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Hey all,
I am close to wrapping up Escape From Old Korvosa with my group (well, sort of. I'm adding in Academy of Secrets next before we leave the city) and I am starting to prep book 4.
I have read the old books, and am running this with the revised hardcover edition. I think the changes they made helped out a bit, removing the convoluted interconnected string of events and making it a little more sandbox-y.
I still think I am going to make a number of changes, and wanted to get thoughts and other ideas from the group here.
To start with, I want to make the travel more interesting. I am going to be using some stuff from The Angry GM blog that gave some cool ideas on making travel more a part of your game. To make that really work, though, I want to have some extra optional locations and enemies that the party can stumble on.
Some ideas I have so far for extra encounters (both for optional locales, and for things the party can fight for Respect Points):
* either the Red Dragon from the random encounter table or a group of fire drakes
* Harassing attacks from Cinderlander and Assassins if the party doesn't take steps to hide themselves
* an ancient ruin full of undead shoanti (maybe? plenty of undead next book, is it too much to add more here?)
* Ash Giants
* An orc warlord with a camp full of orcs that have been harassing the Sun Clan.
* some sort of ancient statue that has a hidden entrance to a dungeon. what kind of interesting loot could one find in a hidden temple in the middle of nowhere?
* environmental dangers. are any of these actually dangerous to a party at this level?
What other interesting encounters could I add to spice up the days of travel?
Are there any good maps of the Cinderlands that have been made? the one in the book is fairly empty. I'm guessing there aren't really many roads out there or anything, but the map feels very bare.
And finally, I would like to possibly make the House of the Moon a little more interesting. Has anyone changed that quest up a bit? The way it is written it feels like it could have been a random encounter. Go in, fight one creature, done. What could be added to make it more interesting?
As for environmental dangers, I imagine emberstorms are pretty epic in scope. Don't forget to mention the mile-long sarenrae's tresses that are stretched out everywhere along the ground--thick hairs and thin bands of razor-sharp volcanic glass.
When a burning emberstorm descends upon them, they can either teleport away or per round deal with 1d6 damage from wind-whipped sand and rocks, 2d6 fire damage, and 2d6 slashing damage from the tresses by taking shelter (give them a Fortitude save for half of 5d6 damage each round). Plus there are probably lots of fire tornadoes within an emeberstorm, that're hard to see until they're right on top of you. But then again, maybe they could just cast a handful of protective spells for hours and walk through the storm.
Either way it has to cost something or its gonna be awkward later when they're asked to take shelter in the Acropolis of the Thrallkeepers to avoid a coming emberstorm.