EATERoftheDEAD's page

I really enjoy having a central focus for a campaign. It really gives the party a base of operations and they will really begin to fall in love with the city and get more invested in the game. Shackled City stays in the same area as written and was a really fun run for my group and I. It took a lot of work to pull it together, but that is covered in the SCAP forums.

I looked at running Age of Worms and Rise of the Runelords and they tend to move around a lot. However, that is easy enough to fix. When I prepped Age of Worms I merged the locations into a central area, combining Alhaster with the Free City with Diamond Lake as a nearby town. I considered doing something similar with Rise of the Runelords making Sandpoint a district in Magnimar and bringing the entire third chapter closer to the city so the flood threatened the party's home.

This approach doesn't take as much work as it seems like it would. It does require throwing out the world as written. I run in a homebrew world so it's no problem for me to rip apart the APs the way I do. Some APs do seem to have a more central city theme than others. Steer away from Savage Tide, Second Darkness, Kingmaker, and Serpent's Skull for that and in a couple instances other reasons. I'm not as familiar with the other APs.

I'm looking for an adventure that is suitable for or scalable to levels 13-14. I'm looking for something that is kind of a spiritual sequel to Speaker in Dreams. So I'm thinking urban based with a kind of mystery and shadow organization or somesuch. I scoured my back issues of Dungeon and I thought about Vampires of Waterdeep but they look a little too dungeon crawl for what I really want.

I thought I'd present this to the forums here in hopes of getting some feedback. The adventure can be from anything 3.0, 3.5, or Pathfinder. I am willing to track something down if need be. I want something that will take characters through levels 13 and 14, but again, if I have to scale a little that is okay. I have all of the Paizo adventure paths so pulling from one of those is fine too as long as it's easy enough to play on its own. I'll even take stuff that covers a wider range if it's easily shrinkable.

So what are your favorite adventures that fall into that range? I'd rather avoid a dungeon crawl as the campaign I'm putting together is already pretty dungeon heavy but if it's awesome I'll consider it.

I began a conversion of Age of Worms to d20 Modern for use in a Call of Cthulhu style game (using d20 Modern not CoC d20 due to power differences). However I stopped the conversion and didn't run the game when I grew concerned about the discrepancies between the power levels of high level characters in D&D and d20 Modern. The final battle with Kyuss will have characters around 22nd level and the amount of destructive combat capability that D&D characters can bring to bear is outstanding compared to what d20 Modern characters can achieve.

My initial thoughts were that it would be a simple conversion of some setting flavor and whatnot but I could still keep all the cool monsters and such that make Age of Worms so badass. However, I soon realized that d20 Modern characters can't pull off the same things that D&D characters can and once they move into high-levels they don't really stand a chance.

I wish you the best of luck and I'm interested to see how your conversion goes and how Pathfinder might make it different. It's a great campaign, as you know.

Pit of the Fire Lord in issue #125 is level appropriate and quick to play. However, it's the last part of the Shards of Eberron series and is kinda weak.

I am all for grittier adventures with tons of moral gray area, that's the way I end up running them anyway so if I had to do less conversion that would be great. So +1 for that concept.

I also give a hearty +1 to a planar themed AP. I was a huge fan of Planescape back in the day and I feel like the planes have really been lacking in adventures since then. I ran some planar adventures throughout my 3.5 time and they are always a hit. Right now I'm converting a couple old school Planescape adventures to 3.x so I can run them as a followup to Red Hand of Doom.

I wait for a whole AP to be released before I purchase it, so I'm excited to check out Carrion Crown and Jade Regent. The ideas and unique flavor of each intrigues me.

I like the idea of a darker, more story driven AP. I'd be interested in gritty and dark campaign with aberrations, something Lovecraftian. I really like dark and alien type themes and really feel like that kind of AP could be quite awesome.

Mostly, I like seeing variety in the APs. I know that my tastes aren't the only ones out there, so the more variety I see the more I know that one will come along that is exactly what I like or will really capture my interest. If they all start to be the same core ideas and themes then they get stale and boring very quickly and that is something I REALLY don't want to see happen.

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To weigh in on the topic of paladins, I feel they can be VERY restrictive to a game, but that doesn't mean it should effect the design process. Again, I enjoy that moral gray area and like to see what the players do with it.

I have had 2 relatively recent experiences with paladin players that added a really interesting take on the game. When I ran Shackled City I had a couple of thunder twin elves (I let them take it as non-dwarves because it was cool) one was a paladin and the other was a NE rogue. The paladin managed to hold on to her morality through some really trying situations including the death of Sir Alek (whom she had married) and the outright villainous activities of her sister.

In my current game my homebrew world has changed dramatically and is now a very gritty and morally ambiguous place. The same player who was the evil elf before decided to play a tiefling paladin this time around. The paladin was faced with the post-apocalyptic violence and morally corrupting influences of the world and finally succumbed to it, falling from the grace of her god. She is now a fallen paladin stalking the wasteland like a vicious vigilante.

I felt these campaigns have been enhanced by the inclusion of a paladin. The last time I played I decided to go with a paladin/sorcerer/eldrich knight build that was WAY different than my normal characters and it was lots of fun. Paladins are only limiting if you feel to constrained by them. Let's face it, the worlds of heroic fantasy are violent and evil places that will constantly test a paladin's devotion to their faith.

Expedition to Castle Ravenloft is a great, self contained zombie themed adventure from the last days of 3.5. It runs levels 6-10 but can be scaled back to be shorter if you wish. The Expedition series adventures that I ran were really quite good and I enjoyed them as much as my players. I ran Castle Ravenloft and Demonweb Pits and heard Undermountain and Ruins of Greyhawk were good as well.

If you are looking for a bigger campaign featuring zombies and apocalyptic undead scenarios, you really can't do better than Age of Worms. It is epic awesome ranging from level 1-22.

We don't really do campaign journals but I can pop back on and post how it went. I know I will have to scale it up because Dead Gods is intended for 8-9th level I think. My players played through Expedition to the Demonweb Pits a year and a half ago so I'm interested to return to the Ratatosk. I'll have to take a real close look at the adventure to look for any pitfalls, good to know there are a couple to watch out for.

I'm converting Hellbound right now though my group has a bit longer in Red Hand of Doom. It is intended for lower levels too but the conversion is pretty easy. I'm aiming more for maintaining the story and the feel of encounters over the strict monsters and such. This allows me to scale to whatever level I want. Interestingly, I have learned from this and other 2nd Ed adventures that there seem to be much less encounters and potential for XP than in 3.x era adventures.

If anyone is interested I can put up my conversions once I do them.

While the topic of the conversation seems to have trended away from the 'sandbox/railroad' debate I'd like to weigh in.

I prefer story driven adventures over open ended campaigns. I like the big epic stories and so do my players. If I don't lay clear plot hooks and weave a cool story to follow my players will wander around and get nothing accomplished. They like to see what is going to happen next and don't deal well with a sandbox style. It's just not fun for us to play games like that. For this very reason Kingmaker and Serpent's Skull didn't interest me.

I despise the term 'railroad' to describe story driven campaigns because that is not accurate. Just because there is a clear plot that unfolds does not mean that the players are forced to take certain actions to advance the story.

In all, I respect the efforts of Paizo and think they release some of the best RPG material available today. I know my opinions are but a part of the entire community so I like seeing a wide variety of APs. I don't like big dungeon crawls but I know lots of people do so I wouldn't mind seeing a mega-dungeon AP. Keep up the variety and the quality and I'll keep being a fan.

I know this is totally bringing this thread back from the dead but I have to put in my two cents.

I am currently running Red Hand of Doom for my group and I was poking around the interwebs to see about good high-level adventures in general and here is someone else looking for a followup. Weirdness.

Anyway, my original plan, and the one I will probably go with is the following campaign arc:
1 Hollow's Last Hope
2-5 Witchfire
6-12 Red Hand of Doom
13-16 Hellbound: The Blood War
17-20 Dead Gods

My new game world is a steampunk setting so I returned to Witchfire, though it was pretty heavily modified to mesh with the setting of Red Hand of Doom. Hellbound is more war themed adventures I though would follow Red Hand of Doom and Dead Gods is just awesome. I have a Plancescape fanatic in my group so I thought it would be cool to go back to a couple of my favorite adventures. I will be forced to update them to 3.5 but whatever.

Currently my party just hit level 9 and have left Brindol for the Blackfens. I have planned advancement points so unless they skip the Ghostlord they should be level 13 after they defeat Azarr Kul.

For my group I didn't change anything, except Vhalantru, but that's beside the point. When the party descended down into the tunnels and confronted the doors they considered the puzzle for close to 30 seconds before the Ogre Barbarian just smashed his way through them and, if hurt badly enough, waited (im)patiently for the cleric to heal him. Interestingly enough, this was also how they dealt with the doors way back in J'zadirune.

I see no reason a temperate forest couldn't work just as well. Something northwestern so volcanoes still fit logically. Werewolves and dire animals and so forth could work instead of the tropical creatures.

I would pay good money for a Paizo quality steampunk supplement. I would be surprised to see such a book since I don't know how well it would really mesh with Golarion. Which is too bad because my homebrew has advanced to a steampunk setting and there is little quality crunch on the genre. Paizo produces such quality products I know they would do something WAY more impressive than the material currently on the market.

My party had some issues with that part also, though they didn't have a near TPK. However, they were really weak and needed to rest. The dungeon is set up to be more like 3 smaller locations, each with it's own 'boss' and the fragmentation of the cult means that the bosses or their minions won't go check on the others. I allowed the party to rest and recover as best they could before continuing onward to combat Triel and the halfling whose name I forgot.

A capture scenario is the way I would go. I feel that a dues ex machina save by having the Striders show up is similar to the do-over. It allows the PCs to do whatever they want and think that they have a safe backup.

When I ran SCAP I had the Striders around as allies but they were always off doing some other quest or mission so they were not usually available for backup unless it was specifically part of the story.

I ran Shackled City to conclusion, from the magazines, and it was one of the best campaigns I ever ran. We had a blast like little else. That being said it needed A TON of work to make it flow appropriately. There are a ton of forums on how to do that, however. I felt that, at first, the dungeons were too large but then became manageable sized and fun to play. I, nor my players, are fans of large dungeon crawls so while it dragged at first it got better. There's lots of intrigue and excitement in the campaign with some really interesting moments.

I read through Age of Worms but did not run it. However, it is the AP that got me into finding more out about this whole "Adventure Path" thing. The tone is very dark and Lovecraftian and uber-cool. There are lots of dungeons but they do not go overboard from the looks of it. They seem to be of manageable size and complexity so it doesn't look to be a detraction from the AP as a whole. However, the story might need some work with it's establishing then dropping cool plot lines and locations (Rod of Seven Parts and Diamond Lake, anyone?).

My opinion of both SCAP and AoW is that they are worth the investment. The SCAP Hardcover definitely, though if you can find the AoW Dungeon issues for cheap they are def worth getting. AoW looks to be more fun, but SCAP is way less expensive to get and still a blast.

Another classic I love to plug when discussing APs is the old Dragonlance series. Converted to 3.5 the length of the game is the same as any of the Dungeon APs and it was the best DMing experience I had in 2nd Ed. SCAP was the best I had in 3.5 though it may be eclipsed by Rise of the Runelords, which I am prepping to run now.

I've adopted this method as well. I ran Shackled City to completion using it and it worked quite well.

The only times I ran into issues were when XP debt came into the game. The first time was when a PC lost a level to death. I simply waited until such a time as the XP for his level would even out with the others and had him level an extra time at a mid-way point between progression points. This was essentially a level twice idea, but a little slower so it worked out well.

In SCAP I had two characters with level adjustments and I did the same thing for them. By the time the party hit 4-5th level everyone was caught up with everyone else.

A problem I did not figure in came up later. I decided to use craft points as detailed in Unearthed Arcana for the creation of magic items but didn't think of permanency. I devised a mechanic that required a GP cost equal to the XP cost and then gave each PC a number of 'permanency slots' similar to the magic item slot concept. I gave everyone 3 slots but they could spend a feat on 2 more slots.

Once I introduced the slot system it put permanent spell effects back on par with where they usually are in a game instead of the way too many that the party dumped on themselves at first. Every character filled up their 3 slots and the mage dropped a feat to get 2 more. It worked out great and is how I handle permanency now.

That might be interesting. I am always on the lookout for new steampunk related material to throw into the new version of my homebrew world. I snatched up The Witchfire Trilogy back in the day and had fun running it. So much so I am running it again now, modified extensively, as a precursor to Red Hand of Doom. I kind of lost interest in the setting when they seemed to shift in favor of their miniatures game and haven't kept up on it at all in years.

Any kind of 3P group going PFRPG is a good thing in my book. I'd like to see even more support for the game as it is a solid rules set.

One thing the campaign certainly lacks in abundance is foreshadowing. Establish Sir Alek and Vhalantru as early as possible as well as the other major players. I placed Sir Alek in the very first adventure and he became a stalwart ally of the party. So much so that they sent him to Redgorge after Maavu in Zenith Trajectory while they went in search of Zenith. This put him exactly where he needed to be in the campaign and freed me from explaining why he was there later.

Vhalantru took an interest in the party during Flood Season but seemed a foppish and rather ineffectual drunkard with too much money and influence. When he claimed control of the city following the riots and began flooding the streets with barbarians for the Blue Duke the party was racking their brains trying to figure out who was pulling his strings. The fact he was the big bad for the political unrest was quite the shocker, as well as the revelation of his true identity.

Make liberal use of the alternate foreshadowing put forth by delvesdeep. It was indispensable in my game, even if I did drop lots of the endgame changes.

I'm putting together a player's guide right now for the game and, despite everyone's advice, I will be merging all of the towns into one small city. I plan on playing up the isolated heroes feeling and with a single location to operate in this should keep that. I tend to gloss over the purchasing rules for community size, playing it kind of loose, so as long as I make it a small city I can add enough corruption and intrigue to keep it interesting but make the city small enough that the characters can become local heroes. I had such success with this aspect of Shackled City I would like to recreate that. My players kind of expect a central location now as well, and got a little off track when I jumped them around in the last campaign. I jumped them from small town at low level to a city for mid level and then Sigil for high level and they kept saying they liked staying in and around one city the whole time.

I plan on expanding this to 20 levels with the addition of The Styes between chapter 3 and 4 and expanding on the whole fae storyline in chapter 3. That story seems so stunted the way its written and really begs for more. I'm running with a heavy Lovecraftian feel to the campaign with a strong fae vs aberration thing going on too so that bit seems the perfect place to expand that theme. The Styes allows me to take the story out over the water for a bit too.

I won't be awarding experience points because I feel this encourages more role playing and less combat for combat's sake. Instead I just award levels at story appropriate moments and use the craft point rules from Unearthed Arcana as well as use a gp cost/slot system for permanency similar to magic items. So even though the XP awards don't add up to 20 levels I can smooth it out so it works. I'll have to scale up a little bit in the latter half, but probably not too much from the lethality I've been hearing about.

I want to decouple that chapters a bit so it feels like smaller stories that combine into a cohesive whole. This will allow downtime between chapters so the party can pursue personal agendas and follow up on their own ideas and stories. I will still be laying heavy hooks early on so the whole plot is more cohesive but I won't be forcing it, with the possible exception of chapters 4-6, where the pace seems to pick up some.

This campaign looks like it will be an awesome and wild ride indeed and I can't wait to run it!

The problem I'm running into is something inherent in my homebrew world. The world suffered a cataclysmic war a few hundred years ago that laid waste to the empires that once flourished. Now a dark age has descended upon the world and there is a kind of steampunk/post-apocalyptic feel going on. I kind of took the 4E 'points of light' concept to an extreme where what few settlements there are exist as walled enclaves, keeping back the chaos and destruction of the world at large. Outside the walls of the enclaves barbarism rules the day.

Because of this I am trying to limit the number of 'civilized' locations. I can't have too many enclaves without the world seeming more populated and civilized than it should be. However, I don't want to include a large city like Magnimar unless it is a series of smaller settlements existing inside a larger, bombed out metropolis, which is another idea I'm considering.

I want to keep the gritty survival theme going on along with other common PA themes like wandering barbarians, rampant insanity, lone bands of heroes struggling to prevent the final collapse of society, etc. Rise of the Runelords offers lots of opportunity to play into the tone and mood of the world with minimal conversion and I'm really digging it for that reason. The only real sticking point is this Sandpoint/Magnimar issue.

Perhaps "deep horror theme" is not really an accurate term. There is a distinct tone of weirdness and the macabre though each author seems to handle it differently. In my read through that theme seemed to be lacking in Chapter 4. I was thinking in dropping Jorgenfist and putting the giant leader, as the climax of the battle. Last night I got the idea of decoupling the dungeon in Chapter 5, making it seven smaller locations, tied together some other way.

Thank you so much for all the suggestions. Ideas for foreshadowing and tying everything together are always helpful. That was exactly what I was looking for.

As far as the merging Sandpoint and Turtleback Ferry, I will definitely be doing this. Merging Sandpoint and Magnimar, however, I'm still not sure about that. I may, giving the party some political intrigue to combat, ala Shackled City. Keeping the campaign tightly focused around the city in that AP was a great device and I'd like to recreate that theme.

I will likely drop the nymph storyline because my party has a bad habit of running off on tangents when given red herrings. I'll be sure to drop hints about Fort Rennick early on. I already planned on including stories of degenerate ogres in the hills.

I noticed that vague connection as well and remedied it in a similar manner to ones already mentioned.

The way I ran it I had Nabthatoron as one of Adimarchus' generals back in the day before Surabar and pals laid them all to waste. Nabthatoron was trapped on the prime and Adimarchus was imprisoned by Graz'zit in Skullrot. 800 years later the barrier between the planes is thin in the area. Adimarchus' madness has seeped into the prime and has been infecting the denizens, animals at first but later in the game higher functioning creatures. Dyr'ryd was a worshipper of Adimarchus and has saught to free his master through a complex ritual and put together The XIII, aka The Cagewrights, to complete the ritual and free his insane master.

The party came along and slowly discovered the plots of The XIII and began to dismantle the organization. By the time they uncovered the location of the Firey Sanctum and moved on the last of the Cagewright Masters Adimarchus' prison was weakening. They knew that the only way to stop Adimarchus' madness from infecting another prime world, creating another opportunity for escape, they went to Skullrot to slay him.

The way I played it the plan was less a conspiracy by Adimarchus and more a byproduct of his madness. However, he was still closely tied to the actions of the Big Bads and simply stopping them was not enough to stop his spreading insanity and inevitable escape.

I bounced around about what I was going to run next and, after some careful consideration, I have decided to run Rise of the Runelords. I've been a little intimidated by this AP for some reason I can't really identify, I ran Shackled City with fantastic results.

So, I'd appreciate some advice from folks that have run this AP so I can know what to expect. I searched for other threads that were along similar veins, but I couldn't find anything specific. I've read through the adventures and have scoured the boards for advice and such, but any potential hazards, plot holes, suggestions etc. would be greatly appreciated.

Here are some of the problems I have seen mentioned and how I plan on addressing them. I have seen some warnings of potential TPK moments and a general steep difficulty in the AP. To combat this I plan on allowing gestalt characters. I did this in Shackled City and it worked quite well. In addition my party will only be 3 PCs so this should help balance the party. I have also seen advice to foreshadow Foxglove and Ironbriar sooner so I will be doing just this, allowing the PCs to interact extensively with them early on.

Some problems I see and would like some advice on include the following. I don't like the fact that the game leaves Sandpoint for so long. I plan on moving the entire Magnimar section to Sandpoint, perhaps redesigning the city a bit to make it larger. I run in a homebrew world so redesign isn't an issue. Also the entirety of Chapter 3 will be placed considerably closer to Sandpoint, perhaps even replacing Turtleback Ferry with Sandpoint.

Perhaps I am not reading it correctly, but Chapter 4 slightly confuses me. The way it looks to me is that the campaign has a deep horror theme and then suddenly drops it in favor of a massive dungeon crawl with some giants. The theme and tone seems to shift suddenly. After that there is what looks like another massive dungeon crawl in Chapter 5. I'm not in favor of big dungeon crawls so any advice on combating this issue would be fantastic. I'm thinking of removing the entire Jorgenfist fortress but keeping the battle of Sandpoint, and just placing another chapter in the AP. Suggestions from Dungeon Magazine? The Styes perhaps?

So, big changes include gestalt characters and placing everything closer to Sandpoint to maintain focus. Any advice folks could give me would be great.

Well, upon more careful consideration, I have decided to take some of the afore mentioned advice and just run Rise of the Runelords.

The 4E version is a full hardcover, it's more than just a 4E conversion of the Tomb of Horror.

Hm, I didn't know this. So they are doing something akin to Revenge of the Giants? That would be cool as Giants was a pretty neat adventure.

Paizo is shipping me the Tomb of Horrors 4E (it takes a while, since I live in the UK). I eventually plan to take the information in 1E ToH, 2E Return to the ToH, and 4E ToH, plus maybe a few other vaguely related modules and some of my own ideas, and create the ultimate PFRPG Tomb of Horrors Adventure Path. Well, that's the eventual plan...who knows if I'll actually even get a decent start before Pathfinder 2.0 comes out.

Wizards.com released a free version of Tomb of Horrors for 3.5 that you might still be able to find on the site for free. It was a 9th level module if I'm remembering correctly. Of course, it was a straight conversion of the original so you're not gaining much for new material. From the looks of it the 4E version is also just a conversion of the original.

Apparently, I just can't post enough on this thread right now.

As an interesting aside, I was considering one of two options for conversion. First was the afore mentioned 4E series, and the other was the old Greyhawk pseudo-path of Temple of Elemental Evil, Scourge of the Slave Lords, and Queen of the Spiders. The latter I have been toying with for some time but haven't had the guts to actually go for it yet.

The main turn-off point for me when it comes to the 4E adventures is the delve system.. I really, really, don't want to have to flip back and forth multiple pages between the brief room descriptions and the encounter descriptions during gameplay.

The Expedition adventures form the last days of 3.5 used this system and it was a total pain in the ass. I had to put way more info in my notes to make reference easier while I was running the game. 4E design seems to take it a step further and remove info from the core text so you can only find it in the delve sheets. With the 2 Expedition adventures I ran (Demonweb Pits aka 'Planescape for 3E' and Ravenloft) it was worth the work because the stories were pretty damn cool.

I don't know about the adventures for conversion, but I wouldn't mind converting some of the classes; the "Invoker" for instance makes me think of a paladin/oracle (in PF terms), which would be a bit of a clunky multiclass.

I found a nifty class construction guide for 3.5 online a couple years back that you might be able to make this happen with. I can't recall where I got it now, though.

Thank you Jeremy for the observations. When I ran 4E we didn't get past 3rd level since we all pretty much hated the mechanics and felt 3.5 was just more fun to play so I was unaware of the discrepancies at higher levels. That was the kind of advice I was looking for. I think I'll just pull the liberals of the material and just do the encounters myself. Oh look, this one is kobolds, okay, let's make a kobold encounter. That kind of thing so the ELs don't get too out of whack.

To the other questions, I like some of the fluff that comes with the adventures, especially the whole idea of the Shadowfell, and feel that a game heavily involving such ideas (portals to a death realm, cultists and a dark god of the undead, etc.) would really jive with my players. Now, I know what you're thinking, 'if you like those ideas just run Age of Worms,' well, I will be running my Shackled City group through that epic soon enough. I'm all about receiving suggestions for adventures or series that are awesome, though.

I'm not saying there are not better adventures out there, I'm just digging the fluff of these and was considering doing some preliminary notes to see if it holds up. I do this quite often and sometimes it comes together, sometimes it does not. For example, my Shadowrun Fourth Edition conversion of Second Darkness got pretty far before I realized it wasn't going to work.

The overall story looks basic, but entertaining with it's long struggle against Orcus and lots of iconic and entertaining monsters and situations. The only adventure I have read fully in Keep on the Shadowfell and I quite enjoyed it. The other adventures I have skimmed to get an idea for the overall storyline, and perhaps I am missing some glaring problems, but they don't look that bad at all.

I'm not a huge fan of 4E but I'm not a hater either. I pillage ideas from any source that presents itself and these adventures looked interesting. Not as interesting as the 3E path that kicked off that line, but still containing some merit.

So, aside from hating on 4E, has anyone given any thought or effort to converting backwards?

The most enjoyable D&D games, plotwise, that I played in were actually published modules. The last 2E game I ran was the Dragonlance Chronicles, from the DL Classics series. The characters were enjoyable and the plot was epic and entertaining.

In 3.5, a recent game I ran to introduce some noobs, was the Eberron path of adventures, The Forgotten Forge, Shadows of the Last War, Whispers of the Vampire's Blade, and Grasp of the Emerald Claw. I heavily modified the campaign to fit into my homebrew world but the pace and characters and such made for a wonderful experience. I followed the game up with Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, which was also amazingly fun and then Greg Vhaughn's classic Istivin: City of Shadows series.

There has been lots of discussion about converting 3E era material to 4E, but I'm wondering how easy it is to convert the other way. Has anyone tried this?

I've been looking at the core 4E path of Keep on the Shadowfell to Prince of Undeath and for the most part I'm digging what I'm reading but I am not a fan of 4E mechanics. From the looks of it converting backwards shouldn't be too difficult but I'm wondering if there are any potential pitfalls that others have noticed in doing this.

2 obvious issues are the level range and experience awards. I would not be attempting a 1-30 level progression in 3.5 as 30 is the new 20, so to speak. So once I drop the level range to 20 levels the number of encounters per level is not equal, requiring more encounter to span all the levels, 300 level appropriate encounters in 4E opposed to approximately 260 in 3.5. So I will be dropping XP awards and just handing out levels at even intervals.

As well, if anyone is familiar with pitfalls or total dead spots in the story I wouldn't mind some heads up in that regard.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

I ran Shackled City with 4 gestalt PCs and it ran just fine. I didn't ever need to adjust the encounters at all with the exception of turning the major villains into gestalt characters as well. This meant I had to convert seven NPCs into gestalt characters, so overall, very little was required.

Simultaneously I played in a game that employed gestalt characters and the DM was constantly scrambling to keep up with us. We were a 5 PC party but that wasn't the issue, so much.

In my experience gestalt is lots of fun and makes for some really unique characters and the party will function as if they are slightly more advanced. My group of 4 PC functioned as if they were about 1 level higher most of the time. The balancing factor was the limitation of splatbook material. In the game I played we were given access to anything published by Wizards and so I had a weretiger fighter/rogue/dervish doing something in the vicinity of 300 attacks per round with large scimitars for about 2000d10+500 per hit.

So a little prep-work on your end going through the books and deciding what you want to allow, or just limiting it to the core books, will go a long ways toward keeping the game fun as you play.

... That way, the monsters/NPCs all had access to the same splatbooks the players did. ...

That's a viable option as well. I just prefer to keep the paperwork on my end down as I already do massive conversions so changing the encounters like that, especially at high levels, is more than I want to do.

I've done out all the math and from the looks of everything, presuming a 4 PC party, the group should be on track through the whole game, ending at about level 22. Given the CRs of the encounters it all looked pretty challenging. I'm preparing to run this now that I'm wrapping up Shackled City so I'm interested in identifying pitfalls from people who have run the game.

If you allow all the multitude of splatbooks the characters most definitely will be too powerful. This is not a flaw of the adventures, as they are rather quite difficult, but a flaw of the material in the splatbooks. This has been discussed at length elsewhere so I won't rehash it here.

My recommendation is to do what I did before I started Shackled City and Age of Worms. Make a player's guide that includes character creation information. Look through the splatbooks and choose the things that you feel are appropriate to the campaign and are not unbalancing. A great example is the Undead Slayer (I'm forgeting the source) so that rouges don't loose their access to sneak attack against the multitude of undead the campaign offers up. If you don't feel like making a player's guide, at the very least, decide fairly closely, what is allowed and what is not then stick to your guns when the players start making their characters.

Doing this bit of work ahead of time will save you massive amounts of work later on and if you make a neat player's guide will really draw them into the game and make it more fun. Limited options, I feel, make for more interesting and exciting characters and campaigns.

The books were some of the first published for 3.0 but should give a great basis for conversion to Pathfinder. It's been a while since I read them but they seemed okay as far as a straight conversion is concerned.

I apologize if someone else mentioned these books already, I didn't see them in any of the posts.

Diablo II: Diablerie
Diablo II: To Hell And Back

Ever shelled out money for what appears to be a great RPG only to get it home and after a close read discover it is unplayable? Or how about hearing the hype on a game only to discover that it wasn't very good? Ever discovered the rule system of a game is too complex to make heads or tails of?

It would be called Fourth Edition. I wanted to like the game so much and it looked so interesting but only after several sessions stubbornly trying to like it it just wasn't very good.

Granted, D&D4 is hardly bad enough to get lumped in with some of the awful games listed here. It's no Batman Roleplaying Game, for example.

I remember those books! I loved the Chronomancer and immediately included them in my games. On the other hand I was not impressed with Shamans because of the severe social interaction penalties they received as they went up level.

As far as conversions I cannot comment on any of the above listed sources as I have not read them. Chronomancy shouldn't be too hard to add to a 3.x game as it wouldn't require more than converting the spells over to the new(er) rules set. 4E Chronomancy on the other hand, that would require some work.

IF the Ogre barbarian survives until that chapter...

With Lord of Oblivion now behind us I can say that Grunt Demoncrunch survived with reckless abandon. Yes, such a thing is possible. I would not have believed it prior to this bastard of an ogre came along. He got it through his head to wrestle Gottrodd and then learned that fisticuffs with a red dragon is never a sound idea. Somehow he survives no matter how many times he drops his axes or gets thrown head first through stone walls by rabid dire sloths.

Oblivion went as follows: door + high-level ogre barbarian = GRUNT SMASH!!!!

Good to know the characters have been consistent over all this time.

Hey, Eater...I'm in the process of reworking SC to fit my tastes. I plan on running the campaign in about a month. I would love to talk to you about the ins and outs of the campaign and get your advice on various things. Can we talk?

Absolutely. Drop me an email at eaterofthedead42@yahoo.com and I'll be happy to have a dialogue. My Shackled City game has been on a tentative hold since the end of Lord of Oblivion but my notes go all the way to the end and I've spent a metric asston of time reading and converting and so on. Anything I can do to help I will gladly do.

Sounds like it a success so far, that's pretty awesome. I ran this out of the magazines so I am not familiar with the details of Drakthar's Way. I'm interested to know what happens when the 'flood season' rolls around. :D

Glad to see your game got off to a good start. Dark Sun rocks, Shackled City rocks, so how is that not a recipe for awesome?

I decided to scrap the XP system entirely and have preset places along the path where the group would gain a level. My party of 4 gestalt characters has fared pretty well so far with minimal deaths but lots of challenge.

I found that since I juggled things around a bunch and chopped out large sections of the AP (Strike on Shatterhorn anyone?) as well as added lots of material, including a lot of delvedeep's alternative foreshadowing, it was lots easier. I did a breakdown of the adventures and the campaign as a whole and just decided, based on EL and story, where the party would advance level.

They have just uncovered the location of Oblivion and are all level 15. By the time they clash with Dyr'ryd and the tree they will be level 18, and when they kick the backside of Big A, they will be level 20. This whole setup saves me so much work and the players are free to explore the story however they like and not worry if they have fought enough or done enough to gain the XP needed.

Solid ideas all around. Looks like it's shaping up well, awesome to hear.

I think the book was Defilers and Preservers because I never owned Dragon Kings.

As usual, ideas behind the cut.

As ususal, notes behind the spoiler space.

Man, this is making me wish I'd run this in Dark Sun. lol

I am familiar with all 3 Dungeon APs but I have only read Rise of the Runelords, so my opinions may be slanted a bit.

The Dungeon APs are longer, 20 levels instead of 15 or so. The issue of 12 installments instead of 6 doesn't factor in as much, as has already been stated. I like the idea of running a game that spans the entire range of play and goes the full 20 levels, but it can be a challenge to get the players through it all. It really is a personal preference. In running SCAP I found the players began to get a little burned out as they started to hit 16th level and we needed to take a break before retuning to it. Pathfinder avoids this by ending at about that point.

As far as story quality is concerned, I prefer AoW over RotRL by far. The darker, grittier, meaner elements are much preferred. Rune Lords starts out great but degrades into dungeon crawling by the mid way point while AoW keeps things changing. There are dungeon crawls to be sure, but the dungeons are smaller and quicker to complete, by the looks of them anyway, leading to more variety and less player burnout.

Age of Worms is a hella cool story and while there are elements that could have been handled better (wind dukes, anyone?), it is still a solid campaign. It is my favorite of the three Dungeon APs.

But keep in mind there are other APs out there to consider. Dragonlance Chronicles was probably the most fun I had in 2E and the length is comparable to the Dungeon APs. There is also other 3p APs like The Drow War (cool though I haven't read part 3) and War of the Burning Sky (I know nothing about this one).

For a game set in the Great Depression I didn't have much trouble with Rift Valley. My conversion was placed in a fictionalized western Maine and the entirety of Rift Valley was placed in the deep mountains. Being Lovecraftian, it was a place full of savage natives warring with the mythos creatures that also dwell in the dark places of the earth.

The locations don't need to be so far away, really. I placed the Spire of Long Shadows on an uncharted island off the coast of Maine. The party would have been able to travel there easily without incorporating teleportation magic, something I wanted to avoid given the "evil" factor magic has in Call of Cthulhu.

In Unearthed Arcana you could easily have the party teleport to Central or South America for that adventure. Perhaps Kyuss began as an Aztec blood sorcerer, it would fit with his backstory as it is written.

In your OP you asked for input from fans of SCAP or Dark Sun. Well, I'm both. :D

Notes below the spoiler space.

Hope you can mine this stuff for ideas. :D