Callum Finlayson's page

One problem with that idea is that what is 'moderate' is defined by local sociopolitical trends, as well as media portrayal of norms: what's 'radical' in one place is 'moderate' in another and vice versa.

Yep. Moral relativism is fun, but however much moral relativists and moral absolutists beat each other up we have to remember that the majority of the popular media & general public in "our" (Western/liberal/capitalist/democratic) culture in general (and en masse) have a position along the lines of:

i) all value systems are equal and are culturaly specific, the value systems of one culture cannot be evaluated in the context of another
ii) except moral relativism which is universally true & the only value system that really recognises the equality of all other value systems, and is therefore superior to the others
iii) and those systems which deny the equality of all other value systems (eg facism) and are therefore inferior

:) cynicism is fun

Great Odin's Raven! Could this thing please come out already.

FFS he's just said it'll be next week before it's available, we've been updated on where abouts it is in getting released and why it's taking time.

What does this thread gain from yet another complaint that the overload hasn't been released yet? I'm sure that everyone here -- including Erik Mona & the rest of the magazine staff -- would rather it had come out a couple of weeks ago, but the simple fact is it didn't.

Yes, it's unfortunate that the overload didn't come out on time, and I've no doubt that if Erik & co had known 2 months ago how much work it would take then they would have structured things differently -- eg released several smaller overloads perhaps, rather than one (very) big one. But it's a simple project management problem of the variety that I'm sure we all see all the time at work, and as far as resource allocation goes they have to prioritise the magazines.

Putting a published adventure into an Evil campaign, you have to work the motivations of the Evil party into the plot, or they simply will have no interest in it.

- Save the town? Forget it.
- Prevent a villain from completing a horriffic ceremony? They'll join the bad guy.
- Find the cause of a mysterious malady on the land? Doesn't pay as much as robbery.

Why wouldn't these be suitable motives for a party of evil adventurers? Whether they are evil for selfish reasons or evil for big-picture supernatural Evil reasons, there are going to be plenty of reasons why an evil party might strive to save the town/disrupt a horrific ceremony/cure a plague.

As before, "evil" even of the big-picture gods-of-evil variety dosn't necessarily mean Texas Chainsaw Massacre grade sociopaths.

From a purely self-motivated perspective greed and selfishness work for all three of the ideas you mention, and are perfectly valid motivations:

Save the town -- straight forward piles of cash, debt & gratitude for saving their wretched butts, enough goodwill to coverup a few indescretions.

Stop the ceremony -- either reward for stopping this particular baddy, or (for arguments sake) the ritual requires various valuable components that you'd much rather were in your pockets.

Mysterious malady -- reward (robbery pays better??? Than curing a kingdom of a plague? One that infected the king's only son? Where on earth are you planning on robbing?! :) ) or maybe you're infected & curing the rest of the country is just a side effect of stopping the magical malady that's affected you.

Other motives may be:
Save the town -- this is *my* town, I was born here, I grew up here, you're not having it. I may not particularly care about my next door neighbour losing the town he lives in, but fortunately for him it happens to be the town that I live in too. Or where my mum/girlfriend/favourite painter lives (just because you're evil it dosn't mean you hate everyone else, you just need a reason to like them more than the random mindless sheep who make up most of the populace)

Stop the ceremony -- "What!? the princess has been kidnapped and is to be sacrificed to Eryhtnul?! No! We must rescue her so that we may fulfil the prophecy in which she is sacrificed to Hextor!". Or perhaps rather than the villain in question binding a particular demon to his service you want to take over the ceremony and bind it to your own service. The necromancer plans to raise a legion of undead to march on Waterdeep? Not likely, those are *my* corpses and I need them for my assault on Silverymoon.

Mysterious malady -- A magical blight that somehow only afflicts the denizens of a particular kingdom, eh? If I could understand how it worked I might be able to modify it's effect and finally rid this land of those wretched elf-scum.

You're quite right that motivation is vital, and I'm not saying that there aren't a couple of problems, but there are just as many motives for evil folk as there are for good, they may just need a little playing with to get to work.

One possible solution: Create a Dungeon spinoff magazine, strictly and clearly labelled as Adult content, with adult material...perhaps only two or three issues per year. Hell - stock it next to the girly magazines with a brown paper wrapper!

LOL! Good luck :)

To a great extent it would likely depend on the party's/DM's take on "what is 'evil' in this game", in particular for groups that don't (either conciously or subconciously) play alignment in the moral absolution terms the rulebooks employ. I'd suspect that any group role-playing in a moral environment other than it's natural one is likely to have plenty of digressions on moral philosophy/value theory.

It may come down to the evil characters motivation/philosophy, and certainly I've long held that an intelligent LE character is in general far less disruptive to a "normal" party than a CN one, and that a character who's evil actions are motivated by essentially selfish desires and immediate rewards attributable to those actions (selfish-evil thieves) is often much more manageable than one who believes in greater "virtues" associated with the commission of acts in the name of Evil (big-Evil clerics).

Remind your players, in their consideration of their character concepts, personalities & backgrounds, that evil dosn't mean sociopathic per se, any more than good necessarily means nice, lawfull fair, or chaotic random.

The bulk of adventures are relatively alignment-neutral (though notably the bulk of those that aren't are more good-friendly) and you just need to consider why a particular motive would work for your characters -- if you're trying to rescue a damsel in distress then there are any number of reasons why big-Evil characters would be involved and plenty more why selfish-evil ones would.

One thing I would be inclined to do with any evil characters, whether big-Evil or selfish-evil, is to try to avoid chaotic and low INT/WIS/CHA ones. The average high INT/WIS/CHA LE wizard is a *lot* for functional in any society (even an evil one) than a low INT/WIS/CHA barbarian/cleric of Erythnul!

The rules for this are on pg 37 of the DMG and include an example, so hopefully you'll be able to tell from that if you're awarding XP the "correct" way.

It's difficult to tell if you "just fighting too much", but certainly I've never seen a party level that fast other than when it was a deliberate munchkin game or they were "speed leveling" (automatically leveling after each session/adventure irrespective of XP in order for the party to reach a particular level), even given that advancement is much more rapid under 3ed.

I'm puzzled though as to how a party can consistently be leveling every session (at least) even if you're playing very long (12-16 hour) sessions and they're very combat heavy -- indeed combat can really slow things down as it chews up party resources, and some combats can be *really* slow!

Is there anything particularly unusual about the party or the encounters? If the party make-up is particularly favourable to an encounter then the effective CR should be reduced -- e.g. if the party has a Radiant Servant of Pelor onboard with all the usual turning-feats and every other encounter they have is with undead, it's not really much of a challenge! :)

One thing I've been very pleased to see in a lot of recent Dungeon adventures is good information on scaling the adventure or on tailoring it for particular settings.

However I think this could be taken a lot further by an article (or brief series of articles) on cutomising & scaling scenarios in general and in particular on converting them to and from various settings. It's generally easy to convert between two settings you know well, but what about when you aren't familiar with one (eg you want to convert an Ebberon adventure for use in Greyhawk and know nothing about Ebberon), worst of course if you're "translating" into a setting you don't know!

This could cover a wide range of areas, from particular settings (both the crunchy details and (perhaps more importantly) the flavour of the setting), to general guides to raising or lowering the level of an adventure, tailoring it to particularly large or small parties, or to oddly "shaped" parties (adding more or less for groups heavy or light on stealth, magic, missile weapons, whatever), coping with parties that have little or no healing without disrupting the pacing of the adventure, etc.

Although this is likely to be of more use to relatively new DMs than to us hoary old dungeon hackers with a couple of decades behind the dice, there should be enough material as everyone is less familiar with some material than with others.

And always, more Greyhawk material :)

It's often easier to add a flavour to a dish than to take it out -- similarly it's generally easier to "taint" a normal adventure with BoVD material than it is to cleanse a BoVD adventure to suit a non-vile campaign.

That isn't to say that all adventures should be generic and middle of the road of course, but we already see a lot of specialisation in D&D both in rules and settings that limit the ready suitability of modules to most groups -- whether they are "psionic" adventures, or "Ebberon" adventures, or "vile" adventures it takes more work to make these into generic/core adventures than it would to take something generic/core and make it psionic/Ebberon/vile/whatever.

What is it that you envision an evil adventure adding? Are you looking for adventures where the PCs are evil, or one where the setting/theme is particularly "vile"? WotC got a bit of grief over BoVD, the Dragon supplement, and the Porphyry House Horror in Dungeon, and it's not really a case of choosing to ignore the material -- WotC's target demographics are noticeably different to those of TSR a decade ago, and I suspect WotC/Paizo would be very cautious about a non-trivial amount of evil material in Dungeon/Dragon.

Should they (WotC or Paizo) put out an "evil adventures" supplement of half a dozen scenarios for evil parties or with particularly vile premises? Perhaps, but I don't think the place for such adventures is in Dungeon, and I suspect that if they did publish such a supplement it wouldn't sell well enough.

Not trying to be awkward, but a little disambiguation of the pronunciation of "kie-" may be needed, as that could be pronounced in a couple of different ways.

My understanding is the first syllable of Kyuss should rhyme with the words "by" and "pie".

According the the LG gods list the pronunciation is "kai-OOSS".

Oh, and not Dungeon/Dragon staff either!

It looks like I will have a group of about 7 characters. What should I do in terms of encounters and treasure as I don't want the characters to fall behind in levels or magic for the next instalments (3FoE has some definate TPKs in it).

...

If this helps I am running this in the Forgotten Realms. Any help will verry appreciated.

The first thing I'd look at is why you have 7 characters -- is it because you have 7 players each playing "full" characters, or do you have fewer players and either a few NPCs attached to the party or players running multiple characters?

This is important as, coupled with whether all the characters will appear in every session, it will affect how you handle it -- if you've seven players at every session it's more carved in stone than a flex&flow ensemble cast where characters come and go (different problems).

Personally I don't feel that 7 characters is too many, so long as your players aren't the sort of people who hang out on the optimisation threads! :) They may advance a little more slowly than a party of four and you may need to bump them up a little, but don't go overboard and have them each as powerful as they would be in a 4 character party, as the threats then need to be that much bigger in turn.

One problem you may encounter with more-lower characters is access to particular spells, assumptions may be made that a party has access to particular (types of) spells either immediately or within a day or so (eg a 7th level party should be able to air walk/fly/dimension door/something similar within a day). And particular to AoW, I expect you're likely to want to make sure you've got access to Remove Disease sooner rather than later!

Giving out more charged items and one-shots is generally a lot safer than increasing the amount of permanent stuff around, and things that are either straight forward bonuses or direct damage are a lot more predictable than miscellaneous utility items that innovative players/characters will find unexpected uses for.

Regarding the Realms, the official customisation for the realms seems okay, though personally my first thought was "Shar" as the premise feels very well suited to her :)

Despite the outlined rules in the DMG, the Wizards-That-Dwell-Near-the-Coast will not sic their hordes of LG gnome Paladins on you,

I thought they sent a team of half-dragon ninjas?

But back to the plot...

In general I concur with what's already been said, be as flexible with awarding XP as you would be with any other part of a published module -- remember that published rules & adventures are designed to suit certain typical & broad types of play and player, and unless your DM is Monte Cook they probably weren't written with the particulars of your group in mind.

How easy an adventure appears, how thoroughly it is completed, and how much different aspects of it are enjoyed will vary from group to group and from party to party -- if your party is a SWAT team from the temple of St Cuthbert then their experiences of a module will be very different to those of a group of archeaologists, and they in turn to a random bunch of ex-cons & mercenaries who met in the pub. The XP that each of these groups gathers during an adventure will likely vary massively -- both in magnitude and origin -- even if each group "completes" the same module.

You've got a rough idea of where they are now, where you'd like them to be at the start of the next adventure, and some of the things they're likely to do/encounter along the way, so you should be able to pace the XP and just fiddle it a bit when it all goes horribly wrong :) In short, cheat -- once you've mastered that managing encounter toughness & XP awards is easy ; indeed once you've got that and the other two cardinal skills -- lieing & stealing -- down you've got all you need to be a good DM! ;)

There's probably not as much on the Cult of the Green Lady in Overload than you're hoping,

I guess the issue then is whether there's much more information to come later on about the Cult of the Green Lady.

If not then I expect we're safe to assume that this is a relatively mainstream Jasidan group -- albeit one venerating a fallen saint. That said, I suspect that a deity of vanity & law, and the priests who serve her, may have a dim view of such heterodox practices! :)

Lastly, if people are looking for more flavour for Wee Jas, I've long been a fan of Nathan Irving's "The Lady of Book and Bone" article in OJ7. It's 2ed so the crunchy bits need converting but the fluffs good; I've a mild dislike of of the speciality class as presented, so I reworked a version for 3ed, but for people after more flavour for Wee Jas I think it's a pretty good source.