs all the way to level 20, and many of the later NPCs would need to be converted. Tracking all the high-level tactical options they have may be complicated. You and/or your players might burnout or drop out before you finish the story. If you prefer the 1-15 model, you'll need to plan an early off-ramp, and accept that you'll be buying stuff you may never use.