Jumping in for the 2nd half

[drsparnum]

I have a group about to finish up Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, and I want to roll them into Age of Worms. The group has one session left of the Temple adventure, and I expect them all to reach L13 by the end of the session with some players knocking on the door of L14. The group consists of 6 skilled* players, slighlty undertreasured, with a 27 point point-buy. My question is when to start - Spire of Long Shadows or Prince of Redhand. Any tips?

*I DM'd two groups through Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, and this group died many, many less times than the first group.

[Herremann the Wise]

drsparnum wrote:

I have a group about to finish up Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, and I want to roll them into Age of Worms. The group has one session left of the Temple adventure, and I expect them all to reach L13 by the end of the session with some players knocking on the door of L14. The group consists of 6 skilled* players, slighlty undertreasured, with a 27 point point-buy. My question is when to start - Spire of Long Shadows or Prince of Redhand. Any tips?

*I DM'd two groups through Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, and this group died many, many less times than the first group.

I would definitely start with the Spire of Long Shadows if you wished to complete the adventure path. There are two reasons:

- The level synchs in well with the level of your 6 PCs (and the Spire is well renowned as a killer in places);
- For the sake of continuity and giving your players the motivation to complete the final hurdle, the Spire of Long Shadows feeds them a good deal of information that they should roleplay through, rather than be given.

I would set it up as Manzorian (Tenser if you are playing in Greyhawk) specifically requesting the PCs. He would enlighten them on his concerns regarding a future "Age of Worms" with numerous prophecies regarding the "Age" having happened. He would "hire" the PCs for the task of tracking down what happened to Balakarde (Bucknard in GH) as well as discovering more about how Kyuss came to be. This as a starting point should be enough to get the Age of Worms ball rolling with just the odd hiccup here or there referencing events from the first six modules.

You as DM will have to be well prepared in terms of the story you present because there will be a handful of kinks you will have to iron out in advance.

In all honesty though, I would give your players a choice of:
- continuing with their current characters (particularly if they are well attached to them) or even better,
- starting the Age of Worms with fresh characters from Diamond Lake.

I have to say, it would be a shame missing out on the first six adventures without a good reason. For me, The Whispering Cairn and The Hall of Harsh Reflections are amongst some of the best modules I've DM'd.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

[waltero]

drsparnum wrote:

I have a group about to finish up Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, and I want to roll them into Age of Worms.

Ha! I am thinking of doing the same thing! My plan was to do the last five adventures. If you think about it, there are a lot of similarities between the two campaigns. I plan to have a bard or archivist character fill the party in on what has transpired up to the point where they crossover. As I work out more details, I'd love to exchange some ideas with you. I've seen you on the Temple boards over at Monte's website.

As for the first set of adventures, my plan was to use them as a lead in to Expedition to Ruins of Castle Greyhawk.

[drsparnum]

Thanks for the tips Herreman.

I actually don't own all of the AoW issues so I can't start at the beginning. The first one I have is the one with Ilthane, and I know my PCs will be too powerful for that.

The Spire of Longshadows seems like a great place to start plot wise, I'm just afraid my players will blow away the monsters there - and I don't want to start out boosting things because then I will need to boost the whole way through. Prince of Redhand seems less optimal plot wise, but probably better from a power standpoint. Thus I'm torn. Thanks for the tip though - it sounds like you'd definetly vote for the Spire.

I already kinda worked out how to connect the two campaigns. I run my game in the Forgotten Realms.
1. One of my PCs (Rhelyx) is a black sheep in the Harpell family. He became a cleric (not a wizard!), and he's only good because he has to be, and used to be (in his background - not actually in game) quite evil. I decided he will be loosely related to Malchor Harpell/Manzorian. Maybe Malchor's brother's grandson? I also decided that Malchor will be quite a bit less ecentric than the average Harpell, and act both serious and cranky. That's my main link.
2. Plus it will make sense for Malchor to contact the other PCs (who are more mainstream in their social life anyway and more likely to do their civic duty because it's their civic duty), since they just stopped an evil god from returning - frankly they seem like a good fit for Malchor's new job and if Malchor interviewed them I don't think he'd need to meet anymore candidates.
3. On top of that, the PCs events from RTTOEE will be part of the prophecy that fortells how the AoW approaches.

I'm just stuck on when to jump in. They're stuck between the two adventures (Spire and Redhand) power-wise, and Spire doesn't look well suited for people to jump in half-way. Maybe I can whittle it down a bit. I don't want to over-XP them, or bore them with easy monsters.

What part of RTTOEE are you up to Waltero? My party's about to enter the Fire Node, and I think my next session (5/17) will be the last. I didn't run the Inner Fane part - it seemed anticlimactic - like a mop up after the fact. To make a LOTR analogy, the Recovered Temple seems like the battle for Gondor when evil can still triumph over all. If my party wins at the recovered temple then going to the Inner Fane just seems like kicking evil when it's down, like the invasion into Mordor - only more so, since no one needs to destroy any fine jewelry.

Of course, if they all die then I'll run AoW straight up, start at the Ilthane adventure, and set it in Greyhawk. But let's hope at least one of them survives.

[waltero]

We're about to start the Outer Fane. The party went in once before but were to weak. Now, they've just about cleared the CRM and are hardly breaking a sweat. I will let them try to do the inner fane if they wish, but I agree, the recovered Temple seems more of an ending.

One of the things I was trying to do was go through the Age of Worms adventure and pick out which items were important for the party for the fight against Kyuss. One of the things that is useful is a recovered portion of the Rod of Seven Parts (Rod of Law). In the adventure, the party finds the largest fragment. This makes them known to whomever possesses the next largest fragment, in the case of the adventure series, it is a Pit Fiend. The adventure says you can have various encounters with the pit fiend's minions as they try to get the Rod fragment from the party. Good for some XP.

Prince of Redhand has many social or physical challenges to gain XP, so I'm not sure how underpowered your party may be. Also, there may be rules about scaling the adventure.

[drsparnum]

I was going to make the CRM keys fragments of the largest piece of the rod of seven parts. The cultists harnessed the permanent power of the fragment of the rod, by subfragmenting it into the individual keys. When the party has all of the keys, it reassembles into the largest of the 7 fragments. The reason no one found the rod in the past 100 years is because the largest fragments been broken up by the cult - and thus this piece can no longer guide anyone to the next piece. It sorta makes sense because I described the keys as rod shaped many times (although I didn't really think this through and just got lucky there).

My party didn't recover all the keys in the CRM. But they have a friendly rivalry with another adventuring party they met in the CRM (who I used a few times as clean-up detail for anything I thought to boring or easy for my PCs, and once as added firepower by joining with the PCs in a large battle against 2 bridge complexes simultaneously). After I finish RTTOEE I plan on giving the PCs a lot of out of game downtime (a year?). Towards the end of the year the friendly rivalry NPC party will return the *useless* extra keys they recovered in the CRM as sovenouirs for my PCs. They will then spontaneously assemble into the 7th fragment. Shortly afterwords, Malchor Harpell will summon them.

Off topic: My party found the OF the most challenging part of the adventure - although they haven't done the recovered temple yet, and won't do the inner fane. If you use Hedrack's blasphemy spell right it can be a TPK waiting to happen. I had Varachan warn my PCs about it so they could try to prepare a counter (silence?).