Creative Director
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Glad to have you back in the hobby, thomasjane!
"Quicksilver Hourglass" is scheduled to appear in issue #123 of Dungeon. This issue will still have a "normal" high level adventure in it; the epic level adventure isn't replacing it. For those who are counting, this means that issue will have four adventures in it. Woo hoo!
"'Quicksilver Hourglass' is scheduled to appear in issue #123 of Dungeon. This issue will still have a "normal" high level adventure in it; the epic level adventure isn't replacing it. For those who are counting, this means that issue will have four adventures in it. Woo hoo!"
Neat! If you can work future "Adventure Paths" that way, too, I would definitely begrudge them a lot less. As it is, the idea of having one-third of adventure content in every mag devoted to the AP is enough to make me reconsider resubscribing.
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Creative Director
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One of the things we're really trying to do with Adventure Path II is to balance its utility as an ongoing campaign against its utility as a bunch of single-shot adventures. In other words, you'll be able to play part 4 of "Age of Worms" as its own adventure just as easilly as you can play it as part 4 of the "Age of Worms" campaign. Of course, this won't always work out; glancing over the outline for the campaign, it looks like a third of the adventures are going to be fairly Adventure Path Continuity Heavy adventures.
Nevertheless, we'll try to fit more adventures in as we get the chance. For now, thoguh, 3 adventures per issue is pretty much it. Issue #123's four adventure is, for now, a bonus.
Well, that's promising, but I have bad memories of Cauldron. Cauldron didn't interest me. The Cagewrights didn't interest me. None of it did at all. And with my subscription I ended up paying for so damn much of it!
It's not so much that I couldn't adapt the adventures into one-shots, just that the whole campaign tends to have an overarching setting and theme, and if I don't like that setting (Cauldron) and theme (stopping the Cagewrights), the whole darn thing is useless to me, regardless of whether I use it as or break it up into one-shots, it's uninspiring either way.
Hope that makes some sense.
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Creative Director
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That does make sense, actually. And yes, "Age of Worms" will have recurring themes just like "Shackled City" did. All I can say there is I hope the themes in "Age of Worms" work better for you than did those for "Shackled City." It's possible they will, since Age of Worms is in many ways a very different campaign.
Also, keep in mind that for the majority of "Shackled City's" run, we only had enough room to do one or two adventures per issue. So if you didn't like that campaign, you had 0–1 other adventures in that issue to choose from. With "Age of Worms" you'll always have two other adventures to check out.
I'm looking forward to "Age of Worms" (and considering subscribing- Why the hell not?), and would just like to say...
Please have a better idea of where you're going before you get there this time. The last few adventures in "Shackled City" didn't exactly thrill me, and struck me as being a bit disjointed. The last leg suffered for trying to squeeze in events that themselves feelt like the framework of a larger campaign, much less three adventures.
Of course, it WAS a 12-part epic, spread out across two years, so I expect the project to lose some cohesion. Held together fairly well (though I don't expect to use the parts i own. Might use Cauldron however...)
Still. "Age of Worms" can be far, far better. The 20-part thing will mean that everyone has something they can make use of. I think. I hope.
Good luck to you on this. I hope it works as well in execution as it sounds in theory.
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Creative Director
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Never fear. We've got the entire "Age of Worms" plotted out from start to finish; we learned a lot with "Shackled City" and one of the most important things we learned was to have everything planned out from the start.
The outline for "Shackled City" is about 2 pages.
The outline for "Age of Worms" is about 20 pages.
We also won't be holding any secrets back from the DMs. One of the most voiced complaints about "Shackled City" was that DMs who ran the campaign as it came out didn't know where things were going. This was partially because the editors didn't know where things were going. This isn't going to be the case with "Age of Worms." The first instalment will have a short companion article that outlines the entire campaign arc (possibly with some concept art to proove it), so DMs will know what to expect in future installments.
And finally... we've decided to do "Age of Worms" as a 12-part campaign; it'll be about the same size as "Shackled City" as a result, although probably a bit more compact. The first few adventures in "Shackled City" were pretty huge...
I recall age of worms was supposed to contain 20 adventures originally; one per level. Did the adventures get longer (2 levels per adventure) or does the AP take characters to 13th level instead?
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Creative Director
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Heh. The original specs for "Age of Worms" that Erik and I were talking about were, shall we say, a "tad ambitious." In any case, we decided that a 20-part adventure path would have just taken too long (almost two years) to put out, and would have dominated the magazine's pages for way too long. We decided instead to drop it down to a 12-part path as a result.
It'll still take characters to 20th level. Oh my, will it ever. The final encounter in the last adventure's gonna make some people cry. MWA HA HA HA HA HA!
Ahem.
For the first 8 adventrues, they'll roughly cover 2 levels of experience. The last four will cover 1 level each, since high-level adventures take more room.
And in the original outline, the adventures were going to each be about 10,000 words. The current outline (which is set in stone finally) has the adventures much longer. Not quite as long as those in "Shackled City" perhaps, but certainly longer than the standard-sized adventure we've been publishing lately.
How we'll fit longer adventure path adventures in the magazine for 12 issues without compromising the other adventures involves secret Paizo wizardry.