D&D 3.5 Campaign in St. Charles, MO, seeking up to 3 players age 21+; 7:30 - Midnight every other Friday. Next session is Friday August 30. Email me at tekuphile@gmail.com if interested.
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Anything is better than Downer. Oh wait, no, there was Snarfquest--that was equally sucky.
Better idea--how about WOTC and Paizo converting all old material from Dungeon and producing a series of compilations containing every single module from the past. While they're at it, they should do the same with all the old classic adventures. Then they can convert all the spell compendiums and monster compendiums and classic campaign settings to 3.5 as well. THAT'S the kind of stuff I'd pay $40 a hardback for.
As an Eberron DM, I'm having a tough time using Dungeon. What you want to do is beg the editors NOT to include Eberron-specific material. That way, you really get good at converting stuff. Stuff written just for Eberron only makes you weak and soft as a DM. Build those conversion muscles!
Templates don't make a good villain. Role-playing and story make a good villain. Many of my best villains have never had even close to complete stats. But if it's a fightin' villain you're after, either borrow a crazy templated monstrosity from someone crazy enough to bother crunching it out or take a regular bad guy and just make sure he has 2-3 unexpected tricks up his sleeve to use in the 3-5 rounds before your PCs kill him. If you want them to remember him forever, just give him a way to get away. Let him get away from them 3 times and intersperse rumors about him as well. After that, most PCs will walk into the mouth of hell looking for him. Then you can run any adventure you want (sorry, Bob the evil blackguard isn't here but you have just walked in to Orcus's throne room). If they don't find that bad guy, they'll just keep looking. Another good thing to do is let them kill a clone or use some other means of faking a bad guy's death. Then have him do horrible crap to them behind the scenes. They rarely catch on. OR just let him die and have some other bad guy resurrect him. That really burns players, but PCs get resurrected all the time. Why not the bad guys? Of course most players seem to enjoy beating a bad guy to a pulp at the end of an adventure just like the latest video game, but the recurring villain can still hook them--it just pisses them off. Especially if they have to THINK to beat the guy or something. A lot of players seem to like the simplicity of the world where you just kill people you don't like and that's that. Then again so does the president.
I'm all for conversions, but I don't do many. I find it much easier to wing it. Just use the MM and wing it. If the creatures in the module are way tougher in 3.5 then wait a couple levels or cut some out, no big deal. Noting is worth sitting down and converting every stat in a whole adventure. Your PCs won't come into contact with 80% of the stats in a module anyway. Make sure you have an AC, HP, attack & damage stats or rough guesstimates and go to town. Almost ALL battles are over in 3-5 rounds. But hey, if someone else wants to convert adventures, I'll definitely use them. And if Paizo would do so and print them, I'd buy it!
Quote: Speaking for myself, I'm more bored with modern fantasy than with the classics. I much prefer Robert Howard, Fritz Leiber, and Clark Ashton Smith over more modern writers, and an adventure proposal cast in the style of their stories certainly has a better chance of catching my eye than one that takes Harry Potter as its inspiration. Reply: Marry me, James Jacobs!! From your taste in fantasy to your desire for more HIGH level (17+) adventures, you must be my one TRUE love. Any chance you like Vietnamese food too? S!$@ I hope my wife doesn't find out...
If I never see another adventure with orcs, goblins, gnolls, ogres, hobgoblins, bugbears and their ilk it will be TOO SOON!!! Besides, I can write that crap myself & run it out of the monster manual. Lemmie guess--small farming village, meet the mayor in a tavern & he asks you to save the town from humanoids who live in a cave and have a few traps, a barracks room, a toilet with an Otyugh in it, a storage room, a room for women and children and a room for the king. Do you even NEED a MAP? I'm all for templated and advanced creatures in Dungeon and here's why--I hate writing them myself. I want Dungeon to print stuff it's a pain in the ass for me to write myself. Any jackass can pick five monsters from the monster manual and throw 'em on a numbered map. Adding templates takes for friggin' EVER! I don't generally do it in my games because any single bad guy I write up is dead in 3-5 rounds. That means out of all his 50 cool tweaked out template abilities he gets to use 3-5 half of which will fail. Whee! That's worth me crunching stats for an hour--NOT!! But I will GLADLY use a well crunched template NPC made by someone else for Dungeon. As long as it's not another friggin' half-dragon, that is...
Who gives a s*$*? It's ONE PAGE. IMO it would fit better in Dragon, but this is fine. Truth is I thought I'd hate the column but I enjoy it. I'd still toss it in a heartbeat for another critical threat or map of mystery, though. |