Zaister's page

I've also always loved Chris' Maps of Mystery and used quite a lot of them in my game, most notably the Pirate Caves and the Dwarven Mine, and I'm still looking to find an oppotunity to put in the Village map. :-)

I'd love to see them back in Dungeon.

Last night I (finally) completed the complete campaign outline section of the Overload document, which was the main thing holding up the release of Age of Worms Overload.

Yay! Thanks, Erik. I'm sure it will have been worth the wait.

Speaking of Tyralandi, a sketch of the prissy necromancer is up on my temporary campaign page at superunicorn.com/diamond_lake/. There are links there for the other illos of Dram and Demon Boy.

Wow, she looks nasty. Love the violin! :-)

There isn't really a set of house rules for the hero points. Generally, they'll let us turn a poor roll or a sudden death situation into something good.

Thanks for the information, James. Sounds a bit like the Hero Points from Arcana Unearthed/Evolved. I guess the point where Demon Boy jumped in the way of the Gertia Land skeleton to save Tyralandi was another example of a Hero Point.

How do you earn those Hero Points, by the way?

Ah, and one question has been bugging me: any relation between Tyralandi Scrimm and the Half-Fiend Nymph from Scuttlecove? :-)

That's a good Erik question. I forget everything they're good for. Mostly we use them to keep the ninja Vyth from dying . . . again.

I'm just wondering which rule you're using, since there are several. I know of the Eberron rule, the Unearthed Arcana rule (which seems a little too high-owered for my taste) or the d20 Modern rule. But then these are all called Action Point. Only in Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed/Evolved I found something called Hero Points, which works quite differently, though.

Since I want to use something like one of these rules in my upcoming next campaign, I'm looking for other players' experiences.

What kind of Hero Points are you guys using in this campaign?

*bump* :)

In case anyone is using PCGen, they might me interested to know that I'm currently working on an output sheet to produce the new statblock.

The "Whispering Cairn" adventure says that the circlet from Zosiel's tomb is a circlet of wisdom +2, but goes on to state that additional properties will be revealed in forthcoming adventures. However, what are we supposed to tell the players if they cast identify on the circlet, shouldn't that reveal all of its properites?

And in issue #127, we've got a Critical Threat AND a Map of Mystery.

Yay! I really missed the Maps of Mystery.

What kind of Hero Points are you guys using in this campaign?

By the way, am I the only one who finds the notion of a mummy hiding underwater as being strange? After all mummies are usually desiccated corpses, so somehow this seems strange to me. :-)

Is the new stat block Open Gaming Content, i.e. am I allowed to use it in my own publication? And does it make sense for a display format to be OGC (or not) at all?

First, I'm a developer on the PCGen project. Second, let me thank you on the name of the team for the kind words. :-)

Having PCGen data files for the adventures in Dungeon would be cool, that is true - but there are difficulties. As you said, we can only distribute data files for sources that are either Open Gaming Content (like the SRD files) or where we have special agreements with certain publishers. Now Dungeon adventures often use material which is from the core rules but not part of the SRD (like, for example, Kuo-Toas or Mind Flayers or Red Wizards of Thay and so on) or form other non-open source like Forgotten Realms Sourcebooks. A data set for such an adventure would then need data sets for these sources to work correctly, which we could not distribute.

Then, of course, someone would need to code up the data sets, which is no small feat in itself.

So, while this would really be a cool thing to have, I'm afraid it's currently not practicable, and we'll all be forced to make up the data for ourselves :(

My party of 4 characters (a Monk, a Rogue/Cleric/Fighter, a Sorcerer/Ranger and a Cleric/Radiant Servant of Pelor) just suffered their first casualty in "Zenith Trajectory". The Monk died at the hand of the (slightly improved, according to GlassJaw's excellent suggestions) Kuo-Toa cleric Mangh-Mictho's Slay Living attack - after the group hat fought through the soldiers and whips and pincers in the Temple, then the Erinyes and the assassin - the sorcerer (in hybvrid werebaboon form) was looking around on the upper level druing the encounter...
In the end they picked up the dead monk and ran away all the way back to Cauldron, to pool the funds to get the monk raised.

My party took on themselves the name "Lucky Bastards" after they had survived entering the Lucky Monkey through the back door and engaging Tonguebiter right from the beginning and then running through the whole first floor and basically engaging all the enemies in one huge fight. :-)

Remember Zaister, there's nothing that says you HAVE to give out full XP all the time. Heck, you could even just TELL them when they level up.

Of course the DM is the final authority. In another campaign I'm playing (Freeport), I've always been handling it the way you indicated. Actually I'm not even calculating XP for that group, that whole campaign is far more based in story and role-playing than in combat, so I just let them level up when I think they deserve it. However, regarding a publshed adventure that says "characters start at level X and are expected to reach level Y at the end" I tend to expect that it actually plays out that way.

The 75% XP seems about right but even in doing so, my players are still about a half to one level above the stated levels but I'm ok with that.

That would be OK, only now, once "Zenith Trajectory" is through I'm guessing they'll be about three levels ahead. And still, I feel uncomfortable reducing the award for the PCs basically because the adventure autor didn't correctly work out the awards (which is the impression I'm getting). Still it's probably the best idea to go that way if I want them no to advance too fast, right.

My players really have no idea that I'm tweaking the XP as I go. I'm keeping their levels on track and that's the most important thing. XP should be a guideline in general, not a hard and fast rule. As a DM, you have complete control over how much or how little your players get.

The latter is of course true, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth to reduce awards in a seemingly arbitrary way. After all, players are not stupid, and often know how XP get calculated.

Anyway. Thanks for you input, Tambryn and GlassJaw, it efinitely gives me something to think about.

I've been running the Shackled City for some time now, and now that we're well into "Zenith Trajectory" I'm wondering about character levels again.

When my party of four adventurers finished "Life's Bazaar", they had reached 5th level. They did not have any encounters beside those prepared in the adventure, but came out of it a level ahead of what seems to be planned

"Flood Season" expects them at level 4 but since they were already at level 5 I had to go and beef up on the encounters. After "Flood Season", they had advanced to level 8, still with no additional encounters, when according to the AP plan they should now be 6th.

Between that and "Zenith Trajectory" there was an unplanned incident with one of the PCs who has been affected with lycanthropy by Tonguebiter (and still is), though, but that was minor in terms of XP.

They have now entered the Kuo-Toa dungeon, fought the soldiers and the mummy there and the first PC has now reached level 9 so they are now passing the point that is planned for the end of the adventure.

Am I making a mistake there somewhere? Or is the scaling of the adventures somewhat off? If they continue to gain one or more additional levels per adventure, they'll be epic long before the last adventures of the path. And of course, beefing up the oppostion to make it tougher only gathers them even more XP and makes them advance even faster, this problem is increasing exponentially even...

Did any of you encounter a similar phenomenon? What did you do about it?

Thx Glassjaw, this really looks cool. My group just entered the Kuo-Toa dungeon, and I think I'll try and work in your changes.

It's from DMG, page 108, under the description of the Aristocrat class

Thanks. I must be blind, since I tried to find it exactly there.

The Stormblades: Since they all have a level of Aristocrat, and you can only be an Aristocrat if you take a level at 1st level

Bram, where exactly do you get that rule from?

One question about Sasserine: in the hardcover will Sasserine still be 200 miles to the south of Cauldron, as specified in Zenith Trajectory, or will it be positioned according to the recent Greyhawk maps? And will the whole AP be anchored in the World of Greyhawk?

Is there a third part planned of this excellent Map of Mystery entry? Or even more? If yes, do you already know which issue it will be in?

Regards,
Stefan.