D&D 5E It's Time To Rethink What An Adventure Path Can Be On Roll20

EN Publishing's epic Fifth Edition campaign of steam and soot comes to Roll20 with Island at the Axis of the World and the Campaign and Player's Guides.

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Steam and soot darken the skies above the city of Flint, and winds sweeping across its majestic harbor blow the choking products of industrial forges into the fey rainforests that dot its knife-toothed mountains. Since the earliest ages when the people of Risur founded this city, they feared the capricious beings that hid in those fog-shrouded peaks, but now, as the march of progress and the demands of national defense turn Flint into a garden for artifice and technology, the old faiths and rituals that kept the lurkers of the woods at bay are being abandoned.

The Unseen Court, the Great Hunt, and the many spirits of the land long ago conquered by Risur's kings no longer receive tribute, but they cannot enter these new cities of steam and steel to demand their tithe. The impoverished workers who huddle in factory slums fear monsters of a different breed, shadowy children of this new urban labyrinth. Even their modern religions have no defenses against these fiends.

Times are turning. The skyseers—Risur's folk prophets since their homeland's birth—witness omens in the starry wheels of heaven, and they warn that a new age is nigh. But what they cannot foresee, hidden beyond the steam and soot of the night sky, is the face of this coming era, the spirit of the next age. The
zeitgeist.

But if you frequent these forums, you likely have read that intro countless times and might even know it by heart. You might have copies of one of the greatest adventure paths in PDFs for Pathfinder, 4e, and 5e. So what does ZEITGEIST on Roll20 bring to the virtual tabletop?

Encounters ready to go. Every encounter is set up with color tokens linked to 5e character sheets with clickable actions to automatically roll dice to the chat window.

Handouts to draw the players into the action. Each adventure contains numerous art and informational handouts to draw the players into the story. The player's guide contains a dramatis personae of nearly 100 NPCs that you can reveal to your players over the course of the campaign. They can keep centralized notes against each NPC to share with each other.

Tools for when the players go off the beaten path. The campaign and player's guides come with maps of Lanjyr, Flint, and the RHC headquarters as well as 40 spare NPCs that you can drop into the game for those times when you need to quickly improvise.

Everything you need is just a click away. All the text is in Roll20 handouts which link to each other, NPC sheets, and the 5e compendium as well as send die rolls to the chat window so everything you need is close at hand.

Read the adventures and guides like a book. In case you don't have every version of ZEITGEIST known to humanity (or even zero versions) each handout comes with paging links so you can read the contents like a book from beginning to end through the external journal.

Saved prep time. All these details mean that nearly 100 hours have gone into preparing Island at the Axis of the World, the Player's Guide, and the Campaign Guide. The attention to detail means that you can focus your preparation time on making the story a memorable one for you and your players.

Happy gaming!
 

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Tormyr

Adventurer
How much social interaction is there in this one? One (actually 2 of them) of my groups they want to ALWAYS talk first, then only fight if forced. It's cool and adult; but a lot of APs and modules - especially old school ones - assume parties are fight first type groups...
ZEITGEIST and WotBS are special APs in my opinion. Choices matter and have consequences, and parties that attack first and ask questions later can really mess things up sometimes. While there is plenty of combat available, there are lots of opportunities for a DM to accommodate players who want to find other options than violence. As officers of the Royal Homeland Constabulary, the PCs are expected to bring people in warm instead of cold when possible. ZEITGEIST has lots of social interaction, and what people think actually factors in fairly heavily in the AP (hence the name).
 

Tormyr

Adventurer
These look great! Are you considering publishing versions for Pathfinder too?
Unfortunately, the grim reality is that there is not really a lot of market on Roll20 for Pathfinder, which likely drives a lack of products, which likely causes fewer PF games to be run on Roll20, etc. 5e has 10x the market share of Pathfinder on Roll20.


You could use the 5e products for the maps and tokens while creating your game with the PF sheet. You would then need to reenter the PF character sheets and come up with a few extra tokens where the types of creatures differed from the PF to the 5e version. You would also need to ignore the adventure text in the handouts and rely on PDFs instead.

In short, there would be a lot of work, but you would still have a head start over doing everything from scratch. Whether that is worth the price is up to you.
 




TheWayofPie

Explorer
Not particularly interested in the 5e version yeah :(
Feel that. Especially considering how well the 4e version plays to the strength of the system. 5e is not really well suited for this campaign in my opinion.

At least it gets more eyes on these damn good adventures though so more power to them!

Would be interested in PF2e port of this though if it ever happens!
 


MarkB

Legend
I hope the future of Virtual Tables is ease of use like this. Great work.

Hopefully in a few years we will have isometric fully integrated virtual tabletop experience. Roll20 is ok, but it sucks for things like elevation and multiple levels where VT should perform better than regular table top.
There are some out there. I don't know which software the group in this video use, or how user-friendly it is in practice, but visually it's very impressive.

 


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