Simple question (with possibly a complicated answer). How much of the adventure path was changed for the hardcover? The reason I ask is that I've recently taken an interest in the Shackled City, and would like to run it. However, I already have all of the Dungeon issues, so it seems like it wouldn't be very prudent to spend money on the hardcover. But if I do run it from the issues, what changes were made? Is there anywhere online to access any of the extra content? Or, at the very least, find a list of what content was added?
Also, a related question- how much work would it be to convert Shackled City to Pathfinder?
Anyone? Beuller? Beuller?
Anyone? Beuller? Beuller?
The book included a followup epilogue adventure to finish off loose ends.
The book also has a useful mapbook, and dramatis personae lists for a bunch of the npc's with statblocks for all the levels. Some o fthe individual chapters were tweaked and errated to fit better also.
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I can't really tell you much since I never owned the Dungeon version of it but I do own the hardcover. To my knowledge though they added a whole chapter to the hardcover as well as an introduction to Cauldron. It also came with a little book of all the maps.
To be honest I think the investment into the hardcover is really worth it, even if you own all the mags.
Edit: Ninja'd
Some of the individual chapters were tweaked and errated to fit better also.
As he said, aside from the obvious changes (Drakthar's way, an overall timeline, etc.), some of the earlier adventures were retooled more subtly to add references to later installments (for foreshadowing, etc.).
I think it's definitely worth the $30, even if you have the Dragon issues. YMMV.
I've been running the campaign from the hardback with the magazines ready to hand, so I have made a lot of comparisons. As has been said already, there's an additional adventure added (Drakthar's Way, which becomes Chapter 2), there are stat blocks for critical long-term NPC's that level each of them up to level 20, the information about important city locations is all collected together, the Flood Festival is more detailed (although you'll still want to take advantage of all the great stuff here and at RPGenius.com too), etc. On occasion, there's stuff in the magazine that didn't make it into the hardback. For instance, I'm presently running Bhal-Hamatugn from Chapter 4, and the magazine had information on lighting and possible spill-over effects (like drawing the attention of monsters in other areas) for every area in the location, and that info's gone in the book. But overall, I think the book is well worth it. I chiefly use it and supplement with the magazines.
Creative Director
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The book was relatively significantly changed in its transformation from magazine articles spread out over several issues into a hardcover all-in-one book. Among the changes:
SIGNIFICANT restructuring of how the information was presented.
An entirely new adventure that takes place between the first and second adventure was added.
Numerous other parts and areas in existing adventures were significantly expanded.
Much more support material, including a detailed gazetteer of Cauldron, was added.
A lot of new art got added.
In all, and if I remember correctly... there's about 50,000 new words of content in the hardcover that never showed up in the original magazine incarnation of Shackled City. Which more or less equates to about 55 to 60 additional pages of content overall.
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Mr. Jacobs..
I understand Age of Worms and Savage Tide will never see a hard copy versions due to licensing issues, does the same hold true to ever Pathfinder and Golarion-izing SCAP? I'm guessing the answer is yes, but we can hope...
If any of you are running the game in PF, I have found that Hero Labs makes it super easy to convert most of the monsters and NPCs...except for the IP ones anyhow....
Thank you very much for all of the info! If there's one thing the magazines is missing, it's more info about Cauldron- I'm beginning my game this week and I really wish I had more stuff to give the players to get them to feel more familiar with the setting.
That being said, I've made the decision to go ahead and buy the hardcover- there's just so much that I'd be missing out on otherwise. So thanks for the help!
(I kinda wish I could have known all this and ordered it a week ago so I could have it before my game this Thursday, but oh well.)
A word of advice that may help in your situation? A lot of people have started their SCAP campaign not with the thugs in Life's Bazaar, but on the road between Sasserine and Cauldron. It gives you a chance to introduce the party to the Lucky Monkey (and above all to Shensen!) early on so that the rescue mission in Flood Season matters a bit more to the players. It would also have the happy effect for you of putting off the arrival at and exploration of Cauldron a little bit, and thus give you time for the hardback to arrive. You can find a write-up of this "Chapter Zero" at the RPGenius.com site, under Chapter 1 materials, I think. Lots of other wonderful SCAP resources at that site too! Really not to be missed. If nothing else, you'll want to run Delvesdeep's expanded version of the Demonskar Ball, which I think has become practically a canonical part of the adventure path (and deservedly so!)
I also suggest taking advantage of the work other GM's have put into fleshing things out also. I am very fond of Delvesdeep's flood festival expansion/rewrite, and i have seen some wonderful redo's/expansions to the Redgorge section.
A word of advice that may help in your situation? A lot of people have started their SCAP campaign not with the thugs in Life's Bazaar, but on the road between Sasserine and Cauldron. It gives you a chance to introduce the party to the Lucky Monkey (and above all to Shensen!) early on so that the rescue mission in Flood Season matters a bit more to the players.
Thank you! I was thinking of doing something along these lines already (the players and I were thinking about having all of the PCs having known each other when they were kids [they were all orphans at the orphanage] so I was going to have them meet up at the Lucky Monkey). But that site seems like a great starting point- so thanks!
(Also, for the record, the complete link is here.)
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Creative Director
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Mr. Jacobs..
I understand Age of Worms and Savage Tide will never see a hard copy versions due to licensing issues, does the same hold true to ever Pathfinder and Golarion-izing SCAP? I'm guessing the answer is yes, but we can hope...If any of you are running the game in PF, I have found that Hero Labs makes it super easy to convert most of the monsters and NPCs...except for the IP ones anyhow....
As with Age of Worms, Savage Tide, and everything else we did with Dungeon Magazine... including Shackled City... those products are owned by Wizards of the Coast. We can't convert any of them to Pathfinder as a result.
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As with Age of Worms, Savage Tide, and everything else we did with Dungeon Magazine... including Shackled City... those products are owned by Wizards of the Coast. We can't convert any of them to Pathfinder as a result.
If you published them as 3.5, I'd snap them up in a heartbeat.
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Creative Director
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As with Age of Worms, Savage Tide, and everything else we did with Dungeon Magazine... including Shackled City... those products are owned by Wizards of the Coast. We can't convert any of them to Pathfinder as a result.If you published them as 3.5, I'd snap them up in a heartbeat.
We can't publish them as anything. Only Wizards of the Coast gets to do that.
I suppose they could license the publication of those adventures to someone else, but there's a better chance of catching Bigfoot and teaching him to play reverse tennis.
As with Age of Worms, Savage Tide, and everything else we did with Dungeon Magazine... including Shackled City... those products are owned by Wizards of the Coast. We can't convert any of them to Pathfinder as a result.If you published them as 3.5, I'd snap them up in a heartbeat.We can't publish them as anything. Only Wizards of the Coast gets to do that.
I suppose they could license the publication of those adventures to someone else, but there's a better chance of catching Bigfoot and teaching him to play reverse tennis.
WOW. I guess that settles that, I was kindda hopping for the same thing but after that explanation I can move on. I do appreciate the fact that you folks at paizo take the time to give us non-industry folks the real behind the scense no nonsense look at what to expect and what not to hope for.
At least now I can see about getting the issues for savage tide I'm missing.|
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I love the current APs, but love the 10-12 issue ones that take you to 20-21.. I would love to see something from Paizo that is as world spanning and EPIC as Age of Worms or even Savage Tide...I'm just finishing up as a player in Rise of the Runelords, and it has been cool..but I wish I got to explore levels above 13, which is where my Wizard will be at the end...In the AoW game I ran, they were 21 and 22 by the end...Shackled City will probably have them at 19-20 it looks like...
A higher level AP would be great... Eric, Tito Leati, James, Nic Logue, Richard Pett.and I'm sure I'm missing several others (at work while writing this) could all contribute to make it an All-Star event...maybe to celebrate and anniversary of the first AP...or a company anniversary...who's with me??
I love the current APs, but love the 10-12 issue ones that take you to 20-21.. I would love to see something from Paizo that is as world spanning and EPIC as Age of Worms or even Savage Tide...I'm just finishing up as a player in Rise of the Runelords, and it has been cool..but I wish I got to explore levels above 13, which is where my Wizard will be at the end...In the AoW game I ran, they were 21 and 22 by the end...Shackled City will probably have them at 19-20 it looks like...
A higher level AP would be great... Eric, Tito Leati, James, Nic Logue, Richard Pett.and I'm sure I'm missing several others (at work while writing this) could all contribute to make it an All-Star event...maybe to celebrate and anniversary of the first AP...or a company anniversary...who's with me??
I'd be in favour of more adventure paths like Age of Worms or Savage Tide, although I haven't reached high levels in either of those paths yet so I can't say that my liking of those paths is due to high level play.
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Or...even better, I heard from one of my players who owns my FLGS, that Hasbro is considering selling or re-branding Dungeons and Dragons again...say Paizo bought all the licenses for good old DnD...then we get Beholders, Mind Flayers and we again have a company who cares about it's customer base running the flagship of role-playing games...The main problem would be all the people wanting support for FR and Greyhawk and Ebberon and Planescape and Dark Sun and Ravenloft...I think that is what killed TSR..trying to support too many products with a split gamer base...you would have to just phase those out and stick to Golarion I think...maybe release a new form of Dungeon mag that would offer amatuer writers to design scenarios or even APs for those settings, but all official Paizo material would be Golarion based...
Just a dream..that is all!!
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My ideal world of D&D would center Paizo owning D&D and publishing for either 3.5 or Pathfinder in Greyhawk again, with 3rd party publishers again publishing lots of compatible stuff.
But if I didn't like Paizo's work, and pre-4e D&D stuff, I wouldn't be here on this page, would I? :)
I'm just finishing up as a player in Rise of the Runelords, and it has been cool..but I wish I got to explore levels above 13, which is where my Wizard will be at the end
That's odd, considering the last adventure assumes 14th-level characters. If played as written, the AP should bring characters to around 16th level by the end.
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I'm just finishing up as a player in Rise of the Runelords, and it has been cool..but I wish I got to explore levels above 13, which is where my Wizard will be at the endThat's odd, considering the last adventure assumes 14th-level characters. If played as written, the AP should bring characters to around 16th level by the end.
Considering what you are fighting at the end, I would hope so...
I love the current APs, but love the 10-12 issue ones that take you to 20-21.. I would love to see something from Paizo that is as world spanning and EPIC as Age of Worms or even Savage Tide...I'm just finishing up as a player in Rise of the Runelords, and it has been cool..but I wish I got to explore levels above 13, which is where my Wizard will be at the end...In the AoW game I ran, they were 21 and 22 by the end...Shackled City will probably have them at 19-20 it looks like...
A higher level AP would be great... Eric, Tito Leati, James, Nic Logue, Richard Pett.and I'm sure I'm missing several others (at work while writing this) could all contribute to make it an All-Star event...maybe to celebrate and anniversary of the first AP...or a company anniversary...who's with me??
My group has just finished "Thirteen Cages", the 10th adventure in the SCAP, and are around 16th level. Personally I have found running a high level game like this a lot less fun than I thought.
I love that a lot of the mysteries of the plot have finally been revealed and the players are able to connect the dots of why things happened earlier in the campaign.
I haven't enjoyed running the high level encounters. My players, having played their characters for over 2 years now, have gotten their PC's to be pretty damn good at what they do.
Conversely, I'm struggling to keep my head above water trying to competently run a combat and make good tactical decisions for high level spellcasters or monsters with a heap of different rules and abilities that I play for just one encounter.
If myself and the players weren't loving the actual storyline like we are then we probably would have ended the campaign a couple of months ago (or now, with the completion of Thirteen Cages).
So I am enjoying the fact that the next AP I run will likely only take the players to level 16 or thereabouts.
Olaf the Stout
I would jump directly to the last adventure after 13 cages. gives you two advantages. First, the higher power level makes the adventure a lot more challenging for your players. Second, you get to skip the rather boring grind that is Shatterhorn.
I would jump directly to the last adventure after 13 cages. gives you two advantages. First, the higher power level makes the adventure a lot more challenging for your players. Second, you get to skip the rather boring grind that is Shatterhorn.
I ended up running a cut down version of Shatterhorn, with some changes to take into account the fact that I'm using delvesdeep's alternate ending to the AP.
To avoid bogging the ending down, I stripped out any encounters with NPC's that the players haven't already encountered yet. So the encounter with the elves and the black egg were removed, as were the Yuan-ti encounters. The Will o' Wisps and the Half-Orc Barbarians were removed from the outside encounter and replaced with further advanced versions of Aushunna, Nabthatoron and a couple of other NPC's that my party had encountered earlier in the campaign.
Bringing Aushunna and Nabby made for an awesome encounter. Both these demons absolutely owned the PC's when they faced them earlier in the campaign (twice in the case of Nabby) so their return allowed the PC's a chance at revenge. The look on the players faces when I put the minis down on the battlemat was worth the price of admission alone! :-)
The combat ended with the demons and NPC's teleporting away badly hurt but alive, so they are somewhere out in the world still. However the combat still gave the PC's a little bit of closure. I think it will make for a nice narrated epilogue to the campaign where, with the Cagewrights defeated, they can decide if the want to hunt down these demons.
All up Shatterhorn took about 9-10 hours of game time to get through. Using delvesdeep's alternate version, the only bit left for the PC's to do is defeat Embril in the dream world and rescue Nidrama. From there they will go to Carceri, enter Adimarchus' nightmare realm, face a few challenges and then face off against Anthux to rescue Adimarchus end the campaign.
Olaf the Stout