With the Serpent Skull AP still a ways away, I'd like to ask for some feedback on a good pirate and/or horror adventure that my group can tackle in the meanwhile to get a decent feel for the genre.
Here's my current adventure library:
Rise of the Runelords
Curse of the Crimson Throne
Second Darkness
Council of ThievesCity of the SpiderQueen
Expedition to Castle Greyhawk
Expedition to the DemonWeb PitsI'm quite interested in feedback from anyone who has played or GM'd the Freeport Trilogy, Savage Tide, or any other similar adventure. Suggestions most welcome.
Savage Tide will have all your piratey/horror stuff for sure.
Freeport is pretty popular but i am not personally experienced with.
Also, check out a couple of the Indulgences from Sinister Adventures. (razor coast is not out yet/still)the mini adventures are like $2 for a pdf and not bad. The Ghost Ship and the Swamp adventure were both cool.
Of the other listed ones, Second Darkness 'kinda' deals with pirates or rather 'general scum' in the first 2 chapters. The rest not so much.
City of the spider queen if run right can be a nice horror genre.
Of all of them though, i think Savage Tide would be my favorite as a suggestion.
I'm your man, I'm running a pirate campaign right now. All the gory details are available on my blog, but I'm mashing up:
Second Darkness, the first two parts minus the drow
The Freeport Trilogy, in its entirety (already ran Death in Freeport and the Holiday in the Sun short adventure)
I've also added in:
"Tale of the Sea Bear," a Sinister Adventures indulgence
"Three Days to Kill," a 3.0 Atlas Games adventure (converted to near Riddleport)
"Mansion of Shadows," a 3.5 Green Ronin adventure (converted to Cheliax)
I plan to use:
Razor Coast from Sinister once it's available
"Beyond the Towers," a 3.5 Green Ronin adventure (converted to Viperwall)
"Crucible of Chaos," from Paizo (as is)
"River into Darkness," from Paizo (as is)
"Treasure of Chimera Cove," from Paizo (moved, possibly)
And depending on timing - I wanted them to go from Riddleport to piracy off the coast of Cheliax to piracy off the Razor Coast/Sodden Lands to the Shackles and the Mwangi Expanse. If Serpent's Skull makes it in time I will tie it in and somehow adapt the lower level start to the PCs' current level. The serpent men tiein is just too good to turn away. In fact, if you're just starting now, it'd be even easier (we're 12 sessions/6 months in to this campaign).
Also, I've run a pirate campaign (and the Freeport Trilogy) before, and it's loads of fun.
Freeport's great. Intrigue plus violence.
And in general it's easy to convert adventures to a pirate milieu. So many of them are set in a remote location anyway - take the adventure locale, put a coastline around it, voila it's an island. And motivation-wise, there's a certain clarity to "you intend to murder them all and take their stuff" that on one hand isn't much different from any other D&D game, but on the other hand doesn't require odd torturous adventure hooks.
Take Mansion of Shadows. Small town, big manor house full of demented devil worshipping nobles. Chelaxians? Slam dunk. In the adventure as written, you're supposed to happen across a member of the family getting ambushed and then want to escort him home and then are supposed to get interested in the complicated power dynamics between the town and nobles and then get caught in a battle not of your own making and want to take sides...
In the pirate version, you're there to infiltrate the weird noble manor to be on the inside when your pirate ship comes to sack the place! There's a lot less "why am I doing this again?"
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I think you have to discuss it with your players.
If you tell them you're thinking about running a Planar campaign next (Demonweb Pits) or an Underdark one (2nd Dark or City of SpiderQueen) or traditional/ old-school style (RotRL) and they all interrupt and scream we hate drow; they're too overused then you can eliminate 3 of the campaigns. If they all sound like fighting devils would make for a fun change of pace you know to go with Council. If you tell them you're considering a cool dungeoncrawl filled with old school references and uberfamous NPCs from back in the day you know to go with Greyhawk, etc., etc.
You can do this without giving away any spoilers, without giving them the title of the campaign even, without difficulty.
Once you narrow it down to a few (maybe they love the idea of drow so you got 3 to pick from -- maybe they like the idea of some coastal adventuring so you have to chose between STAP and Freeport) ask the Players what PCs they want to run. Often, once you've narrowed down your list of possibilities to a small handful, knowing what the PCs are gonna be will help you finalize your decision.
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As for my personal experience with these...
RotRL was lots of fun though I didn't play it as a campaign. "Burnt Offerings" was used as an intro to a completely different campaign I cobbled together; it was very different from the published text when I was done with it. "The Skinsaw Murders" is one of my favorite adventures of the last few years. I've used parts of it twice now in different campaigns, both with TREMENDOUS success (measured in Player fun and DM fun). I really only used the ogre adventure as an idea for how to rewrite the "culture" for all ogres in my campaign world. I haven't yet run the Stone Giant adventure in any of my games yet but I realy enjoyed reading it. And I never got a chance to even finish reading the conclusion of the campaign.
CotCT and Council I have not read or yet played in. Like STAP, I've been avoiding spoilers for these so I can run a PC in them one day.
City of the Spider Queen may be Wyatt's most famous but it's not at all my favorite. After a thousand years of playing D&D one expects a drow campaign to have at least something fresh and creative. This campaign is filled top to bottom with drow tropes and cliches. AWESOME for a group of newbies who have heard of the drow but never actually played in a campaign against them. For experienced gamers, though, I cannot give a nod to this one.
Which, by the way, is exactly how many have described Baur's Demonweb Pits. Tropes. Cliches. Banal everything. Awesome if you've never played a Planescape-like campaign before. Stale if you have.
Greyhawk My favorite published campaign of the 3E era. But that's just because I loved to read it for all the GH references and history. I never ran it but reading it -- if you like GH stuff -- is lots of fun.
2nd Darkness Read it. Loved the idea of the