Dear Pathfinder smarties,
I recently picked up a copy of the hardbound Shackled City adventure path, and am coming up on a day where I will soon be running it.
Unfortunately, I also happened to pick up a few Pathfinder books (Core Rulebook, Ultimate Combat, Ultimate Magic, and Advanced Player's Guide [stupid tax return and complete lack of willpower]), and I'm kind of (super) jazzed to delve into these books as well.
I was niave enough to think originally that the PF books were just a teensey bit different in mechanics and mostly differing in flavor (little different crunch, more different fluff? Do people still use those words?), but it appears that there are enough differences that it may cause some difficulties as things progress.
Has anyone here in the forums run Shackled City à la Pathfinder? It seems like it wouldn't be too big of a headache to do any of the intial conversions that I'm aware of, but is anyone hip to any problems that become messy later on in the game?
I tried to find an existing thread that covered this issue, but my meagre searches didn't turn anything up. If you know of a thread that deals with this, a nudge in that direction would be super, also.
Thanks so much for your time!
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It's the meat grinderest of meat grinder campaigns and does contain a fair amount of monsters out of the Fiend Folio and some other monsters that weren't open IP, so keep your eyes open for that.
It can be run mostly as is beyond that, though if you go all out it can be a lot more fun. There should be a huge amount of shackled city conversion thread about I had thought?
As the NPC get up higher in level the conversions take longer if you are trying to to a complete conversion. The monsters as written in 3.5 won't provide as much of a challenge if you don't convert them.
What I did with AoW, which also goes to level 20 was to convert all the bosses, and pick certain other non boss fights to do full conversions on.
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I did partial conversions; gave a few more feats to the large numbers of fighters and ran it; it ran great. No real problems; though a few encounters became harder than I thought when I did use Pathfinder versions of monsters. Still, the party was fairly optimal, so they did very well; though I got many complaints about them not having proper "wealth by level".
3.5 does give less gold than PF, and SCAP does give you just enough gold to get by.
edit:I never felt so poor in a game, but it was fun.
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Also, XP ends up weird. You need to just level by area; especially late. This will feel odd to them; it doesn't seem like 3.5 would be better. It's like... early you need to be low level for a while, later you need to level almost every session. Feels kind of odd; you may need to have some supplementary modules and have them happen around the city; or do what I did and just let them know this is the way it will run.
Shackled City was considered a fairly tough campaign under 3.5 for the average party, which means it is probably a reasonable campaign under Pathfinder, where characters a a bit tougher than they were in 3.5. Assuming you have enough information to run it as is, I'd say give it a go without altering things significantly.