Anyone ran the Wormwood Mutiny for higher lv. PCs?


Skull & Shackles


I'm thinking of trying to convert the Wormwood Mutiny for a 5th level party. (My players do not want to start over with 1st level PCs). It will probably be a decent amount of working leveling up the NPCs. Has anyone attempted this or have any suggestions? Also, are there any spells or higher level abilities that could present a problem for the storyline during the first twenty days or so?


You should know a fifth level cleric could remedy ability damage and disease; this will make many of the environmental hazards less potent.


While it would be wasting Vol 1, you could just narrate the part of them being press-ganged and start straight away with Vol 2 with the PCs having just won their freedom and their ship and set them to squibbing and marauding.


Uri Meca wrote:
While it would be wasting Vol 1, you could just narrate the part of them being press-ganged and start straight away with Vol 2 with the PCs having just won their freedom and their ship and set them to squibbing and marauding.

This would probably be the best approach, although it loses the opportunity to set up Harrigan and his cronies as the bad guys in your PCs minds through direct interaction aboard the Wormwood.

The second module is intended for 4th level PCs at the start, so putting your guys in at 5th shouldn't be too unbalancing. You'll have to do some jiggering of encounters to balance things out, but not too much. (Starting them at 4th would be a perfect fit, but that's up to you.)

The problem with running the entire AP from a 5th level start is that you will have to essentially rewrite and/or increase the encounters and CR levels throughout all six books in order to balance your PCs' abilities with the challenges in the modules. That's a lot of extra work for you as GM, but if you're up for it - go for it.


problem might be that AP-I sets up the BBEG of the AP: missing out on that... not wise, and causes some narrative difficulties later on.

Also take note that the AP, in its initial stages, is very social, so actual character stats and abilities are less important than actual roleplaying and inventiveness.

Although, yes the AP-I is very deadly, I would not try to skip it, especially since.... well, its probably the most fun of the parts.


vikingson wrote:
Although, yes the AP-I is very deadly, I would not try to skip it, especially since.... well, its probably the most fun of the parts.

Yeah, that's why I would like to run it even though the PCs are at higher level. It is one of the best roleplaying scenarios I've read in a long time, and it will really give the players a feel for the life of a pirate. Plus, its a nice change where your goal is to survive and make allies, rather than just kill stuff.

I think will run the first 20 days, the fight for the the Man's Promise, and then hopefully they will mutiny right away and I can just skip the island and move on to the next one.

The Elusive Trout wrote:
You should know a fifth level cleric could remedy ability damage and disease; this will make many of the environmental hazards less potent.

Good point, though then I won't need to tone down the rum ration effect. Also, our party cleric is a little unique where this might not be a huge problem. He is cursed with a incurable disease so he currently has to cast lesser restoration on himself everyday just to stay alive.

Fitzwalrus wrote:
The problem with running the entire AP from a 5th level start is that you will have to essentially rewrite and/or increase the encounters and CR levels throughout all six books in order to balance your PCs' abilities with the challenges in the modules. That's a lot of extra work for you as GM, but if you're up for it - go for it.

True, true, I do have a life. I'm probably not up for converting the whole AP. This is likely just a side trek for the first two modules. I was actually thinking of trying to then jump into From Shore to Sea, which I haven't read yet, but looks excellent and has some great aquatic and Lovecraftian elements.


You could start them at lvl 5 (or whatever) off the hop with Vol 1 but still starting with only 0 xp (or some other handicap like temporarily requiring the slow xp track, with follow-up scaling of xp thresholds). They'll be plenty hardy to survive the intro and by the time they level up, they'll still be exactly on par for the rest of the AP.


Uri Meca wrote:
You could start them at lvl 5 (or whatever) off the hop with Vol 1 but still starting with only 0 xp (or some other handicap like temporarily requiring the slow xp track, with follow-up scaling of xp thresholds). They'll be plenty hardy to survive the intro and by the time they level up, they'll still be exactly on par for the rest of the AP.

That's actually not a bad idea. Back in the day before Savage Species and the like, an old AD&D DM of mine used to do that to handle the odd creatures (centaurs, half-dragons, and so on) that his wife liked to play. He would start her with the full HP and abilities of her chosen character but 0 XP, and she couldn't advance in levels until she had earned enough XP to "pay" for the level she had started with.

You'd still have to rewrite the encounters in Wormwood Mutiny and probably beef up some of the first ones in Raiders of the Fever Sea, but after that your PCs would be at the intended level for the AP and you'd be off and running.


I am certainly not an expert on CRs, but you could probably just add class levels to some of the enemies (the intelligent ones) and raise the monsters to advanced templates to raise the difficulty to a proper level, instead of coming up with new enemies.


You would need to step up the DC for most of the onboard profession rolls, too, and introduce some further bloackages for diplomacy and other social skills, since your players would both be in possession of stronger skills (making the rolls much easier - and of course, in fact raising their diffulties mostly out of reach for the NPCs). Plus you would also add divinatory and enchantment abilities to the mix making severeal rolls and situations far easier.

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