Adventure advice for a start-up group.

[Alex Martin]

Looking for a bit of advice/suggestions for a group I'll be playing with this fall.

After a long break from DMing, I'll be running a gaming campaign for a group of old gaming buddies. Most of these folks have experience with all versions of D&D - so we're a bit old-school and rusty as a collective. We are starting out with 3.5, since that is what everyone knows, and then we'll likely transition to Pathfinder. I will be setting the adventures in Golarion.

The first step is that we are getting together in person for an intro session, and then likely we'll be continuing monthly via Skype - due to distance, jobs, kids, etc. So, I am hoping to make this first adventure one we can do in a day with some conclusion.

I think they'd like to see some dungeon delving in this first act, but some RPing would also be fun. That being said, my current roster of ideas are:

*Hollow's Last Hope - it seems like a nice intro module, but I'm not that familiar with it

*Crypt of the Everflame - This seems like a great dungeon crawl and intro adventure, although the pretext of going there may not fit with what the players want to do (all being from the same town).

*Mad God's Key from Dungeon Magazine - This also looks like a good one, and since it was designed as an intro to a game-world (Greyhawk originally - but I'll alter it to Golarion). It seems like it might be a little longer than we can finish in one sitting.

*Master of the Fallen Fortress - This one seems like a good intro, but honestly it seems like too much hackn' and not much else.

*Pathfinder Society Adventures?

I guess what I am asking for is further recommendations on an adventure, or suggestions on any of the ones I named above. For example, any Pathfinder scenarios that would be better than others?
Any feedback is appreciated.

[Sir Not Appearing in this Film]

I started DMing for the first time this year in an effort to get my group to switch to Pathfinder - complete success.

We started with "Hollow's Last Hope" - seemed to have a good mix of delve & RPing. And it's already in 3.5, if that's what you're starting with.

Went right into "Crown of the Kobald King" which was a huge hit.

If you're looking for something for a longer-term campaign, you might want to consider some of the older 3.5 adventure paths, like Rune Lords.

[shinzakei]

Well the "burning plague" is a ton of fun to start your group in. It's from WoTc and its a free mod they made a while back. I used it a while back to start my last group (we started lvl 1 and went to lvl 18)

It isn't too long and it gives some small towning with a dungeon dive. Download the mod and check it out. I am thinking of running it again in my new Pathfinder group inside kingmaker.

Here is the link
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/oa/20000801a

[Troy Malovich]

I absolutely LOVE "Mad God's Key" it is a fun adventure just because it covers a lot of different action types, locales, and interesting scenarios other than a typical delve or city scene. The cross-wharf chase is a great starter too. Though I'm not a Greyhawk fan, and I run homebrew, it isn't hard to convert.

[Rezdave]

shinzakei wrote:

Well the "burning plague" is a ton of fun to start your group in ... Here is the link

Linkified above

FWIW, I threw BP into a campaign as a "side adventure" because a Players wanted a "good old fashioned dungeon crawl after all the urban and mystery adventures we've been doing". It ended up reshaping the campaign, mostly because the PCs involved themselves with not only saving the locals, but stabilizing and rebuilding their community.

Definitely one of the better of the WotC downloadable adventures, and on par with anything traditionally published.

Note that all of the RP they did in the community was outside the scope of the written adventure, but the options for setting up a "home base" are there. You could easily substitute Diamond Lake from the AoW AP for the community to give your campaign a "home base" and possible adventure tie-ins.

HTH,

Rez

[Orthos]

Rezdave wrote:

FWIW, I threw BP into a campaign as a "side adventure" because a Players wanted a "good old fashioned dungeon crawl after all the urban and mystery adventures we've been doing". It ended up reshaping the campaign, mostly because the PCs involved themselves with not only saving the locals, but stabilizing and rebuilding their community.

... it took a few read throughs before I finally realized you were referring to the adventure mentioned in your quote and not the current oil fiasco....

[Alex Martin]

Hmmm...interesting stuff on the Burning Plague. Thanks for your feedback everyone; feel free to keep dropping in them. I have about another month before we get underway.

[Rezdave]

Alex Martin wrote:

Hmmm...interesting stuff on the Burning Plague.

More on Burning Plague in my campaign:

Here's how I played it out in my campaign ...

The PCs were 3rd-4th level and most were leaving the major city in which they grew up for the first time. I'd been running them through several mystery and urban-RP adventures until this time.

One of the PCs was actually a priest from a small community in the foothills in another region, and needed to return from the city to update his high-priestess on business there. I used the town of Twilight Hollow (Tears for Twilight Hollow, in Dungeon #90) as the basis for this, altering Andress into a high-priestess of a not-necessarily-Evil Shar who eventually went bad. Another PC was a Conjurer from the city who was referred my a mentor to a higher-level specialist who coincidentally lived in the same general region (Sloth, #91). Everyone decided to accompany them.

While on the road towards the mountains, the party tracked some kobolds (Bandits of the Bunglewood, #51) into the lands of a goblin tribe. When the goblins massed to ambush the party, the adventurers where surprised to learn that their priest-friend spoke semi-fluent goblin and negotiated for them to meet the chief, claim the kobolds and gain passage through the goblin lands. He also showed off the powers of his goddess at a feast for the chief. Leaving the goblin lands they continued on towards Twilight Hollow, passing through Duvik's Pass along the way.

The adventure Burning Plague includes no map for Duvik's Pass, which is why the map and set-up for Diamond Lake from AoW-AP would work. In our case, I made it a smaller, stockaded settlement with a few outlying farms and ranches. Stopping there, the party learned of the plight of the settlers, the loss of communication with the miners and so forth.

Dealing with the problems at the mine itself and curing the eponymous disease, the party still found that the settlement was left in the lurch, since any wandering monster, band of goblinoids or bandits could easily claim the mine, and moreover there were no able-bodied miners left to work it since only the few farmers, ranchers, elders, wives and children, etc. living within the stockade down the pass were left alive. The Party went back to the goblin tribe and negotiated a treaty for the goblins to send a small garrison to live in and secure the mine from any claim-jumpers while the party continued to evaluate long-term solutions. Both the goblins and the Party were granted shares in the mine, once it was returned to productivity. Several of the goblins converted to worship of Shar, and the party established shrines to the deities they worshipped in the settlement.

Leaving Duvik's Pass, the party was involved in a few minor incidents and side-treks before getting tangled up in the troubles of a remote dwarven copper mine (Ever-Changing Fortunes, #85), and after saving the dwarves convinced them to give up their low-producing copper mine in order to become partners in Duvik's Pass and work that silver mine. Their displacement of the dwarves was noticed in the region, however, and word of a silver-strike in the pass swiftly spread, resulting in a conflict between the settlers who claimed the entire pass and the prospectors who wanted to work it themselves. While the party held off and threatened the claim-jumpers, Shaunnra Stillhand (Tears for Twilight Hollow) helped negotiate a settlement whereby the reduced community of settlers would sell off plots of the valley and pass (since they were too small to mine it all) based upon a dwarven-overseen survey that would evaluate the potential of each stake. The settlers would keep the active mine and have first-claim to a percentage of the remaining plots once the results of the survey were published.

Meanwhile, the party settled into a period of extended downtime, serving as Sheriff or Foreign Minister or Defensive Battlements Architect or Parish Priest or other functions. They helped negotiate an economic and military alliance with a neighboring major power to help secure the valley from being conquered by any of the other regional powers, while also locating a band of higher-level, retiring adventurers (eventually Dying of the Light, #84) to settle there in return for shares as "Lords of Duvik's Pass" to keep the area secure from bandits, monsters and neighboring warlords.

For several more in-game years the party continued using Duvik's Pass as a base-of-operations while pursuing other adventures, now that things were settled down, plus their shares in the mine (maintained while they were active in their downtime professions but lost once they started adventuring regularly again) provided them with a nice purse and steady income for a while.

So that's how an intended side-trek adventure re-focused my campaign between levels 3-9. After than, the next major even was an invasion of giants far to the north and the resulting war.

I think you could use the backdrop of Diamond Lake (or any similar community) for Duvik's Pass and run the PCs either as a group passing through or as townsfolk returning from a war or trip to the "big city" or anything else that would have had them away when the Plague hit. Alternately, run Whispering Cairn (#124) and a few other "local" adventures at levels 1-3 without pursuing the AoW trek to "set the stage" with the PCs as locals, and then hit their home-town with the Plague while they are away on one of these adventures and then deal with saving and rebuilding the community.

Thoughts, anyway ... hope you've found them helpful.

FWIW,

Rez