EATERoftheDEAD's page

After having recently picked up a copy of Expedition to the Demonweb Pits I was very happy to see that ti is essentially a Planescape campaign and probably the closest we will get in 3.5.

I loved Planescape back in 2nd Edition and think it's too bad that it wasn't carried over. I ran a very entertaining short campaign about the Blood War, utilizing the information in the Blood War boxed set. We went from 1st to about 12th level with that one. I started by getting the characters from my world to Sigil and then began to get them into the Blood War and then hit them with some of the big reveals that the boxed set has. All in all it was good game, even if the bugbear fighter ended up submerged in the river Styx.

Your experience may certainly vary, but I am finding that I have only made it up to Flood Season in that many adventures. I DO however add in a tremendous amount of Role Playing in between each adventure and this has made the SCAP way more fun.

I run a small group of only two players. They do all kinds of roleplaying and between each other and with the world around them but they tend to stay real focused on what they need to do in the story. We play 8-10 hour sessions and they usually advance just under a level each session.

Running the Dragonlance Chronicles in 2nd Edition took us about that long and I always use that campaign as a basis of comparison.

I think they get better and better as they go, but that they are all good... so I don't want to short treat one because I played another first that learned from the first.

Indeed. I don't want one to feel crappy by comparison because it looks so good.

I'm fairly sure that open discussion of pirating PDFs is a bad thing...:(

Hmmm, you could be right.

Perhaps I will point out that my intention is only to offer scans of issues for people who don't have the ability to scan themselves. I'm not advocating piracy. The products are worth purchase and that should not be forgotten.

I already have a hardcopy of each issue, and would just like to have it in my portable, more desert friendly version.

Depending on the issue I could probably email you a .pdf of it. I have most of them scanned into my computer for ease of reference. I have the entirety of the other two APs if you want those but I'm still in the process of tracking down the last few Savage Tide issues.

Drop me an email if you want at eaterofthedead42@yahoo.com but just make sure I know it's you so I don't accidentally delete it thinking it's spam.

That sounds seriously bad ass. I'm a huge Shadowrun fan and drums on Fire Mountain ranks as one of my all time favorite modules.

It was pretty cool. Because of the helicopter, however, the party cut out the whole first half of the adventure, getting to the volcano and then had an easy time of things outside. If I had been thinking I would have taken the helicopter away or tailored the first half so it accounted for it but i didn't. Then at the volcano I should have given the Orcs some anti-aircraft weapons but again, didn't think of it ahead of time. But it was fun overall and still managed a psuedo-PA feel.

Shadowrun is one of my favorite games. My last campaign was my first using the Fourth Edition rules and it was awesome. I had been making changes to the setting to account for wireless technology anyway but the depth that SR4 goes to is amazing. It was everything I had grown to want out of cyberpunk. The campaign was an urban war story in a future Boston against Insect cults. I had to make up Fourth Edition rules for insect totems and spirits but it was worth it. The climax was an assault on an orbital station over the Boston sprawl. The city was on fire from the war that had been raging there and the orbital station had become the main cockroach hive. I also detonated a nuke in Worchester about two thirds of the way through the campaign. Did I mention I love Shadowrun?

See, I'm the opposite, I don't care for d20. To me, the Palladium system definitely has its quirks, but all in all its some fun gaming.

Whatever works for you, then. :D

I have played Palladium Fantasy, Heroes Unlimited, and most extensively, Rifts. I hated every one of them. I loved the world that Kevin Simbieda (or however you spell his name) created with Rifts, with the exception of the New West, that book was just lame.

I even tried to run it and had some fun though it would have been a lot less work with a different system. The group played a squad of Coalition special forces after the invasion of Tolkein. I drew lots of material from Coalition War Machine, I think that's what that book was called anyway. They thwarted a group of terrorists who had a collection of nuclear weapons and were targeting Coalition cities. It was fun but the paperwork and prep time were torturous on me and I didn't have a job at the time so all I did was game. I washed my hands of it after that and haven't looked back.

But as long as you have fun that's all that matters.

Rewriting Sandpoint as a post-apocalyptic town was great fun.

Converting to a PA setting is a lot of fun. I did a psuedo-PA conversion of Drums on Fire Mountain and ran it in Shadowun, Second Edition. The mission sent the group into some blasted landscape in the southwestern desert. I had been watching Mad Max 2 and thinking I wanted to do something like that in the SR game I was running at the time and I pulled DoFM off my roommate's shelf and the rest came easy. It was a lot of fun except the party was pretty powerful and had access to an attack helicopter I hadn't taken into consideration. They ended up launching an aerial assault on the volcano and sending everyone into disarray and kinda killing the feel I was shooting for but at least we still had fun.

Two words: DARK SUN.

Look it up and see what an apocalyptic landscape might look like if it happened to a typical fantasy world.

If you're thinking of something more akin to a modern world thrust back into a dark ages society that's easy too. You don't need to change the rules at all, depending on how you want to handle magic, you just change the way things look. The dungeons are the blasted remains of cities and skyscrapers and sewers and the swords and clubs and armor are salvaged bits from our world. Magic in such a setting could be reduced by saying maybe only sorcerers were available for play.

To get back to my beloved Kender.

I agree they do rock and are one of the things that made Dragonlance such an enduring setting. The tides of magic was another unique feature that made it cool and different.

I began playing D&D in the early days of 2nd Edition but it was quite some time before I came across Dragonlance (Dark Sun was my first published campaign setting) and I fell in love with the Kender at first read. I played one and loved it. I didn't understand why folks would groan when I mentioned playing one. I think too many people just played the most hyperactive and annoying character they could but they missed the subtle nuances that make Kender so damned cool. I even went so far as to fully incorporate Kender into my own world and convinced other DMs to allow me to play them.

My most extreme moment of Kender love was my conversion of Kender for use in Second and Third Edition Shadowrun. They incorporated smoothly and made for a very interesting character. Though I did manage to get shot and blown up a bit more than other characters...

I remeber being dangled out of the back of a van by an annoyed sammie. I pulled a grenade to further threaten him and when he pretended to drop me I tossed the grenade as a reflex. I fell and survived the road rash but the rest of the party, except for the rigger who was remote driving the van, died in the blast. The damn rigger even made me clean up the goo inside of the van. Bastard.

you can probably pillage good ideas from them for your homebrew.

Which is exactly why I picked up a crapload of back issues and how I discovered Age of Worms. I'm in the process of getting the last few Savage Tide issues I don't have yet.

I'm going to just run them in order. They shouldn't take my group too long to play through them. My group pulls about a level a session so we should get through these in 20-25 sessions. I just need to hope they stay focused on D&D long enough and don't want to switch to World of Darkness or Shadowrun or something.

Ouch, yeah, lost me a Rifts.

The concept is a damn cool one, don't get me wrong. I love the world of Rifts and PA adventures all around. However, I absolutely HATE the Palladium system. In my opinion it is the single worst system I have ever played with the exception of that Batman RPG I picked up for 25 cents. That was just painful.

I could wax poetic about how much I despise that system but I will refrain here.

Perhaps this could work great in Darwin's World, or my preference, d20 Modern Apocalypse.

If your players thought that Dragon Lance was the cats pajama's...

...and the bees knees.

Dragonlance Chronicles was one of the most fun campaigns I ever ran. My players are pretty good about following obvious leads and not derailing the story too much. They always want to know what's coming next. I only found one part that I really had to force things along and I wish I had altered it and that was when the party first returns with the Disks and they are captured by Draconians. If there is anything my players hate it's imprisonment. I could have done it differently but didn't think to until after.

I love long and rich campaigns like that and my players do too. The prospect of starting at 1st level and playing a single story through to retirement is really exciting for us.

For example, I was intrigued by The Drow War and the whole Complete Campaign concept but I'm leery about dropping the money on it. I was taken quite by surprise when I stumbled across, quite accidentally, Age of Worms while looking up Eberron adventures. Much to my joy I learned I had the other APs as well.

i find myself stuck in the desert with a group of maniacs calling themselves A Company.

I can't answer your question but I can say that all the seafaring and water in Savage Tide should be a welcome escape to the heat and sand. :D

Good luck over there.

EateroftheDead, one thing you should really look for as you make your readthrough is solid "outs" in each respective AP. If you're an attentive DM that has a good feel for the pulse of his players it's vital to identify ahead of time a good spot to stop at; a place you can bring the campaign to a smooth satisfying end prematurely if it's not going well. You don't want to ever just bail out on a campaign all of a sudden since even though players that aren't enjoying it would prefer to play something different, they also have invested a lot of time into their characters and the campaign (even though they don't like it) itself. Provide them with a satisfying area to stop at which their characters can retire with dignity and give them a sense of closure.

Holy crap, I can't believe I never thought of doing that. I usually just discard the whole thing and move on to something else and I always feel unfulfilled. Seeing those 'outs', or even inserting them, is a great idea. I shall do precisely that from now on. I hate to just end a game without reaching the end but if there is a resolution of sorts it won't be so bad. I can put one in every 6-8 sessions and see how the game is going at the time.

I am reminded of Episode 13 of 24's Season 1. They weren't sure if the series would continue so they made an ending of sorts. Thankfully they continued but that's how I see this idea going.

I am very intrigued now and quite like the idea. Thank you very much for that one.

You people are monsters. I am in awe of your gaming fortitude. I think I may have to start uping my expectations for weekend gaming.

For me those 20 hour sessions were a result of the fact that we had a game store to ourselves and no lives outside of gaming. Believe it or not, we used to do that twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was crazy.

My players are quite fond of the whole AP, as it gave them a dozen or so truly great moments, the kind of sessions that will be remembered for years to come (a fire giant that throws the barbarian into a fiery forge, the monk that plots to become the city lord mayor, a romantic relation that evolves into betrayal and redemption, and more).

I appreciate the detailed response. That's the kind of input I was looking for.

From what I can tell all the APs have their own strengths and weaknesses that a little tweaking can make run smoothly. I'm just going to do a detailed read through and decide based on whatever story grabs me the most and talk a little about it with my players to see what they want to play.

Right now I'm running an introductory game to get a friend into the game. The story is a modified to my world Eberron series; The Forgotten Forge, Shadows of the Last War, Whisper of the Vampire's Blade and Grasp of the Emerald Claw with some short Dungeon adventures thrown in. However, I'm always looking for my next big game and the APs really jumped out at me.

Jeez, I average 8-10 hours and that seems short to me. Back in my gaming heyday we used to sit down when the store I ran opened at noon and play until the sun came up the next morning at 5 or 6.

Those were marathon sessions.

Skimming through Age of Worms it looked like a heavy reliance on dungeon crawls, which is precisely why I was asking folks for input. Sometimes it's hard to tell how much of a story relies on a certain element just by the amount of page space dedicated to it.

I learned that the hard way with some of Chaosium's old Call of Cthulhu campaigns.

Thanks for the input guys, I appreciate it.

That's one vote for. :D

Good to know it was fun. My skim through of both Age of Worms and Shackled City seemed generally positive. Because of the medium of magazine articles I think there seems to be the possibility of sloppy DM style ruining it. I think this may have been the cause for the negative comments I have seen.

I'll have to see what it's like when i do a detailed read through.

I've run RHoD, and I like it a lot, but I would have a hard time seeing someone successfully complete it in six or seven sessions, unless those are marathon sessions.

In all honesty I have not had the opportunity to run Red Hand of Doom yet. I was making a guess about it's length. I guess I was wrong. :D

Red Hand of Doom all on it's own works out pretty well for a mini campaign. It gives you a wide variety of things to do and ties up nicely. It's not epic but for a short campaign is pretty good.

I'm not an Eberron player but I have access to the books and the adventure path of The Forgotten Forge (in the Core Rulebook), Shadows of the Last War, Whisper of the Vampire's Blade, and Grasp of the Emerald Claw works great as a mini-campaign. I converted them all very easily to a more generic D&D world, my own, with ease and minimal work. The adventures will run your party from level 1-6 depending on the number of players. The length of time to play that depends on your group. I included small adventures from Dungeon in between the modules to keep my group off kilter so I can't say how long it might take. We went 8 levels in about 10 sessions (6-8 hours at a sitting) but that was with three additional small adventures and a few red herrings plus lots of digressing.

I have recently acquired a number of back issues of Dungeon and Dragon magazine and I have all of both the Shackled City and the Age of Worms adventure paths as well as several installments of Savage Tide.

I googled all three and have seen that reviews have been mixed. I don't want to invest the time and energy in a campaign that is going to bog and perhaps loose the attention of my group.

We all enjoy a lot of action, adventure and intrigue but extensive and tedious dungeon crawls get boring and will kill a campaign quicker than anything else. For example, the most successful and entertaining epic campaign I ran was the Dragonlance Chronicles. Those adventures had a great balance of what my group enjoys. On the flip side were the 3rd Ed module series. The site based adventures, read dungeon crawls, were entertaining at first but got tedious quickly and nearly killed the campaign.

As with everything I will be adapting this to my own world.

For folks who may play in the games please use a spoiler space if you include story elements. I'd like to hear from both DMs and players to know what your experiences and opinions of the campaigns were so I can decide if I should bother to try and run them. I especially want to hear from people who played them to completion.

-Josh