Morgenes's page

Note: Sorry about the links to images, I thought I could post the images here originally, but apparently not.

Hi, it's me again. I posted earlier here about using 3-D terrain from World Works Games to run the Savage Tide Adventure path. Well, it seems I completely missed posting pics from the Beneath Parrot Isle and Lotus Dragons portion of the first chapter. I did far more work on the Beneath Parrot Isle portion, even custom-drawing my own tile to handle a water area shown on the map. The Lotus Dragons portion I used the Minichunk 1" dungeon tile floor pieces to create the map. I tried using the doors from the Minichunk set, but the players still had issues with seeing over them, so I created door floor tiles that look a lot like the map symbol for doors.

The second chapter of the Savage Tide adventure path starts with the players trying to chase down Vanthus who has gone to Kracken's Cove to set fire to ships to later steal their contents. The players arrive too late, as told by the plume of smoke visible a mile from the cove. When they arrive, the find they were too late:

Image of fires burning on skull cove

Beyond the burning ships was the Sea Wyvern. It was far enough out that it wasn't caught in the flames. The Sea Wyvern will play an important part in future chapters of the story, and so I went ahead and photo-shopped the described blue wyvern onto the front sails of my Maiden of the High Seas model, turning her into the Wyvern of the Sea.

The Sea Wyvern at Skull Cove

I used 'Skullcove', 'Maiden of the High Seas' and 'Bits of Mayhem' (for the fire transparencies) sets to complete this set piece for the start of the 2nd chapter of the AP. The flat paper ships were downloaded from the Wizard of the Coast site, resized to 1" squares and printed out to represent the burning ships.

One of the things I've been working on is gluing the ground tiles to flat sheets of magnets rather than dealing with other suggested methods for keeping ground tiles together. It gives them a fairly good weight even if you didn't have a metal board to set them on, and almost works too well on a magnetic surface. Here's what one looks like:

Magnet Tile pic

And here it is being laid in:

Magnet tile being laid in pic

For more pictures, check out my gallery.

Ok, so my players are going through Bullywug's Gambit. Due to an unfortunate set of rolls, all the (non-warforged) pc's have acquired the Savage Tide disease from the savage monkeys in the first encounter. On top of the acid damage, and walking right into the savage dionysus, they needed to rest pretty quickly.

Since there's nothing about it, and they waited out the fire, they rested on the Sea Wyvern, I figured everyone on board was dead, and so didn't have any encounters there. The problem is they then decide to hole up on the boat for 2 days before re-entering the caves.

Should I adjust the caves further on for them taking longer? Obviously the lanterns that were low on fuel, lighting the caves would be extinguished, but what about Captain Harliss Javell? Should she have survived to this point, or should I have her as another victim of the Savage Tide?

What to do? The rest of the adventure is very time sensitive, and if they keep resting it'll take them forever to get through this. Although I guess it'd explain why the Bullywugs were able to get to the Vanderboren estate before them.

Any input you guys could provide would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Morgenes

So my players are nearing the end of the first chapter and last weekend they faced the crucible. The text describes the cavern of the crucible as being 20 feet high, but there's no mention of how tall the well is above it. I decided that the well itself was 30 feet deep before the cavern below it.

Of course, I didn't think to look up the jumping into water rules until after the session. You'd think the fact that Lotus Dragon thieves jumped into the well would tip me off that I should have. But, according to the d20 SRD, the first 20 feet of fall into at least 10 feet of water does no damage. After that the next 20 feet do 1d3/10 feet non-lethal damage.

So my guess is the well was supposed to be 10-20 feet before the cavern opened up for another 20 foot fall. This would give a 30-40 foot fall which should result in 1-6 points of non-lethal damage for the falling thief.

With a successful DC 15 tumble or swim check, they could have avoided all damage if it was a total of 30 feet from the well to the water.

My players (six level 2 pcs and one level 1 pc) ended up using the well's rope (and another rope they brought along) to climb down by twos, and after swinging, (DC13 strength) jump to land. They ended up pincushions from the four Lotus Dragons hiding behind the arrow slits and illusory wall and two of them were put under as they were trying to climb down, plunging them into the murky water below.

Anyone else run into this? How did your players handle the descent into the well?

Now that the Dragons are on alert, the text describes that there are seven of them in the barracks, sleeping unless they are on alert. It never says where those seven go if they're not sleeping. My thought was to use them as random encounters, or reinforce other positions (possibly the exit from the crucible as my players are currently hiding in the crocodile (in my case carrion crawler)'s den. Anyone else have any ideas on where they'd go?

After having my warforged players negate two issues with their character traits in the first two sessions (walking on the bottom of the bay to reach the Blue Nixie and poison immunity) I was thinking about what's going to happen when they encounter the Savage Tide. Being immune to disease, the warforged will not really face any true threat from the Savage Tide.

My current plan is to say that the tide will affect any living being, being a supernatural disease, but I'm not sure my players will really buy it.

I'm wondering how other Eberron DMs are handling this, any insights?

After re-finding World Works Games (http://www.worldworksgames.com/) from a post on this board, I purchased and built their Maiden of the Seas model. Since I found out about it here, I thought I'd go ahead and post my feedback that I also posted on their boards. Included below and in the linked gallery is some spoiler information about the first part of the first adventure. Don't read further if you haven't begun reading the first adventure.

Here's my post on the WWG forums:

The first part of the Savage Tide Adventure Path appearing in Dungeon magazine is a high stakes encounter onboard a sailing ship docked in the middle of the bay. Here is my gallery showing pics from the first adventure which ran last Saturday night.

http://wwgallery.pcinfoman.com/thumbnails.php?album=305

I took the Maiden of the Seas and pulled it together over 3 weeks of 2-4 hours per day working on it. I took a couple of days off over Thanksgiving, but it was probably about 40 hours of work easy. All told the project probably cost me about $60, including the PDF from WWG, ink, paper, foam board, glue and sharpees (I went through a brand new black sharpee completing the boat).

Based on how good it felt to have such a great prop and the stunned reaction from the players who had no clue what was coming, it was the best $60 I've ever spent on a gaming product.

To serve as the cage housing the exotic creatures that were being smuggled into town, I kitbashed together a 2"x2" cage using the outline of the cargo cubes and manipulated and overlayed the texture from the grates.

I have purchased several other sets (as can be seen in some of the decorations on the ship) and am now happily building the Vanderboren Vault for the next part of the adventure which will run in two weeks. I'm using a magnetic masterboard instead of the velcro and so far it works wonderfully. I'll post pictures of that after it runs.

Thanks to Denny of WWG for such a beautiful ship to build, it truly is a masterpiece. Thanks to all of the posters on WWG's forums who have really helped with their tips and discussions. As I've said before, the biggest tip is to edge before you glue. Edging after you glue makes it really hard to get in and cover all the white areas. Even then, as you can see in my pictures, there is still a good bit of white showing.