Hi folks. I have posted a similar question on the WotC board but had limited response therefore I was wondering if you had any ideas on starting the Age of Worms for 4th or 5th level PCs, merging with a campaign I've set pre-Time of Troubles in the Forgotten Realms. I'm after stuff like setting challenge ratings for opponents in The Whispering Cairn initially. Thanks in advance.
It kind of depends on how committed you are to starting from the beginning. If you start out adjusting The Whispering Cairn up four levels from what it was designed for, that problem is going to haunt you throughout the campaign. Maybe that's what you want, but it is going to be a lot of work because you'll rarely be able to use things as printed. Have you considered starting the adventure path at Encounter at Blackwall Keep?
It may be easier to design a hook to get them into that adventure and throw in elements there that give the information discovered in the first two adventures, rather than advance all the adventures from here on out. Just an idea.
I've looked at starting with Encounter at Blackwall Keep but I like so many of the elements in the first two adventures that I'd like to run them if I can work out how to up the CRs. Thanks for your input, though, BlackFalconKY :-)
I would beef up certain encounters, but leave the majority of the adventure as is. Many of the traps and puzzles in TWC are pretty darn interesting, and could easily challenge a party of that level (possibly even more so than a paranoid group of first level bashers). Consider slapping a few levels on Filge, Kullen and his crew, and possibly advance the wind warriors a bit. Basically what I'm getting at, is that BlackFalcon has a point, and trying to advance each adventure would be a major headache, especially at the higher levels. By only upping a few choice bits of the lower level adventures, the PC's won't advance as quickly for a bit, but around the time they get to HoHR or TCB they should be pretty much in line for the rest of the path.
Indeed, let the first couple of adventures be a little bit easier than printed and they will soon even out, maybe be a level above printed until say the Spire but that's not an issue then at the Spire drop the bonus XP for the visions and they should be right on track. It also depends on how optimised your PCs are too; if they are not optimised for a potentail meat-grinder of a campaign, then having them a level or two above that printed can be a good thing to help prevent them dying lots.
Have fun, I have with my group, which started off as 4 PCs at 3rd level in the Cairn, not especially well balanced or optimised, and is now 3 PC's with animal companion and follower, at 16th level half way through the adventures in Alhaster. On the way there have been two deaths and a number of fights which were challenging but defeated through good tactics and/or luck, plus a number of encounters which were pretty easy but in my opinion that's a good thing the players shouldn't be fighting for their PC's lives every minute or it gets a bit much. My group's composition has changed only slightly through this process (losing one PC due to player loss), but its flavour has definitely changed as the players have slowly but surely gravitated towards a very well balanced and quite powerful setup required to overcome the challenges they have encountered.
Thanks, folks ... they all sound like great ideas and not tooooo much work ... lol ...
Thanks, folks ... they all sound like great ideas and not tooooo much work ... lol ...
I posted a few weeks ago about how we got rid of experience points in our AoW campaign. Doing something like that may help you in trying to "pull" your PCs back into the level track the adventures follow. That way, they can't gain too much XP in these early adventures you're tweaking.
I think Whispering Cairn will work pretty well for higher-level PCs with few changes. If you allow the three cult-groups in Three Faces of Evil to cooperate a bit more, and maybe up-level a few of the leaders, that should be okay too.
Blackwall Keep will be too easy, in all likelihood. (It's awfully easy even at the stated levels.) It may be helpful to give the lizardfolk a level of fighter apiece, and more intelligent tactics.
After that, I think having PCs above the stated levels may be a positive asset. Hall of Harsh Reflections nearly killed my campaign; it was much harder than anything my player could enjoy (double TPK). After that we raised the PCs' levels; perhaps too far, but I'm pretty reluctant to go back down to the stated levels after the debacle in HoHR.
Mary
Hall of Harsh Reflections nearly killed my campaign; it was much harder than anything my player could enjoy (double TPK).
Really? You never know what the dice are going to spell out. My group just finished "Hall of Harsh Reflections" last night. The group was never in any serious danger (Telakin was on the verge of victory, but fickle fate ate his lunch).
(SPOILERS)
The invisible stalkers were tough but went down fairly quickly. The fight with Telakin was one of our most memorable battles in a while. A random encounter in the sewers rendered one PC an afflicted wererat. Last night's fight with Ilserv (FR version of the mind flayer) was a 15-round slugfest of spells, arrows and mind blasts. I found the position of the mind flayer at the start of the battle horrendous (levitating above the middle of the water). It kept me from using extraction at all! Had I thought more about him being stranded over the center, I'd have positioned him a square or two to the side. Oh well, we had a great time anyway!
Last night's fight with Ilserv (FR version of the mind flayer) was a 15-round slugfest of spells, arrows and mind blasts. I found the position of the mind flayer at the start of the battle horrendous (levitating above the middle of the water). It kept me from using extraction at all! Had I thought more about him being stranded over the center, I'd have positioned him a square or two to the side. Oh well, we had a great time anyway!
Other people seem to have had very different experiences with the mind flayer encounter than we did.
None of our PCs could affect it with spells (we had not realized that Glitterdust ignores SR, and frankly I still think that's a mistake). It just hung up there, out of reach, while its octopins killed the slowed and mind-blasted PCs. Only one PC was a strong archer and the mind flayer concentrated on him. With its high armor class, displacement, and dispel magic it seemed more than capable of handling anything they could do. (Actually I forgot to give it the benefits of its displacement, but that didn't help enough.) There wasn't any fight. They basically could not hurt it.
We went back over the fight(s) afterwards and basically didn't find any way for the PCs to win with their normal capabilities, short of rolling nothing but 20's. They could have spent a lot of money souping up to its level, but we had been trying to avoid that.
This one encounter pretty nearly ruined my game. I wish I had vetted it better in advance. We have an implicit contract that the players won't munchkin the rules, and the GM won't give them things they flatly can't handle. I broke my side of the bargain here, and I've been paying for it ever since.
We had the same experience (different GM and player) with a key fight in SCAP. It's one thing to fight a very hard foe, but a foe which you can't hurt at all is hard on player morale. The player actually *won* that fight with seventy rounds of mostly "ready" and "delay" and a lot of running around: but the reaction (both player and GM) was "That was no fun; I never want to do it again; I don't think I care to continue." Took a lot of work to salvage the campaign.
Mary
You've said that characters have died in these adventures so I have another question: how do your players roleplay the deaths of their own characters and those who survive?
I've had two adventures (not AoW ones) in which a character or two have died and for the players it's like "oh well ... roll up the next one". There's no contemplation from the survivors (even if the deceased is a relative). I tend to work the mourning into my recap before the next adventure. I had one character who lost her baby brother away from home and didn't even think about how she was going to tell her parents when she returned.
As for the AoW campaign ... I've decided to give it a go :-)