My copies of Pathfinder #1 and D2 just shipped, so I was able to download the PDFs. (Yay!)
I just flipped through D2 (Pathfinder is big enough that I'll read it tonight after dinner) and I was struck by how much it seems like a Shadowrun adventure.
- The way you are hired at the beginning.
- The lawlessness of Kaer Maga and the street gangs.
- The magical research station gone haywire.
- The "Good Doctor" = Mad scientist run amok.
* Of course, maybe these comparisons just came to mind because I was flipping though some old SR2 sourcebooks on the weekend.
I LOVE when Shadowrun meets D&D!!! Awesome!
The turbines alone had me grinning, thinking of Blade Runner. Great adventure, especially if you have a taste for something vivacious and deadly.
Nice...Now I'll have to make the Ork Physical Adept I played for 4 years in college to run through SSoS...
* Of course, maybe these comparisons just came to mind because I was flipping though some old SR2 sourcebooks on the weekend.No, it was made that way by Sutter. Check out his blog post about it from yesterday.
Thanks Mike. I missed that blog post yesterday.
I LOVE when Shadowrun meets D&D!!! Awesome!
The Shadowrun meets DnD theme is one of the main reasons my group started Eberron a few years ago. Replace Seattle with Sharn, Megacorps with Dragonmarked Houses, etc and you can run Shadowrun style adventures instead of traditional high fantasy. Which allowed us to stop alternating Shadowrun and DnD campaigns, and instead just incorporate everything into one campaign and one system.
Its good to know that Golarion has room for elements like this as well. (Although I suspected it would given some of the early blog posts)
This was easily my favorite GameMastery Module so far, although they all have been excellent.
I think a mix of flavors is always good as long as everything works together as a whole.
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I love my issue of Pathfinder 1, and I loved Bloodsworn Vale and Crown of the Kobold King, but this one isn't doing it for me.
I have to say that this adventure feels to me like a bunch of unconnected rooms. As I go through it, I just scratch my head. The thing that really felt 'tacked on' was the cultists summoning the Vrock as the PCs enter. Why?
I think the idea of Kaer Maga is the best thing about the advenutre, but I didn't feel that there was enough in the adventure to really develop the character of the place. And it felt like some encounters were cut at the last minute. For example, what is the 'abandoned mill' encounter supposed to be like? Since it marks the entrance to the dungeon, I thought it would be developed a little more. I also felt the mapping was more confusing than I would have liked. For example, the location of the laboratory is said to be towards the back wall against the cliff face. Presumably there are countless passages that lead back that far, but no indication of a stream or mill. My confusion was increased by beleiving the cliff loomed above the city, rather than below. But I don't see how the mill could 'fit' in that particular location.
There are elements of the adventure I like, but overall, I think this one will involve a little more work to get it to work for my game - something to connect the pieces together. Heck, I might just disassemble the dungeon and put individual rooms in my own dungeons so they don't feel 'disjointed'. I know that this was developed from a collection of 'unrelated' rooms as the Paizo delve. I suppose I wish that instead of taking all the best rooms and jumbling them together, they had instead been spaced over a number of dungeon adventures, where each would really shine.
I really do like the interior artwork, though. While not my 'favorite' style, I think it looks good, and the action shows through really well.
Am I alone in feeling the adventure didn't 'gel' well?
I love my issue of Pathfinder 1, and I loved Bloodsworn Vale and Crown of the Kobold King, but this one isn't doing it for me.
I have to say that this adventure feels to me like a bunch of unconnected rooms. As I go through it, I just scratch my head. The thing that really felt 'tacked on' was the cultists summoning the Vrock as the PCs enter. Why?
I think the idea of Kaer Maga is the best thing about the advenutre, but I didn't feel that there was enough in the adventure to really develop the character of the place. And it felt like some encounters were cut at the last minute. For example, what is the 'abandoned mill' encounter supposed to be like? Since it marks the entrance to the dungeon, I thought it would be developed a little more. I also felt the mapping was more confusing than I would have liked. For example, the location of the laboratory is said to be towards the back wall against the cliff face. Presumably there are countless passages that lead back that far, but no indication of a stream or mill. My confusion was increased by beleiving the cliff loomed above the city, rather than below. But I don't see how the mill could 'fit' in that particular location.
There are elements of the adventure I like, but overall, I think this one will involve a little more work to get it to work for my game - something to connect the pieces together. Heck, I might just disassemble the dungeon and put individual rooms in my own dungeons so they don't feel 'disjointed'. I know that this was developed from a collection of 'unrelated' rooms as the Paizo delve. I suppose I wish that instead of taking all the best rooms and jumbling them together, they had instead been spaced over a number of dungeon adventures, where each would really shine.
I really do like the interior artwork, though. While not my 'favorite' style, I think it looks good, and the action shows through really well.
Am I alone in feeling the adventure didn't 'gel' well?
The overall theme that bound the rooms together into a coherent whole for me was the science fantasy feel, but I agree that it is different than the other GameMastery Modules to date, because its essentially a static dungeon crawl.
To be fair, it was based on the GenCon delve, so it kind of is supposed to be a static dungeon crawl.
A few quick responses:
*Trying to make a bunch of totally disconnected rooms flow into each other was definitely the most challenging part of this adventure, so all I can really say is that if not all of the encounters are working for you, hopefully you can trim rooms until they do, or use it as a toolbox.
*In the beginning, I really wanted to do the mill fight above the dungeon entrance, but when it came time there just wasn't the space. I think you'll find, though, that it's easy enough to plug the mill encounters from "The Skinsaw Murders" into its place.
*Shadowrun is awesome. I miss that game.
I'm glad to hear that folks are enjoying this one!
*Shadowrun is awesome. I miss that game.
I'm glad to hear that folks are enjoying this one!
I think Shadowrun is awesome too. Haven't had a chance to actually play the 4th edition of it though.
I've started a play by post game here on the boards for D2, and it's definitly starting off like a shadowrun. Of course, most of that is intentional on my part, emphasizing parts of D2's intro, but the mix of PCs I got helped this feel as well.
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Thanks for the reply, James.
I hope it didn't sound like I was being too hard on you. I can appreciate how hard it is to take unrelated pieces and put them together into a coherent whole. That's what I did most of my time before Dungeon came up with the idea of an Adventure Path. It seems that many people really enjoy the feel of the dungeon, and the fact that it seems 'random' to me (or almost 1st edition) isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I think that I'm going to hold onto this one for some time to see what else we learn about the city. And I very well might hold out for the mill from Pathfinder #2 to plug in there.
At this point, I guess I'm most excited to see how the various Pathfinder releases and Game Mastery modules develop the world. So, if nothing else, the adventure was at least an enticing overview of what could be my favorite part of the new world (hard to have a favorite with so many things to choose from).
Currently, my group is starting a brand new campaign set in a 'horror' world, sort of a dark ages meets taint magic (all magic is bad and can turn you into a monster). But a lot of the features from Pathfinder seem like they'll fit (the ancient fallen mages, the land studded with ancient monuments, etc). If only the whole campaign were already out I know it would help a lot. I certainly look forward to stealing from this module (and others) wholesale.