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Runelords and Crimson Throne both had obvious and strong ties to the region they were placed in. Still, you were able to move them off-planet if you liked without losing much of the depth and history.
What little I've heard of Second Darkness, though, suggests it involves far bigger picture stuff like the origins of drow and the planet's astronomy. For those of you reading this Path, is it more locked in to Varisia than the previous campaigns? Could you see this adventure working in a homebrew world or in Eberron or something where maybe they've already established the origins for Drow and have their own cosmology?
There are some pretty significant tie ins into the drow mythology, into world history (in the third adventure you do some sort-of time travel into the past), and to a lesser extend cosmology.
There is a bunch of awesome material that you could use elsewhere but you would be hard pressed to drop this adventure into Forgotten Realms or Ebberon without some serious rewritting or setting aside significant elements in those campaign worlds.
Thanks fellas, that's pretty much as I thought it.
It makes me wonder, though, if Second Darkness wouldn't make a good Spelljammer campaign. I'm a big fan of the Spider Moon setting published in Dungeon a few years back, anybody have any thoughts on how this Path would play out in space?
Could Varisia be reskinned as the human/halfling world of Quelya with the elven world Perianth and it's drow-inhabited moon serving as the elven lands?
I'm making an attempt at converting this to FR. The first two APs were pretty easy to convert to FR... but this one? Not so much. This looks to be far too Golarion and not adaptable enough, which is a tremendously big flaw to my eyes. It's the most inferior AP of the bunch so far, IMO. Hopefully things change for the better.
Thumbs-generally-down so far.
(Though, if one were to convert it to a different setting, FR is the best one. Almost all the spoilers listed by Iziak above have a place in the FR setting.) The time-travel thing is a particularly frightening/disturbing prospect, though. Boo to Paizo!
Creative Director
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I'm making an attempt at converting this to FR. The first two APs were pretty easy to convert to FR... but this one? Not so much. This looks to be far too Golarion and not adaptable enough, which is a tremendously big flaw to my eyes. It's the most inferior AP of the bunch so far, IMO. Hopefully things change for the better.
Thumbs-generally-down so far.
(Though, if one were to convert it to a different setting, FR is the best one. Almost all the spoilers listed by Iziak above have a place in the FR setting.) The time-travel thing is a particularly frightening/disturbing prospect, though. Boo to Paizo!
We intentionally upped the "Golarion content" of Second Darkess, to be honest, to see if we COULD do an AP that had more world continuity than any AP we've done before. I'll wait to see how folk react until the entire AP is out before jumping to conclusions.
As for converting to other campaign settings—the two things that would probably be the most difficult are the following; here's how I would convert them to FR or Greyhawk, though...
Aboleths Pulling Down Meteors: There are ancient aboleth empires in most D&D worlds; if you have aboleths in your world, you can have an ancient empire. And that means that they can have developed the magic to cause falling stars to strike the world. In a non-Golarion game, you'd lose the history of a HUGE event in the world's recorded history, but that doesn't mean that the aboleths haven't done this in the ancient past in prehistoric times. It doesn't even have to be aboleth magic, honestly. In Greyhawk, it could be "magic" stolen from the strange metal cave in the Barrier Peaks or from the City of the Gods. In Faerun, the meteor magic could be ancient rituals from Martek's time, or the creator races, or even any number of the epic-level spellcasters in Faerun's past could stand in easily for the aboleths as the source of the meteor-hurling magic.
Since we ARE trying to build Golarion as a campaign, if we can successfully do Golarion themes in our APs, that's good for Paizo. Furthermore, we can't really do official guidelines or advice on how to adapt these adventures to other campaign worlds, since those worlds are copyrighted. But unofficial advice here on messageboards is okay! :)
As for time travel... Time Travel is actually one of my least favorite aspects of fantasy, since it causes SO much trouble with continuity and paradoxes and all that. The "time-travel" elements in Second Darkness aren't really time travel at all. You can't change the past. You can just observe things.
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spoiler omitted
Yeah, it’s a pretty narrow road. In my opinion, Scales of War suffers as an Adventure Path for a lack of an engaging setting, but if you make your Path too tied into even the most inspired setting, you limit DM options.
I guess that can go both ways, too. A setting too specific to run any other concepts is just as limiting...I'm looking at you Drow of Eberron who don't even know what an Underdark *is*...
And, for what it’s worth, the time travel element during Age of Worms is the top event that makes me want to run that Path for my players. I can’t imagine anything more jaw-dropping for my players than all the realizations that come during that event.
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I'm making an attempt at converting this to FR. The first two APs were pretty easy to convert to FR... but this one? Not so much. This looks to be far too Golarion and not adaptable enough, which is a tremendously big flaw to my eyes. It's the most inferior AP of the bunch so far, IMO. Hopefully things change for the better.
Thumbs-generally-down so far.
(Though, if one were to convert it to a different setting, FR is the best one. Almost all the spoilers listed by Iziak above have a place in the FR setting.) The time-travel thing is a particularly frightening/disturbing prospect, though. Boo to Paizo!
An adventure path written for a specific setting's ability to transplant itself into another one seems like a pretty poor criterion for determining the quality of work. The actual adventures involved in the adventure path are excellent. So you don't like Golarion. Sorry to hear that. But it seems really stubborn and narrow minded to write off a whole six-months worth of material simply because it has to be set in Golarion, at least from where I'm sitting.
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Yeah, it’s a pretty narrow road. In my opinion, Scales of War suffers as an Adventure Path for a lack of an engaging setting, but if you make your Path too tied into even the most inspired setting, you limit DM options.
Just wait, I'm sure Wizards will roll out their new point of light campaign setting after Eberron.
I've also found Second Darkness a little diminished for being too Golarian-specific. Although the quality of the adventures is still excellent, there are elements that either don't lend themselves to easy substitution or simply don't fit in my chosen World. While I'm not adverse to hard work, I do question if the extra effort is worthwhile. I often run pre-fab campaigns as filler while I write homebrew campaigns. Therefore, more time spent converting means less time spent working on my own material. While I understand that the APs are a vehicle for developing Golarian, I will admit that I have flirted with the idea of cancelling my Pathfinder subscription if Second Darkness is any indication of the direction for future APs. (I plan to wait until the conclusion of Legacy of Fire before making any final decision.) In short, I prefer APs like Runelords and Crimson Throne which can be converted quickly and easily, but still provide a quality experience.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Paizo should tie their AP as much as possible to Golorion. The alternative limits the story far to much.
As a DM that converts all of these things not only to 4E but also to a homebrew my experience has been that any AP that is at all tied to a setting requires some significant redesign work.
Furthermore trying to anticipate what the problems in converting an adventure path to another settings are going to be is essentially impossible. For all the difficulties I'll have in converting this to my homebrew they pale in comparison to the difficulties I'm going to face with the supposedly much more 'generic' CotCT. Thats because my homebrew is centred on a Decadent Empire and the first question out of my players mouths are going to be "Where the f%+$ is the Imperial Army? The mayor of this place is a b%#@! - and worse yet she's out of control, I'm ratting her out to the powers that be!"
My point is its simply impossible for Paizo to predict what will easily convert and whats going to be a nightmare - so its better for all concerned, IMO, if they just stick to telling the best dang story they can within the confines of their world and leave DMs that want to convert to grapple with the problems themselves (or with advice from the message board).
My point is its simply impossible for Paizo to predict what will easily convert and whats going to be a nightmare - so its better for all concerned, IMO, if they just stick to telling the best dang story they can within the confines of their world and leave DMs that want to convert to grapple with the problems themselves (or with advice from the message board).
I'm going to go out on a limb and disagree with you here. Paizo was absolutely able to predict that Second Darkness would not be easily converted to other settings. James Jacobs even says that they did it on purpose to pull people into the Golarion setting. Don't mistake a financial move for artistic integrity.
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Creative Director
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And don't mistake a financial move for lack of artistic integrity.
Second Darkness is very Golarion specific, but as we see in this thread, tying an adventure to a specific game world does NOT make sense financially. I've known this for years. Despite the constant cry for Forgotten Realms or Eberron adventures in Dungeon, we got more complaints from readers that "they can't use those adventures" in their campaigns. And just looking at the numbers: adventures and products set in a specific game world sell less than those set up to be "generic." It's a fact of the industry. Something like the Spell Compendium sells a LOT more than Magic of Faerun, despite the fact that they both have a LOT of spells in them, and despite the fact that Magic of Faerun had a LOT of brand new spells but the Spell Compendium was only reprints.
What we don't know, though, is how many of our customers are Golarion fans and how many are just gamers who are looking for easy adventures or campaigns to port into their home games. Second Darkness is an attempt to figure that out. We've had an overwhelmingly positive response to Golarion, after all, and that tells us that our customers might be more receptive to adventures that are more solidly set in the framework of a world.
Of course... taken as single adventures, they're a LOT easier to set into any setting (no tougher, in any case, than any other Pathfinder adventure). Is it just the overarching plot that's causing problems then?
There are many many of us who just want great gaming material... the Adventure Paths are for my group "The World". I don't have the time or energy to create a gaming world around my game, nor do I have a lot of money invested in a setting or other adventures in another setting to worry about. So my biggest concern is awesomeness of the material. If tying the adventure closer to Golarian works (and so far it does) then it makes me happy.
I understand how you folks who have to move stuff over to another world feel... but I don't think Paizo should make an effort to make a module generic if that will make the quality of the module suffer.
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And for what it's worth... we've not been trying to make the modules and adventures generic. They've ALL been deliberately set in Golarion, and they ALL have deep Golarion continuity. It just so happens that Golarion itself is based on the same traditions as D&D, and as a result it's a world that's very similar to and shares a lot of the same baselines as Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms. As a result, Golarion adventures tend to handily fit into similar worlds like that. It just so happens that with Second Darkness, two of those bits of lore are pretty different than established traditions...
Is it just the overarching plot that's causing problems then?
In my case, no. The elves of my homebrew world have a reverence for the "Old Night," the time before the Sun and the Moons, which easily stands in for the First Darkness. What's more problematic are the basic assumptions about Elven culture and history. Second Darkness is driven by very specific assumptions about elves and dark elves — assumptions my world doesn't share. That's by no means anyone's fault or a flaw in the AP itself; its simply too specific. As opposed to Runelords and Crimson Throne, though they drew on Golarion history, weren't heavily dependent on it.
I’m starting to see a lot more continuity between individual GameMastery adventures and that venue may take up the slack in terms of easily adapted campaign arcs.
Early on they were pretty piecemeal and scattered about the world, but as Darkmoon Vale is developed and places like Osirion are getting multiple visits, I think the cut-n-pasters will be able to go there for the more setting-free pseudo adventure paths while the Golarionaholics would find their needs met by the Pathfinder serieses.
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Is it just the overarching plot that's causing problems then?In my case, no. The elves of my homebrew world have a reverence for the "Old Night," the time before the Sun and the Moons, which easily stands in for the First Darkness. What's more problematic are the basic assumptions about Elven culture and history. Second Darkness is driven by very specific assumptions about elves and dark elves — assumptions my world doesn't share. That's by no means anyone's fault or a flaw in the AP itself; its simply too specific. As opposed to Runelords and Crimson Throne, though they drew on Golarion history, weren't heavily dependent on it.
Well... Runelords was VERY dependant on the history of Thassilon and the fact that this nation of monument builders left behind some very huge legacies. And Crimson Throne pretty much demanded a big city only a few day's travel form a desolate barbarian-filled wasteland. I would think that both of those would be equally difficult (or easy) to adapt as the elven/drow history. Is it more difficult to adapt racial history than it is to adapt regional history?
I'm not trying to be difficult, mind you; just trying to isolate what makes the Golarion drow flavor seem so difficult to adapt.
Is it more difficult to adapt racial history than it is to adapt regional history?
My gut tells me that the very first thing someone does when he starts planning a campaign setting is establish a role and history for his player races. At the same time, huge gaps can be left in the history or geography of a setting that leaves room for insertion of a Runelord or Cinderland.
“The origins of elves” is a really big-picture element that most campaign settings have established by page 4. I reckon you could probably gauge how easy an element is to adapt by how late in the world-creation process that element appears.
Yeah, but in most cases that racial history definition isn't anything the players care about or have been exposed to, it's just the DM's pet creative writing project.
It really takes very little work and creativity to adapt any of this to any setting. Remember, the players (and characters) know very little, and in their mind's eye they don't have any context to discern between 'big ass old Thassilonian ruins' and 'big ass old dwarven ruins' and 'big ass old alien ruins.'
Plus, remember there should be a diversity of what people believe about the game world. No one in Golarion knows "the complete history of the world". I imagine there are 100 different theories of e.g. where the drow come from. And maybe there are different groups of 'drow' who were generated different ways.
It really takes very little work and creativity to adapt any of this to any setting.
Tell that to the Eberron fans.
It really takes very little work and creativity to adapt any of this to any setting.Tell that to the Eberron fans.
Nothing adapts easily to Eberron that encompasses a large area. We dropped RHoD into Eberron and is was a PITA.
Pretty much the more your world deviates from the D&D 'norm' the harder it will be to adapt any material. Eberron deviates from pretty much everything.
I'm a big fan of Eberron but if you play Eberron you need to recognize up front that you aren't going to be able to really 'drop in' a lot of third party material.
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It really takes very little work and creativity to adapt any of this to any setting.Tell that to the Eberron fans.Nothing adapts easily to Eberron that encompasses a large area. We dropped RHoD into Eberron and is was a PITA.
Pretty much the more your world deviates from the D&D 'norm' the harder it will be to adapt any material. Eberron deviates from pretty much everything.
I'm a big fan of Eberron but if you play Eberron you need to recognize up front that you aren't going to be able to really 'drop in' a lot of third party material.
Absolutely correct.
Which is the #1 reason we made Golarion adhere so close to the D&D norm, of course.
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Try Malhavoc Press' Diamond Throne, Mongoose's Conan, or Fantasy Flight Games' Midnight. Eberron's a piece of cake in comparison.
Pretty much the more your world deviates from the D&D 'norm' the harder it will be to adapt any material. Eberron deviates from pretty much everything.
Depends. I'd have an easier time adapting a Pathfinder RPG to Conan or Midnight, personally, than I would to Eberron.
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Depends. I'd have an easier time adapting a Pathfinder RPG to Conan or Midnight, personally, than I would to Eberron.Try Malhavoc Press' Diamond Throne, Mongoose's Conan, or Fantasy Flight Games' Midnight. Eberron's a piece of cake in comparison.
Pretty much the more your world deviates from the D&D 'norm' the harder it will be to adapt any material. Eberron deviates from pretty much everything.
After reading some of the spoilers above, I don't see any major major problems adapting the AP to my Eberron campaign:
The only major problem I could see would be the elves and drow, and it's not because Eberron drow are based on scorpion worship. No, in my campaign, ALL the surface elves AND dwarves disappeared one night. Right now I replace any elves in modules with half-elves. Hmmm. I could probably still use the Pathfinder drow in my game unmodified: imagine the PCs surprise when, after haven't seeing an elf in over half a decade, they find their cousins :)
I've played both RotR and Eberron, and I'm not sure what the problem is. The vast majority of the action in chapters 1-3 happens "way out in the middle of nowhere" except for a brief stop in Magnimar, which could be any city. Heck, in our Eberron campaign we actually ended up manning a fort-in-the-middle-of-nowhere much like Fort Ranek.
In fact, come to think of it, we started out in a little town in the Shadow Marches that could have been Sandpoint, went through Sharn, which could very well serve for the parts of Magnimar you real with briefly, and got a gig out near the Droaam border at the behest of general somthingorother of Breland at a fort out past Orcbone... Hell, even the area map there isn't too far off.
And if the runelords are the problem, their history isn't all that relevant really. Xin-Shalast is on an alternate demiplane now anyway, it could be anything from anywhere. The Runelords could be fricking aliens for all it matters. Remember, all that backplot is totally invisible to the PCs and is only revealed by you the DM. The difference between something being a ruined old lighthouse and a zappy fire tower used milennia ago by the Runelords is little more than you opening your piehole and saying it.
It's a little harder to convert from Eberron adventures to Golarion, if there's big scenes on lightning rail or airships, but really I find most conversion "issues" to be composed of little more than an unwillingness to think about it for 15 minutes.
** spoiler omitted **
Well the problem is
An adventure path written for a specific setting's ability to transplant itself into another one seems like a pretty poor criterion for determining the quality of work. The actual adventures involved in the adventure path are excellent. So you don't like Golarion. Sorry to hear that. But it seems really stubborn and narrow minded to write off a whole six-months worth of material simply because it has to be set in Golarion, at least from where I'm sitting.
It is, in fact, a fantastic criterion to determine the quality of work for my particular preferences - which is all I'm commenting on.
I'm not going to be so foolish as to try to say that Second Darkness is "objectively" good in any way. I'll leave that to a certain subset of internet wankers out there who get off on arguing that sort of thing. "Narrow minded"? "Stubborn"? Whatever, d00d. Guess you're "sitting" in the wrong place. Oh well.
All I know is that CotCT managed to satisfy in both areas, AFAIC.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Paizo should tie their AP as much as possible to Golorion. The alternative limits the story far to much. Furthermore trying to anticipate what the problems in converting an adventure path to another settings are going to be is essentially impossible.
I understand how you folks who have to move stuff over to another world feel... but I don't think Paizo should make an effort to make a module generic if that will make the quality of the module suffer.
Meh. I simply point both of you to Shackled City, Age of Worms, and Savage Tide. "Quality of the module suffer(ing)" and "impossible" just doesn't fly (and is demonstrably untrue).
In any case, I'll be even more generous and note that CotCT shows how both competing (?) considerations can work together.
Is it more difficult to adapt racial history than it is to adapt regional history?
Oh, heavens yes. By leaps and bounds. And more leaps. And more bounds.
A racial history can affect the entire world, and is more than likely long-since set in stone for any campaign world. A regional history is just that - regional... and may not even have much detail in the first place, depending on what region the DM selects to place the AP.
Like you said, all you really need is a city with barbarians nearby. Woo.
[Okay, that's enough of me spamming the thread. James' note regarding his philosophy about time travel is great news, since time travel is one of the most stinky stink things that ever stunk. His comments give me a sigh of relief. The other stuff is, so far, insertable into FR (for example) with only a bit of pain (just considerably more pain than all the previous APs we've seen). Drow? Check. Hate elves? Check. Big Underdark? Sure, a region like that can fit in... check. Other planets? I use Spelljammer and Realmspace with my FR campaign, so it can work... check. Crashing meteors? Already happened in FR... check.]
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As usual, I'm thinking about an SD-to-Eberron conversion myself an while I still have to wait until I've learned more I don't think that it's impossible to achieve this.
I'm thinking about placing Riddleport anywhere in the Lhazaar Principalities (good place for Devil's Elbow, too)). Not sure, what to do about Kyonin so far: Xen'drik, Aerenal, Valenar?)
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Paizo should tie their AP as much as possible to Golorion. The alternative limits the story far to much. Furthermore trying to anticipate what the problems in converting an adventure path to another settings are going to be is essentially impossible.I understand how you folks who have to move stuff over to another world feel... but I don't think Paizo should make an effort to make a module generic if that will make the quality of the module suffer.Meh. I simply point both of you to Shackled City, Age of Worms, and Savage Tide. "Quality of the module suffer(ing)" and "impossible" just doesn't fly (and is demonstrably untrue).
In any case, I'll be even more generous and note that CotCT shows how both competing (?) considerations can work together.
I'd disagree that these were really generic settings. Shackled City was maybe the closest, especially in the early parts, where it essentially made its own setting by being a small isolated city in the wilderness. Age of Worms however was quite heavily tied to Greyhawk and you'd have to do some significant conversion work to put it some where else. Savage Tide might be even worse in this regard - if your not using the Great Wheel Cosmology its going to take some pretty significant design work to do the end of that adventure path.
If they'd cut all these links to Greyhawk then I'd think the stories would have suffered. Thats not to say its impossible to tell a story thats both good and completely generic but it certianly limits the amount of story options.
Okay, I think I have ideas for Second Darkness conversion to Eberron! I've been running an Eberron campaign for about 6 months, (admittedly mostly centered around Sharn,) so I hope I'm passingly fluent in Eberronese by now.
Spoilers for Second Darkness abound below, but there might be one or two for Curse of the Crimson Throne in there, too.
Drow: Let us suppose there is a radical splinter group of Drow racial purists who believe that all non-Drow, particularly elves, are an affront to their manifest superiority. Two sub-groups within this organization are working on eliminating all non-drow elves from Eberron, approaching the problem from drastically divergant directions, (both involving extensive deals made with demons.) The "Kinder, Gentler" solution created by the first group is the Drow Contagion, (as per James's suggestion,) a magical disease that transforms infected elves into drow. Unfortunately, it's less than a success, for as a side effect of its demonic origins, it only affects evil elves. Good and nuetral elves can still be carriers, which is how the Big Bad End Girl catches it. The other group, quite naturally, hits upon the idea of dropping a really big rock on the elven nation.
Meteors & Aliens: If there's no such thing as outer space and meteors in Eberron, (I'm not so well read on that aspect of the cosmology,) the rocks could be chunks of extraplanar debris pulled from the space between the dimensions. The hunk that crashed on Devil's Elbow could be a fragment of Xoriat (the plane of Madness) that broke off when the plane was thrust out of its orbit in the distant past, naturally explaining the origin of the aberrant aliens.
The Elves: Naturally, when the elves discovered they've got a disease in their midst that transforms them into drow... not just that, but evil drow (they might not know the disease only affects evil elves, only seeing the result, psychotic drow, and thinking it turns elves evil in the process.) they'd want to cover it up and initiate a strike against this group of Drow terrorists. Some of the elves argue that the drow as a whole cannot be trusted, leveraging the idea of an assault on drow as a whole. Consider it a war against terror with a need-to-know government coverup and a racial profiling thing going on, not that I'm being, you know, political or anything. The Big Bad Evil girl found out about the big-rock weapon, advocated just dropping their own version right in the middle of Xen'Drik, and when she was called out for advocating all-drow genocide, murdered a council member and went drow right then and there.
Celwynvian: I'm just starting the Armageddon Echo now, so I'm not sure about this one yet. Possibly an ancestral elven/drow city in Xen'Drik, where the anti-elven drow are staging a simulation of the attack by calling up a phantasmal demi-plane inhabited by shades of the elves that used to live there and dropping a phantom rock on it? Crying Leaf could be an outpost of elves in Xen'Drik investigating the drow racial purists' plan.
Anyway, hopefully, that helps, or at least, stirs up thoughts and conversion inspiration. ^-^
I'd disagree that these were really generic settings. Shackled City was maybe the closest, especially in the early parts, where it essentially made its own setting by being a small isolated city in the wilderness. Age of Worms however was quite heavily tied to Greyhawk and you'd have to do some significant conversion work to put it some where else. Savage Tide might be even worse in this regard - if your not using the Great Wheel Cosmology its going to take some pretty significant design work to do the end of that adventure path. If they'd cut all these links to Greyhawk then I'd think the stories would have suffered. Thats not to say its impossible to tell a story thats both good and completely generic but it certianly limits the amount of story options.
I placed all three of those in FR in my sleep (ie. "cut the links to Greyhawk), so I can only shrug at your statements.
I placed all three of those in FR in my sleep (ie. "cut the links to Greyhawk), so I can only shrug at your statements.
There were pretty extensive conversion notes so far as I recall. Beyond that Forgotten Realms has a lot of overlap with Greyhawk, I'd think it'd be tougher to convert it to Dragonlance, possible of course but there'd need to be some design work done.
In any case what your arguing for is not so much a generic fantasy setting but a fantasy setting that follows the tropes of Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk. Both of which have some strong commonalities in terms of racial origins and cosmology.
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I placed all three of those in FR in my sleep (ie. "cut the links to Greyhawk), so I can only shrug at your statements.There were pretty extensive conversion notes so far as I recall. Beyond that Forgotten Realms has a lot of overlap with Forgotten Realms I'd think it'd be tougher to convert it to Dragonlance, possible of course but there'd need to be some design work done.
In any case what your arguing for is not so much a generic fantasy setting but a fantasy setting that follows the tropes of Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk. Both of which have some strong commonalities in terms of racial origins and cosmology.
I would hope the Realms would have a lot of similarities to the Realms. Insert your own 4E joke here. ;-)
In any case what your arguing for is not so much a generic fantasy setting but a fantasy setting that follows the tropes of Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk. Both of which have some strong commonalities in terms of racial origins and cosmology.
I have to agree with Jeremy here. From where I sit, Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk are pretty much the same animal.
Compared to, say, Eberron or Dark Sun, it's rather "Same stuff different names."
The main difference is, there's this... implication (justified or not) that you're -supposed- to memorize more stuff in FR (region feats and languages, history, gods, etc) to play the game than in GH.
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EDIT: Attempt at better word choice in the last sentence.
In any case what your arguing for is not so much a generic fantasy setting but a fantasy setting that follows the tropes of Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk. Both of which have some strong commonalities in terms of racial origins and cosmology.I have to agree with Jeremy here. From where I sit, Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk are pretty much the same animal.
Compared to, say, Eberron or Dark Sun, it's rather "Same stuff different names."
The main difference is, there's this... implication (justified or not) that you're -supposed- to memorize more stuff in FR (region feats and languages, history, gods, etc) to play the game than in GH.
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EDIT: Attempt at better word choice in the last sentence.
My real point though is its not so much that these are generic settings when contrasted with with Eberron and Darksun, since these really are very different beasts when it comes to a fantasy setting but that Greyhawk/Forgotten Realms are strikingly similar to each other even when contrasted with some other fairly generic fantasy settings.
Dragonlance is a generic fantasy setting - it follows a great many tropes that one associates with fantasy gaming and yet it'd take some significant work to convert some of these APs over and I suspect you'd get the same deal with something like Kingdoms of Kalamar or a whole rash of other, fundamentally generic, fantasy settings.
So the real question is should Golorion stick to the conventions of Greyhawk/Forgotten Realms or should it deviate in some places? Hence its not really a choice between generic fantasy and non-generic fantasy but whether or not Golorion could or could not be simply another continent in either Toril or Oerth.
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So the real question is should Golorion stick to the conventions of Greyhawk/Forgotten Realms or should it deviate in some places? Hence its not really a choice between generic fantasy and non-generic fantasy but whether or not Golorion could or could not be simply another continent in either Toril or Oerth.
It's worth noting two important factors here.
1) By sticking close to the conventions of Greyhawk/FR for Golarion, we keep close to the baseline of the game implied by the rules themselves. That gives everyone a common ground to share, so that if someone happens to have a really exotic campaign setting, he'll still share that common ground (assuming he uses the core rules as his baseline) and it should be almost as easy for him to use Golarion material in his setting as it is for him to use material from the core rules.
2) We, the designers, developers, and editors at Paizo, prefer this type of setting to play our D&D style games in. We built a game world that pretty much covers everything we'd want to see in a game world we'd run, and with that comes the passion and commitment and drive to see it done well. It wouldn't make sense for us to build a game world that was one that many of our employees didn't love, since that would result in the job becoming just a job.
Some ideas on Realms conversions for Second Darkness as well:
You can easily have the drow study this phenomenon and decide to emulate it themselves.
Westgate probably isn't too far removed from the initial strike to use as a stand in for Riddleport, although it obviously doesn't have a Cyphergate. That having been said, you would simply set Riddleport whole cloth into the Border Kingdoms along the coastline, since that area of the setting hasn't been extensively detailed. In fact, there is plenty of room along the Shinning Sea to set the city in.
I would actually use Zirnakaynin as a "new" drow city, instead of trying to retcon an existing one for use in the AP, as it can be very useful to actually play up that the drow of this city worship demon lords and not any of the gods of the drow pantheon (which isn't much of a stretch, according to older lore).
As the final crux of this, I would introduce that the drow have long believed they could no longer access Elven High Magic, but the drow of Zirnakaynin, in secret, have experimented and found that they still can, with great difficulty, use Elven High Magic.
Not only are they going to use this to call down the meteor, but their manipulation of Elven High Magic was originally focused on reversing the High Magic Ritual that changed the drow into what they are now. When they did this, the ripples of that magic began to shift several elves into drow by "reawakening" the old ritual.
If you really, really want a twist, make the elves that are concerned about this into members of the Eldreth Veluuthra, and Celwynvian into an ancient, lost Mythal City that the Eldreth Veluuthra were trying to reclaim in secret.
In the end, after thwarting the drow threat, you could then take a nasty turn and have the "good" elves that the PCs are working with turn on them after they do the Eldreth Veluuthra's dirty work for them. Or the PCs could find out earlier, but still thwart the plot for fear of what drow with the ability to target surface elves and "nuke them from orbit" and to turn surface elves into drow might do to elves that aren't quite as vicious as the Eldreth Veluuthra.
So the real question is should Golorion stick to the conventions of Greyhawk/Forgotten Realms or should it deviate in some places? Hence its not really a choice between generic fantasy and non-generic fantasy but whether or not Golorion could or could not be simply another continent in either Toril or Oerth.It's worth noting two important factors here.
1) By sticking close to the conventions of Greyhawk/FR for Golarion, we keep close to the baseline of the game implied by the rules themselves. That gives everyone a common ground to share, so that if someone happens to have a really exotic campaign setting, he'll still share that common ground (assuming he uses the core rules as his baseline) and it should be almost as easy for him to use Golarion material in his setting as it is for him to use material from the core rules.
2) We, the designers, developers, and editors at Paizo, prefer this type of setting to play our D&D style games in. We built a game world that pretty much covers everything we'd want to see in a game world we'd run, and with that comes the passion and commitment and drive to see it done well. It wouldn't make sense for us to build a game world that was one that many of our employees didn't love, since that would result in the job becoming just a job.
Sure and thats your baseline. The next question becomes 'how close?' and 'in what manners can we deviate?'
Campaign worlds evolve and grow in depth as time goes on and the more that Golarion evolves the more difficult it may become to easily slot adventures based in Golarion into other fantasy worlds including Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk.
So, for example, the Goddess Desna will become ever more detailed, her myths and activities will get increasingly fleshed out and in fleshing her out it will become increasingly more difficult to simply replace her name with another campaign settings God or Goddess in the case of adventures that revolve around her. So what do you do now? One option is to never make adventures that would get to the heart of how, say her church was run, or that hinged on myths in her background. If you take this route then it will always be easy to swap her name for another God/Goddess' name but it will also limit the richness and depth of the story.
This is, in some sense, what we are seeing in Second Darkness. You could not use Lolth as the Goddess of the Drow and could not use core rules presumptions of Drow origins and mythology. Now you could have just written the AP without addressing these aspects, leave them a mystery basically, it would have even slotted into any world that uses Drow easily, however it would have also limited the story by limiting the depth to which you could really explore Golarions Drow - that'd come out in the APs and would probably lead to people wondering why this AP seems to have less richness of texture when compared to the previous offerings.
Hence I think that, while you may have started with D&Ds roots as a baseline you may not stay there as Golarion evolves into its own campaign world. Are you going to consciously avoid basing the adventures around Golarions rich and evolving tapestry because doing so might come into conflict with established Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk Cannon? Thats an option that, it seems to me, makes no real sense, because it makes cool and unique concepts actually bad for Golarion because, by its vary nature uniqueness does not conform to another worlds cannon.
...and we get to this thread - Golarion Drow are unique (and cool), don't do that.
IMO the more the adventure path is specific to the world the better. Of course coming from me that might not mean much as I am using the Golarion world in my campaign. Love the world, absolutely love it.
That being said I can see the point of other game masters who are using their own worlds to play in. Although a well creative DM, which most of you seem to be from this post, can make it happen anywhere they want to.
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Try Malhavoc Press' Diamond Throne, Mongoose's Conan, or Fantasy Flight Games' Midnight. Eberron's a piece of cake in comparison.
This is actually the biggest reason that I discontinued dming a diamond throne campaign. And I loved the material. The campaign world, short stories and add on material was all excellent but both myself and my players missed the more standard D&D core type material. I found the magic system awesome but it was easier to use the core system when it came to other material so I eventually went back to core for that too. The only aspects that survived were the additional armors, two of the classes(Unfettered and Akashic), a few feats, and some magic items.
It's worth noting two important factors here.
1) By sticking close to the conventions of Greyhawk/FR for Golarion, we keep close to the baseline of the game implied by the rules themselves. That gives everyone a common ground to share, so that if someone happens to have a really exotic campaign setting, he'll still share that common ground (assuming he uses the core rules as his baseline) and it should be almost as easy for him to use Golarion material in his setting as it is for him to use material from the core rules.
2) We, the designers, developers, and editors at Paizo, prefer this type of setting to play our D&D style games in. We built a game world that pretty much covers everything we'd want to see in a game world we'd run, and with that comes the passion and commitment and drive to see it done well. It wouldn't make sense for us to build a game world that was one that many of our employees didn't love, since that would result in the job becoming just a job.
Golarion based material has been awesome for use in my Forgotten Realms game and I have had no problems converting it. As long as the campaign world sticks to the formula they have so far, I will continue mining the idea gold mine that is Paizo for adventure paths, chronicles, and modules.
Okay, I think I have ideas for Second Darkness conversion to Eberron! I've been running an Eberron campaign for about 6 months, (admittedly mostly centered around Sharn,) so I hope I'm passingly fluent in Eberronese by now.
Spoilers for Second Darkness abound below, but there might be one or two for Curse of the Crimson Throne in there, too.
Spoiler:Riddleport & Varisia: First of all, you may want to set Riddleport on Xen'Drik, as sort of a colony city, a bit of an outpost of civilization in a land of untamed wilderness and ancient mysteries. In fact, in my opinion, Varisia in general, makes a good counterpart for Xen'Drik, what with the vast tracks of wilderness and ancient, cyclopic ruins. Rise of the Runelords could go virtually unchanged there, and in Curse of the Crimson Throne, you could substitute tribal Drow (mistrustful of the human invaders who pushed them off their sacred territory) in place of the Shoanti, and Darkest-Africa-esque Jungle-ify the badlands and the challenges there-upon in History of Ashes.Drow: Let us suppose there is a radical splinter group of Drow racial purists who believe that all non-Drow, particularly elves, are an affront to their manifest superiority. Two sub-groups within this organization are working on eliminating all non-drow elves from Eberron, approaching the problem from drastically divergant directions, (both involving extensive deals made with demons.) The "Kinder, Gentler" solution created by the first group is the Drow Contagion, (as per James's suggestion,) a magical disease that transforms infected elves into drow. Unfortunately, it's less than a success, for as a side effect of its demonic origins, it only affects evil elves. Good and nuetral elves can still be carriers, which is how the Big Bad End Girl catches it. The other group, quite naturally, hits upon the idea of dropping a really big rock on the elven nation.
Meteors & Aliens: If there's no such thing as outer space and meteors in Eberron, (I'm not so well...
Another thought:
My real point though is its not so much that these are generic settings when contrasted with with Eberron and Darksun, since these really are very different beasts when it comes to a fantasy setting but that Greyhawk/Forgotten Realms are strikingly similar to each other even when contrasted with some other fairly generic fantasy settings.
Good point. I did go a bit over the top with my examples, there.
Cool Ideas.
I really like your idea, actually. I like it a lot, Hogarth.
I can't help remembering a post someone wrote somewhere on some message board talking about a threat to the status quo big enough that even the local hobgoblin king is offering his daughter's hand in marriage to any PCs who'll stop it. I'd love to have that happen in a game one day.
...replace elves with goblins...
::blink blink::
That's really clever. A simple reskinning and Second Darkness is suddenly enhancing Eberron traits rather than shoving them aside. Brilliant!