James Jacobs's page

It's true. We're going to try to do at least one Epic adventure a year in Dungeon, one psionic adventrue, and one or two Oriental Adventures adventures (that sounds weird) per year. Ghostwalk is a really interesting campaign, and if we get an adventure submission set there that really knocks our socks off, we'll even consider publishing that.

Just off the top of my head, we used some stuff from the Book of Vile Darkness in issues #111 ("Strike on the Rabid Dawn" has a diabolist and some vile feats) and #112 ("Maure Castle" has some Yeenoghu cultists with the Bestial domain). Issue #116 has a Book of Vile Darkness in it. We haven't used much from Book of Exalted Deeds but that's mostly because the info there doesn't lend itself that well to villains. That's not to say we'll never use material from it... just that we haven't had any adventures submitted that use it (hint, hint...).

The Death of the Quick Reference Format: The Light/Sound/Reaction/Aura format was dropped from "Thirteen Cages" (and all future adventures as well) because it simply took up too much space in the magazine. The information is still present in "Thirteen Cages" but it's hidden in the body text of the encounters (or in the core books, in the case of magic item and creature auras).

Bone Naga CR: CR 11 is correct; that's what it's listed as in the Monster Manual II, and there's no eratta yet for that book. That said, if you feel it to be too low, you can certainly alter it as you wish in your campaign (or perhaps just reduce its sorcerer caster level to 10 or so?).

Demodands: The demodands were designed with the majority of the 3.5 rules in mind. The change to how damage reduction works was one of the last additions to the revised rules, but everything else is solid, so there's no need to buff them up (unless you want to, of course—I'm sure the demodands won't mind!).

With the new layout in the magazine, you'll be getting a high level adventure in every issue. Of course... "high-level" by our defenition is an adventure for 13th-level to 20th-level characters. Issue #116 has one for 19th-level characters, and the lower levels of Maure Castle (issue #112) can easilly challenge 17th-level or higher characters. And don't forget "The Lich Queen's Beloved" from issue #100!

As for 22nd-level sorcerers, the DMG has some bare-bones rules for epic level characters in it, so we can certainly publish adventures with characters of that level in the magazine. All we need is for someone to submit some good adventures for high level (hint hint...). We've got some good ones coming up, but we're always on the hunt for more.

Rest assured, everything that gets mentioned on these messageboards about Adventure Path II is being noticed.

And I think that you'll get a kick out of the final adventure for the Shackled City Adventure Path; it definately takes the PCs somewhere new!

We kind of ran out of room when it came to detailing some of the new monsters that lurk on the Isle of Dread, but chances are fairly good that'll be addressed sometime soon...

The guidelines are more or less written, but they still need a little bit of tweaking and quite a bit more editing. They'll be up by the end of the week for sure. Once they do go up on the website, I'll drop a note here to let you all know.

Oh, and never fear. There's a LOT for characters who have the Sign of the Smoking Eye to do in the final adventure in the series.

The problem with the last few installments of the Shackled City Adventure Path is that the last few adventrues ended up being well over 30,000 words each. Rather than cut these last two adventures in half and lose a lot of fun encounters, we instead split these two adventrues in half over the course of four issues.

In a way, you can think of "Foundation of Flame," "Thirteen Cages," and "Strike on Shatterhorn" as one huge adventure split into three parts. The 2nd two parts unfortunately (in hindsight) rely too much on the previous adventure.

"Asylum" (the last Shackled City adventure path installment, due to appear in #116) has its own hooks, with a few "setup" encounters before things get going.

One of the things we've learned from this at Dungeon is that we need adventrue hooks in every adventure. When we get Adventure Path 2 going, we'll be including numerous adventure hooks for each adventure.

Correct; Evard made the rings himself, using the "no space limitation" modifier to market value that appears on the Calculating Magic Item Gold Piece Value at the end of the Dungeon Master's Guide. You can pretty much do the same thing with any magic item that takes up a "slot" on the body, althoguh with things like gloves and boots and hats it ends up looking silly.

The web enhancements stopped after "Flood Season" because they take a fair amount of additional time to develop and edit, time that the Dungeon staff doesn't usually have to spare, alas.

There are no plans at this point to add web enhancements for Adventure Path 2, with the obvious exception of the online map/illustration booklets we're doing for all issues of Dungeon. I'll look into the logistics of posting the maps without tags, but I can't make any promises there (yet).

There should be fewer instances of sudden plot shifts in the second Adventure Path. The dramatic shift in plot from "The Demonskar Legacy" and "Test of the Smoking Eye" works on some levels, but in hindsight it does leave certain story elements hanging. Since the second Adventure Path will be more or less completely planned out from start to end, this shouldn't be a problem the next time around.

As for errors in stat blocks and continuity errors (such as Hookface's gender swapping)...they're unfortunate, but they'll creep in now and then. Having the entire adventure path plot laid out should help a lot, if only because we won't have to wait for Author #3 to finish his installment before we can get Author #4 working on his installment, which should give us a LOT more time to develop and edit them!

While we're not ready to unveil any of the juicy details on the new Adventure Path quite yet, we're definately interested in hearing what the readers want to see in it!

So what do you all think? Any requests for the Adventure Path 2? What did you like in the Shackled City Adventure Path, and would you like to see that in the second one? What about things you didn't like in the first? More gnomes? Less demodands? More new monsters? Less new prestige classes? More exploration and overland travel? Less dungeons? More ninjas? Less baboons?

We'll definately take any opinions and recomendations posted here into account as we plot out the next adventure path, but the earlier you voice any suggestions and/or concerns, the better!

The one thing I can guarentee is that we'll be building in goodies for all 11 of the core character classes throughout the next adventure path.

Tantalizing Hint Time:

#1: If we do compile the Shackled City Adventure Path into one book, there will definately be additional content and maps and encounters.

#2: There is indeed going to be a 2nd Adventure Path in Dungeon. We're still working out the details now, but you can expect it to wriggle into the light sometime in the first half of 2005.

One thing to keep in mind about the Cagewrights in "Thirteen Cages" is that they're all a little (or a lot) crazy. They may know that the PCs are on the way, they just don't care or don't think the PCs can do much about stopping the ritual.

Of course, if that doesn't do it for you, it's simple enoguh to have the Cagewrights present in the Fiery Sanctum to wait for the PCs in the final encounter area. Fighting them all at once is an EL 22 or so encounter, though, so you can expect a group of four 16th-17th level characters to have a bit of trouble with the fight!

Cora at level 4 may only have an Intelligence of 10, but what's to say she didn't use her ability score modifiers for level 8, 12, 16, and so on to increase her intelligence? A headband of intellect'll also help her intelligence score as well, and let her use her duelist skills more effectively.

That said, though, Vic's right. Not all NPCs are meant to be perfect examples of their class or profession. They don't always make the best choices, and that helps give them character and personality. Cora's certainly got the scars to prove that she's not the best duelist she could be!

In any case, it's really cool to see how the Stormblades are being used in the various Cauldron campaigns! Anyone else have any Stormblade stories to share?

We made the decision with the relaunch of the magazine to abandon that format. While I agree that it's helpful to have an indication of lighting, sounds, reactions, and auras at the start of an encounter, they started taking up a lot of space in the magazine, especially in the higher level adventures. Space always seems to be at a premium in the magazine, and when we were forced to choose between cutting the quick reference format from the encounters or cutting what would have amounted to about 3 to 4 pages (or more) of encounters and text from the magazine's adventures itself, we chose to cut the quick reference format.

If I had to guess, you can expect to see about six Eberron adventures a year in Dungeon. The Eberron adventures will include sidebars with tips on converting the adventure to core D&D.

The majority of the adventures in Dungeon will use the core D&D world, and should be quite easy to fit into any game.

The current plan is to do an epic adventure about once a year. For psionic adventures, we'll be doing one (maybe two) a year. We've already got a psionic adventrue ready to go for Dungeon #116 (November, 2004), and we're waiting for revisions on what looks like a pretty crazy and unique epic adventure.

We probably won't be printing these types of adventures more often than once a year, unless reader response is higher than we anticipate.