Aron Reif's page

I'm in the middle of Savage Tide, and I placed it in Mystara as well. Since I've always hated the "tourist" aspects of the Ierendi Gazeteer, I replaced Ierendi City with Sasserine whole cloth, circa AC 1000. I decided that the Scarlet Brotherhood was an agent of Hule, so I could easily keep all of the SB references intact. I retconned the history of Ierendi to include an invasion and subsequent revolution from Thyatis (to fill the Sea Princes' role in the Greyhawk version of Sasserine's history).

Since I was placing it in AC 1000, I replaced the celebration to vanquish Kyuss during the first adventure as a new millenium celebration. It fit in pretty nicely.

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Troy--just wanted you to know, I've been reading your blog, and it's been very helpful. My group is just starting Sea Wyvern's Wake, so I've been mostly concentrating on that part, not your more recent posts. Seeing the your NPCs on the ship interacting with your PCs has really helped me establish personalities for my own versions of those NPCs. I haven't bothered to comment, because I'm reading stuff that you were doing many months ago, so I figured you'd miss any comments I made.

I would love to see pictures of your skull cove set as I might follow your example.

I haven't started it yet; I have a baby due in the next month or so, so my spare time has been devoted to getting the nursery together and such. But I should have a model of Farshore done in a few months, and I'll post pictures when I get it completed.

As for the ship; did that model match the official size of the Sea Wyvern?

No, it's a bit too big in all dimensions to match the official map. Not by much--maybe 3 or 4 inches in length and maybe an inch or two in width bigger. It's within the margin of error, at least for me. I have 8 players and I need a bigger deck to deal with the larger number of both PCs and extra monsters to combat those PCs, so the extra deck space was actually a blessing.

The default Maiden of the High Seas is quite a bit bigger still, so if you're interested in creating an accurate representation of the Sea Wyvern, then you'd have to do a good bit of customization to get it down to the proper size.

Barbarian levels always work well--lots of extra hp and damage. Plus, it fits with the Bullywugs' savage, chaotic nature perfectly.

I gave her two crested felldrakes (Gut and Tugger) to use as flankers. I also boosted the DC of her charm a bit, then charmed one of the fighters at the first opportunity. None of the party would actually attack each other, but there were lots of flankers for her to get a few sneak attacks off. I booster her HP by another 20 or so, and then had her drink her potion of gaseous form once I knew should wouldn't survive another round (at about 25hp or so). I think I boosted her by giving one level of Thrall of Malcanthet. This also gave me a good reason that the PCs would come to Malcanthet's attention once they actually defeated Rowyn during Sea Wyvern's Wake.

Adding a few extra rogues for extra flankers and HP sinks would also probably be a good idea.

... they have a few scrolls of Rope Trick and keep the passengers in there in time of danger! ... let's say I prefer to have the passengers mostly wiped out.

Keep in mind that, unless they've purposefully purchased scrolls at higher level than the default, then the Rope Trick scrolls last only 3 hours (CL2). So that will only protect the passengers for a little while after each casting. And each spell only holds eight passengers, so they might have to cast multiple spells to protect all the passengers. So if they land on the beach and use the rope tricks to protect the passengers whenever the jungle creatures attack them while they're making repairs, you can make it so they run out of rope tricks long before they're ready for sail.

Also, the passengers can't all get into the extradimensional space instantaneously...they each have to climb up the rope, one at a time, so they is plenty of opportunity for them to be picked off while they're all trying to scramble up the rope. And if the passengers are all helping with the repairs, most of them won't be near the rope trick at the time of the casting. Some may even be in the jungle harvesting timber for ship repairs. It seems like killing them off should be fairly easy.

Trying to drown the passengers safely hidden away in the Rope Trick will probably look a bit too much like railroading to your players, especially if they've already complained about it during the last game.

Another thing that i did differently was to use poster board for the outside wall. This way there was no sagging or bulges.

If I were going to do it again, I would recommend your approach as well. Or, if you have extra foamcore, that would be ideal. I have also heard recommendations to glue some paper to the underside of the foamcore boards, to help counteract the warping of the foamcore once you start gluing stuff to the top of it. Also, if you haven't figured it out yet, the outer wall templates are slightly longer than the inner walls, which really screwed me up when I tried to build the courtyard.

I literally followed the exact plans on the scenario and thus the room were somewhat cramped and i was not able to get their beautiful grand stairwell in. If I were to do it again, I would increase the room dimension by another 5-10 ft.

My game has 8 players, so I wanted to increase the size of some of the rooms and hallways anyway, just so all the PCs could fit in some of the rooms all at once. Having Shellendrak be a default 3x3 just made life easy.

I've also used Worldworks' village set for the battle between the stiltwalkers/ Daimondback and the PCs. I was able to impressed them when they enter the room to find the whole table covered by village terains.

We did the same. I had the village terrain already built from past games. One nice touch I added was using the crowd tiles from the most recent Dungeon Tiles set. That helped get the point across that they couldn't just charge the stiltwalkers.

On a separate note, I just purchased some mega bloks from ebay, which included parts of some old ship set, but not a complete hull. I think it'll work nicely as the Thunderer (or whatever the name of the ship is that the Mother-of-All lives in). I'll post photos when I finally get that setup completed.

Nice!

This thread might interest you.

Yes, your thread was my inspiration. I used your recommendations as the baseline when I started looking at various ship options (and the Mega Bloks ships in particular, which have turned out to be nearly perfect). I found the Pirateology model on clearance at Borders for $4.99 each, so I bought 4 copies.

I'm planning to add in a couple extra sea battles for my players before we get to Farshore, so I need lots of ships. I only wish I could find a copy of the Mega Bloks Flying Dutchman, just so I can have one more ship option. So far, Toys R Us has plenty of the Black Pearl sets and Empress sets, but no FDs.

I plan on building something along the lines of your Wreck when my players finally get to Serpents of Scuttlecove. They're starting Sea Wyvern's Wake right now, so it'll be a while before I have to start building my own Wreck.

I wish I had more time, then I would do this...

This is great!

Thanks! The ship was pretty easy. It probably took 10-12 hours of work all told, but if you ignore the figurehead replacement, the rest of it was just a few hours of work. The wyvern figurehead ended up taking a good deal of time, because I had to drill out holes and pin it to the ship to keep it on.

The Manor took a few weeks of nights and weekends to get constructed. It was fairly easy to build, but it was rather time-intensive.

I enjoy building 3D models of some of the major encounters that my PCs are going to run through. My work isn't the best, but I thought you all might enjoy seeing some of it, so I posted it on Flikr.

Here's the model of Vanderboren Manor that I made for the Bullywug Gambit. This is built from cardstock using Worldworks Games' Shellendrak Manor templates. I had to redesign the map of the manor to get it to fit with the wall templates, and to keep it contained on a 20" x 30" foamcore board. I had to combine a few of the rooms (like the statuary room and the trophy room) to make it all fit. Some of the cardstock walls look really warped, largely due to cupping (warping) of the underlying foamcore, plus the moisture levels in my basement where it's kept. Still, it really got my players excited to go room-to-room hunting down bullywugs. I'm especially prowd of the Vanthus Vanderboren portrait on the dining room wall, right where it's described from There is No Honor. That was not easy to get scaled down and reprinted. The manor is rather sparcely furnished, because I ran out of time to build the furniture before we ran the adventure.

Here's my version of the Sea Wyvern. I used a Mega Bloks' Black Pearl as a base. I replaced the black cloth sails with white cardstock sails, which include an image of a blue wyvern that I found on the internet. I replaced the Black Pearl figurehead with a representation of a giant wyvern (a Mega Bloks' Cirrusfire Dragon ). I covered up the "lego bumps" with cardstock floors, and I custom-built the crow's nest. I used black thread to represent the rigging. If you're looking for a good miniature-scale ship, Toys 'R' Us sells these Mega Bloks Black Pearl sets for about $20, which is really hard to beat. I was planning to build a ship using Worldworks Games' Maiden of the Seas, but I would have spent much more than $20 on ink and cardstock alone.

My next project is to start on the village of Farshore, using Worldworks Games' Scull Cove templates.

Did anyone record the "Sticking with 3.5" one? Or transcribe it? Or, you know, can just give me a summary? Thanks!

If I remember that part of the module correctly, once Khala is killed, the real Demogorgon's eyes appear in the sky to glower at the PCs. If they haven't left the temple yet, there's nothing that says that Demogorgon's rage doesn't also create a evil-induced tropical storm in the area.

Thanks, everybody, for your comments. I'm leaning towards pulling them out completely, but some of you have made me think twice about it.

OK, I've been reading the STAP since the first adventure came out a year ago, and I'm getting ready to start running it. I'm re-reading the first couple of adventures (you'd be amazed how much I forget in a year), and I realized that I can't remember the Jade Ravens adding much to the plot at all.

Do they have a purpose or critical plot point that I've forgotten about? The first adventure briefly mentions them in passing, with the note that this is just foreshadowing, and that the Jade Ravens will become much more important characters later. Now, it could be that I've forgotten their critical role, but I don't really remember them adding much to the overall plot of the STAP at all.

This is a big deal to me because my players tend to be a fairly suspicious bunch. If I introduce a set of characters (competing adventurers, no less) that have no immediate purpose, they start thinking that the Jade Ravens are behind the attack on Lavinia's parents, or that they're somehow flunkies of Vanthus, or something. They're going to start asking questions that I can't really answer: "If Lavinia already employs the Jade Ravens, why is she bringing in us to do this? Are we the expendable fodder?" (Yes, we've played too much Shadowrun) Basically, I have a feeling that they're going to spend a significant amount of time trying to chase down these "leads" unnecessarily.

So my question boils down to: I'm thinking of getting rid of the Jade Ravens all together. Do you guys know of a reason that I shouldn't?