Post/Author/DateTime	Post
jerrycutshaw 10-18-07, 11:32 AM	We've decided to start a new adventure series for my gaming group. We had orginally been playing SCAP but found it too hard to keep track of all the NPCs, plot and nuiances in Cauldron (we only play once a month). My group tends to have the "kill it all" mentality so we tend to digress into a hack and slash adventure. I'm looking for a 5th lvl adventure (or short series) that is going to challenge the players wits AND brawn yet still have ample opportunity to role play. I was hoping I could revamp "Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh" to 3.5e rules but I don't know if a mystery like that will really sell. In a 1st level adventure every time something jumps from around a corner and goes "oggedy boogedy" it scares you while at 5th lvl your already a bit jaded. I am still seriously considering using the Saltmarsh as the base city in my campaign (with a few tweaks to make it a little less wealthy and urban) so a waterbourne or coastal campaign would be great! Thanks in advance for your suggestions. . . .
molten_dragon 10-18-07, 05:49 PM	I'll make the obvious comment and suggest Red Hand of Doom. It starts at 5th level and runs up to 10th and is in my opinion (and several other people's) one of the best adventures wizards has put out for 3.5
Subversive 10-19-07, 02:42 PM	Gotta agree. Red Hand of Doom is right down your alley. Wickedly challenging combat, ample opportunities for role playing and alliance building, a grand plot that involves immense battles and evil gods, and a fairly straightforward, yet open-ended structure where the player's actions decide the vale of an entire region. -Steve Bennett
jerrycutshaw 10-21-07, 02:07 PM	Gotta agree. Red Hand of Doom is right down your alley. Wickedly challenging combat, ample opportunities for role playing and alliance building, a grand plot that involves immense battles and evil gods, and a fairly straightforward, yet open-ended structure where the player's actions decide the vale of an entire region. -Steve Bennett Thanks for the replies. I'll definitely check this one out. That being said I wanted to avoid a large adventure series as our group is rather small and could be changing dramatically. Is this an easy adventure to scale up or down depending on who makes can play a given session?
nittanytbone 10-21-07, 10:29 PM	Red Hand of Doom is a great adventure, but rebalancing it from week to week can be tricky. - Many of the encounters feature larger numbers of low powered monsters. If 6 PCs show up instead of 4, you can increase the number of monsters by 50%, but that probably won't really up the CR enough. So, balancing on the fly can be tricky. - Many of the treasure hauls are lopsided. I.E., at the start of a chapter, the PCs might find a large trove. Then, for the next month of adventuring, treasure can be quite light. This can make fair distribution of loot difficult if PCs are coming and going. - There isn't much downtime. THis makes it tough to explain where PCs go in between sessions.
Gerry 10-22-07, 07:52 AM	There's LOTs of suggestions and stuff on leveling in the Index in my sig. Check it out. Plus support maps, etc. It IS 5 chapters of adventure. mega-module or mini-campaign. But you can work each chapter as its own module, complete with different parties if you need to. That is, Each chapter may take 6-10 sessions of play time. If by the end of any one chapter you're getting a big turn over, it'd be easy enough to pass on info gained from group A to group B. Just "co-ordinate the good army intel on the enemy" and pass on a mission to the next group being one easy example. Chapter One would play best with one team, though there's oppourtunnity to drop/receive PCs in Drellin's Ferry. Chapter Two, almost every encounter could be a seperate mission or evenings adventure for different parties. Chapter Three is like Chapter One, once you're into it it'll be one team. Chapter Four could easily be run a couple of times. The first few encounters are run for each team on different nights (assuming all your PCs want to get back in for the big defense of the city), culminating in a big showdown where the surviving PCs from each team race to the climax of Chapter Four in a third, combined-team session. Chapter Five is like one and Three. But based on Caligula's campaign, sending two or three teams at it would be useful. Each team could take over where the previous team, uh, died. Kinda like repeated charges at the enemy lines. Eventually the lines will crack. Just don't run out of PCs :) Gerry
jerrycutshaw 10-23-07, 08:12 AM	It IS 5 chapters of adventure. mega-module or mini-campaign. But you can work each chapter as its own module, complete with different parties if you need to. That is, Each chapter may take 6-10 sessions of play time. If by the end of any one chapter you're getting a big turn over, it'd be easy enough to pass on info gained from group A to group B. Just "co-ordinate the good army intel on the enemy" and pass on a mission to the next group being one easy example. Gerry How long is your normal session? For us 6-10 sessions is 6-10 months! (all married with kids not alot of time to play). Does anyone else have a guess at play-time for this adventure? I am strongly considering messing with exp system and awarding double or triple exp so that after most sessions we gain a level. We have NEVER had characters higher than 12th LVL and that took about 2 or 3 years to achieve. I think it would be funner if we go most sessions gaining a level. Any thoughts?
Gerry 10-24-07, 12:41 AM	3 hours every two weeks. Well, we're supposed to start at 7:00 pm, and we always wrap up at 10. A couple of times a year we do marathon Saturday sessions, 1:00 pm until 9 or so. The designers had it at 26 sessions, a year's worth of playing. (Check the index in the sig, it's got it somewhere). Gerry