D&D 5E Savage Tide Adventure Path

[Boarstorm]

I had forgotten about this AP... I may mine it for some goodness myself, since the Isle of Dread adventures would fit in quite well with Chult.

 

[Tormyr]

My biggest memory when running this was its extreme lethality. It was pitched towards experienced groups, but still, beyond the earliest levels, it felt like we were losing characters every other encounter, and that's a big problem in an adventure with heavy continuity links.

We got through the long sea voyage, and there were some good fun parts, but we called it quits after arriving at the island.

I had heard of how deadly Age of Worms was, but the players were cruising through during the play test rules. Even when I started getting the monsters in Basic and the MM, things did not get too much harder. Then the party lost the cleric to real life, and the updated encounter building guidelines came out. Ouch. 2 sessions ago, the 6 member party was mired in a sea of 7 mimics, which they handled after a drawn out fight. Last week they fought 3 invisible stalkers while walking across rotting beams above a stagnant pool with sharp pokey things sticking out. 2 went unconscious (1 twice), another fell in the water, and without the Dragonborn Sorcerer firing every lightning bolt he had, they would not have survived.

So yeah. Now that the rules of 5e are getting finalized, watch out on the lethality of the encounters. NPC spell casters especially. If you use a spell caster of the same CR, they are much scarier in 5e. In 3.5 they had a spell caster level that matched their CR. So they had the same level of spells as the party. In 5e, the spell casters have a level 50% above their CR. So an NPC could have spell levels above what the party has available. Even back when the characters were level 3, a wizard NPC had a couple castings of fireball available. I had to pull my punches on that one.

 

[Gundark]

. Age of Worms was the best of the three APs in Dungeon magazine.

Cheers!

Ugh. And Age of Worms was pretty horrid

 

[Storminator]

I thought Sasserine was pretty awesome, and they really should have included ties back to it in the later adventures.

Hopefully 5e solves the horrific grapple problem, because were lots of monsters with +40 grapple checks and Improved Grab. I think every single melee character died, including all the animal companions and cohorts.

One particular problem for me as a DM was the sailing adventure. It has a series of encounters laid out along the route, but it has the encounters listed twice, with vital info in each listing. So you have to keep flipping back and forth. I missed a lot of stuff and it was very frustrating to run. If I had to do that again I would photocopy those pages and splice the two lists together so I had all the info for each encounter consolidated.

PS

 

[Zardnaar]

Sasserine is great, I have added it to my 5E campaign but it was underused.

 

[MerricB]

I thought Sasserine was pretty awesome, and they really should have included ties back to it in the later adventures.

Hopefully 5e solves the horrific grapple problem, because were lots of monsters with +40 grapple checks and Improved Grab. I think every single melee character died, including all the animal companions and cohorts.

I think the Wizards designers learnt the lessons of 3E Grapple pretty well. Both 4E and 5E fix it by making the check just another ability (skill) check, rather than having size bonuses figure into it, and by having the scores of the monsters much lower. (Pathfinder halved the size bonuses, but it wasn't enough. Opposed skill checks have a completely different behaviour than normal checks when calculating success chances).

A giant crocodile (CR 3) grapples you - the escape DC is 16.

A tyrannosaurus (CR 8) grapples you - the escape DC is 17.

And you can escape by either a Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics) check.

Cheers!

 

[Vael]

Savage Tide has been on my list of "things I'd love to run" since 3.5, though some bad experiences with Age of Worms meant I didn't really DM again until 4e came out. I've thought about running Savage Tide in 4e, Pathfinder, Fate (either Strands of Fate or Fate Core with the Freeport campaign setting) and now 5e.

The main part I'd want to change, though, is the high-level play. I quite like the path up to Scuttlecove, but the stuff in the Abyss is less interesting to me. I'd be curious to hear how others changed these parts, if they did.

 

[ugulu]

Just in case anyone is still lurking - I'm in the process of learning 5e by converting Savage Tide. I've had the same feeling - that it rocks while focused in/around the city but that it might lag during the ship-based portion. I do like the Isle - I think we could have fun with that. Currently googling for good sources of 3.5 to 5e monster conversions - considering posting an Iron Cobra and Huecuva concepts but would love to see what others are doing with it. Figure on having to run some play tests to get a handle on how the mechanics works.

 

[Mistwell]

Just an update, still running my 5e players through this. Heading into the Bullywug Gambit chapter soon. My players resurrected the dead thief, Pinkus, which changed alllll sorts of stuff with the thieves guild raid. I switched things up, and made it so that the guild mistress (the Lady) was betrayed by Vanthus as well and trapped in her room with a minor demon (invisible) using an illusion of the guild mistress to continue to run the guild on Vanthus' behalf. When the players rescue her (which should happen next session), she will re-unit with Pinkus, and along with the players take back control of the guild (those thieves that are still alive after the party ran through them like a hot knife through butter), and will then hunt down Vanthus on the Lady's behalf as well as their patrons. I also added a metric crapton of traps to the thieves guild - because it's a thieves guild and had almost no traps!

I am considering switching the Black Pearl that releases the savage tide at the cove, to instead being a trapped container that held one of the Deck of Many Things cards (due to a link to something that previously happened to the adventurers).

 

[Herobizkit]

I have been cribbing Savage Tide to run for my players, and I've been looking forward to it for a few days... but now to hear that there's a large jungle exploration part and that the players are still butthurt over the sandbox exploration of Kingmaker makes me very leery of running it...