Hey all, I'm getting ready to run the Age of Worms AP in about a month here. We are wrapping up the first story arc of my Eberron campaign, and I'd like to give myself a brain break and run some fun published adventures for a while. Here's the lowdown:
-We are running it in Greyhawk
-We are using the gestalt rules; to avoid confusion, I killed multiclass penalties in general
-We are using the 'Fast Feats' variant (all PCs, NPCs and monsters get a feat at 1st level and then another at each even-numbered level)
So it's fairly high-powered, but that's how we like it our games. I'm making more work for myself because I have to restat all of the monsters and NPCs, but I enjoy that aspect of session preparation quite a bit, so I'm not too worried. Besides, some of the villains in AoW look like they'd really enjoy the gestalt rules and a couple of extra feats.
My PCs (all human):
-A fighter/knight who plans on going into cavalier and riding a griffon
-A warmage/wizard who is going into initiate of the sevenfold veil; emphasis on the duality of his build (offense-heavy/defense-heavy)
-A ninja/cleric of Pelor who is going into shadowbane stalker
-A bard/barbarian who is taking levels of dragon disciple, dragonsong lyrist and war chanter
With all of that in mind, back to the Whispering Cairn. I really like the dungeon and I think my PCs will enjoy all of the traps and puzzles; I'm particularly looking forward to the side trek to the Land Homestead and all of the things that come after that.
However, I'm thinking about altering a few of the opening encounters. I've searched around here in the old Whispering Cairn threads, and it seems like a lot of people think the swarms are too hard. I don't necessarily think so (our warmage will probably have multiple burning hands ready to go), but beetles in general don't thrill me. I was thinking about taking out the following monsters:
-the wolves in the entrance
-the beetles and mad slasher that attack the PCs while they are figuring out the sarcophagus puzzle
-all of the beetle-type creatures in the Lair of the Laborers
Replacing them would be an ettercap and a half-dozen Medium- to Large-size monstrous spiders, with maybe a swarm or three thrown in for extra creep value. Ever since I've DMed, I've always wanted to use monstrous spiders, but my PCs always seem to slip out of the low levels before I get a chance. This seems like a good opportunity to satisfy my arachnid urges. What do you all think? Any special considerations for altering the first few encounters of the Whispering Cairn in this fashion?
Any additional advice for running the Whispering Cairn would be greatly appreciated. I'm seriously thinking about lowering the Search/Disable DCs on some of these traps. My poor rogue...
I was thinking about the spiders some more, and I thought of one major problem - how do the bigger spiders get in and out of the Lair of the Laborers? They certainly can't use that malfunctioning elevator, even if they had the brains to operate it, and it seems odd that the ettercap would play bellboy for them when they go out on hunting forays.
Two possible solutions I'm thinking of:
-get rid of the elevator altogether. It collapsed a century ago when some previous adventurer tried to use it, and the Seekers cleared out the rubble later on, before they were wiped out.
-add some sort of secret, hard-to-access-without-a-climb-speed tunnel that connects the Lair of the Laborers to the Hall of Honor or False Tomb.
The first one is easier, while the second one lets me keep the malfunctioning elevator intact. Did anyone enjoy that trap, by the way?
Also, looking at incorporating the spiders into the adventure path a bit more - the aforementioned ettercap could be the minion of a harpoon spider (MM3) who has recently arrived in the area. This intelligent, malicious aberration plans on turning the greater Diamond Lake area into his own personal hunting ground, so he sent his trusted ettercap lieutenants to secure a few safe havens around the town. One such nest is the Whispering Cairn. The harpoon spider could be encountered at a later date, possibly between the Whispering Cairn and the Three Faces of Evil. An early look at that adventure makes it pretty obvious that the PCs will need to come in at a higher level than Mike Mearls recommends.
No feedback? Not even 'no treehouse, that's retarded'? C'mon, people ;)
Or maybe I just need to be more patient.
Anyway, moving on to other things in Whispering Cairn...I am trying to decide what to do with Filge to bring him into gestalt format. Cleric seems like the obvious choice for his second class because of his undead-lovin' ways. If I go that direction, he'd worship Vecna. That allows me to tie him into the story of 3FOE more completely. He'd be very interested in bringing down a blasphemous Ebon Triad cult if he was an 'orthodox' Vecna priest.
The thing is, I'm not sure that I see Filge as a religious man, and I want to keep his personality intact. Then again, priests of Vecna aren't as zealous as priests of other deities.
Opinions? Any other ideas for Filge besides cleric?
Spiders don't need elevators.
I am no arachnid expert, but couldn't the larger spiders just feed on the smaller spiders? If that is the case there is no need to leave the level at all... the smaller ones are able to feed on the goo down there and the bigger ones eat them.
Overall I see replacing the beetles with spiders as a fine solution if that is your bag, just watch the CR's and you should be fine. From your description I wouldn't try and take out the harder encounters, your PCs should be up to (high powered to the extreme for their level).
You'll also want to rewrite the descriptions for the laborers level to take into account the hordes of spiderwebs that will have accumulated.
The other nice thing about spiders is players are more likely to transfer their own real life 'ick' factor too them than they would to a swarm of beetles.
You are making some work for yourself, but if it gives you a result you enjoy then it is a good thing and I see no inherent problems with it. That said, I don't think I would be doing the same.
Sean Mahoney
I think that I nerfed the elevator trap. It came up and then shuddered and fell before anyone could get in. Partly I didn't want to kill anyone yet and partly I was just to excited to get to the creepy crawlies.
As far as spiders vs. beetles...whatever floats your boat I guess. I had a lot of fun with the beetle swarms. I managed to gross out the players pretty well. Remember that these are diminutive insects, not fine. According to the description, that means 6"-1' in size. Blech. I had the beetles make all manner of horrible chittering and clacking noises as they crawled all over the PCs. Fun.
Thanks for the responses.
That's a good idea about the spiders eating each other. If I go that route, I'll probably get rid of the ettercap/harpoon spider subplot and just have the spiders be long-time residents. They fulfill the same role as the beetles, but they have a much better chance of creeping my players out. In that case, I'll probably leave the elevator and general floor plan intact, and just add some webs.
I like your spider idea, it's a good sub for the other monsters.
I would also suggest keeping one of the wolves, either inside the cairn or just outside of it, but make the wolf infected with the green worms. I think from a plot perspective this will make finding the worm in Filge's lab more interesting, and gives them a personal encounter with the worms rather than just hearing rumours about "worm infested creatures" as it suggests in the adventure intros.
I think doing this helps focus the players attention on the worms and the threat they could pose to the world.
Personally, I wouldn't (and didn't) get rid of any traps from the Cairn, or even decrease the difficulty of finding / disabling them. My group did OK, and the party rogue never maxed out search at that stage, and she has never had disable device. There's enough clues to pick up on the traps without the need for an uber search or disable device; if your players are reasonably clued up, a little cautious, and maybe a little lucky here and there, they should be able to by-pass or at least survive the traps no worries.
My group only got hit by one trap in the Cairn, the windy corridor near the end of the cairn, and even then everyone knew it was a trap waiting to go off somehow, it's just that the character who set it off was a carefree elf who doesn't show due respect to danger so she walked down the corridor even when the others said not to. They still all survived though (she grabbed hold of something, while the rest had already roped themselves up tight).
For Filge, what about adding Fighter, making him a bit more of a melee threat? My group tore him to shreds pretty easily, it was his zombie guards that caused them problems (no Cleric in the group, and I changed one of the zombies to a bloodhulk fighter). Of course, at that state the group has two wolf animal companions, so once that pair of wolves got hold of Filge, it was quite literally "make a wish" time...