just looking for some input on this and as i develop it i will post my progress and as much of it as i can stand to do. i am reworking the third AP, second darkness into a space opera style sci fi campaign. this is in its earliest of stages and it is using a rules system that i dont think is publishable, but its home brew... somewhere between pathfinder and 4th ed. anyhoo. i am looking for ideas, i have ALOT but i figured this is a great place to start, besides a new idea COULD be better than my own...
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Tip 1: don't sell riddleport too much to your players. The AP assumes a bunch of travel & never actually goes back after the big climax of book 1 (2? i forget). Unless you plan on re-setting all the adventures to be local to it, it's probably better to skip the whole "win the house" routine and have the 1st bit just be a regular old Job/Run/etc.
Tip 2: Make at least some of the elves likeable. As written, pretty much every single Elf in the game deserves a knife in the ribs. If the party actually LIKES a couple of them, the consistency errors of book 3 (4? The Armageddon Echo) vanish fairly easily.
Tip 3: The plot/NPC's are set perfectly for a Sci-Fi reskinning...overarching evil BBEG, manipulative pseudo-friendly NPC's, crazy alien monsters from space. Run with those features, and really amp the volume when dealing with Akata, other tentacle-monsters, and a certain high-speed stellar body.
Tip 4: Consider losing the whole "Negotiate with the Winter Council" bit in book 4/5. If you run that set of encounters as straightforward combat, it's much more believable. That is, unless the PC's have made good friends with some of the elven leadership...in that case, they're likely gunning for the support of 1 or 2 counselors, and can whack the others right off the bat.
That's pretty much it, and with some re-skinning, the basic adventure line works very very well when adapted to a Firefly/Serenity or even Shadowrun/Cyberpunk 2020 style of game. Good luck, and consider a Campaign Journal so we can read your exploits.
There is a lot of discussion of this AP in the Second Darkness subforum further down the page, along with ideas from various DMs who have run the AP. None as differently as you're planning to, I don't think, but you might pick up some ideas from there. :)
(Also, if you're posting in the Second Darkness forum, you don't have to worry as much about hiding spoilers. It's assumed everyone posting there is a DM, not a player, unless specified otherwise.)
just to clarify the way i will be doing this is with a very limited number of sapient aliens(3 of em) and the elves and drow will consist of 2 of those 3. hamster, thanks for the advice thats super helpful. i will get a campign journal up when i get this going in the next couple months. i work slowly and methodically so im letting another member take over as DM for a while as soon as i finish my current campaign(rise of the runelords). then it will start, im thinking ive got 6 to 8 months. we'll see. i have the beginning down, and the fact that the PCs wont stay at riddleport is fine.
It starts with me asking each player what his motivation is for being in a whispered meeting with the other PCs about a mutiny of their captain. after they take over the ship, they will find that the space station outside of imperial space riddleport a perfect hideout to figure out their next move... all the while something outside, though undetectable, is changing the color and appearance of space itself....
im thinking of making the "asteroid" an extra dimensional threat... sort of conjuring up ideas from event horizon.
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that all sounds good.
May I recommend:
After the mutiny and subsequent docking at "Riddleport Station," the party finds their Captain has been neglecting some payments to some rather unsavory characters.
Since they can't just TAKE the ship (what with the whole anti-piracy act of 2045 and mutual defense agreements), each organization has to put pressure on the PC's to pay up.
This way, you can introduce the various factions you're going to use (Cypermages, Golden Goblin, etc...) right from the get-go (a weakness in my opinion of the written material), and give the group a reason to A: stick together, and B: make some loot while still at Riddleport Station.
That segues nicely into book 2, since as written, there is a dearth of transport available to go check out the incident that triggers the adventure.
Bonus points: since the ship is "In Hock" and maybe placed in a stasis field, any damage that may have occurred is negated, allowing the PC's easy egress from the Station and out to "Incident Location A."
As far as Elves/Drow as aliens, that sounds perfect. Go with the whole Vulcan/Romulan pairing, where one is controlled and fairly pleasant (but definitely NOT human), and the other is wild, chaotic, and dangerous to all. Makes 100% sense to me.
Are you planning on changing the ruleset at all? Blasters & Chainswords or keeping everything as-is?
If you want the feel of Sci-Fi, but want to keep the rules as is, you could use my "firearms" rules.
Bows = Guns. It's that simple. Anything you could do with a longbow/composite longbow you can do with a rifle (rate of fire, damage, feats, etc.) The only difference is that you CAN use a rifle while prone, the tradeoff being a whole lot of noise.
Bullets = contained units which cost the same as arrows, and no, you can't make gunpowder bombs (unless you want to, in which case, use the d20modern grenade stats, they're great).
That's it. Anything you want to re-skin, just do so, and keep the underlying rules the same to make it easier on you and the players.
Finally, I would definitely check out the various "How to Make SD Better" threads in the SD section down below...a bunch of NPC tips & plot-hole-fillers will come in handy.
THANK YOU!!! thats awesome and is right in line with what i had in mind... The aliens are going to be a race that stayed during the last galactic cataclysm(the elves) and remained largely unchanged but their numbers now dwindle to the thousands after what happened, the second are going to be a cousin race, the ones that used untested and unsure extra dimensional travel tech to escape it, and only now are returning in greater numbers. the ELDER (the name the humans use for the "elves") will then fit right in as the elves and the Forick(the drow, and origional name of the race as a whole) are going to be a race of bizarre humanoids seemingly touched by hell itself. they will be a mix of geth from mass effect, the borg and Terminators. lacking the compassion the Elder still possess, replacing it with a robotic logic. essentially going from CN to LE. I am a big fan of sci-fi horror and i will take some parts of the AP in that direction.
As for the rules, the whole reason i am doing this is to sort of play test a rules set i have been working on and off of for the last couple of years. this being the most unique and playable in my opinion...hence my willingness to adapt an entire AP to it at this point. The rules take some points of 4th that i liked, and some from 3.5/pathfinder and mostly are an amalgamation of the many systems ive played with some new stuff... i may post a link or throw em on here at some point. the idea is that fantasy rules are designed to work well from a perspective of melee, and using ranged attacks as a secondary portion of combat. i essentially did the opposite with these. Though melee is also unique to this system, showing more similarity to shadowrun than to DnD.
Oh yeah the third race is one that was formerly a slave race to the Forick/Elder and are the only other sapient aliens. they populate most planets that are at least slightly inhabitable. highly aggressive, and territorial they are going to be a constant threat to the PCs if on a "class M" planet. maybe even less hospitable planets as they are a highly adaptable race. (in actuality they are a race that the forick/elder created by mixing the DNA of early humans and a couple of other races...humanity is the only one that survives). most of the story of the races goes back to the forick/elder and the appearance and now thriving of humanity is essentially a stain on their galaxy.