Stebehil's page

I have a theory about playing with backgrounds based in movies, books etc.
These backgrounds have an inherent difficulty if used for gaming: If you stick to the main story told in the movie, etc., the characters just don´t make a difference for the world. If you change the storyline or play in an off-beat area or a different timeframe, it just is not close enough to the story and looses much of its appeal.
Lets take LotR: Re-playing the original story with different characters just would not work (Imagine your typical D&D Party in this story... shudder. Would Gandalf hire them in the Prancing Pony ? ;-)).
Playing somewhere else just has not the appeal (running around with the Blue Mages?), just as playing in the fourth age would be pretty boring (cleaning up after the heroes).
So, either you stick to the story, and keep the background intact, severely limiting choices for the PCs, or you change the story in some way, and have it loose (at least some of) its appeal.
Good stories just don´t make good adventures, and vice versa.

That being said, if someone just has to use an established background, the rules should transport the feeling of the story, if possible. For most of these backgrounds, level-based rules are too limiting in some regard and stand in the way of the story in some way.
An open rule system gives more flexibility in representing the story, as stories are not written with "rules" in mind, but only with the story itself, and the more complex the rules are, the less good the story can be fitted into it.
The old Star Wars d6 was a rather flexible system, and thus more suited to the task. Games like Call of Cthulhu or Stormbringer would not work for me with d20 rules also.
Reliving stories with RPG rules demand flexibility and the possibility to improvise from these rules, and the rather rules-heavy d20 system mechanics just don´t fit the bill for me.

Stefan

As a side note, many people here have posted recomending the "Saltmarsh" series of adventures. Were they good? Would it be worth my time picking them up to run in my current campaign? (Set in the Principality of Ulek.)

I have never run them, but they seem to be quite good, IIRC from reading them. According to Canonfire, the modules are set in the Hool Marshes, in Southern Keoland. That should be not too far from Ulek.

Stefan

I would get the LGG first, personally, but take care: there's another cheap product (also some Gazetteer, I think) WotC put out in preparation for the launch of Living Greyhawk that contained little useful information.

Yes, heed that warning: look for

http://home.flash.net/~brenfrow/3e/living.htm
not for
http://home.flash.net/~brenfrow/3e/gaz.htm

If you ever need to know what the various products look like, just go to this page. Its amazing!

Stefan

For those generally interested in Greyhawk material,
http://www.canonfire.com
is a great, but inofficial website, with lots of material.

Stefan

If you want the "Free City" from AoW AP, then try to find the "City of Greyhawk" Box, it describes the City in Great detail, along with a great bird´s eye view map of the City.

Stefan

I was just looking for something in the Dragon Archive, and in issue #52, there is an ad for AD&D featuring Auric, Tirra and Khellek. The artwork shown there clearly was the inspiration for the artwork showing those three in AoW.
Probably these three turned up elsewhere als well?

Stefan

I have a plethora of 1st and 2ed Greyhawk material in print and in .pdf form. I expect there are some products I should odnwplay and others I should rely on more.

If I had to prioritize getting 5 or 6 products in print form for Greyhawk (apart from the 3e stuff mentioned above) what should I be concentrating on?

Well, the City of Greyhawk Box is chock full with details about the Free City. The Falcon series of modules has some further city details and a few nice npcs, nice to have over all, but not crucial.

Rary the Traitor details the bright desert. The From the Ashes box has some canon issues, but is still a good source about the greyhawk domain. Slavers has some details about the southern wild coast. It depends upon where you want to set up your story.
Check out the LGJs in Dungeon/Dragon, one of them had a long piece about Hardby.
The various Living Greyhawk websites might give a starting point for regional adventures.
The canonfire website has a wealth of fan-made information about greyhawk and is always worth a look.

As I´m writing by memory here, I probably have overlooked something, but it might provide a starting point.

Stefan

I just wish they had given some stats for Iggwilv herself.

Well, just make her a epic-level conjurer, perhaps with some levels of some fitting prestige class. But Iggwilv is IMHO so out of league for most heroes that you just don´t need any stats for her, much less for the various demon lords and such. I won´t judge a game in which the heroes start battling demon lords or gods or something like that, its just too far off to me. The idea from ad&d2 with gods and the like having avatars with stats and the gods themselves being so far above the power level of mortals that they just don´t need any stats is just the way I like it.

Stefan

Just out of curiosity, I just started a page count of the Age of Worms AP. WC 34 + 11 art (Online), 3FoE 32 + 9 art, Diamond lake 15 + 2 art, Overload 29, Wormfood 1+2 3 each = 116+22 art, and thats just the start (I don´t have part 3 with me right now)

If that sets the trend for the whole AP, then we would have 360-400 pages of adventures, 60+ pages of background and more than a few maps, not counting any extra artwork or anything else.
If there are any plans to make this into a hardcover, it seems that this would be even bigger than the SCAP hardcover...

This sounds just great!

Stefan

Never did run Doomgrinder or Star Cairns - they worth another look maybe?

SPOILERS AHEAD

Doomgrinder is not - only if you like a magitech driven juggernaut laying waste to the greater greyhawk city area. The base idea presented in FtA of the doomgrinder being some kind of (perhaps apocalyptic) countdown is great, but is pretty much ruined in the adventure IMHO.

Star Cairns is a classic dungeon crawl with a few twists, IIRC. Sure nice to read, but I´m not recalling too much details at the moment.

Stefan

Perhaps you could give an estimate in which issues these will be, for starters?

Stefan

Back in 2001, four friends and me toured through scotland for a week, in a rented car. Every time we were driving, we played. The middle arm rest between the front seats was the die-rolling area. It was quite fun, but we did´t get very far on the story.

Stefan

I have just started planning a new Campaign, this time an evil one, and looked for fitting evil prestige classes. Is there an overview of PrCs in general somewhere on the web?
The evil PrCs in BoVD seem to be geared toward NPCs, and to me seemed to be not too fitting for evil PCs.
(For those interested, my basic idea is "borrowed" from the backstory of the PC Game Heroes of Might and Magic III, where the lands of Good (Erathia) are overrun by evil hordes - I plan to have my players be part and later leaders of those hordes. The re-conquest of Erathia by the forces of good might be a campaign that immediately follows. I just love HoMM III :-))

Stefan

The idea of him being a Simulacrum reminds me of the adventure "Threshold of Evil" in Dungeon #10, where the PCs are up against an archmage in his hollow mountaintop. It is chock full of simulacra. The Archmage himself is level 21 or so, so his simulacra range from level 1 to 11, along with a cloned fighter. One scene in the throne room holds two simulacra of the archmage and two or three of the fighter, along with the originals - quite a challenge...
So perhaps even more of the leaders might be simulacra or something similar. A nice twist to the usual spell might be an exploding clone instead of one just melting...

Stefan

According to "The Star Cairns" (TSR 9579, 1998), page 2 (Introduction), the Star Cairns were built as research sites by some Suloise mages and abandoned after c. 200 CY. If you take that as given, there is no connection to the Wind Dukes. The battle between the Wind Dukes and their enemies occurred several thousand years past, IIRC.

Stefan

Has anyone an idea how long it takes to get the issues if you subscribe in europe (germany, to be precise) ? I consider the idea since I saw how much cheaper it would be (subscription 12 issues 60 Euro compared to 7 Euro per issue = 84 Euro for twelve issues in my local store). The store gets it around two-four weeks after shipping date as far as I can tell, and if a subscription delivery would take much longer, I would just go on supporting my local store :-)

Stefan

Well, you could always rule that it rained for several hours and the difficulty shoots up as much as you like, if you don´t want him to find the tracks.
An if he takes 20, maybe someone is going to notice him, for taking 20 takes some time. Maybe someone of Kullens band notices him if he gets too close to the old observatory...