Wandering Monster's page

Two years ago I mashed up Age of Worms and Carrion Crown, moved the adventure paths to the early 1990's, changed the system to Savage Worlds, and ran an Aztec-inspired campaign that culminated in a battle against Kyuss rising out of the Matterhorn in Disneyland. Highlights included the finale, a vampiric silver dragon being taken out with one shot, stabbed in the eye with a dagger made from her own tooth, and an antiquities dealer dual-wielding David Koresh's desert eagle and an enchanted macuahuitl. It was, in a single word, epic.

Never one to leave well enough alone, I decided to try something similarly epic by mashing together the Serpent's Skull and Legacy of Fire adventure paths. But this time, I would run them in separate worlds, with the PCs fighting a world-spanning serpent person conspiracy (i.e., Reptilians) arising from a fantasy world inspired by Dark Sun. The two worlds are connected by stable portals in secluded locations.

Since I no longer do more than 2-3 hours of game prep for an entire campaign, I have absolutely no idea how all this will turn out. The campaign will likely go way off the rails somewhere after about 10 sessions, but that's half the fun.

The last campaign (Rise of the Worm Sun, it may be in the archives here somewhere) started with nod towards the movie The Hangover. This one begins with Souls for Smuggler's Shiv, a plane crash on a flight from Rome to Sydney, and a nod towards Lost (which I just finished binge-watching).

So first, the PCs:

Alex - Astrophysicist Postdoc

Amos - Amish teen on Rumspringa. He won a free trip around the world in a contest. Is severely delusional and believes that television is a reliable reflection of how the world works and how people behave. (I swear, every character this player creates is like this. It's like he's playing a completely different campaign than the rest of the group.)

Chester - Obese herpetology professor, gamer. (After stripping primitive leather armor from a gnoll corpse and strapping it on, when asked why he was doing that, he replied, "Because I look Badass!")

Clara - An aspiring journalist, self-entitled member of the 1%, and a bit on the naive side.

Samantha (Sam) - Recently left the Peace Corp. Uses risk-taking behavior (skydiving, etc) to hide the fact that she's secretly terrified of pretty much everything.

I also asked the players to provide me with 3-5 NPCs each who were also on the plane. I ended up with over 48 of them, including an 18-member high school choir going to a festival, a great dane show dog named Tuba, an 81-year old Korean war vet traveling around the world in honor of his late wife, and an entire bridal party returning from a ridiculously high-priced bachelorette party in Rome (Clara was a member of that party).

To get them to actually create NPCs for me, they were offered a reward to be determined during the first session (for 3 NPCs, the player got to choose 1 useful item from their own luggage, for 5, an additional useful item from somebody else's luggage).

I thought the players would see through my plan to start with a plane crash, but they remained stubbornly fixated on the idea that I was going to start the campaign with Snakes on a Plane.

About the session notes: Two of the players (the one who plays Alex and the one who plays Sam) trade off taking notes during the session. Both of them tend to skim over parts of the session, generally when the most intense roleplaying is going on, so a 15 minute, in-character discussion between the PCs and NPCs will frequently get reduced to a plot dump in the notes (e.g., "John tells us that there are monsters here.") Our sessions are generally pretty high-octane and beer-fueled, and three of the players have children under the age of 5 and start fading after a few hours, so things get a little sloppy towards the end of each session and the notes get more disjointed. I'll try to fill in the blanks as I go along, but I'm lazy, so no promises.

So, without further ado, the introduction to A Conspiracy of Snakes, featuring a plane crash, a malevolent fungus hive mind, bloodthirsty pirates on an island in the Indian Ocean, a numbers station, and a beach wedding conducted over a satellite phone with a great dane standing in for the groom.

I'm a huge fan of the adventure paths, having run Shackled City, Rise of the Runelords, and Curse of the Crimson Throne in D&D 3.x, and Kingmaker in Pathfinder. A few months ago, I realized I was completely burnt out on fantasy gaming and with the complexities of the d20 system. So I decided to convert the Age of Worms adventure path to a modern-ish setting. And since I was already doing a conversion, converting it to Savage Worlds seemed obvious.

Now some 15 sessions into it, I can honestly say that such a conversion is not for the faint of heart. There are certain questions that come up in a modern setting that aren't necessary in a standard fantasy setting, like "where did all the bodies for these zombies come from?" Modern adventurers also spend a great deal of time getting questioned by the police.

While looking for a workable hook in a modern game to rope the characters into the Age of Worms, decided to scavenge the Carrion Crown adventure path and mash the adventure paths together and start with the first adventure in the Carrion Crown, the Haunting of Harrowstone.

Despite being knee-deep in the campaign now, I have yet to write a coherent document of how the campaign is mapped to a modern setting. It has something to do with a lost, Aztec-like civilization. Luckily, I've been blessed with the GMing gift of babbling details until a player speaks up, so the players tend not to notice contradictory story elements and are generally comfortable with not having a clear picture of the story... which is good, because I don't have one either...

The game is set in the early 1990s, starting in the Four Corners area. With one exception, every one of the players was in their late teens or early 20s during this time. The game is regularly derailed by nostalgia and references to long-dead slang, but the lack of cell phones, the Internet, and large databases end up playing a big role (yes, I know those things did exist in the early 90's, but they were so rare (at least in the context of this game), that they might as well not exist).

Our soundtrack consists of our personal collections of music from the time, as well as the top 100 on the Billboard charts for 1990, 1991, and 1992. The soundtrack is set on shuffle, is occasionally distracting, and occasionally hilarious. Each session has a theme song for that session, generally chosen during or after the session.

Occasionally, bits of terminology from the Savage Worlds system creep into the notes. "Shaken" is the most common, with "soak" (removing a wound), and "benny" (essentially fate points) following close behind.

In play, we use Savage World's Action Deck. All magic items and most treasure has been offloaded to the Action Deck. If somebody plays a "relic" card, I roll it up on the magic item table and apply the results to the most obvious item in the scene. The other two cards that pop up a lot are "Enemy" and "Love Interest", both of which often require a great deal of improvisation on my part.

One of the major benefits of converting the entire AP to Savage Worlds is that it detaches the AP from a level-based system and allows adventures to be run out of order with a minimal amount of work. For example, the 4th adventure of the Age of Worms was run simultaneously with the Trial of the Beast, and before the 3rd adventure of the Age of Worms.

A warning: We tend to drink a lot of beer during our games. Parts of the session notes that make no sense (especially near the end of a session) are either the result of alcohol consumption or the note-taker getting excited by the game. We also are a foul-mouthed lot, and play the unpleasant sides of characters (racism, sexism, etc...) with great gusto. I've edited those parts of the notes out when necessary.

My players discovered the value of the magic item economy early on in their kingdom's life. The first 10-12 months of kingdom building were a bit rough while they saved every BP to buy their first magic item producing building, but those early turns quickly paid off. Now, some 50 months into things (kingdom size of 102), they produce 8 major items and 28 medium items, and have 13 city districts in which to sell said items (well, 13 items at least). Barring the odd under-4000gp items which pop up, selling items generally nets them 100+ BP per turn.

While this has created explosive growth in the nation, this isn't the problem. I'm more than willing to roll with the players loving their growing kingdom (they're having more fun than they were when they were struggling to buy a graveyard...). The problem is that they managed to get a loyalty score 72 above their command DC, mostly through building lots and lots of monuments.

I didn't see this coming at all. They kept building monuments to all the NPCs I killed, and after running Carnival of Tears set in their capitol city, there were a whole lot of dead NPCs.

So now I'm facing this scenario:

Kingdom Building turn 1: Don't bother expanding (much). Collect BPs by selling magic items. End turn with buffer of over 120BP.

Kingdom Building turn 2: Limited expansion. Wait until withdrawl phase and withdraw 52 BP with absolutely no chance of failing the loyalty check (command DC + BP withdrawn < Loyalty + 20). Then, use your 110,000gp to buy the major items sitting in the shops.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Since I'm not using XP in the game, I can offset this a bit by keeping them at a lower level then recommended. And considering that the players are at the mercy of my random item generator, the munchkin potential is somewhat limited.

It's way too late in the campaign (just finished the 30th session) for me to change the magic item economy, but in a few sessions I think I'm going to be desperate to stuff this genie back into the bottle.

Hi there,

I picked up the PF core book at my local FLGS and seem to have some duplicated pages. Pages 289-296 have been replaced with 297-302. While I appreciate having two entries for Implosion, I miss having rules for Haste.

My local FLGS didn't have any replacements in stock and mentioned I should contact the publisher. So... What are my options for replacing this book?

(I must admit I'm tempted to give the book to one of my players and tell them that Haste was removed from the book).