Adventure Path Help Please

[Netherstorm]

These recent posts have been very helpful. Thanks! Reading both the adventures and the suggested tweaks, I can tell you that there is PLENTY enough story and role-playing for what my group wants.

On the upper levels, I'm concerned about my laziness in fixing the math will lead to a problem, but I suppose I have quite a while to worry about that.

I'm also interested in hearing other reports of people who had good experiences with it.

I made a thread on the Scales of War DM Group forum about the epic tier of Scales. You may have to sign up to the group to read it. I detailed every single encounter, the modifications I made, and how each encounter went when I ran it. Check it out here.

 

[klofft]

I made a thread on the Scales of War DM Group forum about the epic tier of Scales. You may have to sign up to the group to read it. I detailed every single encounter, the modifications I made, and how each encounter went when I ran it. Check it out here.

Thanks. I look forward to reading that. For whatever reason, I followed your link and I didn't have to sign up for anything (though I would be happy to).

 

[Unwise]

Further to [MENTION=6687664]fenriswolf456[/MENTION] 's comments.

Kalad is a useful friend for them to have. What I do is having him being their wingman. For instance he and his paladin mates hold the portal open while the PCs go through, this helps me skip the boring Wraith fights in Umbraforge. He also heads up the investigations to guard and shut down that portals once the PCs report them. Generally he is their first port of call for passing on jobs they don't want to do. It is good, as it makes them feel like he is part of the team, despite being abscent.

Amyria is a more difficult one. How do the PCs have any attachment to her if she has no definable personality or history? What I did is make her a Deva that comes in the form of a 14 year old girl. I made her a pacifist cleric who powers all of her heals from self-sacrifice. So she is very effective at what she does, but the PCs are very protective of her and don't want her to heal too much as it hurts her. This stops them from trying to bring her on missions with them too often.

As for the "big reveal" in the Mottled Tower, the reason they end up starting the adventure is that Megan from the Farstriders has discovered a terrible secret and assassins are trying to kill her before she can tell anyone. It turns out that <drumroll> Sharshan is the bad guy! Oh shock, oh horror. Any competent group has reported him to the authorities half a tier ago.

I'm afraid that I can't help much with advice on the skill challenges. My group really has little interest in social interactions with NPCs, which is a shame. Things like that never go over well. I would suggest maybe adding in some encounters with assassins half way through the negotiations or what have you though. Maybe a seperate skill challenge to track down the assassins, doing so helps the main skill challenge.

 

[fenriswolf456]

Further to @fenriswolf456 's comments.

Kalad is a useful friend for them to have. What I do is having him being their wingman. For instance he and his paladin mates hold the portal open while the PCs go through, this helps me skip the boring Wraith fights in Umbraforge. He also heads up the investigations to guard and shut down that portals once the PCs report them. Generally he is their first port of call for passing on jobs they don't want to do. It is good, as it makes them feel like he is part of the team, despite being abscent.

Amyria is a more difficult one. How do the PCs have any attachment to her if she has no definable personality or history? What I did is make her a Deva that comes in the form of a 14 year old girl. I made her a pacifist cleric who powers all of her heals from self-sacrifice. So she is very effective at what she does, but the PCs are very protective of her and don't want her to heal too much as it hurts her. This stops them from trying to bring her on missions with them too often.

As for the "big reveal" in the Mottled Tower, the reason they end up starting the adventure is that Megan from the Farstriders has discovered a terrible secret and assassins are trying to kill her before she can tell anyone. It turns out that <drumroll> Sharshan is the bad guy! Oh shock, oh horror. Any competent group has reported him to the authorities half a tier ago.

I'm afraid that I can't help much with advice on the skill challenges. My group really has little interest in social interactions with NPCs, which is a shame. Things like that never go over well. I would suggest maybe adding in some encounters with assassins half way through the negotiations or what have you though. Maybe a seperate skill challenge to track down the assassins, doing so helps the main skill challenge.

Ahh, right, the 'I can't tell you in this message, meet with me instead' trope. I must have blanked out on the awfulness of this blatant hook. Of course she could tell, he's already trying to kill her ... what's he going to do, kill her more if she says? And yes, certainly not difficult to discern for oneself. Sarshan supplied the goblins, he almost supplied the orcs, he supplied the gnolls, the githyanki had tons of mercenaries ...

Now that I see it again, I'll have to replace her with someone else so the hook is more believable ... nevermind that she's a hardened combat veteran who rivals the PCs.

My players are wanting some more RP and interaction. And most of the skill challenges don't seem too bad. I'll likely scale down the leadership skill challenge. The middle of a war in which you're currently losing is not the time to hit the campaign trail. Whoever designed it either forgot that there was an actual war going on, or blanked on the fact that it actually takes a few days to travel to different locations, especially Brindol.

As to Amyria, I agree, there's very little depth there. And another slip, I don't understand why Amyria _Scion of Bahamut_, goes to pray at the shrine to Ioun, when there's a shrine to Bahamut literally like 2 doors away ... Why I wanted her to at least accompany the PCs for a bit. As written, she assists in one whole fight in the entire series, and is otherwise just there to say "Hey PCs, go here and do stuff". I'm liking your idea, and may steal and modify the concept to fit into my own plans.

 

[klofft]

I made a thread on the Scales of War DM Group forum about the epic tier of Scales. You may have to sign up to the group to read it. I detailed every single encounter, the modifications I made, and how each encounter went when I ran it. Check it out here.

Netherstorm,

I have been having an absolute blast reading your notes this week. I'm almost done and I'm sad that it will be over. (If anyone has anything even approximating this for Heroic or Paragon, you'd be my hero forever.)

Couple questions: Normally, you had 6 characters, but it seems you didn't often add stuff. How much do you think that contributed to the ease of some of the encounters? Also, it seems these characters were fairly well-optimized. For example, I don't know Epic Tier AP at all, but I can't figure out how characters got NACs around 50. It seems 40 would be fairly high (though not unreasonable). Likewise, a skill bonus of +30 would seem pretty high, but it seems they had much higher.

I'm inclined to just steal all your suggestions wholesale, but I wanted to make sure I wouldn't create a slaughterhouse; my players are not ineffective at building, but I'd call them much more "average" than "optimized."

 

[Netherstorm]

Coo,l I'm glad you checked that thread out!

We had 6 players for the first adventure of epic, then we dropped to 5. It's pretty easy to scale up for 6... I'd just divide the total xp by 5 and add that much xp worth of monsters (usually it ended up being one more monster).

As far as the high defenses, usually a PC would have one or two really high defenses and then 2 that were pretty low. Mari the sorcerer, for instance, had a 51 will, but I virtually could not miss her AC, REF, and FORT.

Skill bonuses are easy to come by. Many times an item will give you a power or property and throw in a skill bonus to sweeten the deal. Also, our wizard took the Sage of Ages epic destiny which gave him huge skill bonuses.

As far as notes on the other tiers, things that jump out at me:

(Spoilers)

- The first fight of the first adventure is awesome
- The main bad guy in rivenroar was not effective even years ago, you will definitely need to fix up that encounter
- The Nexus.. and heck, the entire second adventure, is absolutely awesome. One thing you will need to do is put a key on a dead dark creeper in an encounter leading up to the nexus. It is needed for the third adventure.
- The umbraforge adventure has its' problems, but once the PCs get to umbraforge it is really great. They have the freedom to explore it as they see fit.
- Sarshan is a weapons dealer, and you may want to create "Chaos Ore" blades that he's selling to the monsters of the region. Give them some kind of power.. this has been discussed on a forum somewhere. The chaos ore ties into the lost mines of karak. Running into monsters with those blades in each adventure will help drive home the story.
- Lost mines feels kind of random, but there's a lot of cool stuff. The final fight is awesome, but deadly. This one ties into red hand of doom a bit.
- Den of the Destroyer is OK. The bounty hunter solo is no threat at all. You should definitely give him and overhaul, maybe make him an elite and give him some sidekicks. Or revise the stats of his summoned animals (they were useless)
- Temple between is very good, though that huge temple map is a big pain to draw. The assault on the city is awesome. You should read up on mounted combat for the final fight (the general is poorly foreshadowed - the pcs will be expecting to fight Sarshan. You may want to somehow have the pcs hear about the general or see him flying above the sky on his dragon, perhaps even have him swoop down and breathe on them back in rivenroar or something)
- Mottled tower is AWESOME, start to finish. The green dragon fight is a highlight.
- The githyanki stuff is fantastic. The airship fights are one of the high points of the whole path.
- Haven of Bitter Glass is great, but be careful how you handle the bad guy. I just threw him at the PCs and it was pretty much a TPK. This adventure contains one of the only "roleplaying encounters" in 4e, something they should have done a lot more of.
- Stone-Skinned King is the low point of paragon, not because it's bad, but because it doesn't have much to do with anything. The final fight is great, though.
- Garaitha's Anvil was cool but I never understood the whole planar portal deal.
- The final githyanki adventure is fantastic, and contains the very best encounter of the entire path (the one where the PCs are on an astral skiff while githyanki are on a floating stone head firing ballistas while red dragons charge the heroes)

And one thing you may want to consider... The 3.5 adventure "The Red Hand of Doom" is a prequel to this campaign. It's supposed to be really great. I've always wished i could have converted it and run it before Scales.

 

[klofft]

Thanks, Netherstorm!

Between this thread, the pbworks wiki, and your epic notes, I have enough to check and tweak the whole damn AP!

I finished reading your epic notes this afternoon and I was pretty sad it was over. They were great.

Overall, it seems the paragon tier seems strongest - or, at least, I find the fewest negative comments about that section. I've yet to find a comprehensive re-do on any of those adventures.

Oh, and I have played the Red Hand of Doom already. Our first party TPK'd at the battle for Brindol (the snipers did them in). We created a new 9th level party to pick up the story after Brindol and they were TPK'd in the fortress fighting the erinyes in close quarters. Then we quit and tried a different set of adventures.