I will start out by saying I have and will continue to support Paizo by subscribing to as many things as I can.
What I am curious about is why there are so few adventures written for levels 12 on up. I know I have 10 characters that I have put a ton of time into and they are all stuck at level 12 because of lack of pre-written adventures. It makes me not want to have my characters that are 9th level go on any adventures because I don't want them to get into that dead zone. I have 2 characters that are above 12th level that have been just solo characters, and I have 3 that have gone on the adventure paths that are 19 or 20th. The solo characters have all but exhausted the old dungeon magazine adventures and a lot of the 3.0 third party adventures.
Are there any in the works for the upcoming months or do I have to beg and plead my gaming group to write something?
P.S. Our yearly 6 day gamecon is coming up at the end of March. Hoping to find something for atleast one DM to run by then.
My slightly educated guess: High level modules take a lot more time to create and generally have a much lower audience.
I know they've said before (but my search-fu is weak) that the audience for upper level modules is MUCH smaller than that for the lower level adventures. However, since they have had a number of threads in regards to higher level content, they are hoping to have the next AP, Kingmaker, run up to approximately level 16-18.
Also, I believe that Monte Cook's module coming out this summer is supposed to be approx. level 10-12. It's not as high as it sounds like you're interested in, but it's getting close.
Creative Director
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There aren't many adventures above 12th level for several reasons. Here are the big ones:
1) High level adventures don't sell as well.
2) High level adventures are harder to write, and so authors are timid and hesitant to write them.
3) Most gamers VASTLY PREFER mid-level adventures. Adventures for 7th level are far and above the most popular.
4) The game's original design had a weird sort of self-imposed glass ceiling. The Expert set stopped at 14th level. And classes in AD&D 1st edition stopped getting HD and new class powers at around 10th–12th level. They still got new spells, sure... but for all intents and purposes classes kinda stopped at about 12th level. Monsters too; there's a HUGE skew in monsters toward what's effectively challenges for up to about 12th level play, but not much beyond that. You see this carry over in some ways to 3rd edition, with not as many high level monsters in the Monster Manual, and lots of character classes that start to have less and less going on at high level. We've tried to fix some of these problems in Pathfinder.
5) High level adventures take up more room. Folks like to say this is because the stat blocks are longer, and that's certainly part of it, but the truth is that once you have high level characters, their options are SO VARIED that every element of an adventure needs more information. This makes it more difficult to fit an adventure into a 32 page module format, especially when authors don't take this into account and rather than keeping things tight and self-contained go crazy and add too much.
There's more reasons, but those are the big ones.
Now, we HAVE done some high level adventures. Blood of Dragonscar, for example, is for 15th level characters. Monte's adventure is for 12th level characters. And there's at least one, usualy two adventures in a Pathfinder AP that is for above 12th level characters (folks are fond of complaining that the Pathfinder APs only go to 12th level, when in fact only ONE of our APs has stopped close to that level—Council of Thieves. All other climaxes to an AP are for 14th level characters, which means your PCs will be close to 16th or 17th level by the time they're done).
With Kingmaker, we're trying REALLY HARD to have the six adventures break down to starting levels like this: 1st, 4th, 7th, 10th, 13th, 16th. So that PCs will be close to 18th or 19th level by the time the adventure's over.
But despite how much folks clamor for high level adventures, we have to also weigh that against the money that those adventures bring in. Doesn't mean that we'll NEVER do a high level adventure if they don't sell as well as low or mid level adventures, but it does mean we won't do them as often.
Now. All this said... I'm pushing VERY HARD for a honest-to-goodness high level module for later this year. I'm thinking a module that's for 17th or 18th level characters. Something you can bring a group of PCs who've completed an AP on. We'll see if we can find anyone who wants to write one AND is capable of writing one...
Now I have a question, seeing how I am just an normally gamer, I have plenty of ideas for 12th level and higher adventures that I would be more then happy to share with everyone, I'm just not sure how to go about doing it, any thoughts? or ways I could even get them published?
i'd like to mention that many lower-level adventures are fairly simple to convert to higher-level. all you have to do is increase the difficulty of the threats faced. the plot can stay the same.
There is also Nick Logue's Dark Vistas - Ebon Shroud adventure that is due out in February at http://www.sinisteradventures.com/index.php/dark-vistas
That is 12-20.
-- david
Papa.DRB
i'd like to mention that many lower-level adventures are fairly simple to convert to higher-level. all you have to do is increase the difficulty of the threats faced. the plot can stay the same.
Unless it involves elements that are made pointless by high-level spells. An encounter about crossing a rope bridge works great for 3rd level adventurers, but is pointless for 11th. A pack of imps wreaking havoc in a town and being hard to find is fine for low level but you can't just slap in a few CR10 demons and call it a day; the town would be destroyed in no time.
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Creative Director
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i'd like to mention that many lower-level adventures are fairly simple to convert to higher-level. all you have to do is increase the difficulty of the threats faced. the plot can stay the same.
I actually disagree with this; there's a HUGE AMOUNT of plot elements that become unusable or change dramatically as adventures become higher level. This is the reason why I started feeling that the "Adjusting the Adventure" sidebars we used to run in Dungeon were doing more harm than good, honestly; those sidebars DID basically just go through and suggest monster replacements to increase/decrease threat, but they didn't handle the fact that there are elements to adventure plot and construction that can be rendered meaningless by high-level powers and abilities.
Murder mysteries, for example, change their requirements once you're writing a 5th level adventure and the PCs can get access to speak with dead. They change again at 9th level when raise dead can allow you to even more thoroughly interrogate a murder victim.
Journey adventures (like Fellowship of the Ring) become impacted at 9th level when teleport enters the fray, then again every few levels thereafter as things like wind walk and shadow walk show up.
Dungeon adventures have to be built differently as access to things like passwall arrive.
Political adventures change dramatically once you have characters who have really high Diplomacy, Bluff, and other skill checks.
Even on a micro level things change. An adventure that's basically a long climb up a series of ledges on a huge cliff becomes completely different once the PCs can levitate or fly, for example.
And as you get higher and higher level, all of these things start piling together to fundamentally change the requirements of writing a good high-level adventure. And I don't know if that's something that a lot of designers keep in mind—that at high level, you have to find NEW challenges. Simply using the same sort of challenges that the PCs faced at mid or low level just won't do it. And honestly, I think this can be a good thing; it helps to make adventures that are high level feel fundamentally different than low level.
good points
I wholeheartedly agree, and I think there is one more thing to add. Because of all these new things characters can do (and not just casters, everyone is now above and beyond what a low level character can do at say 12) the scale of the story should change. Level 20 characters should be involved in something worldshaking. The plot should have large reprecussions. After all if i can make the very heavens fall in a swarm of meteors, I dont think it is right I be chasing down a band of goblin raiders, whether or not their lair would be a proper challenge for my talents.
I've been a GM/DM/Player for years and the problem with high level adventures always boils down to creating a challenge for players, and by challenge, I mean a good story that can really challenge them. Throwing tougher and tougher monsters or high level NPC's at them in combat is easy and just gets repetitive. The hard part is creating a truly challenging story where a party of PC's can't simply use high level spells/abilities to bypass everything. At the same time you can't create an environment that completely negates their abilities either as that is counter productive, frustrates the players, and basically throws the rewards for getting to higher level in their faces saying " ya you can do this now, but it doesn't work here ".
Personally I have been extremely lucky in the fact that I have played with some good DM's that figure out a way to really challenge the party without doing this, however the highest level we ever got to was 14th level. I have DM'd a group up to 16th level in an Oriental campaign, which was much easier to come up with challenges simply due to the nature of the setting, but it was still hard.
Another thing that I have seen DM's do is limit the effect of spells such as speak with dead, raise dead, etc. or make it hard for these things to happen. Not making them impossible, just difficult. It represents challenges on their own. Such as you want to raise a murder victim, but the victims soul will only return when their stolen locket is returned to their body or something like that.
I myself don't really get wrapped up in levels, more a good story, but some players really get wrapped up in it.