Edhel's page

Extremely nice. Where did you get the map @ 4:27?

This is a matter of taste but what I would have done differently is tell the story through the characters' eyes. I doubt they (or anyone) know what happened 10k years ago, or that Aroden was a dude from Azlant (except maybe from religious myths).

I would have told the story in the terms of culture and power. Who rules who, and what the ordinary Chelish life is like.

IMHO the real problem is "death by action economy". The PCs will always overwhelm single opponents. If you want to give the monster more actions, give it more actions or give it more time to act (=increase its HP).

(The third way is to negate PCs actions with immunities and counters but that usually feels cheap.)

I think many of the 3.5 D&D's problems were somewhat fixed by introducing the elite and the solo monster categories in 4e. You could look at e.g. Monster Vault or MM3 to see the design philosophy even if they're mechanically different.

In my own 3.5/PF campaign I had a couple of dirty tricks I used on the fly:
* Double the HP (the simplest)
* The monster has a mystical connection to something that gives it more time to act: a wizard's life force is tied to a stone statue that crumbles piece by piece, the shapeshifting glabrezu twins have an unbreakable familial connection that makes them combine their HP to one pool
* a huge monster is composed of several large pieces that each have their own HP pool (the kraken is an obvious one but it's also cool to force a dragon to land by taking out its wings)

I didn't usually add actions to creatures unless they had parts/limbs that could be reasonably thought to act independently. Having the monsters make a full attack and move seems ok, though.

We're currently playing a low-fantasy sword & blackpowder version of RotR with Savage Worlds. I've already been thinking about the next campaign, and Jade Regent with Ameiko as a PC was one of the first things on my mind. She's going to marry one the characters in our campaign.

I haven't read through JR yet but are there any real reasons within the story why this wouldn't work or you would have to change large portions of it?

Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones

The game is just too dang rules heavy.

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Now I just want to role play and want the game to go fast and fun. If a fight lasts over 30 minutes I lose some of the fun and want to move on.
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Same with creating npc's and adventures. I want more creating and less book keeping. I want to think up crazy Pirate dwarves with peg legs and a crazy Irish accent and then spend 5 min writing his stats down.

You need Fast, Furious, Fun!?

No I'm not trying to justify ghoul-love!

No need, don't be squeamish.

Undead women, plain old corpses, aliens, semi-animate floral women - it's all good after you read a couple of Clark Ashton Smith stories.

Morthylla - One can only be satisfied by undead women.
The Death of Ilalotha - Corpses are seductive too!
The Door to Saturn & The Monster of the Prophecy - "The sorcerer and the inquisitor were impressed, even if not captivated, by the mountainous amplitude of her charms and by their highly novel arrangement." & "--there were females of a sort, if one were not too squeamish.")
The Garden of Adompha - "Now, as if in suppliance, the semi-vegetable arms reached out towards Adompha with their human hands. The king felt a revival of his old interest in Dwerulas' horticulture, a queer excitement woke within him before the mingled grotesquery and beauty of the grafted plant."

In all adventures I optimized the npcs in combat encounters, usually by changing stats or giving a bit more hitpoints. Otherwise my experienced players would've had it too easy.

I also used the taint mechanics from Heroes of Horror. Most of the characters got depravity and corruption from Kraken's Cove as it is a severely tainted location (Will/Fort DC 25, 1d3 depravity/corruption). Getting infected by the savage fever also gave 1 point of corruption. The foggy jungle around Demogorgon's temple was also a tainted location giving corruption and failing to resist the wisdom-damaging dreams gave depravity.

The Scarlet Brotherhood became a Riedran organisation and I tried to draw some lines to Sarlona. E.g. one of the characters is from Krezent in Talenta Plains, a serpentblooded human offspring of the feathered yuan-ti who fled from Sarlona (EBCS and Secrets of Xen'drik p.68) and he joined the party to research the history of his people in the Isle of Dread. (Oh yeah, I run STAP in Eberron.)

There Is No Honor

As it is suggested in STAP conversion notes, I turned the cult of Vecna in historians' guild into a cult devoted to Sul Khatesh (one of the imprisoned rajah overlords of Lords of the Dust in Eberron, Dragon 337) and used the One and the Five affiliation from PHB2 (p.176) as a base for it. My CN Illusionist doesn't know what he's dealing with and instead of giving him the normal 'Of the mind' benefit of getting more spells, I gave him a fiendish familiar (from Fiend Folio) that looks like white tiger fur attached to his back. The cult also works as a great background plot, as Sul Khatesh wants to know more about Demogorgon's plans and learn more about the pearl. This gives the character motivation to seek more information as his quests. So far he only knows that the cult has some religious aspect but doesn't care about it and it is knows as the Keepers of Secrets. Maybe later the truth will come out and he'll have to choose if he wants to be a puppet for the Lords of the Dust and gain more power or try to fight back. So far he seems to be slowly sliding to the dark side. I don't know how this all will play out in the big plot but I hope to get some drama out of it. At least my player is greatly enjoying the cult missions and his mysterious (evil) divination and illusion spells that grant him depravity (although he doesn't know this).

I didn't change much but I should've changed the Lotus Dragon hideout as it was a classic and really boring dungeon.

The Bullywug Gambit
Added the corruption effects to Kraken's Cove.

Sea Wyvern’s Wake
I changed the No-Neck fella and his ship into a Riedran ship with sailor-monks and an Inspired shock trooper captain. The characters swiftly rammed and boarded the ship and killed them all.

Changed the animated tower shield (SIGH!) into a large firebrass shield with spearblock ability. (Secrets of Xen'drik and Complete Warrior) Added the notched spear legacy weapon beside the shield. Changed the notched spear's monstrous humanoid bane ability to sacred so it'll be more useful in the later adventures.

Here There Be Monsters
I changed the gargantuan centipedes (=creepy but boring) and mummies to tomb spiders and web mummies (from MM4). It fit the tomb setting much better and I also planned that the shaman's tomb could've worked as a magical location reward (like the touchstones etc) but didn't have the time to work that out. I also don't like the paralyzing fear of the mummies but the sticky web mummies weren't any more entertaining. The first PK almost occured as the druid cast cure serious wounds from prayer beads to the main fighter as he was infected by a tomb spider's negative energy poison. Good times.

I optimized Olangaru with some feats and gave him more interesting magic items. Also, the demonic jungle had a corrupting effect as explained before ^.

Tides of Dread

Not many changes here, but I turned the Olman zombiemasters into potent magical herb-brewing dread necromancers. Devilweed (Book of Vile Darkness p.42) worked as loco weed and I used all the drugs I could find from BoV and Lords of Darkness. The corrupted illusionist is now smoking loco weed all the time and drank juju juice (Terran Brandy p.43, gives +2 CL) in the main battle against Crimson Fleet ships.

Vanthus would've been a pushover for my players so I optimized him to rogue3/fighter4/tempest5. Now they had to flee him and reorganize and attack him again. The yuan-ti sorcerer's flesh golems were dm-polymorphed into serpentflesh golems (Serpent Kingdoms).

Changed the regeneration of fire bats to fast healing as my characters didn't have cold magic.

Changed the mithral breastplate into a serpentskin armor to make it more cool and also allow the druid a possibility to use it.

The Lightless Depths

We haven't played this yet and apart from optimizing the kopru priest of Demogorgon I think I'll only change the elder black pudding into some other, more humane man-eating ooze, like corrupture (ooze) from MM4 or arcane ooze or some other bizarre polyp from Nth dimension.

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Btw, tar pits don't really have tar but asphalt.

For a sneaky wizard use e.g. this build:

Rogue1/Wizard5/Unseen Seer1/Arcane Trickster8/Abjurant Champion5

Alignment: nonlawful (for Arcane Trickster)

necessary feats:
1) Able learner (Races of Destiny; allows you to buy cross-class skills at 1:1 ratio and as you multiclass, you'll effectively gain the Rogue skills as your class skills and you can qualify for Unseen Seer which then allows easy entry to Arcane Trickster)

x) Combat casting (for Abjurant champion)

At level 20 you'll have CL 19 (20 with Practiced Spellcaster feat) and spells as Wiz19, BAB +11 and sneak attack +6d6.

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Variants:
If your DM allows, you could replace the rogue level with Ninja1 and take Kungfu Genius (Dragon Compendium) that allows you to use Int modifier instead of Wis modifier for AC bonus and Ki Power. The change: gain sudden strike instead of sneak attack, but gain Int modifier to AC (yay!).

Also, you can drop the Abjurant Champion levels and take more Arcane Trickster (10) and Unseen Seer (4) for more sneak attack damage. The change: sneak attack +8d6, BAB +10. Less hitpoints.

With that much sneak attack damage, even the low level ray spells can be useful sometimes.

I was thinking about changing Urol to Archivist1/ExpertN (the archivist base class in from Heroes of Horror). IMO, it suits his academic interests perfectly. Druid, not so much, and my group already has a shapeshift variant druid. There's a feat called Archivist of Nature (or something similar) that allows an archivist to extend his dark knowledge ability to giants and fey but I'd houserule that it extends to animals too so Urol could contribute to combat in IoD a bit.

We're playing STAP in Eberron so I don't want to make the dwarf from Jade Ravens a cleric as I feel it'd make him too special in that setting. Maybe I'll turn him into a Ranger4 so he could have the same animal companion.

PJP

Palando Cordyn, human illusionist (focused specialist, PHB2) - a street performer

Zacharias de la Rocha, human druid (shapeshift variant, PHB2; Fey heritage feats, Complete Mage) - a former sailor who was possessed by a jaguar spirit after a shipwreck, currently developing his fey skills and later joining the Greensingers.

Federico de la Garza, human bard - a somewhat decadent dandy who likes frilly shirts and his pet jaguar.

Dahar Gilman, human fighter - a street thug, Palando's friend. He has a some bullywug (or something) blood in him (aberrant feats from Lords of Madness).

Later, one yet unnamed serpentblooded human (a variant of draconic template) warblade will join the group. He's probably from Krezent in Talenta Plains and I'm still thinking how to tie his yuan-ti heritage with the certain temple in ToD. I hope future Eberron conversion notes have some grand ideas for the temple and Silver Flame.