Adapt The Whispering Cairn from AoW


Age of Worms Adventure Path


Hi all,

I need your help and suggestions because I want to use The Whispering Cairn, the first chapter in Age of Worms Campaign, in my ongoing campaign.

I need suggestions because the party of PC who will explore the Cairn is a 7 level party of 6 characters.

What type of change I need to do to creatures and traps that they will find inside?

Thanks in advance for any help.


I am going to flag this to be moved to the AoW section of the forum. When I ran it I did not change anything. I just used the Pathfinder version of the 3.5 monsters. Since you have 6 players I would add more enemies to increase the CR by 1. For the necromancer I actually converted him to a Pathfinder wizard since it is somewhat of a boss fight. That should increase his spells.


IIRC the module has a built in guide to up the Difficulty for above level characters; use that, and then follow wraithstrike's suggestion and you should be fine. I'd also remove most of the telltale clues for the really deadly traps since your party is APL appropriate for most of them.


Is it going to be an adventure if the party defeats everything so easy? Do i understand it correct and the party is already 7th level? Why not start at the champions games?


Whoa, 7th level? That's...going to be hard to adapt. Let me see...

- Replace those couple of wounded wolves with a pack of dire wolves.
- Quintuple the acid beetles' acid damage and HP and give it at least 5 more hit dice, while giving the mad slasher 4-5 more hit dice, boosting Dexterity to 20, and granting it Dex to damage. Maybe some bleed, too.
- Replace the Lurking Strangler with a few choker stranglers
- Replace the giant beetles with a few ochre jellies, or perhaps one of these replacement beetles, or perhaps a swarm or two of army ants.
- Make the water elemental Huge. Same with the earth elemental. Increase their HP by half.
- Make Ulavant the ghoul a ghast with class levels (or perhaps a huntmaster), and give him several ghast rogue minions. Consider giving them all the Bag of Bones feat (maybe they were crushed by cinder block traps) and providing some cramped crevices for them to hide in underwater.
- Replace the grick with a deathtrap ooze or Trapper (or one of each).
- Find A Gathering of Winds, if you have it, and use those stats for a lone wind warrior (deleveling as you see fit). If you don't have it, give the wind warriors fighter levels and teamwork feats, and/or make more of them. You should have at least three.
- Replace the wounded owlbear with a wounded froghemoth. What? Too mean? Okay, a "wounded" hydra. And by "wounded" I mean its heads litter the place and now it has more. Alternatively, a wounded yrthak.
- Bring Kullen and his gang up 4-5 levels each. Consider adding an amoral priest to the mix to balance out for the action economy (and to encourage some extra strategy beforehand).
- Make the tomb mote into a tomb mote swarm. Treat as a bloodhaze mosquito swarm, but change the speed types, swap Con with Charisma and replace the disease with Corpse Bloat: Bite—injury; save Fort DC 17; onset 1d3 days; frequency 1/day; effect 1d6 Str damage; cure 2 consecutive saves. The save DC is Charisma-based. The skin of a diseased human turns a hue of green, bloats, and is warm to the touch. Also, the tomb mote swarm can choose to Swarm two creatures a round if it moves through their squares, though it must end its turn in the square of one of the two.
- Replace the human skeletons with CR-appropriate exoskeletons, variant skeleton templates and/or paleoskeletons.
- Replace the rest of Filge's minions with random undead here. Let some of his experiments come to life to serve as especially powerful, but initially inactive undead/golems.
- Filge himself should be 8-9th level. Make him either a necromancer or reanimator.

These are all rough ideas, taking into account the massive power increase Pathfinder brings to PCs, the harsh intentions of Whispering Cairn, the larger party, and the high levels.


Also, if you aren't too attached to the original maps, you may want to increase their size to allow for larger/more numerous foes. Just a suggestion.


Obviously, that's totally leaving out the traps. I don't have the adventure itself on hand.


I did not even realize he mentioned 7th level characters. Oh well, it i s probably too late now.

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