3.0 Wizards adventure path: war stories?

[LordMelquiades]

I've scoured through these boards, and not found anything on this subject, but apologies in advance if this is a re-hash of an old discussion...

Has anyone actually run (or attempted to run) the original Wizards 3.0 adventure path as a campaign? I mean right through, from the Sunless Citidel to the Bastion of Broken Souls. I am contemplating this, but as I read through the adventures (admittedly it's a once-over-lightly at this stage) it seems that the connections between them are generally tenuous. There are elements of shared back-story (Ashardalon pops up a lot), but that's about it.

To be fair, elements of the later modules do link back to the earlier ones (Ashardalon again), but that's not really the same thing. Running them one at a time, off-the-shelf, looks to me like it would be disjointed, much more episodic, discrete 'lumps' of adventure, rather than a dynamic, flowing campaign.

Are my comments fair? Has anyone taken steps to rectify these issues in their own games?

You just KNOW I'm looking to pinch stuff...

Cheers

 

[godfear]

Yea, I ran from Sunless Citadel through Heart of Nightfang Spire pretty much continuously, but as you say, the connection between them is tenuous at best. Still, I had fun coming up with the connector plots, characters and backstory, and everyone seemed to have fun.

As for things you can steal... I dunno, I just drew some semi-logical conclusions based on the NPCs presented, and added my own NPC antagonist to spur the party on. We took a lot of time to deal with character backstory issues and adventures in the times between the modules, too. I was kind of just building a generic D&D world as we went. It was going pretty well until Nightfang Spire got set on puree mode and started killing PCs left and right. Oh well. Next time, they'll be more careful. ; )

 

[pogre]

You have read Wulf Ratbane's story hour right?

 

[LordMelquiades]

Glanced through it. It's fun stuff, but (mainly due to its form and intent) it doesn't really address what I'm interested in - the linking of the adventures into an overall campaign. The impression I get as a reader is that the party's patron simply sent them out, one adventure at a time. That's a perfectly good approach, and one I've used and played with myself in the past, but I'm after more a DM's overview.

Am I just being lazy here?

 

[pogre]

Your original assessment of the series is correct. However, I like them for their modularity. I also think it's a natural consequence of having so many different authors involved. I really think a patron style campaign works best if you want to use the adventure line as is.

 

[Ravellion]

One of my DM's linked the first three together. Dragons destroyed my characters home town, which sent us to the citadel, but I think we found out there was someone behind the dragon attacks...

eh... I think I won't be much help. basically, if you want to link them, you'll have to edit them a bit.

Rav

 

[LordMelquiades]

Yes, and here we once again find the eternal stuggle, the struggle between 'the need to modify' and 'inherent laziness'...

 

[HeavyG]

We're playing through them right now. Just finished Lord of the Iron Fortress. The DM is running them pretty much as is, one after the other.

I have to say it's very tedious. Almost every encounter is a life or death struggle and everything is very much studied to remove any advantage the PCs might try to use, such as divination, invisibility and so on. For instance, my rogue has been pretty much useless for the last two adventures (he would have been useless in Heart of Nightfang Spire too, but I was playing a ranger at the time). Of course, that may be due to the fact that we are two levels below the recommended level (though we are 5 characters in the party and that helps).

Really, we're all eager to be rid of the last adventure.

 

[Patman21967]

The last one absolutely rocks....I love Bastion...I ran it as a climax to a campaign, without using the other mods, and we all loved it....I want to update it to 3.5 and try it with a new group..

 

[HeavyG]

Speaking as a player, the one that was most fun was the first one. It may have been because it was all fresh and new, though.

Speaker in Dreams and Standing Stones were also quite fun, because they weren't typical dungeon crawls.

Deep Horizons was actively boring. That one wasn't very tough, but it seemed like nothing much was happening. And the bat-men were a very obvious example of a creature whose sole purpose is to take away any advantage the PCs might have beyond brute strength.