My player is bound and determined to find the other six parts. The PCs became quite balky when Manzorian asked for the piece they had (they have decided that Manzorian is a bad guy, though one too powerful for them to oppose directly) and are now going to use Commune and other spells to try to find the remaining parts.
I told them about the pit fiend with part #6 and gave part #5 to the Vecna priest in _Library of Last Resort_. I asked for a rain check on the other parts....
Has anyone run this? Are there good published adventures that could be swiped for finding the other parts? (The PCs are nominally 13th, but very strong 13ths--an adventure for 13, 14 or 15 would probably work fine.)
I'm kind of regretting putting the first piece in. On the one hand, the PCs could really use more experience (there are too many of them, meaning not enough EXP to go around) and treasure. On the other hand, it's going to be a ton of work, and the reason I'm running an Adventure Path in the first place is lack of preparation time.
I guess it's a tip of the hat to older D&D material, but if I'd thought ahead, I would have made it a Staff of Three Parts!
Mary
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There is actually an adventure called The rod of seven parts - it is one of the late 2nd edition supermodules. I'm not really sure if I think it is better than merely OK, but it does contain some cool suggestions for adventures.
Depending on your tolerance for epic quests, I'd suggest getting Return to the tomb of horrors while you are at it, and put a fragment in good ole Acacerak's hoard - or as end-campaign loot in the very cool Die, Vecna, die!. You can get the PDFs from Paizo for $4 or so a piece.
Any of these should give you material to run a very, very, very long campaign. However, it will require a huge amount of conversion work - so much that I would not bother with converting at all, but rather just derive inspiration from the published stuff and then go nuts by yourself.
Hope that helps a little.
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 6
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I embraced this element, and gave out the first section instead of the seventh. I'm working in elements of the Rod of Seven Parts boxed set, but keeping the adventures short.
1st piece - in the tomb
2nd piece - I'm using portions of City of Broken Idols for this, as a stand in for the aboleth adventure in Ro7P
3rd piece - I've mostly dropped Kings of the Rift from my adventure, but will use pieces of it for this portion of the adventure. I may swap the order of this with the next part.
4th and 5th pieces - using the original adventure's oasis
6th - held by the pit fiend referenced in Spire of Long Shadows (which was inspired by the Ro7P boxed set)
7th - held in the prison of the wolf spider, per the original boxed set
There was indeed a boxed set in 2nd edition called "The Rod of Seven Parts". The back says it is "designed for four to six heroes and heroines of levels 10 to 12." It also refers to a novel of the same name by Douglas Niles.
I have to be honest though and say that this adventure never appealed to me at all. It is basically a collection of seven uninspirational adventures to get the seven parts of the rod. Moreover, converting it to 3.5 would require an enormous amount of time, so I'd advise against it.
Your players also have to understand that, if they go after the rod, they will leave their current quest unattended. Seeing how this is their main objective, you should really steer them in this direction. If they really want to get the seven parts, you could make that into an epic campaign, once the AP is finished. In that case you could get the boxed set, but only as inspiration. You'd be doing a lot of hard work yourself.
I'd arbitrarily stick the rest of the parts in places where the PCs have no real chance of getting their grubby hands on them.
If I were you I would not worry to much that your players don't have enough XP to go around because there are lots of them. In general more players with a little less XP is more powerful then fewer players with the normal amount of XP. This is because the system rewards players for taking down bad guys at CRs above their level. Your players are slightly lower level then they would be if there were fewer of them and are tapping into that bonus XP and therefore gaining more (as a total in the group) then they otherwise would. End result is they may, individually be weaker then the AP calls for but as a group they are actually more powerful.
In general this should make them, individually, in more danger of dying but the chance of success of the group as a whole has gone up.
Well, they aren't supposed to know where the pieces are and they got the end of the rod that doesn't tell you where the other parts are. If they want the whole thing, and you think they won't give up until they get it, just use that as the motivation to go through the AP. You can find ways to drop hints on where the pieces are--have Balakarde going after that instead of on the trail of the Kyuss worms. (Or maybe the Kyuss worms were a cover for finding this powerful artifact. . .) You could give a piece to the Harbinger in SOLS, hide one in Lashonna's stash under the healing house in Alhaster, put one in Kongen-Thulnir--in the possession of the aging Cloud Giant king, one in Brazzemal's horde, or Dragotha's, etc.
Then all you need to do is figure out what powers the rod has while united and make that the key to defeating Dragotha. (I.e., maybe cut out some of the bonuses for Balakarde's spirit fragments or for accomplishing the various tasks in Alhaster in Dawn of a New Age, or don't give them the sphere of annihilation, to even the odds a bit).
In this way, you'll need to do a modest amount of work (stat up the full rod, modify the adventure hooks a bit), but you'll be able to preserve most of the AP as structured without having to generate endless side quests.
Either that or plant info that leads them to conclude the other parts of the rod have been destroyed, and remind them somehow that this adventure is about Kyuss, not the Rod.
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Either that or plant info that leads them to conclude the other parts of the rod have been destroyed, and remind them somehow that this adventure is about Kyuss, not the Rod.
or have it so that the Rod is a component needed by Lashonna and/or Dragotha to help bring about Kyuss' return or give him more power upon his return. You could also flip the bit and have Kyuss' whole return be an elaborate plot by the Queen of Chaos to rebuild the staff so that she can summon Miska the Wolf Spider and resume the Law/Chaos war....
If I were you I would not worry to much that your players don't have enough XP to go around because there are lots of them. In general more players with a little less XP is more powerful then fewer players with the normal amount of XP.
In general this should make them, individually, in more danger of dying but the chance of success of the group as a whole has gone up.
Our experience is that this is true at the lower levels, but at the higher levels SR, or Unholy Word, or other strongly level-dependent effects can kill the whole party if they are a couple of levels below what they should be. We had one such TPK already in HoHR and I'm not very keen on another. It's even worse when coupled with the inadequate treasure (meaning lower AC, fewer boosts, worse saves).
For whatever reason, we seem to come out of each module since the second having slid back nearly another full level. I've been putting in a lot of side stuff, but it's hard work. We tried abandoning the EXP idea altogether and just giving levels, but the player disliked what it did to item creation.
If I hadn't done anything, the PCs would now be 11th, going in to SoLS which is written for 13-14, and I think it would kill them outright. (As it is, I am very worried about the eladrin encounter.)
Mary
Our experience is that this is true at the lower levels, but at the higher levels SR, or Unholy Word, or other strongly level-dependent effects can kill the whole party if they are a couple of levels below what they should be. We had one such TPK already in HoHR and I'm not very keen on another. It's even worse when coupled with the inadequate treasure (meaning lower AC, fewer boosts, worse saves).For whatever reason, we seem to come out of each module since the second having slid back nearly another full level. I've been putting in a lot of side stuff, but it's hard work. We tried abandoning the EXP idea altogether and just giving levels, but the player disliked what it did to item creation.
If I hadn't done anything, the PCs would now be 11th, going in to SoLS which is written for 13-14, and I think it would kill them outright. (As it is, I am very worried about the eladrin encounter.)
Mary
How many splat books are you allowing? I'm just not finding this really. SR is one of the most potent effects in this regard but the players should be able to fall back on some spells that don't have SR and 2 mages using such spells even a few levels lower should be more potent then 1 mage. The same should generally be true across the board. If a martial type has a 50% chance to hit then two lower level ones that have only a 40% chance to hit should still hit more often. The total sum of the PCs hps should be significantly higher etc. Its not like your group has less magical items or treasure then other groups. Their finding everything that others found. Their just spreading out a little thinner.
Are you sure your players would not be having these problems if there where less of them and they had appropriate XP? Age of Worms hands out lots of TPKs to 4 player groups as well so it may be more that the adventure itself is hard and not specifically that larger groups don't fair well.
Anyway you can avoid the situation altogether and simply hand out more treasure and give out a bonus in XP either in lump sums or by having all monsters be worth 25% more XP.
Im a "plussed content" kind of DM, so when I saw that they would get one of the seven Rod parts, I naturally thought of the roleplaying opportunities that the other six rods could offer.
The PCs are mid-to-high level by now and can plane shift, so I thought about placing a piece of the wand in major planes like: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Shadow, etc. They would have to face (or negotiate with) canon monsters of the planes, in addition to another adventuring party that had a piece, and the Balor (or whatever it was) that had the final piece.
I had begun mapping out important places and identifying the threats. I would scale down the XP a little (I had done that from the beginning so that I could award story XP) and add only a little treasure, since the rod in and of itself was treasure.
You know what my PCs did? They traded the rod fragment to Tenser/Manzorian for a free meal at the pub and a pack of bubble gum. :)
While the PCs were continuing their adventures, Celeste and Manzorian's apprentice (the book worm - his name escapes me at the moment) took on the role to further the story. Tenser and Agath was out. Where? Later the PCs are presented a gift at the end of the story before facing Kyuss - he and Agath had recovered the rest of the fragments and they gave the full rod to the PCs to use against Kyuss.
Several things to consider:
Each of the 7 parts may be anywhere in the multiverse - so questing for each part is a good way to introduce planar travel (trips to the abyss, elemental plane of fire, etc., etc.) This is cool - but also virtually impossible for lower level characters.
Each piece is supposed to led you to the next bigger piece, so part 6 will guide you to part 7. So any lower numbered parts will be very hard to locate (and part #1 is much, much more valuable than the others, in this regard).
Lots of other powerful beings (good and evil) are actively looking for the other parts. Most of the other parts already belong to very powerful beings (good and evil) who will not give them up without a fight. It's easy for a high level paladin to go kill a pit fiend to gain a part, but what about a part owned by a planar?
Finally, some of the parts may have been hidden by integrating them into other magic items. Part one could be used to form the hilt of a magic sword, for example. The owner of this sword may have no idea that he also owns part of the rod (and may not believe it if you tell him). Extracting the rod will require destroying the sword - possibly an epic quest in and of itself.
At any point along the way, parts could be stolen or taken away, dragging things out further.
Ideally, the pcs will be motivated to get the rod in order to beat some extremely powerful being of chaos - doing so will, naturally, cause the rod to fragment again...
Your players also have to understand that, if they go after the rod, they will leave their current quest unattended. Seeing how this is their main objective, you should really steer them in this direction. If they really want to get the seven parts, you could make that into an epic campaign, once the AP is finished. In that case you could get the boxed set, but only as inspiration. You'd be doing a lot of hard work yourself.
It makes me sad that the rod of 7 parts doesn't play a major part in the adventure at all. I mean, why to introduce one part if you know they're not important in the adventure...?
It's largely just there for the name-dropping effect. My players may be disappointed that they didn't collect all the parts, especially considering how useful they would be against Iuz, who by now is their ruler.
If your campaign goes epic, I imagine that the first thing you're going to want to do is run around picking up the parts to use against Iuz. This is probably one reason why you don't get it; if the Rod was good enough to finish Miska, it's probably good enough to one-hit Kyuss. On the other hand, it might only weaken him, being a deity and all.
Interestingly, the idea of the PCs collecting the parts only for them to be stolen by the owner of the last part is a cliche that comes from video game RPGs. In the game data, the individual parts and the completed item are entirely separate items, and the game interface would have to be specially programmed to let you combine the items. The solution to this was that the game would have you lose all the items at one point, only to gain the completed item later.
I finally put all of the Rod pieces in places already significant to the Age of Worms, hopefully places that will lead to the PCs staying more or less on the module line and more or less in order.
(Player of mine, please don't read this.)
#1 is with Dragotha's phylactery (hard to find)
#2 is in Dragotha's hoard
#3 is owned by Manzorian
#4 is in Darl's possession, on a ship en route to the Library of
Last Resort
#5 was in the Well of Triptych Knowledge; the PCs have it now
#6 is held by a pit fiend based out of a ruined fortress
in the orc lands near Redhand
#7 was in Icosiol's tomb; the PCs have it now
They may or may not find them all, but at least the player won't hate me for posing the choice between giving up for purely out of character reasons or derailing the Adventure Path, and I won't have to write or buy a ton of side adventures.
Mary
For what its worth, I actually like the fact that an artifact that is in various pieces shows up only in part. Its almost cliche that the ancient artifact of 23 pieces, if one part shows up, will show up in whole by the end of the campaign. I mean, don't these things stay separate for hundreds or thousands of years at a time?
...or as end-campaign loot in the very cool Die, Vecna, die!.
If you do get this one, be sure to look for the reference to the Head of Vecna in it. :P
Yeah...
I ran The Rod of Seven Parts box back in '98/'99. The PCs at the time are now powerful NPCs in the campaign (though distant and separate from the AoW path). When my PCs find their first piece of the Rod, I might have to call those NPCs into service as mentors, but I'm not sure. It seems to me that it would be silly for the Rod to pop up again after only about 10 years of in-game time. I would think that after plunging the Rod into Mishka, the Rod would separate and not be found again for a few centuries. I'm not sure how to handle that.
I want to make sure that the Rod pieces have no direct influence on AoW. I don't see how the Rod has anything to do with Kyuss and the Age of Worms. I will not have all the pieces conveniently placed in AoW modules. The search for the Rod pieces should carry into epic levels, beyond Kyuss and his schemes, ultimately leading to the Steaming Fen, spyder-fiends, the Queen of Chaos, and Mishka.
This thread helps with ideas, as I'm wracking my brain deciding what to do. I've been toying with the idea of Allustan finding piece #4 in Icosiol's tomb (I don't want my PCs to have an item that uses heal - piece #7 - at this stage of the campaign), then traveling to Illthane's lair in search of piece #5 (where he is captured and the PCs have to save him, finding both pieces and possibly losing one in the inevitable experimentation). I've also thought about having Darl own a piece. He and his gang might seek out the PCs in an attempt to gain their piece(s). Lastly, I've been thinking of having a group of demons/wizards/whatever that owns the first three intact pieces of the Rod attack the PCs in a bid for more pieces, possibly allowing the PCs to claim even more pieces...
Eh... I'm sure once I figure all this out, what I end up with will be far different from what I thought I'd do.
I ran The Rod of Seven Parts box back in '98/'99. The PCs at the time are now powerful NPCs in the campaign (though distant and separate from the AoW path). When my PCs find their first piece of the Rod, I might have to call those NPCs into service as mentors, but I'm not sure.
Heh. Same deal; I used the wizard from the RoSP adventure in place of Manzorian throughout the AP. Worked out beautifully.
I ran The Rod of Seven Parts box back in '98/'99. The PCs at the time are now powerful NPCs in the campaign (though distant and separate from the AoW path). When my PCs find their first piece of the Rod, I might have to call those NPCs into service as mentors, but I'm not sure.Heh. Same deal; I used the wizard from the RoSP adventure in place of Manzorian throughout the AP. Worked out beautifully.
Maybe I'll do the same thing...