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In my view, the first module does two things for the campaign as a whole, 1) Introduce the town of Sandpoint and all its NPCs and get the PCs to care about it and 2) Have the PCs explore the Catacombs of Wrath and get a sense that Sandpoint is built on top of Thassilonian ruins.

These can both be accomplished within the Skinsaw Murders module. Have the PCs arrive in town to investigate the murders. You might have to do a bit of rewriting of the module to make it more of a mystery who the murderer is (in the module itself the PCs can figure out it's Aldern pretty quickly). But with a more robust whodunit the PCs can get introduced to the various NPCs in town, the locations (including, possibly, the Catacombs of Wrath). The Scarnettis, the rumor that Chopper is back, etc. can provide a lot of red herrings.

As Sunderstone mentioned, Book 3 ends with the PCs learning of a Giant Attack inbound to Sandpoint and Book 4 begins with the PCs fending it off. If the PCs don't care about Sandpoint, the rush to defend it and the epic battle to save it have less of an impact. It's one of the high points of the campaign and having interacted with the guys at the brewery makes it all the more dramatic when the giants destroy it and possibly kidnap the brewers.

The Catacombs could be encountered in The Skinsaw Murders, or you could wait on it. The Giant Attack in Book 4 is for one of the Baddies to see if the thing he is looking for is in the ruins under the town. This will get them curious about the Thassilonian ruins around town (although the Old Light will generally attract interest), but I don't know that you couldn't just encounter the Catacombs when the sinkhole opens it up in Book 5. There's just a cool moment in Book 5 when you go back to the first dungeon you explored in the campaign and there's relevant stuff beyond a corridor that was blocked the first time you came down there.

Stopping in to echo a lot of the points already made here. The Adventure Paths do indeed assume a 4 person party (I'm not sure what point buy but 15 sounds right - it should be relatively low so that, e.g. your Wizards aren't auto-passing every Fort save they come across). Having more players or optimized players is going to mean that not every encounter is going to be challenging for them and you'll have to modify some.

Adding more PCs gives the PC side more actions/round, which is the most important resource in the game. Here is where I plug this guide which really gets into the action economy and how you can modify encounters based on your party. Ranged blasters (archers or mages) also really benefit from having more PCs on the team since there are physically more bodies in front of them preventing the enemy from closing the distance easily.

My own two cents is to have your intelligent enemies (and I would classify Jaagrath in this category) know the rules of the game. They know casters get their spells back in the morning and usually buff themselves and their party before going into battle. Have the bad guys extend their sentries so they can figure out where the PCs are camping and buffing so they can ambush them before they're at full power. And PCs that run away should face opposition that is prepared for their tactics.

Man, if I had a nickel for every "None of the fights in this AP are challenging. I have 6 mythic PCs with 35 point buy stats and they haven't been stopped by anything yet" comment.

I would also say that the campaign traits are not really a value calculation in the same way the feats are. They're meant to add color and help you as a player integrate your character into the town of Sandpoint.

The "best value" traits from a combat min-maxing perspective only add +1 to hit and damage to a specific type of enemy, so it's not like you'd be missing out on a lot if you choose "wrong." I put that in scare quotes because there really is no wrong answer here at all.

Travel distances are an awkward thing that you'd think they would print somewhere in the module. But yeah, the plot encounters go really, really quickly.

I imagine that warships in the D&D world are pretty well equipped for spell combat. Sure you can fireball a merchant vessel into oblivion, but the Crimson Fleet have spellcasters on their payroll. They know how that trick works and presumably have something prepared against it. When a PC wizard gets fireballed, somehow he doesn't emerge naked and hairless even though the fireball should burn off a good deal of his hair and clothes. I think it works the same way with people who are prepared for ship combat. One third level spell should not sink a ship or melt its rigging.

Splitting up is an issue, since D&D envisions the party working as a 4 man band. There may be enough NPCs to help out the split party members but... that will be pretty rough. The Yuan-Ti sorcerer has 5 Eneveration spells with a +11 Ranged Touch. He can really easily take out a single party member (my party's wizard flew out to fight him and got a face full of Enervation, rendering her essentially useless for the rest of the fight). Similarly I don't know how the party could stop the Vrocks unless they are grouped. Good luck to them though.

Also Vanthus as written has a +3 Will save, which is laughable.

Yeah, the execution of this module is pretty bad but there are some great ideas that can be brought out if you polish the encounters a little.

First of all, the travelling encounters are uniformly awful. The Elder Black Pudding encounter is a potential TPK if the party doesn’t have knowledge of that particular ooze’s strengths and weaknesses. The roper is basically a pinata. The rhagodessas are fun to see again, especially if the one in TINH kicked the crap out of one of the party members. But none of those encounters are particularly good. On the other hand, having the party just wander through the underdark for several days and encountering nothing is pretty boring. So you’ve got to do some work here. The random encounter table is good, so you can roll on that before the game and create your own underdark encounters.

There’s a lot of potential for roleplaying in the module that you can bring out. The encounter with the dragon turtle is great as written and helps to get the party used to the idea that sometimes they will need to negotiate with and placate evil creatures that are stronger than them. This dynamic forms the crux of the Abyssal part of the campaign.

The troglodytes are CR4. They are not meant to be a credible threat to the party. In my campaign, I really emphasized their pathetic-ness. I tried to make the party feel bad for killing them. They are unmistakably evil, having converted to Demogorgon worship, but it should be a sad kind of evil. They basically can’t move and so can’t prevent the party from slaughtering them. But you should describe their raspy breaths turning into screams as the players murder them. So, like a turtle on its back, but a turtle that’s cursing them the entire time, promising that Demogorgon is going to feast on their entrails. If you make it clear the party is murdering the troglodytes and not just defeating enemies in combat, you can get some interesting ethical dilemmas. For example, one of the troglodytes in the initial fight with the dimetrodon is overcome with hacking coughs during its move action, lowering its guard and provoking attacks of opportunity. Do the players take it?

Likewise Irgzid is really fun to play. He can come off a little Gollum-y so be warned not to go in that direction. I made him pretty intelligent. While he’s obviously repulsed by the Demogorgon worship and the disease fetish, he’s not Good in the D&D sense. However, I had him be able to bat back criticisms from the PCs - “Of course we deal in slaves - You pink-skins take all the best land for yourself, declare us monsters and send people into the swamps to kill us.” He wants to turn his community from the demon worshipping that they are doing now to being regular troglodyte evil. And he wants to make the PCs okay with this.

While the module is linear, the tunnels are not. The PCs should need some kind of guide, which Irgzid provides. They can technically find a way to Golismorga using divination spells, but they lose NPC information. One of the big issues with this module is that there’s a lot of information about the setting and the conflict presented to you the DM but no real good mechanism for relaying that information to the party. The plot relies on the kopru discussing their plans openly in front of N’glothnoru, who then relates part of it to Irgzid and the PCs. It’s… not great.

Anyway, that takes you through to Barbas.

Teleport can potentially cause a whole bunch of problems. In 3.5 the range limitation is such that the wizard has to devote her entire day's slate of 5th level spells to teleporting back to Sasserine, but it's still doable with stopovers in Renkrue and Tamoachan.

My party, for whatever reason, was not interested in teleporting back and using portable holes to transport trade goods or to hire mercenaries. So that was nice. They basically made a trip back at the end of Tides of Dread to go shopping and that was about it.

The adventures are pretty good at giving out useful magical items as treasure and not too much cash that needs a store in order to use. I would highly recommend tailoring the magical items carried by the bad guys to be useful to the party.

The timing is the real issue. If you have Lefty the Pirate give the impression (as he is supposed to) that "The Crimson Fleet will be here in 2 months or exactly 60 days," the party can get into "spreadsheet mode" where they plan out precisely what they will do every day for those 60 days and what to do with the work crews. Depending on your idea of fun, this might not be the best. OTOH, if you get more vague about the arrival time of the fleet, the party may be less inclined to explore the island for exploration's sake because they may be away when the fleet shows up.

Also, read up on grappling rules. This adventure has a bunch of monsters with improved grab and swallow whole.

So, Tides of Dread is a sandbox but a pretty linear sandbox that relies on the party carrying the bat idol around on them. The adventure does its best to have the party encounter the episodes in the order they are printed in the book.

The party needs tar to fix the Sea Wyvern and bolster defenses in Farshore. The Olmans know where the tar pit is, but need the bat idol to solve the bat god problem before they will reveal the information. Once they go to the tar pit they fight the giant T-Rex, meet up with the Phanatons, probably follow them to their village, get told about the Rakasta temple, go there, then head back to fix the Sea Wyvern. Especially if the party has teleport, the listed encounters only take about 2 weeks to 100% complete, which leaves a lot of time for the sandbox type stuff. Be prepared to fill in a lot of time.

The flow of the story just gets a bit messed up if the party doesn't happen to have easy access to the bat idol. In my campaign, the party buried all the treasure at the beginning of HTBM near their wrecked ship (Tavey got really excited about drawing a treasure map). So they didn't have the bat idol on them when they first encountered the bat god problem. This required an awkward teleport to the wrecked ship, fight with the kopru, and teleport back.

Finally, make sure you have figured out pronunciations for all the Olman words ahead of time. They can be difficult to do on the fly.

The Scarlet Brotherhood ship encounter is supposed to be an easy encounter. James Jacobs says somewhere that he wanted to give the characters a chance to be badasses instead of being ground down by EL = Character level encounters.

If you've got over 21 people, that means they can't Create Food and Water their way out of the provisions problem. I also suggest establishing that Created Food and Water tastes really bland and pastey , to give the NPCs an additional thing to complain about.

Have the Terror Birds do a lot of hit and run attacks (the way raptor attacks are described in Jurassic Park). Also go in hard for the random encounter table. The jungle can be a little easy in the first part of the adventure.

Finally, have the pregnant woman give birth, peacefully, in Farshore. It's great to have built the suspense of her just about to give birth, possibly in Fogmire, and then just dispel it all.

This module suffers, in my opinion, from two big issues.

1) The first is storms. The module text tells you specifically that Lavinia picks the best time of year for sailing weather, which is all well and good. However, the module scripts two storms and both have major effects on the PCs. The first separates them from the Blue Nixie and Lavinia and the second shipwrecks them on the Isle. By the second storm, as soon as you tell the players the clouds are looking heavy, they know they are going to get screwed. I personally feel that you should run some non-plot storm encounters, to get the PCs used to the idea that ship travel is dangerous, but they are not going to get owned every time there's a storm. Stormwrack has some good ideas for weather based encounters, or you could just run one of the two storm encounters in the module, but with lower DCs and without the major plot implications. I feel this helps to avoid some of the concerns the players will have with the second major flaw,

2) Railroading. Even a cursory review of the threads on SWW will find many discussions about the unavoidable shipwreck at the end, but there's also the Sargasso encounter (which is unavoidable and unnoticeable, the latter of which can really irritate PCs). In my experience, players don't, in principle, mind the shipwreck on the island -- it gets them off the boat, finally -- but the loss of agency and the feeling that no precautions they take matter ends up hurting the game. E.g., it doesn't matter how many ranks they put into Profession (Sailor) because they won't get lost in the first part of the journey even if they roll bad and they can't avoid the Sargasso or Reef if they roll amazing. To counteract some of that, I suggest having the Sargasso seriously damage their ship. Either in its death throes or earlier, have it rip off 2 of the 3 masts. Put a giant hole in the bottom of the ship that destroys a lot of supplies. Make them feel like they are barely limping away on a practically destroyed ship and that the sails and helm don't work well anymore. This way, once they encounter the second storm, it isn't as much of a stretch that they wreck no matter what.

Having an Olman PC is super useful. There are a bunch of times from The Sea Wyvern's Wake to The Serpents of Scuttlecove when having someone who speaks/reads Olman or knows some history and background about them is pretty important.

If you don't have one now, don't sweat it. In my experience you usually end up with an Olman PC at some point in the campaign because characters have the tendency to die on the Isle of Dread.

I'd love to get copies of TLD, CoBI and onwards.

tfcrowell at gmail

IMC the whole Vanderboren Manor situation was a bit of a cluster.

The party decided to sail the Sea Wyvern back from Kraken's Cove, theorizing that it was faster than the dingy they got there on. This led to a fun roleplaying encounter when the Sasserine Navy moves to interdict what they see as a Crimson Fleet pirate ship sailing straight for Sasserine.

The Wyrmfall Festival has some good encounters, which are really fun. The out of control wagon is the best. The stiltwalker got killed pretty fast.

When my party arrived at the manor they saw no signs of struggle outside it and no broken gate. They theorized (quite rightly) that the bullywugs must have come in through the basement and that Lavinia, if still alive, is probably barricaded as high up in the house as possible. This led them to enter the building and proceed directly up the stairs to the 2nd floor and encountering the Drevoraz encounter as the second encounter, after the atrium fight. When this fight is won, the party suddenly has a bunch of loot and (with a few shots of a CLW wand), 2 fully healed and pissed off Jade Ravens along with their gear (in the same room) and Lavinia, who has some combat stats.

They then went about ruthlessly slaughtering the remaining bullywugs, who were no match for the Jade Raven-augmented party.

SWW is really fun. I think one of the hardest things to do is to get the party to say "Eh, let's abandon Sasserine to go on a multi-month expedition to the Isle of Dread." So I would start, out of game, talking up the Isle of Dread to one or more of your players. If one of the group is really excited about going there, this can really sway the group. Otherwise you have to present, "Lavinia wants to go on this big long trip... there are really no other options."

You won't run into too many traps in the campaign, so not having a rogue isn't going to hurt that much.

In fact, the end boss of SWW is a plant creature (and one of the harder fights is against an ooze) and the boss of HTBM is a golem, so rogues can get a little frustrated. It's not like Age of Worms where you need to modify rogues so they can harm undead or they're useless, but the middle section of the adventure path can be hard for that class.

The hook for TBG is super easy: Vanthus went that way! My players had no problem following it. They need to get over to the cove by boat though, which can be a good opportunity to introduce Amella or one of the other sailor NPCs from SWW.

I figured that the Shadow Pearl attack on the fort was Vanthus trying to experiment with them to see how they worked. The first time he was just desperate, this time he's got one (somehow) and is being more scientific about it.

It's been mentioned on the boards before, but everything is new again! In the Lotus Dragon Guildhall, the room that Rowyn is in is super tiny. The party, Rowyn, and Gut Tugger barely fit, and that's assuming that none of the players have animal companions. As it's drawn up, Rowyn can't really move around to create flanks and can get overwhelmed really quickly. I know we've been talking more RP tips in this thread, but making that battle site bigger really helps the party not kill her in 2 rounds.

In my experience, players don't forget Vanthus. They understand how narratives work, and thus that Vanthus will return. Players like to defeat villains and the fact that they don't get to defeat him will stick in their craw and make them remember him.

After HTBM, which took my group like 4 months to complete because of irl reasons, as soon as they saw Farshore on fire when they first arrive they immediately said, "I bet it's Vanthus."

But for more concrete-ness, someone (I think in V's Campaign Log) recommends swapping the relatively boring "Fort Destroyed By Lizardfolk" encounter in SWW with another Savage Tide attack, to remind players that the Savage Tide is still a thing. (in my experience, players remember Vanthus - that bastard we haven't killed yet - but can forget about the Savage Tide threat that gets introduced in TBG and is pretty central to the campaign)

And yeah, I have failed to come up with a way to make the Jade Ravens interesting.

Awesome! Good luck!

Also, I will say that I really enjoyed the end of the campaign, as did my players. The plane hopping and coalition building of the final chapters is really great and you've got a bunch of NPCs who are really fun to play.

In my experience, getting players to loathe Vanthus is not difficult. Pretty much run the first adventure as written (the fight after they first encounter him is pretty brutal for four 1st level PCs) and they'll hate him.

Getting them to like Lavinia is much harder, but much more important. I found that showing her to be competent and badass was really key. Especially first adventure Lavinia can be a little damsel in distress-y, which makes players start asking why they're risking their lives for this woman, is she the only one who has jobs in this town? etc.

Once the party heads off to the Abyss/Scuttlecove it becomes good again. I think the perception of boringness comes from "The Lightless Depths" and "City of Broken Idols" which are both longish dungeon crawls, one after the other, right after the high note of the battle of Farshore. These two modules are a letdown after the climax that was the Battle of Farshore. They can be good though. TLD sets itself up well to be super creepy and almost horror in tone, so you can use that to make it interesting. COBI is, imo, the weakest adventure. I lowered the difficulty of the monsters and made it a romp--a place for the characters to show how powerful they were, instead of another slog of EL=Character Level encounters.

Lastly, be careful with how much RP you put into the prologue if it gets them attached to Sasserine. The Player's Guide to Savage Tide is very heavy on Sasserine stuff, so players could get the sense that Sasserine is a place they're really going to get involved with, a place where they need to get to know the movers and shakers and a place they need to be a part of. When in fact the adventure path needs them to be fine leaving Sasserine at level 5, never to return. I had an urban character who had a hard time leaving her city to go off to explore some island thousands of miles away.

Yes, it should be DC 18 (that also increases the chances that the party's fighter/rogue will fail it).

I know these were in the OP, but:
He casts Freedom of Movement because enemies will often have battlefield control spells or grappling abilities.

He should definitely stay submerged unless he wants his face full of arrows/fireballs.

Capsizing rowboats can either be fun or a way to make your full plate player really pissed off as he sinks to the bottom and can do nothing to help. It depends on how evil you're feeling and how much you feel like point out the drawbacks to wearing super heavy armor.

What the heck, I'll take one too, if you're still handing them out.

About to start SWW today. Super excited.

tfcrowell at gmail

People have done extended PF conversions, so someone who did that might pop into the thread to say what they did.

But as written in 3.5 it looks fairly similar to Deathblade poison (1d6 Con initial/2d6 Con secondary, but DC 20 instead of the DC 18 of the masher) and Wyvern poison (2d6 Con init/2d6 Con sec, DC 17).

In PF those poisons are Deathblade: DC 20, Frequency: 1/rd. for 6 rds, Dmg: 1d3 Con, 2 saves req'd. and Wyvern: DC 17, 1/rd. for 6 rds., 1d4 Con, 2 saves.

So your DC 18 d3 con dmg/rd, 1/rd. for 6 rds., 2 saves. would be about right.

The most important thing is for one of your players to still be recovering from the poison when the T-Rex shows up on the beach when they land.

This thread has been really helpful, especially Vermilleo's suggestions and additions. I wish I had read this when I started the campaign. I sold the players on the idea of pirates (and the cover of the player's guide really emphasizes the pirate flavor), so of course the rogue writes CN on his character sheet and goes about trying to defraud Lavinia, the first noble he meets. Had to work to get them onto Team Lavinia.

Do people have advice about keeping momentum through TLD and CoBI? We're gearing up for ToD and everyone's super excited (me included). It's such a high point for the campaign. Going from the NPC-heavy episodes of TSWW and HTBN and ToD to two straight dungeon crawls seems tough. They're not big into dungeon crawls and while I think they'll enjoy a change of pace in TLD, I don't know that they'll be super stoked for CoBI, which seems like TLD Part II: This Time On the Surface.