Cassius's page

Thank you both, very useful feedback.

Good advice on the conversions, we are playing 1E so I can see I'm missing out a bit.

I will look into the examples of the suggestion on Drow material, sounds awesome.

Cheers,

JNN

Hi,

So... I have converted the old "Dead Gods" adventure by Monte Cook to the pathfinder system (or at least tried to). This was way more cumbersome than I had anticipated but also good fun. A few questions/issue have popped up during the process. Maybe some of you have similar challenges in other conversions.

1. A lot of demon/devils are not in the pathfinder "cannon"! how do you go about that? I found an old dungeon magazine (issue 150 I think) that has a lot of 3.5 creatures (demons). That helped quite a bit.

2. Classical monsters like Beholders and mindflayers etc. are not in pathfinder either! I made them in hero lab but they are not ideal! any suggestions?

3. Specifically for this adventure, I find the "The Vault of the Drow" chapter super annoying/underwhelming and I am looking for something that would fit in that setting/level range. Still "Drow" themed of course.
I was thinking of making it a "shadowrun" type of job. Like.. to get access to Erehe, the group has to break in and "steals this" and the same time "blame those" - type of job.

4. Any suggestions on cool magic items (generator/site) themed for the planes? I really dislike that part of the pathfinder system in general. Just adding ++ for progression is boring.

Any comments/suggestions are welcome

JNN

yeah, art can have a great impact in terms of mood as well as consistency.

Just look what DiTerlizzi did for Planescape.

Yeah that guy rocked, almost made you want to live in the City of Doors.

:D

Cover art by Wayne Reynolds, sounds wicked.

Will there be different artist doing the illustrations? or will you chose one specific to set the "mood" by doing most of the illustrations in the adventure path? I ask because lately your illustrations and illustrators has greatly improved and have an almost comical side to them which a like a lot.

Hehe sounds as the Cauldron adventure path is quite the PC killer.
Funny how my group constantly complains about low hit points and the lack of magic items (I must admit that I kinda remove a lot of the smaller magic items, they tend to unbalance things). My group is struggling to get back from Occipitus, taking a detour around Sigil and the Outerplanes. The body count though is quite low, possible because they run a tight operation. Much like a swat-team, planning for hours, but no plan survives the first seconds of action (and I take care of that).
It’s very rare that they die in action mostly they screw up by them selves.
For example when they explored the Demonskar, in the cold, dark and wet ruins they met three lovely maidens which offered them the Nectar of Gods. Three succumb to poison offered by the Hag sisters, oh my go… drink the nectar of gods… how stupid can you be? Well half of the party fell for the textbook ploy, the last three with the help of Yem One-Strike (a hired blademaster, witch of course was a spy for some other sinister group) won the day.
One of the players survived the poison even though he failed all saves, thinking himself lucky; he thought no more of it. Even though two of his friends just died of the hideous poison. He failed to notice the strange felling in his head, a presences, he was without knowing it possessed by an evil entity brought to him by Yem (great stuff in the Book of vile Darkness) the entity saw potential in the young rogue and saved his life.
The second player character was replaced by a zealous deamonhunter stalking Occipitus and the third was reincarnated by the groups Druid (no raise dead spells in my campaign).
So all in all only three deaths in my campaign but a lot of close calls and a lot of running, screaming through darkness.

:D

Jakob NN

I would like to throw in some comments as well; even though my written English might not be so good.

I have been a loyal buyer of Dungeon Magazine many years and always enjoyed the extra inspiration it gave. I never actually played any of the adventures; I only used bits and pieces for my own campaign that’s until now.
The Cauldron adventure path changed that. Well written and full of new and interesting stuff. I did “ctrl_alt_delete” on my existing campaign and made a new one, placed Cauldron in it (in a cold mountain region that is, -never really liked jungles, hate bugs, and the Japanese snow monkeys worked well as the werebaboons) and called all the heroes forth.
I must say that Life’s Bazaar (issue #97 By Christopher Perkins) and Test of the Smoking Eye (issue #107 By David Noonan) is some of the best “short” adventures I have ever read.
Even now my players are running around like blindfolde in Sigil and the Outlands trying to get their “prime buts” back to Cauldron.
I have a few comments related to the new adventure path “Age of Worms”.

- I love the introduction of new feats, spells and templates. It really spices things up a great deal. As the DM I can remove or add them as I see fit so in my opinion there can’t be enough of these nice “fortune cookies”.
- Personally I love wilderness campaigns and the Cauldron adventure path was more a “lava tube gone alien kinda paranoia theme”, but it was no problem adding a few extra hundred miles to other areas of interest (Red Gorge or the Demonskar) and thereby creating wilderness encounters. So don’t be afraid about to much dungeon crawl it’s so easy to balance it with urban or wilderness encounters.
- I to felt a little uncomfortable with all those big reptilians flying around, and as others, just replaced them with big nasty critters waiting to raise hell. It would be cool to see more strange beasts from all the new source books. Personally I feel much love for the Crawling head, HEEEAAAAD, it could be the perfect villain fleshed out with a cool, but sad, story (and those awesome spell-casting powers).
- Speaking of hell, the fallen angel plot is really nice. Can’t remember when I last saw this type of villain. I took a bit of rewriting but he turned out quite well, just add a little of “Torments” (PC game based on the Planescape setting) melancholy and you have a tragic and not so good ending (love it). So if the new adventure path includes dark gods, unspeakable madness and lost loves I will be your biggest fan.
- The only negative thing I can come up with is concerning the last two adventures in the series. High level NPC’s are easy and fun to make, many DM’s (I think) love to create new villains and even more when they are able to sling out killer spells more rapidly than t…. from a rabbits a…. So don’t spend ten pages on super villains and then forget about the story and the encounters.

I really look forward to The Age of Worms, keep up the good work.

Jakob NN (Denmark)