Hi All
I have heard about some of the pre adventure path adventures from the older dungeon magazine (such as savage tide and age of worms). I own a couple of the adventure paths (King maker and Serpents Skull) and I had a few questions:
More specifically, I would like spoiler free answers as my friend owns these and we may run them in the future (I think I was in savage tide but our adventure ended prematurely due to non D&D issues). We were on the isle of dread when we finished, just after some dungeon with mummies.
I was wondering how these old adventures differed when compared to the adventure paths that are currently out? As I wish this to be spoiler free, I suppose I mean in feel, organization, length, etc.
How many of them are thier and what are thier names?
What edition of D&D are they for?
Is thier a players guide for these adventures?
Thanks for your help. I am a bit new to all this adventure path stuff and I am trying to understand the history of it.
Creative Director
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Hi there! The adventure paths we published in dungeon consist of these three:
1: Shackled City (we revised and republished this one in the form of a hardcover book)
2: Age of Worms
3: Savage Tide
All three of these APs use the 3.5 D&D rules. Although the first couple of Shackled City adventures came out just before 3.5, we used them as a sort of "preview" for 3.5. And when we updated that AP to its hardcover form, we went back and updated everything in those first few adventures to work with 3.5 even better.
We didn't produce actual player's guides for them, but we DID run lots of support articles in Dragon magazine for Age of Worms and Savage Tide that gave a lot of extra player option stuff.
You actually did produce a player's guide for Savage Tide though :)
You can buy it right here:
Savage Tide Player's Guide
The two main differences between the three Dungeon APs and the Pathfinder APs is that they by default use the world of Greyhawk as opposed to the world of Golarion, and that they consist of 12 adventures each instead of 6 adventures each.
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Creative Director
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You actually did produce a player's guide for Savage Tide though :)
You can buy it right here:
Savage Tide Player's Guide
That's true! Although that book ended up being more of a gazetteer to the city of Sasserine, which only features in 1/6 of the entire adventure path, so it was kind of poorly focused. We learned a lot about that player's guide.
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You actually did produce a player's guide for Savage Tide though :)
You can buy it right here:
Savage Tide Player's GuideThe two main differences between the three Dungeon APs and the Pathfinder APs is that they by default use the world of Greyhawk as opposed to the world of Golarion, and that they consist of 12 adventures each instead of 6 adventures each.
Also, the Dungeon adventure paths generally assumed that the characters would reach level 20+ by the end of the final adventure, whereas the new Adventure Paths generally finish up somewhere in the level 15th to 18th range.
Thanks everyone, this has been helpful.
This is purely my own opinion (obviously, but this is the net afterall).
I thought the paths featured in Dungeon were shorter per adventure. Or rather, being that I recieved the Dungeon paths first, when I saw the first issue of Pathfinder, I was supprised at the length of the adventure.
What I meen by this, is other than the first adventure (at least in Age of Worms), the Dungeon adventures are generally a single dungeon, or a small hand full of encounters. With space limitations, this was just how the magazine was (and back in those days we liked it that way! /end old folgey rant). It feels like there is more room in the Pathfinder adventures for a few extra encounters, other than what the plot and story NEEDS to function.
This isn't a critisism, or at least I don't think the one is better than the other because one is shorter and the other longer. Just a difference.
The other big thing someone should know about Shackled City, anyway, is that with the hardcover you get tons of great stuff, but it also was the first adventure path that the Paizo folks made, and in some ways it shows. I think everyone would agree it's got a weakness in that (if you run it as written) the main bad guys aren't foreshadowed well at all, and the players basically find about them when they meet them to kill them. There is a lot of material available that various DMs who have run the campaign have made available to deal with that problem, and a great community surrounding it in general with all sorts of helpful stuff, but the DM who runs it should probably plan to do a fair amount of modifying to make it satisfying. (I'm running it now, and while I am making a number of changes, the wealth of stuff available on the web to supplement the hardback is incredible, and continues to grow.)
Hi All
I have heard about some of the pre adventure path adventures from the older dungeon magazine (such as savage tide and age of worms). I own a couple of the adventure paths (King maker and Serpents Skull) and I had a few questions:
More specifically, I would like spoiler free answers as my friend owns these and we may run them in the future (I think I was in savage tide but our adventure ended prematurely due to non D&D issues). We were on the isle of dread when we finished, just after some dungeon with mummies.
I was wondering how these old adventures differed when compared to the adventure paths that are currently out? As I wish this to be spoiler free, I suppose I mean in feel, organization, length, etc.
How many of them are thier and what are thier names?
What edition of D&D are they for?
Is there a players guide for these adventures?
Thanks for your help. I am a bit new to all this adventure path stuff and I am trying to understand the history of it.
I have played half-way through Shackled City, and I am about to finish AoW in a few weeks. I have never played STAP, but I heard it is brutal. I have pathfinderized a large part of AoW, and it gets time consuming, but it helps keep the original difficulty level in tact. All of them are very difficult and have several TPK-potential moments. Don't bring a weak character to the table is all I'm saying.
They are all enjoyable though.|
Creative Director
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I thought the paths featured in Dungeon were shorter per adventure. Or rather, being that I recieved the Dungeon paths first, when I saw the first issue of Pathfinder, I was supprised at the length of the adventure.
This is absolutely true.
A typical Dungeon AP installment was about 25,000 words. I believe the LONGEST one was the penultimate Savage Tide adventure, which clocked in at about 30,000 words.
A typical Pathfinder AP is 35,000 words. The longest one there probably came in at about 45,000 or maybe 50,000 words.
That said, Dungeon APs ran for 12 parts. So overall, an average Dungeon AP was 300,000 words, with about 30,000 words of support material in Dragon Magazine for a total of 330,000 words over that 12 month period. A Pathfinder AP clocks in at 210,000 words, but it has a lot more support material as well (about 120,000 per AP).
Which basically means that both the Dungeon APs and the Pathfinder APs have about the same amount of content. The pathfinder ones just do so with about twice the detail.
Oh, and we do two of them a year instead of one.
Hmm... starting to figure out why I'm so tired all the time...