jjust4me's page

The Prestige class is not as good as it looks. I've done the numbers. You lose a caster level and a hex, and gain a bunch of crap (shaping ice? Really). The arch type is pretty good, but the restrictions on patrons is pretty sever-only two or three are worth taking. The class could be so awesome, but is full of so much crap.

I am currently finishing up with the second adventure, looking at the third at what I plan on altering and some general advice. If you have players who have specific weapons that are not found in these adventures, alter the loot that is found. One of my players is a ninja, so I an item specifically for his class in one of the items. I am not big on item creation feats (do you want to stay at home and make stuff or adventure?), so I make sure there is something for everyone. If I see an encounter that might be difficult for my party-say an invisible NPC and the party has no way of detecting it, I will drop a scroll in of detect invis.

For the card game-I am going to allow as many players who want to play, play-but for each player-the NPC gets an additional role. I don't want half the party sitting around watching (and why the designers did this, is just plain lazy and foolish).

I am just curious on various house rules when a flying target becomes immobilized, do they plumment to the ground for damage or gently float?

Sorry. I mean thanks "John Wood" for the game mechanics dot com suggestion.

Badger, trying using HeroForge. It's great for 3.0/3.5 supports all of books and it's free. If your players have laptops, they can enter their chacters and buffs/debuffs as combat goes and you print out your bad guys, buffed, debuffed. Great program-based on excel.

Crodocile wrote:

If I ever get there in the AP, I'm using Cthulhu from Horrorclix.

http://www.wizkidsgames.com/wk_article.asp?cid=40709

Okay, it's not 100% right, but it's got the right feel and it's a good size (friggin' huge!).

I don't know about using Cthulhu as a Kyuss mini, but it would make an excellent broodfiend. How big did ya say it was?

Incredible work, I'm going to see if he'll do a Kyuss and a DemoGorgan for me!

My PC's gang tackled him and ended the fight in less than two rounds. Grappling him was something I think the editors (nor I) thought about.

First death in the campaign, The Whispering Cairn. The earth elemental scores a critical hit and maximum damage versus the monk, Grasshoppa. Bug guts everywhere! :-)

I was pretty disappointed with the first installment of Savage Tide. The adventure wasn't bad, but wasn't anything exciting or new. The overall arc looks to be exciting-big D has alway been my favorite abyssal lord, and a pirate type of adventure + isle of dread has tons of potentional. The best thing I see so far is the reoccuring villain-the only thing that was missing from AoW. There is no Honor, lacked the creativeness and inspiration that the Whispering Carin provided.

The detail of the city was skeletal and there were no good NPC's for the DM to sink his teeth into and a serious lack of motivation for the party-other than money-to partake in the adventure. I hope we see a drastic improvement over the course of the next few installments.

WC-As all four party members walk down the halltowards the mouth. The Rogue, "I bet this thing is trap". Click-the pressure plate tripped. "What was that?"

I've been DMing for 25 years now, playing D&D for even longer but Age of Worms AP introduced something that has never even come close to happening ever before ... one fateful night, the entire campaign crashed and burned!

The AoW AP has been, in my opinion and I *thought* my players agreed, the best, most exciting campaign we've ever tackled. My small band of players are all old-timers who have been having fun for decades under my leadership (one is my wife, who's been involved with D&D even longer than me!). Everyone has developed complex but wonderful characters and we've all been having a great time.
Then, for no foreseeable reason, we were playing along and suddenly all my players "got attitude". Without warning they abruptly seemed to just no longer care whether their characters lived or died. No player made any comment illuminating this plan nor did anyone express any discontent with the campaign or my DMing style (which as I've said, they've all played happily under for decades). I was oblivious to what was even happening at first. A bad choice, a character drops. A foolish move, another one drops. I began to feel puzzled. The encounter was difficult but not impossible and the PCs certainly had the resources (both fantasy and real world knowledge and accumen) to resolve the conflict. I started wondering what was up with these people. Why were they playing like they'd never seen dice before? One character died, followed quickly by another, then another. Anyone who knows me from previous posts knows I'm nearly a Fate Nazi - I hold players responsible to the Nth degree for their choices and the fate of the dice roll - I never "fudge" anything. But at this point I saw TPK approaching on a fast horse with players who were literally offering themselves up to death. I have spent hours reading, plotting, and preparing for the Age of Worms and more than anything (even more than my own homebrew) I didn't want to see the campaign end. So against all my better judgement, I started to "fudge" - just a little. I held...

I guess the bottem line is, know your players and know their characters. If you have a player who is really attached to his characters, and the dice gods are not on his side, cut him a brake-it's OK for the DM to fudge a die roll from time to time. If a player does something foolish though-he had better hope the Tymora is watching after them.

We have been through two sessions of AoW and the PC's pretty much cakewalked through WC, though I cut them a brake on the trapped hallway with the face and gave them several chances to grab the chain as they were blown out of the hallway! Granted they were also using Gestalt characters, but the Gestalt characters didn't have as much of an impact as I thought it might have.

Know the adventures as well. You know SOLS has almost entirely undead, with death spells being tossed around like kobolds at a fire giant kegger, so give them a couple of death ward items along the way. In most cases, unless the party completely overextends themselves, grossly incompentent or, as in this case, just overtaxed from all the deadly combat, the DM has to take some share of the blame.

As much as I like AoW, I will be cutting out huge tracks of it to reduce the amount of combat and may eliinate HOHR competely, just because I feel like it wasn't that original and has some seriously overpowered combats.

So, the PCs have made it through the Spire of Long Shadows, with several trips back to Greyhawk to resupply. They enter the room with the Harbinger, and as written, he does not hasten to get into combat with them. They talk for a while (long enough that the rogue's Improved Invis ring wears off), and then the PCs get sick of it and roll initiative.

I rolled a 23 for the Harbinger. The PCs rolled better.

The wizard got a 28, the rogue (with an item of constant Gravestrike he got from Tenser) a 26, and the dragon diciple monk a 24.

The wiz lets off a sudden maximized, sudden empowered Greater Disrupt Undead (from the SC, level d8 dmg to undead, 10d8 cap) for 102 or so damage. Then the rogue sneak attacks the flat-footed chaotic lich with the (axiomatic) sword of Aaqa, and drops him. And even if the rogue didn't have the grave strike item, I'm sure the monk would have dropped him in one hit (and wouldn't have been affected by the lich's DR either).

Kinda anticlimactic, but what can you do?

Again, having a lich just wait around for the adventures' to come and pick him off doesn't seem like what a creature with such a high intelligence would do-especially if the players have made multiple ventures into his lair. I would have had every defensive spell the Harbinger had already up and running, and had him seeking the PC's out along with the knights and a the big worm-that would have changed the fight considerably.

***Spoilers***

So the PCs have made it to the final room – the Harbinger of Worms. They’ve systematically killed/destroyed/avoided everything else in the Spire.

I’m having a hard time coming up with a reason why Mak’ar hasn’t ambushed them anywhere in the Spire up to this point and why he is content to sit in his room and die like the six-armed worm he is. To complicate the reality of things, many of the inhabitants had to be encountered room-to-room like a crack house bust to keep from having a TPK on my hands.

On one side of my quandary is the fact that he is brilliant, wise, and charismatic beyond my ability to even run him. The other side of the coin is that he is alien and doesn’t exactly think like a regular humanoid.

I plan to run him akin to the “Architect” of the Matrix, since they could conceivably share many traits, with the exception that all dialogue would be telepathic in nature.

“Welcome. Incontrovertibly you have found your visitation adversative. You empathize that this is the way it must be to certify that you are indeed the protagonists of the past (DM Note: an allusion to the dream/prophecy event from issue #132) and the catalyst to the coming Age of Redemption (DM Note: Mak’ar does not call it an Age of Worms). The precondition has been met; you, like I, are forever bound to the trials that will come to pass, ushering in a new order to things. I have no inclination to do battle with you: there is little to gain from annihilating my liberator. But then, if I am able to kill you, then how could you be the trigger? (DM Note: this reeks of Cypher from the Matrix movie, but oh well…) You cannot feign to even comprehend the depth of this dilemma. Such knowledge would leave you in a catatonic state utterly.”

I anticipate the PCs attacking, if for any other reason, XP. He of course will try to win the battle.

Does anyone else have a better solution to why this guy hangs out in his room to possibly be destroyed by upstart PCs?

Just be careful with doing the whole Architect deal, that was the weakest part of that movie and if you have PC's who feel that way about the movie, they may feel that way about the climax.

That's the one thing I was hoping to see in AoW, a template to add to critters so we could have more of Kyuss minions. I want to create some Kyuss Carrion Crawlers! Perhaps are editors could through something up here for us?

Unholy Toughness-I know it's been discussed previously-but I can't find the thread-what is it exactly and what book is it in?

With the final chapter only a few weeks away, I hope Dawn of a New Age will live up to everything we are hoping for. There is nothing worse than going to a movie that you have great expectations of, and it doesn't live up to the hype, but the last four chapters of AoW have rocked, so I expect this one will as well.

In addition, I was wondering if the editors plan on having another 2 pages worth of art with all the major villians/NPC's of AoW in it, like they did for the previous adventure path?

Here is the original nursery rhyme-still creeps me out! With a few minor changes, it is very easily adaptable to AoW. If any of you creative DM's do so, please repost it, I'd like to see it.

Warning! Not for the squeamish!

The Worms Crawl In
Did you ever think, as a hearse goes by,
That you might be the next to die?
They wrap you up in a big white sheet,
And bury you down about six feet deep

They put you in a big black box,
And cover you up with dirt and rocks,
And all goes well, for about a week,
And then the coffin begins to leak!

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,
The worms play pinochle on your snout.
They eat your eyes, they eat your nose,
They eat the jelly between your toes.

A great big worm with rolling eyes,
Crawls in your stomach and out your eyes,
Your stomach turns a slimy green,
And pus pours out like whipping cream.

You spread it on a slice of bread,
And that's what worms eat when you're dead.

Alternate / Additional Lines:

They wrap you up in a long white shirt
And cover you up with rocks and dirt

They put you in a long pine box
And cover you over with dirt and rocks

The worms that crawl in are lean and thin
The worms that crawl out are fat and stout

Your eyes fall in and your hair falls out
Your brains come pouring out your snout

They use your bones as telephones
and call you up but you're no longer at home

Your eyes pop out, your teeth decay
and that's the end of a peaceful day

You turn the color of sickening green
And pus comes out like butter and cream
You wipe it up with a piece of bread
And that's what you eat when you are dead

They eat your eyes, they eat your nose
They eat the jelly between your toes

Your stomach turns a mossy green
And pus comes out like fresh whipped cream
You wipe it up with a piece of bread
And that's what you eat when you are dead

This adventure provides almost endless possibilities-though I certainly don’t think it would be the end of AoW. In FR, Waterdeep has enough high-powered heros to gain control of the situation-granted it might take a few weeks for them to destroy all the wights in the city. In the mean time, I can imagine martial law being enacted-only those capable of dealing with the threat in the city are allowed in the streets-at at least in the effected wards.

Merchants will be screaming about how their business is being affected and trying to downplay the disaster. Priest of Talos, the destroyer, Cyric and of course Bane will be seizing an opportunity to further there own agendas. Perhaps evil doers in Skullport will be moving sensitive goods through the city-never having an opportunity like this before.

All the while, the PC’s will be wanted by the Lords of Waterdeep for their part in this mess and how aggressively they are hunted depends upon what the Lords know and who is hunting them. Lawful PC’s may feel obliged to turn themselves in, but others may not. Will they squeal on fellow party members? If the PC’s turn themselves in or are captured, what’s their punishment. When the Lords have cleaned up the PC’s mess, perhaps they have a mess for the PC’s to clean up-an excellent opportunity to run the trio of vampire adventures in Waterdeep that came out during AoW. What about those vampires in Waterdeep? Are they going to ‘recruit’ a few of those wights?

I think with all of the different possibilities is what makes this adventure one of my all time favorites-not just in AoW.

I'm interested in seeing how you fit the tarrasque into AP3. ;)

I already know where it is in Eberron. It's not where you'd think.

I am sticking one down there in the Wormrift Fissure snoozing-I am going to leave it up to the party if they want to awaken it and try to kill it or let that sleeping dawg lie! BTW, is me or is a CR 20 for a Tarrasque a bit on the low side?

Xaene the Accursed wrote:

I noticed that Arcane Strike was a part of the original plan for Dragotha: If you look on pate 83 under Atk Options: you see Arcane Strike is still listed.

Additional Error Report

Dragotha's Statistics (Page 84): Dratoliches do not have Unholy Toughness.*

Yeah... Arcane Strike got cut at the last minute mostly because we just didn't have the room to reprint the feat's details. Plus, it's kind of like strapping a flamethrower to a nuclear bomb. This is also why he doesn't have any Draconomicon spells. I certainly support any decisions made by individual DMs who decide to use Draconomicon spells in place of Dragotha's listed spells!

As for Dragotha having Unholy Toughness... that's actually not an error. It was a conscious decision. Dracoliches/red dragons also don't have a death wind breath weapon. Dragotha's more than a dracolich; he's a unique undead creature. I was actually strongly considering not labeling him as a "dracolich" at all, to tell the truth, but ended up including the word anyway because it's iconic and cool.

First James, let me say awesome adventure. The various types of encounters and the sheer deadlyness of big D has pushed this adventure to the top of the heap as my favorite. I can't wait to see the finale!

I hate it though when I see you write the words 'we did have the room to reprint..." UGH! Cut some of the short features at the end of the magazine! Don't get me wrong, I like those little features, but this is AoW we are talking about here-the Coup De Grace to many poor adventuring parties! I can wait a few months on the filler stuff at the end of the Dungeon.

Also, any chance of Brazzels horde being detailed? Assuming my PC's defeat him, they will want to seek out his 'unguard' horde, and probably several of the other dragons they kill. Has any other DM thought about what they are going to do when the PC's start on a massive dragon lair hunt?

What are you smoking? The best two characters in Phantom Menaced got whacked (why didn't they kill Jar Jar instead). Maul didn't have enough screen time and the kid that play Annie couldn't act his way out of a paper bag. Very cool pod racing sceen and the light-saber fight was awesome, but Phantom Menance was the weakest of the six. Attack of the Clones was better and the first 20 minutes and last 20 minutes of Revenge of the Sith was awesome-but some of the acting and script between Anikan and the Princess was atrociously horrid!

Empire was my favorite because they took this massive battle between good and evil and made it very personal with Vader vs Luke. Besides, how can you beat the line, 'No Luke, I am your father'! I'd rate them:

1. Empire
2. Jedi
3. New Hope
4. Revenge
5. Clones
6. Phantom

Just MHO! :-)

Yamo wrote:

I'd rank the first five like this:

1. Phantom Menace
2. A New Hope
3. Attack of the Clones
4. Empire Strikes Back
5. Return of the Jedi

But...but...Jar-jar!

Issue 124 looks great, I can't wait until I get it. Maybe I'll run it with a pack of Kobolds. (My PCs have a colony living beneith their Castle)

ASEO out

I am beginning my campaign in about a month or so and in 25 years of DMing, I have never been so excited about a campaign as I am AoW. That being said, I wanted to do some serious forshadowing in the first session. After the group meets and gets together in a side adventure (the wharf chase from the Mad God's Key, issue #114-a great 1st level adventure-but I am just using the wharf chase), they encounter a group of children singing various creepy songs such as 'Ring Around the Rosie' and 'The Worms Crawl In' - just to set a dark tone. Most of the players will have something in their characters' background that makes them dislike worms, maggots from something that occured in their history.

A great episode of Battlestar Galactica inspired me as well-The episode Scar, where they took a cyclon fighter and turned him into this larger-than-life villian who hated humanity and killed numerous pilots and had everyone on nerve about facing him. Looking at the first encounter in the Whispering Cairn, I found my Scar with Eric's description of the wolf that bore the scar down his.

Scar, will have quite a bounty out for him by local farms and the city watch alike. Rumors will persist about his uncanny cunning and intelligence in ambushing people; of how he has snatched babies from mothers arms, of how he managed to cripple one of the elder warriors in town. 'Mad' Murrik, one of the town drunks, was infact a ranger/druid until he lost his hand to Scar. When Murrik speaks of the wolf, the PC's will hear the fear in his voice as he relates how he has never felt so much malign evil in a natural creature before. The overwhelming hatred that ran through 'it'. How 'it's' unnatural malevolence seemed to permeate it's very essence. I want the players to poop themselves when their first encounter is with Scar, the Great Gray Wolf!

Just taking a simple encounter with three wolfs and making it much more adds a lot of fun for the players (and me too).

If you really want to make the mirror maze dicey, hit the PC's with a Deeper Darkness and Silence spells. Have them write down what they are doing and then justify in your mind (or write it down on a piece of paper-but not so they can see) where they really are and what's happening around them.

Having been a firefighter for five years, going into a that is so full of smoke you can't see your hand in front of your face can be very disorientating. No way to talk to anyone-downright frightening. If you got a spare room, pull each of your PC's aside and ask them what they are doing. This takes a lot longer, but can make the encounter very memorable, instead of annoying mirror maze with dopplegangers.

I kinda of agree with you LarryMac. It's not that Eberron doesn't fit into D&D though-that world is not that much different that WoF or FR, in fact, that IS the problem! Did we really need another high end powered magic world? Greyhawk is moderate to high magic and the Realms is high, so now we got super-high! In addition, there have been many other campaign worlds that have fallen by the wayside (Mystera, Darksun and my absolute favorite-Ravenloft), but these products are not directly supported anymore, so I don't want to invest my cash in something that is not going to have any follow up in a few years. I wish WotC would have gone for a low magic world instead, something really dark and gritty, but instead they went for flash-n-cash.

In regards to the D&D online game, I was skittish about buying it as well-I saw Eberron and groaned, but bought it at the constant nagging of a friend and have been blown away by it. A few of my friends have also not bought the game for the same reason-they were hoping for Greyhawk or FR. The gamefeels more like generic D&D than Eberron, so buy it, you won't be disappointed!

"AoW and Eberron Don't Mix"

Of course not, D&D and Eberron don't mix. Sorry, had to be done.

Call me the old guard or a fanboy or whatever - I despise Eberron. It's the only reason I didn't jump into the MMOPRG and it's why I dread v4.0. My D&D charcaters should not be robots (sorry, warforged) and shouldn't be riding trains and airplanes to the next dungeon. If I wanted to play Gamma World or something, I would.

That being said, converting a Greyhawk or FG adventure to Eberron is far simpler than the opposite. Add some lightning rails and make some of the NPCs warforged. Don't have the PCs recover a piece of the Rod of Seven Parts, have it be a dragonshard. If, on the other hand, the point of the module is to uncover why the Artificer's Guild caused a lightning rail to skip the tracks on its way past all of the dinosaurs of the Talenta Plains while on its way to some summit aboard an airship between the halflings and one of the dragonmark houses...well, good luck converting that to any other setting.

At the end of the day, Eberron will die out soon. It's too cliquish and those settings (see Dark Sun, which I loved, Mystara, Spelljammer, etc.) always die because they're too far removed from the core.

For FR, since Bane was reborn and Waterdeep was the place where Myrkul died, what a perfect spectal to bring the Lord of Bones back into the Realms. With the amount of destruction 10,000+ wights would cause, it would be the perfect catalyst to bring him back. I am just not sure exactly what portfolios to give give since Kelveor is the Lord of the Dead. Any suggestions?

So what's the CR for 18,000 wights? ;-)

One thing I noticed in this adventure is, what happens if the player choose to leave the big worm trapped in the forcefield-as my players likely will. In the final confrontation in the arena, they have a nasty fight, then this big ol worm burst forth and let's face it, he is very likely to swallow a fighter type without much difficulty. Now he gets tougher, and all hell brakes loose in the arena from the negative backlash of energy released. I am running FR, so I am sure Lords of Waterdeep would get a handle on the situation, but not after hundreds or even thousands are killed in what follows (according to the adventure).

Has anyone had to deal with this situation?