jon's page

I'm planning on running this on Sunday with my group. I'm hoping to fit it in one 10 hour day. Does anyone, especially Mr. Conners, have any suggestions for making sure I can finish it in one day? Places that might be good to trim? Things that might be combined? etc.

As a side note, I'm running it as a one-shot, perhaps with more in the future, that I'm calling Sasserine Adventures. My group is nearly done with Into the Wormcrawl Fissure in Age of Worms and Savage Tide is the next campaign. I thought it might be fun to have a series of one-shots or small adventures set in and around Sasserine that take place the year before Savage Tide. So when we can't get the whole group together or we just need a bit of a break, the players can still experience that part of the world. They'll have a chance to get to know some of the NPCs prior to the campaign. I actually have L1 versions of the Jade Ravens as pre-gen characters for anyone who doesn't have a character to play. (They're not allowed to use their Savage Tide characters in Sasserine Adventures.) Spider Eaters fits perfectly into the Sasserine/Amedio area. It'll also be a good chance for my normally hack'n'slash group to learn that there is usually more than one way to solve a problem.

There seems to be some problem with your scripts checking credit card numbers. I tried entering two different credit card numbers to pay for an order and in both cases I received an error saying that you only take VISA or Mastercard and that the credit card number was not correct. Amazon.com is quite happy to use either of those credit cards.

Please let me know how we can resolve this issue. Email is the best way to get in touch with me.

Thank you.

jonmichaels AT mac DOT com

Putting these docs on the web seems unfair use of the copyright, so let's say we're friends, and now we can exchange this privately by email. (in fact, I feel I have a lot of things in common with you all AP3 DMS :p)

For those who might be interested, just let an email here and I will send you the files (.rtf and .pdf).

Mando, if you're still doing this, I would love to be added to the list: jonmichaels AT mac DOT com

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

All this talk of missions on behalf of the Dawn Council, boat trips up river into the jungle and tie-ins with the "slaver" series from 1e AD&D has me thinking. Perhaps a certain colonel has taken leave of his senses and the PCs must now head into the "heart of darkness" shall we say? Perhaps even with orders to "terminate with extreme prejudice"?

Cue music from The Doors.

;)

I'm just curious, but is there a Church of Heironious in Sasserine? Or should I force him to be a Paladin of St. Cuthbert.?

If you look at the Savage Tide Player's Guide you will see that there is indeed a Shrine to Heironeous in the Sunrise District. It's number 19 on the map. Heironeous is certainly the logical choice for the Patron of a paladin but not the only choice. Mayaheine, who also has a shrine in Sunrise, was a paladin before she was granted divinity.

If you track down a copy of Dragon #306 (April 2003) & Dungeon #104 (November 2003). They have Paladins of Greyhawk with lots of nice fluffy bits for many of the Good-aligned gods. Plus a crunchy feat for each if you desire to go that way.

The last 3rd of the campaign is in the Abyss.

So... I don't know how well d20 Past could model that.

That fact that I know nothing about d20 Past at all, save for its name, could have something to do with this.

How about d20 Past + the Elder Gods of Cthulhu?

"Shadow Over Innsmouth" has all those fish creatures from the deep, and there's another story with a island coming up from the sea floor covered in ancient monuments. "Dagon" maybe? I forget.

You could even have a "melting pot" of various exotic cultures. The ancient Chinese sailed all over and have a long tradition on the high seas. Not all of those people would be noble explorers. Some would be pirates. The old Disney Swiss Family Robinson movie had the fantastic Sessue Hayakawa as the pirate captain with an "asian" crew. The Mutiny on the Bounty happened because many of the sailors had gone "native" and taken Tahitian brides. And even literature like Moby Dick has its Queequeg.

I can picture a campaign where many sailors could be tattooed Olman or Suel throwing bones on the deck and whispering of angry gods and bad omens. And working along side them could be Touv sailors with their own traditions. It wouldn't be so strange to see others of the Far East as well. I'm sure there's a Kara-Tur equivalent on Oerth.

Got a spare $4.95? Check this out:

http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=1473&

It's 2E, but it's mostly fluff so it should fulfill your player's needs.

Oh yes, I picked up the various fluffy Greyhawk PDFs including that one, the old boxed set, the Greyhawk Adventures book, The Adventure Begins book and the Scarlet Brotherhood book.

My plan is to compile the data on the various pantheons, countries, power groups, etc. into some Knowledge check tables so that if the players run across, for example, a member of the Scarlet Brotherhood, I have a reference as to how much information they might know about the group.

I was just hoping that maybe some one already had something similar to this that I could use as a starting point. ;)

I really like how Dragon Magazine in the Ecology articles and WotC in the recent books has Knowledge check tables that sound more like rumors and anecdotes and less like reading off a stat block list of resistances, immunities and DR. I'm hoping to bring that same kind of style to my tables.

It'll still be many, many months before I'm ready to run Savage Tides (my group is just starting Prince of Redhand in Age of Worms), but I've started to gather things for the coming campaign. I plan to run Savage Tides in Greyhawk and all the Living Greyhawk documents are a great starting place for a 3.5e version of a Greyhawk campaign.

My question is this: Does anyone know of any Knowledge check tables for Greyhawk similar to the "What do you know?" sidebars in the Player's Guide to Eberron?

My group is much more familiar with 2e Forgotten Realms and I'm running Age of Worms in Eberron. Since they already know next to nothing about Oerth and the World of Greyhawk, they won't have to "fake" what they do and don't know. But it would be handy to have a guide like "Ok, with a DC 10 Knowledge (religion) check... Yes, you are familiar with the evil pantheon of Flan gods."

BTW, the Living Greyhawk Deities 2.0 document on the RPGA website is a great resource for expanded cleric domains for not only the core gods, but all the Greyhawk gods. Stormwrack and Spell Compendium didn't exist at the time that document was created so there's still some tweaking you could do, particularly with the sea gods, but I've found it extremely helpful.

http://wizards.com/default.asp?x=lg/welcome

Jon

Farscape. Definitely.
I second the Buffy nomination.
Upright Citizen's Brigade.

How do you suppose one would go about incorperating OA classes and XPH classes into an AoW campaign?

There are a few ideas regarding OA classes that also appear in the Complete Series in this thread:

What about swapping out the idea of "Asian" for "Exotic". Various monster races might not have quite the traditional fighter / cleric / wizard / rogue line-up. For example I've seen it suggested before that the Dhakaani Goblinoid tribes of Eberron, being the descendents of the original rulers of Khorvaire, might have more of these classes.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ebds/20040816a

Wouldn't a Hobgoblin Samurai fit in nicely with the well-organized, militaristic lawful nature of those creatures? Goblin ninjas? Or stepping outside the goblinoid races, and since it's your avatar, what about a Kenku ninja? Ninjas being masters of stealth and deception might fit nicely with the mimicry of Kenku, and the +2 Hide and Move Silently bonuses are also a plus.

Now fitting monster races into your campaign might be a bit trickier. Eberron would certainly help that since it seems to open the door more to monsters races as PCs and the over-all idea that "things are not as they seem".

While I will agree that Apple does just about everything wonderfully, contrary to Tiger's P.R., they didn't pioneer desktop search.

What are you saying?! Apple didn't invent EVERYTHING?! My life is shattered! ;)

Of course I realize that searching inside a document is hardly a new thing. It's just that's pretty spiffy when it's built in to the computer and you don't even have to think about it.

I'm certain their first concern is going to be piracy which is unfortunate because PDFs are great. Anyone who has a Mac running 10.4.x knows that the Spolight Find feature of searching inside documents (including PDFs) is awesome. I dream of the day I can have my library of rule books, magazines, adventures, etc. on my laptop.

Not sure of a rule or the stats on a monster or whatever? Hit Cmd-Space. Type in a few words and the relevant data starts popping up in a list.

(Don't worry, you Windows folks will be able to do the same thing when Vista finally comes out in 2000-whenever. ;)

I would love to see them offer something like this. But I also understand if they're concerned about losing revenue.

I would like to join a game if I can find one that fits into my schedule. Weekends are best for me. D&D 3.5e. Eberron looks very interesting but honestly anything's fine.

I'm 31. I haven't played PnP D&D in about 17 years. They were still on the 1st edition when I was playing. Never tried the 2nd edition except in the computer games.