And here we are. After going through and re-writing most, if not all, of the first book for Curse of the Crimson Throne to take advantage of the fantastic ideas but fix the horrible pacing and execution, and then moving on to completely overhauling and cutting up/rearranging the plot of Rise of the Runelord's Skinsaw Murders to make it play better and advance at a more natural and narrative pace, I've finally arrived at Jade Regent.
Jade Regent, I should point out, is a campaign I really don't have a lot of gripes with, at least in the initial books. While some people consider them to be the weakest links in the AP, my conclusion is actually that they're rather interesting stories, they just lack the pacing and the padding necessary to really make the scenes in the book develop and have the impact they should. So originally, my intention was to just play the book as-written, with the addition of some extra content wedged in to pad the runtime out and allow more roleplaying interaction opportunities with the NPCs.
But this all assumes an important thing; That the players are basically coming to Jade Regent immediately following experience with Rise of the Runelords, and thus a pre-established familiarity and level of caring for the NPCs involved.
This is not the case for my current group, and as such, I'm having to improvise, to give them some time to become familiar with Sandpoint and develop those relationships before the campaign starts. I actually have the content I'd like to run here, the problem is a bit of a mechanical one. I was thinking of running The Dragon's Demand as the "introduction to Sandpoint", but that module is struck by a bit of a leveling problem. And my problem with the DM is that I can't just run roleplay-only sessions in Sandpoint, there has to be something for the players to do, but I don't want them to be level 7 by the time they finish all of it, because then I have to either remove or scale away all the content in Jade Regent to match, and that's a math nightmare.
And so with that, we move onto my current outline for how this campaign will proceed.
1.) First, I'm thinking of running the introduction to The Brinewall Legacy (TBL) basically as-written. The players spend a little bit of time establishing their place and role in town, and then it's right off to Brinestump Marsh to deal with the Goblin incursion. This will just be delivered normally, with the Goblin Bounty and all that, and likely a little prodding from Ameiko and Shalelu.
2.) Being that I'm running the Marsh first, I'll probably do the whole Kaijitsu-family ship and letter thing normally too, with the difference being that when the players return to Sandpoint, they will be returning to the tower collapse that marks the start of Dragon's Demand.
3.) Dragon's Demand will play pretty much the same, for the most part, with the players delving into the ruins beneath the Witch Tower, fighting the Kobolds, and finding out the source of the collapse, etc.
4.) Perhaps a truncated version of the Blood Vow Lair, as I think I can do without 20 rooms worth of dungeon here just to get across the point of the plot.
5.) I really like the Wizard's Estate auction piece, the problem is as-written it's designed as a platform for the players to basically explore the Wizard's house and deactivate traps, followed by a set-piece auction who's major purpose is to introduce the dragon. Unfortunately, I'd likely just have to end the module here, as going any further and actually running the auction as it's intended would really just open up too many quests and plot threads that would need to be resolved, and it would take too much time and effort to fix the scaling problems brought about by them.
6.) Once the matter with the Kobolds is wrapped up, it seems like a perfect time to bring Ameiko back into things, having things in town settle down, and lots of wealthy people pouring in to auction off the Wizard's estate seems like it would be her perfect opportunity to pawn off the Rusty Dragon and leave town with the party. By this point she's been sitting on the letter from Rokuro for a while, but probably hasn't thought about it at all since all the activity with the Kobolds. But when things calm down, she finally realizes that she's tired of being a passive player while adventure happens around her and leaves. This is where Jade Regent picks up again.
So that's what I've got so far. I'm looking for input, ideas, corrections, questions, basically anything I can get to make this whole thing a bit more interesting and work better.
Sorry for the long-winded post. That tends to happen with me.
