Anyone try fixing Scales of War

[mattcolville]

I was looking at a thread from 2009 on Scales of War and the opinion seemed to be the adventures were disconnected and often missing key plot elements.

Has anyone taken a stab at cleaning this up?

 

[Sarasani]

There is a very good and helpful site - pbworks. Try and google for Scales of War. Its one of the first hits you get. I have the link but this forum won't let me post it...

 

[tuxgeo]

There is a very good and helpful site - pbworks. Try and google for Scales of War. Its one of the first hits you get. I have the link but this forum won't let me post it...

Is this it?

 

[Sarasani]

Yes, that's it. There are notes for each part on suggested changes to make it all fit better. It works great as a sort of campaign handbook.

 

[jacktannery]

Don't forget to update the monster math to MM3.

 

[Jeremy]

We're starting Throne of the Stone-Skinned King and the wealth of backstory with the help of that Wiki and additions based on my individual character backgrounds and choices they've made in the game has made our campaign very rich. And as the scope increases in scale the payoffs are only going to get better.

Definitely correct the math, definitely read through the later adventures synopsis first so that you understand WHY some of the stuff is happening and can CHANGE things to fit your campaign without creating plot holes (or even fix plot holes the unmodified text has).

It's a fantastic framework for a campaign in my opinion.

http://imgur.com/a/0fXUa#0 <-- Pics of the campaign I plug at every possible opportunity ^_^

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

Scales of War has a brilliant underlying premise of Bahamut vs Tiamat and great ideas such as the fragment of Bahamut etc... but to call it an adventure path is to ascribe to it some sort of organisational framework that simply does not exist.

While the pbworks team did an admirable job of trying to get it to make sense and turn the encounters into something other than a collection of randomly-generated level appropriate monsters, I think most DMs would be better off taking the core concept, some of the locations, and then rewriting it more or less from scratch.

For me at least, trying to make it make sense takes even more work than simply doing a rewrite. And if I did do it, I would probably use Red Hand of Doom as the Heroic Tier.

 

[sabrinathecat]

The biggest rewrite needed is the big meeting to negotiate the various factions. It was horribly illogical and convoluted.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

(snip) It was horribly illogical and convoluted.

Yep, that's the entire pseudo/faux-adventure path in a nutshell.

 

[sabrinathecat]

Yep, that's the entire pseudo/faux-adventure path in a nutshell.

Someone told me it was one of the best Role-Playing sessions they'd had, after the DM completely rewrote it.

Overall, however, I did enjoy the experience, and I think Scales of War is overall a good series (once you get through all the typos and bad monster information transfers). I had a lot of fun taking a Fey-pact warlock from lvl1 through lvl30. Only got killed once (nearly three times), in spite of a pacifist miracle worker priest in the party.
I did have fun with it afterward too, when I was running my game after we'd finished that one (with another DM running Scales).
The party was attending a Conclave of Dragons. "The Red Dragon is obviously a priestess."
A: "What God?"
B: "Tiamat, probably"
Me: "Who?"
B: "No Tiamat in your world?"
Me: "Not anymore..."
Table chuckles.