First, greetings to everyone. I signed up yesterday and this is my first thread.
I am running an Age of Worms campaign in the Forgotten Relams and I'm looking for a suitable side adventure that would fresh things up. My players got a little jaded from the last dungeon crawl (Dourstone Mine) and I'm looking for something that offers more roleplaying and/or puzzles.
Please note that I only have the issues with The Whispering Cairn and The Three Faces of Evil, so please include the number of the issue so I would know what to look for.
Thank you all beforehand.
I am currently going through some of the planning stages for running the Age of Worms. One of the things I really like about it is that I can fit something unique and different into each adventure. The first few have TREMENDOUS amounts of roleplaying potential, specifically most of this is found in the Diamond Lake background article and a little creativity.
Here are some of the things I am thinking of including or focusing on...
1 - The Whispering Cairn - I plan on running a mini-adventure with any local PCs who are human with the other players getting to play other locals as kids. Specifically they will be a group of friends who finds the Cairn and one of them will die (the source of the bones in the first area of the Cairn). It also explains how they all know about it, ties them to the area, and gives me a ton of RP opportunities (not much combat for 10 year olds).
2 - Three Faces of Evil - I plan on splitting the three temples up. Clues from the first will lead to the second and from there to the third. Perhaps I will break that up so it isn't linear and they can choose the oder. But they will need clues from all three to find the hidden temple with the pool. There I will have a cultist scene, ala Indiana Jones, except that it will culminate in the creature absorbing the life of all of the cultists to bring it to life... and then the fight happens as planned. There was an adventure a while back that had a blood cairn (not sure the issue) which I plan to steal heavily from for the last location. So this one would focus quite a bit on the puzzle solving and breaking the fights up with it as well as RP (since the temples are seperate).
3 - Black Marsh - The battle defending a fort and being under seige is quite unique and will be a good start. I will also then use a suggestion I saw on these boards of having the players play pre-generated, low-level guards back at the fort as the creature breaks loose and reaks havoc on things... I am going to play up the horror aspect of this quite a bit (probably even use some Call of Cthulhu rules and tactics).
All the while the interactions and role-playing of the personalities and local descriptions and feel will take a very large center stage... the fighting will be there, sure, but it isn't necessarily the focus.
Sean Mahoney