War of the Burning Sky – Scouring of Gate Pass detailed impressions (spoilers)

[Skyscraper]

War of the Burning Sky – Scouring of Gate Pass detailed impressions (spoilers)

I have read the first adventure of the 4E version of the War of the Burning Sky campaign saga called Scouring of Gate Pass, together with the Player's Guide and Campaign Guide (for the DM).

In essence, I find the background and setting for the campaign and adventure to be great and the story to be appealing; but the adventure itself to be very underwhelming. I welcome input and argument to the contrary and would love to be convinced otherwise concerning the points I dislike.

*** SPOILERS AHEAD ***

I assume people in this forum are familiar with the game background, but I'll summarise in case some readers are not.


The background for the campaign sets the PCs in a general setting world that can be fitted into just about any conventional setting, where an emperor dies and leaves the empire headless. A few individuals and groups try to take advantage from the vacated space to gain power. War ensues with neighbouring nations and the PCs are caught in the middle of it all.

The PCs find themselves in the first adventure Scouring of Gate Pass in a city that one of the empire's armies is besieging. There, they need to hook up with the resistance and not only survive the perils of a besieged city (including bombings from wyvern riders) but accomplish a number of tasks.

The environment is dynamic and exciting. The snow-covered city streets, the attacking army, the threat of a deal with the enemy to let the "Inquisitors" into the city, hooking up with an underground resistance, several competing factions that the PCs need to interact with... All that makes for an interesting setting. The different factions are fun: the resistance (allies), bounty hunters, terrorist mercenaries, the inquisitors (that hunt magic users), eladrin spies, they're all interesting groups that intermesh in a plausible way.

I also like the general idea of the storyline: the PCs need to recuperate intel, escape a besieged city and carry this precious information to a faraway ally that supports the resistance. One upside is that they'll be opposed to some groups that are not necessarily the bad guys, which makes for some measure of moral dilemmas, at least for some players it will.

However, it's in the details that the adventure loses its shine. There are numerous things that bug me importantly.

First, many of the different quests asked of the PCs look like boring side quests to me. The worst is probably this fellow that comes up to the PCs on the street (while war is raging) and asks them to help him find his dire weasel pet that he lost (while war is raging!). Ensues a skill challenge in which the PCs must track down the animal in nearby buildings and streets, without any interaction with other creatures. Reading through this, I had the impression to be in a 1996 computer RPG tutorial where you learn how the game works by carrying out some dull task.

Another quest is to help a woman out of a burning building: they find her screaming for help from the second storey window of her house with smoke coming out of the window. Did I see this before? I'd say about 1000 times, mostly in Looney Tunes or Benny Hill.

They need to fight undead that coincidentally break out of a crypt where the PCs happen to lodge and this has nothing to do with the story whatsoever, these century-old undead just burst out the very day the PCs are there; they need to stop a depressed singer from being beaten up by a couple of teenagers because she's singing depressing songs; stop to cure an injured man... And they earn XP doing each of these actions, isn't anything free anymore? With the table of XPs, I understand that if you don't do all this stuff, which might be a very logical decision given that war is raging and they are on an important mission, well then they'll be short on XPs when it's time to level up.

Another point I dislike about the adventure is the railroad. Not only are the PCs expected to follow events on set tracks, but someone tags along with them and leads them by the nose just about the entire way. She's a cleric named Torrent and, by the way, the adventure mentions that she should only use her healing powers in battle when the PCs are out of healing... What kind of an ally is that? Not only that, but the adventure suggests that this cleric should be ordering the PCs about on the battlefield to have them improve their battle skills. Talk about fun: their boss is tagging along!

So as far as railroads go, it's hard to do worse. Torrent is even the one to go out to find some story-related information and bring it back to the PCs while they battle unrelated undead. I can't wrap my head around that one.

Then there are things that just seem wrong. The PCs go into a very important repository that is so badly guarded it's a wonder no one ever broke into the place to start with. Later, they are likely to have to fight a 10-th level elite opponent when they're level 1 or 2 at most, while the DMG clearly states that opponents should not be of that level for 1st level PCs. Speaking of powerful opponents, the only solo opponent they face is a wyvern rider that coincidentally falls from the sky in the building next to them. I guess there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but to me a solo opponent is supposed to be somewhat of a Big Bad Evil Guy, someone you'll be expecting to fight, a quintessential enemy, not just a happenstance...

I guess this solo falling from the sky sums up a major issue I have with this adventure: the PCs never seem to have any initiative over what happens to them, everything simply happens to fall on them as they follow the direction given by a NPC. To me this is a major flaw.

For the time being, I doubt that I'll be running this adventure, or if I do to take advantage of the great setting, story and background provided therein, I'll have to work to modify the encounters and the storyline significantly, which is a bummer.

All this being said, I haven't played the adventure so it's quite possible that some of my concerns are not supported or that I misunderstood some things. If you have read or played and feel differently than what I have expressed above, I'd love to hear from you.


Sky

 

[Morrus]

Sorry you didn't like it.

Obvously I'm not going to try and persuade you point-by-point why you should like something you didn't. Hopefully you got some enjoyment from it, though!

 

[RangerWickett]

However, as an (admittedly not wholly satisfactory) explanation for the flaws, the 3.5 version was E.N. Pub's first time producing an adventure, and the 4e version was its first ever product for 4th edition. They get better later in the line.

I'm not working on the revision, but it's obvious that a few of the encounters in the 4e version were added in to fulfill the XP requirements of the new edition. In some cases these are just side quests, but in a few instances it looks like they're weaving in whole new plot threads that give the campaign more depth.

We're working on the early stages of the next campaign saga, and if we go ahead with it, I'm confident our plan will better integrate the structure of 4th edition.

 

[Daern]

As someone who has run the module I would first defend it by pointing towards all the threads on this forum describing peoples' play experiences -They tend to be very positive!
Otherwise, I would just say that the set-up and story are unique and really compelling and that I treated most of the various encounters as optional and used them as appropriate to the story and the pace of the game. This certainly makes it more appropriate for experienced DMs.
In general I have come to see this huge size of these adventures as a strength because, while I end up dropping a great many sub-plots and encounters for the reasons given above, I realize that I could just as easily have used those pieces if the players made different decisions or expressed different interests. This make for a great amount of freedom and creativity along the Adventure Path.
I chuckle whenever one of my players looks at me and does a little "choo choo". Little does he know its more like a wide open highway! Cue Highway to Hell...

 

[Skyscraper]

Thanks for the replies. And sorry if my post sounds a bit gruff. I still stand by what I said, but I want to convey that I respect this work that comprises several very interesting elements for which my superlatives were perhaps not as colorful as those used in my (consequently not consctructive enough) critisism. I managed to cite Benny Hill for the first time in 15 years though!

I went and read Durn's adventure description in this board and, at the outset, congratulations on a great forum writeup. Interesting and good balance between too much and too few details. Fun read.

And, I admit, it has given me pause to consider the adventure path differently. There are some things that still don't jive with me in the Scouring of Gate Pass but perhaps I'm focusing too much on single encounters (such as the weasel one) and not enough on the big picture that includes some of the very strong upsides that the AP has to offer.

I'll have to reconsider my decision to avoid this adventure and perhaps work out a few of the disturbing (for me) elements (unnecessary encounters and too much Torrent intervention) and use those encounters I find cool in more of a free-form manner based on the good setting and story. Hmm. Food for thought.

**********

Short wish-list if you're going for another AP (probably would belong in another thread and who-the-heck-am-I-to-give-you-advice, but here it is if you wish to hear just this ordinary guy's opinion):

- free form adventures are cool (inasmuch as design permits). E.g. provide a setting, a storyline, a goal, then let the players find their way to that goal anyway they like, providing numerous encounter a portion of which will probably remain unused. The precise time or sequence of encounters should be left out. Of course, this can only be done for a number of encounters, then a goal is achieved, the PCs have levelled up once or twice and you constrict the game back to a chokepoint, whereafter you let the PCs loose again, and so on.
- skill challenges should be few and far between, not every other encounter. General skills challenges can be provided to the GM such as a footrace through the city, breaking out of a guarded area, and the like, usable in different instances.
- bring back the RP officially in the modules. Let PCs play their way out of key situations without providing a mechanic for it! It might come down to a (general) skill challenge or a battle, but the DM is not aware of where it's supposed to go, and that's the key point.
- don't pay XP if a player heals an NPC by the roadside

I don't pretend to know the ins and outs of designing APs or modules and some of you most obviously know better than I do on that topic. My intent is only to give my feedback and impressions and the above list is to hopefully make it constructive.

Sky

 

[Blackbrrd]

After DM-ing the Scouring of Gate pass I can tell you that it's a really good module. Although, as you note, there are some issues that you would want to resolve.

There are some silly encounters, but hey, they don't need to take much time and the characters are quite free to skip them. The group I played had quite a lot of fun with the weasel-guy. It's so ridicules it gets amusing. Most of the skill challenges can be run in such a way that they are amusing and a break from hard combat. My party loved the Dwarf-skill challenges at the end of the module and the resulting feast afterwards. Yeah, and the melancholic singer: it got one of my players start singing in character and really made the place feel alive. Think of the skill challenges as opportunities to create atmosphere and pulling the players into the game.

Regarding Torrent and how you run her: it's very much up to you as a DM. I ran her as a normal NPC in the first combat and stated out of character to my players that she wouldn't interact in combat after this because it's a huge party and having her help doesn't make combat any more fun, it just makes it slower. The way I ran her I am quite sure the players didn't feel led by the nose. They had a lot of opportunities to choose what actions their players would take.

Regarding the 10th level elite, there are so many ways for the characters to handle this situation that has nothing to do with combat I am nearly feeling we aren't reading the same module. The only way it will end with a fight is if your characters are looking for one and they should have plenty warning about it being a bad idea.

I think that the reason you feel the module is rail roading the characters along is that it might seem so after your first reading, but if you take the time to see how you can run it, you will notice that the characters have plenty of options the whole time and that the NPC's have their own motivation for their actions so it's relatively easy to adapt their behaviour to the characters actions.

For instance the players had gotten their hands on the quest item back from the Eladrin and the little devil knew about it but couldn't take it from the PC's. He also knew about the the Eladrin elite, so while invisible he blackmailed the characters for the item. It's not something that is written in the module, but the motivations for the devil NPC is quite clear - he will do anything to get his hands on it.

To sum it up: Some parts of the module are probably not as you would want it, but the basic plot, the NPC's and the motivations are very logical and easy to build upon as a DM. It's not at all like the typical WoTC modules that are very straight forward with no thinking necessary.

You can read the review I made after DM-ing the module here. I was quite enthusiastic as it was one of the best experiences after running a module I have had in over 10 years of roleplaying.
http://www.enworld.org/forum/war-burning-sky/275279-scouring-gate-pass-short-review.html

(Regarding XP: I levelled the characters using the xp-chart as a guideline instead of counting xp for every single encounter. It just doesn't fit in with how the module works, just as you noted)

 

[liggetar]

One thing I like about the War of the Burning Sky series is that it seems everyone, and every place, is well-described and real enough to me that as a DM, I am more able to deal with those monkey wrenches the PCs always seem to have about. More than once, my PCs have been interested in following up lead X,Y and Z instead of A, B and C that are presented in the book, and I find that I'm able to let them the vast majority of the time, simply because I have the information to do so. And even though you may have a set series of obstacles, where the adventure really shines is in the number of ways the PCs have to overcome them - and my players and myself agree that this is what makes a game really fun.

The XP charts make it easy for me to give level ups at appropriate places - this is the first game (after 10+ years DMing) where I've not kept track of XP, and just let the levelling go with the pace of the game, and I really like the freedom that comes with it.

And last, but most important to me, this adventure delves deeply into the shades of grey that should surround a conflict like this. I've always felt that it's those shades that help you stop and really think about your character - and make them that much more real.

 

[Bercilak]

I initially felt the same way as the OP about WotBS 1. But as I've continued the campaign, I was really thankful for that first adventure.

Even though my players were experienced, their characters weren't. A couple were new recruits to the Resistance, and the others were new to Gate Pass. They had no problem with being lead around a bit by Torrent, as she represented someone more knowledgeable about the town and the Resistance.

As the campaign progresses, and the PCs get more responsibility (and even their own NPCs to boss around), it's nice for them to be able to look back on their humble beginnings.

While some of the encounters are a bit silly, others seem less so. I wasn't reminded of Benny Hill at all by the woman in the burning building--it seemed a standard heroic trope to me, and it fit well with the attack going on. (The weasel was less connected, but my group enjoyed the encounter with the fighter and weasel wrestling and the other characters trying to convince the owner that he wasn't really hurting the weasel.) These encounters seemed to reinforce the idea that the heroes are at the start of their heroic journey. They rescue people, feeling heroic, but they also track down lost pets, something reflecting their humble beginnings.

-Berc

 

[aryus]

I have to agree that I didn't find everything in Scouring of Gate Pass to be to my liking, but the overall story arc is excellent. That's why I chose War of the Burning Sky as the campaign I will be starting tonight.

I won't give away all my changes in the case one of my sneaky players is browsing these boards, but I had a lot of fun altering the encounters. I don't care much for skill challenges so I've replaced many of them with minor quests that are accomplished through roleplay. Two things mentioned in the original post that also didn't jibe with me were the weasel skill challenge and the undead encounter. I changed that skill challenge to one in which a thief takes advantage of the chaos and absconds something from a PC. The undead encounter I made into one where a terrorist is bedding down with the PCs and many refugees in the crypt of a temple. He summons the undead and then kills himself and several refugees with alchemist's fire.

Anyway, I'm really excited to start DMing War of the Burning Sky. I hope I can do the story justice.

 

[Skyscraper]

Thanks for more thoughts and for constructive suggestions.

I've just bought the HS1 WotC module entitled The Slaying Stone. (Only minor spoilers ahead on HS1.) It's somewhat the opposite of The Scouring of Gate Pass in my opinion, in that it suffers from poor backstory and setting support, but it is to a certain extent open-ended and free-form in its encounters. It looks fun overall. I'm now thinking about throwing this adventure as a first opening adventure before setting the PCs into The Scouring of Gate Pass, allowing me some leeweay to drop some encounters that I'm less inclined to run. HS1 could occur somewhere in Ragesia, probably not far from Gate Pass.

This being said, the HS1 module asks that the PCs recuperate an item in a village populated by goblins. Although this item is specifically mentioned in HS1, I could trade it for anything else that suits my campaign. Do you have any ideas on an item that could be merged into the WotBS campaign and more specifically link to the Scouring of Gate Pass adventure, perhaps leading to the reason why the PCs want to meet Torrent? I have a few general ideas (other intel, such as names of resistance members and spies that was going to be given to Ragesia or to the better payer), but I wonder from those with experience with WotBS.

Thanks for any thoughts,

Sky