Ok, so i know, in the loosest sense that Shackled City was an AP published in Dungeon. But i was hoping that i might be able to get some details about it. I ask because i currently have the opertunity to by the hard back version of the Adventure path form my flag. I really want to know if its any good, get a plot synopsis and get advice as to if i should or shouldn't pick it up.
|
Ok, so i know, in the loosest sense that Shackled City was an AP published in Dungeon. But i was hoping that i might be able to get some details about it. I ask because i currently have the opertunity to by the hard back version of the Adventure path form my flag. I really want to know if its any good, get a plot synopsis and get advice as to if i should or shouldn't pick it up.
This thread has overviews of each chapter.
Personally, I think it's a great campaign, though it's much, much better if you supplement it with the materials on these boards and on therpgenius.com. Without the supplementary stuff, the ending comes off as pretty anticlimactic, since the PCs show up to kill the BBEGs without knowing their names or anything about them individually.
I second the above post. The campaign needs a little tweaking to make it better but what DM doesn't tweak a published adventure anyway.
In my opinion, if you have the time to play through it, Shackled City is worth the investment. It has been one of the most fun and rewarding campaigns I have run in a long time and we're not even done yet.
i thought this hadn't posted, so imagain my susprise when i saw that i suddenly had answers :)
SCAP is very good stuff.
Ok, so i know, in the loosest sense that Shackled City was an AP published in Dungeon. But i was hoping that i might be able to get some details about it. I ask because i currently have the opertunity to by the hard back version of the Adventure path form my flag. I really want to know if its any good, get a plot synopsis and get advice as to if i should or shouldn't pick it up.
I just picked up the hard cover about a week or so ago and was really very impressed.
Its excellent material, despite being the first of the adventure paths, I find it to be one of the most well built on a "nitty gritty" level.
A big thing that stands out for me is that, in my opinion of course, I find it to be the least "railroady" of the three APs. Age of Worms has some places where you can smell the coal, and theres a spot or two in Savage Tide where you can feel the clatter of the tracks almost (coughSargassocough).
Having all of it compiled in a hardcover book is awesome. I highly reccommend it if you forsee your gaming group having any sort of longevity. It does take about a year to two years to get through and AP, so unless your comfortable with trading out Players and PCs midway (which can get a little problematic past a certain point due to plot reasons), you would want to go into it with everyone at the table knowing the scope of it.
That said, 60 bucks or less for a year or two's worth of weekends filled with fun? More if you then pass it over to another new DM and take a dive yourself? I wish I could get that kind of mileage out of my Fun Budget dollars anymore.
Well we are currently about to start book two of curse of the crimson throne, so i may be a while before we even get a chance. I'll have to read up a little more on it and see if it is something i want to try :)
It does take about a year to two years to get through and AP...
I have noticed lots of people saying this about the APs. My Shackled City game has been averaging 2-3 sessions per chapter at 10 chapters (I am running from the magazine so minus Drakthar's Way and I'm using delvedeep's alternate foreshadowing so that also removes Strike On Shatterhorn) that makes us complete the entire path in 20-30 weeks of gaming. The latter chapters are shorter, Foundation of Flame is easily half the length of Flood Season for example, so it will likely come in at under four months.
I fail to understand how gaming groups can take so long with this. My group was done J'zadirune in about 1 session. They started it half way through one session and finished it up at the beginning of the next and then conquered the Malachite Fortress before we concluded that night. However I have read accounts of upwards of 7-8 sessions in that one dungeon. I do not have a particularly focused group and they tend to digress ALOT so it's not that they're efficient.
I fail to understand how gaming groups can take so long with this
Well... most gaming group I know play one session every two weeks... (most people got jobs, kids and do other activities than RPG)... So 30 sessions is 60 weeks of real times.. that`s more than an year!
|
I fail to understand how gaming groups can take so long with this. My group was done J'zadirune in about 1 session. They started it half way through one session and finished it up at the beginning of the next and then conquered the Malachite Fortress before we concluded that night. However I have read accounts of upwards of 7-8 sessions in that one dungeon. I do not have a particularly focused group and they tend to digress ALOT so it's not that they're efficient.
You also need to account for the experience of your players. Did you have two people who had never seen a D20 before getting into this game? Did the cleric constantly have to refer to his spellbook to know what he could do? Your 'not particularly focused' group could have been Seal Team 6 compared to some of the other guys.
I know part of the problem with my group is my inexperience as a DM. I wasn't sure how to prod them along at times, and didn't want to railroad people. It took them nearly a whole session and about three visits to find the entrance to J'zadirune. We had plenty of nights where all we did was BS around the table, but then, we were deployed, we needed that unwinding time.
I fail to understand how gaming groups can take so long with this
My group just finished session 50, and are making preparations to travel to Occipitus. We play 4 hrs every 1-2 weeks, so this has been running since March of last year. Our group delves into a lot of "in-character conversation" with one another and with NPCs. They have enjoyed the politics seen in Cauldron and have spread rumours to the detriment of their opponents.
The first adventure took a few sessions. They made a foray to rescue the rat familiar. After returning and healing, they discovered one of the group had the Vanishing. Only after they healed that did they go back down to the Malachite Fortess and kill the slavers. Then Keygan was arrested, the party was questioned, and finally the party made a third foray into the Jzadirune to clean it out. In total, from entering Jzadirune the first time to finishing the third time took 5 sessions (not to mention tracking down Keygan to begin with (1 session) and then the trial of Keygan (1 session)).
I'm sure you can see if it took this long to finish the first adventure, you can appreciate why it would take 100+ sessions to finish the SCAP.
It does take about a year to two years to get through and AP...I have noticed lots of people saying this about the APs. My Shackled City game has been averaging 2-3 sessions per chapter at 10 chapters (I am running from the magazine so minus Drakthar's Way and I'm using delvedeep's alternate foreshadowing so that also removes Strike On Shatterhorn) that makes us complete the entire path in 20-30 weeks of gaming. The latter chapters are shorter, Foundation of Flame is easily half the length of Flood Season for example, so it will likely come in at under four months.
I fail to understand how gaming groups can take so long with this. My group was done J'zadirune in about 1 session. They started it half way through one session and finished it up at the beginning of the next and then conquered the Malachite Fortress before we concluded that night. However I have read accounts of upwards of 7-8 sessions in that one dungeon. I do not have a particularly focused group and they tend to digress ALOT so it's not that they're efficient.
It took my group 8 sessions to finish Life's Bazaar. The did go through almost every room in Jzadirune before finding the elevator down to the Malachite Fortress. They also had no Rogue in the party until they had basically finished the chapter so the traps and doors caused a lot more trouble than they would have otherwise.
Drakthar's way took 6 sessions to complete (during which they reduced Drakthar to gas on 3 separate occasions but retreated without finding his crypt).
In addition to that we'veo spent a session doing character creation/campaign prologue and another session in between the 2 chapters. This in between session wrapped up loose ends from Chapter One (including Keygan's trial) and I introduced some NPC's into the campaign. Most of this session was spent roleplaying.
All up that means we've taken 16 sessions to complete the first 2 chapters. I'm hoping the next couple of chapters are a little quicker. I did start the SCAP with the expectation that it was going to take 1-2 years to complete though.
Olaf the Stout
Our sessions normally go for 4-5 hours. In theory we play from about 6pm until 11pm every second Wednesday night. In practice, the start time is more like 6:30pm. A couple of sessions haven't start until after 7pm due to late arrivals. After that happened I made it a rule to start the session as soon as 3 of the 5 players where there.
The finish time depending on what point we are up to in the game. A couple of time we have finished close to 12pm so that we could get to an appropriate stopping point.
So Life's Bazaar probably took 30-35 hours to complete. Drakthar's Way would have taken about 25 hours.
Olaf the Stout
Well, these explanations all make lots of sense to me. I wasn't trying to say anyone was crappy at gaming or anything, I was just generally confused.
My group is 2 n00bs who only ever played one game before I threw them into Shackled City with a resounding 'okay, now the gloves come off'. The other two are old hands at gaming and have been playing for under 10 years and over 15 respectively. So we've got a mix of total newbies and experienced gamers. We play for about 6-8 hours a sitting every week or two.
Life's Bazaar was supplemented with The Burning Plague so that added a sizable prologue plus all of my additional encounters and running around. The first session was short for us, about 4-6 hours, and they did the prologue and got as far as the Lantern Street Orphanage. The second session was about 6 hours and added a new player but they did all the Keygan material and went to J'zadirune, which I removed from his basement. They did the rest of the session going room to room in the ruins and got about half of it done. The next session ran about 6 or 7 hours and they finished J'zadirune and went back topside to try and find the Malachite Fortress. I moved the slave bazaar to a dockside warehouse instead of the massive dungeon that appears in the adventure. There were several encounters with local thugs and hoods and the guard and they found the base and raided it. They finished up the Malachite Fortress pretty quickly and returned the children to the orphanage before we wrapped up for the night.
So all told that was about 16-20 hours for an expanded first chapter. Flood Season, I'm running from the magazines, took us a little longer with 3 sessions but they ran more hours.
I find it interesting to see how different groups go through things.
EotD, I didn't take your post as an insult or anything like that. I'm not surprised that my group took a lot longer to complete things compared to other groups. Even I thought we've taken too long to complete the first 2 adventures, even allowing for roleplaying.
Our group tends to get a bit off track with out of game comments from time to time. I've been trying to crack down on it a bit recently but everyone seems to enjoy it so we won't be removing all out of game talk from our sessions.
Combat was another thing that was probably going a bit slow. In the last few sessions I have started to count down players turns. If they don't tell me what they are doing in that time then they delay until the next person in the initiative order has gone.
I have also limited talking between players in combat as it was starting to turn into a bit of a tactics discussion every time someone had a turn. "No, you move here and attack, I'll cast this spell and move here and then....". I don't mind pre-battle planning or quick instructions in combat but you don't have time to have a 30 second discussion between each player's turn! :-)
Despite the slow progress, everyone still seems to be enjoying the game and the storyline. They're engaged in the storyline and have developed quite a few relationships (good and bad :-) ) with key NPC's in the campaign. As long as that's happening all is good.
Olaf the Stout
My group seemed to fall into cohesion pretty quickly despite the two newbies and the rogue player trying out a sorcerer for a change. In the magazines the first two adventures, Life's Bazaar and Flood Season, seem longer and more involved than the others. The third, Zenith Trajectory, is shorter but not quite as streamlined as some of the later ones. The pace really seems to pick up pretty quickly once the tax riot hits.
Speaking of combat, one big thing I noticed in my previous campaign. I tried out minis and tactical battles but eventually gave them up in favor of more cinematic narrative battles. I noticed this quickened the pace of the game and even made things more exciting. Perhaps simply removing the miniatures battles and tactical planning was the major contributing factor to our faster sessions. I think the added play time could easily be accounted for if we plopped down a map and placed minis every time we rolled initiative.
Also, speaking of dungeon sizes, I noticed the dungeons in the first two were considerably larger than most of the following ones. In Life's Bazaar there is J'zadirune and the Malachite Fortress and in Flood Season there's the Kopru Ruins. All of those are pretty big dungeons compared to the Kuo-Toa Shrine in Zenith Trajectory and Vaprak's Voice in Demonskar Legacy. This trend of small dungeons continues up until you get to Thirteen Cages but even then the dungeon isn't that huge.
Okay.
I have perchased the AP, at £25 it seemed like a steal. Reading through it i really like the openness of style compaired to many written adventures. Feel more comfortable with letting events take their own course rather than sticking rigidly to the expected path.
I am currently preparing to run the AP at 4TK Gaming which is my local non-GW war gaming shop and club. What advice can you all give me, can you point me towards specifically useful threats here.
I will be using Pathfinder Beta at least until PRPG comes out.
I will be allowing players to use Tabbit in addition to PHB races and the battle Dancer and Savant in addition to the Standard classes.
Not knowing Gray Hawk i am considering moving the AP to Golarion, is their anything that will make this difficult?
I am toying with awarding Levels at the PCS reach milestones rather than based on experience.
|
|
Take a look at www.therpgenius.com first and foremost. It has a huge number of files containing supplementary material on each of the adventures as well as general files for fleshing out Cauldron and it's environs. After that, there are really hundreds of threads which you should take a look at on the Shackled City board on these forums. I would just go through the thread titles and see what they say. There are also a number of threads in the archives, so doing a search on the different chapter titles or on certain NPCs names will help you find some of those.
I really suggest you take a look at DelvesDeep's "alternate" campaign set-up. It does a lot to fix the anti-climatic last few adventures while helping you foreshadow the villains across the entire game. This probably sounds like a lot of work, but since Cauldron is where the PCs stay most of the time then all this work will make a very vibrant setting.
The search feature at the top right corner of the main page of the SCAP forums is the best way to find specific threads. The SCAP has been out for a long time now, and there are lots of older threads in the archives.
For example, if you search for "level-up", you find a thread about appropriate times to level characters using an XP free system, and some of the problems that might cause. (LINK).
I imagine that if you search for "Pathfinder" or "Golarion", you'll probably find some threads devoted to those subjects as well.
Congratulations on your Hardcover purchase!
And don't forget that the best resource of all is these boards. People here will likely answer and give their opinions on any questions that you might have.
My suggestions for prepping would be as follows:
- Read the whole thing prior to starting. You don't need to read to the level of every stat block and room description, but get a good idea of the story and how it all hangs together. This will give you the ability to keep things consistent when the party runs off to do things that are not in the path (which is fine if you understand what is all going on and why).
- Search the Campaign Journals forum for records of other peoples run through this campaign and read up. Some you won't find too useful but if you find one similar to your own play style it is invaluable and lets you see where other groups have hit hard spots and/or what others have done to improve things.
- Take the time to add foreshadowing both in the game itself and in the characters backgrounds. There are several threads on this if you search the Shackled City Adventure Path board as well as the RPGenius site. Take the time during any adventure you are about to run to quickly breaze through the next two adventures and ask yourself what and who you can foreshadow.
- Prior to running an adventure, do a search on that adventure title on these boards. This will help find threads that cover problems or additions that other DMs have dealt with and other peoples advice.
- Finally, post any and all questions and concerns you have here. You will find that there is a very active community of both people running the AP and people who have finished it but are still happy to help.
Anyway... welcome to the fold!!!
Sean Mahoney
|
Okay.
I have perchased the AP, at £25 it seemed like a steal. Reading through it i really like the openness of style compaired to many written adventures. Feel more comfortable with letting events take their own course rather than sticking rigidly to the expected path.
I am currently preparing to run the AP at 4TK Gaming which is my local non-GW war gaming shop and club. What advice can you all give me, can you point me towards specifically useful threats here.
I will be using Pathfinder Beta at least until PRPG comes out.
I will be allowing players to use Tabbit in addition to PHB races and the battle Dancer and Savant in addition to the Standard classes.
Not knowing Gray Hawk i am considering moving the AP to Golarion, is their anything that will make this difficult?
I am toying with awarding Levels at the PCS reach milestones rather than based on experience.
Considering that I paid close to $70 for it you got it at a steal,my budget for game stuff is pretty limited and I consider this book to be WELL worth it at any price.
It was/is the BEST campaign I've ever played, if your group like to roleplay their PCs interactions with the NPCs you'll get even more enjoyment out of it.It took a full 16 months real time to play through for my group(once weekly meetings lasting 5-6hrs each)Its funnyy you should mention awarding levels at milestones because thats exactly what I did on this campaign it worked out ok but was a little problematic in the later parts because of spells with XP cost, not tracking XP ment that if you cast a limited wish your gonna auto drop in level if you dont find an alternitive,I toyed with temporary Con damage based off the power of the spell and the players seemed to like this and thats actually how we do it in my homebrew.
As for transporting it to another world we did ours in the Realms so it shouldnt be to hard just look for a suitable geography and have at it. Anyway thats my 2cp.
Happy Gaming!