Age of Worms - Likes/Dislikes? [MY PLAYERS KEEP OUT]

[Baron Opal]

Some spoilers here

A little spoilerage.

I only have Whispering Cairn. I was thinking of running a quick adventure to get them all to second level. Any ideas?

Actually, there is mini adventure in the Dragon magazine that was issued the same month that might be helpful. It helps establish a base for the PCs, gives them some xp and gives them a couple of items that just happen to be handy against swarms.

As implied above, Three Faces of Evil is easily the weakest of the adventures. Which, given that is the second adventure in the series, is saying something positive I think. If there is a hardcover, it will get the most rewriting. Even so, it is still a good adventure once you put some work into it. The three-way gang up is the most pressing concern for me as well. However, the faction that is most likely to come to the other's aid, the Hexorites, is the one you hit first.

I'm surprised that you found it difficult to convert, Abraxas. I wouldn't think that there was any conversion that you needed to do. I don't know the Dark Six very well, but I would imagine that the three temples would map easily enough to an Eberron equivalent. I run a homebrew game under the Arcana Evolved ruleset. One of the things that made it difficult for me to convert was the underlying cleric / divine assumptions of AE / Diamond Throne setting. That is, there aren't any. It's the first truly agnostic / atheistic setting I've come across, and that conceit is fully supported by the rules. But, it was an opportunity to see if magisters, mageblades or akashics would make the best cleric replacement.

They all do a good job, by the way.

 

[dungeon blaster]

I only have Whispering Cairn. I was thinking of running a quick adventure to get them all to second level. Any ideas?

I believe that several people have suggested running The Mad God's Key as a prequel to Whispering Cairn.

Search the Paizo messageboards and you will find tons of good info on everything related to AoW.

Yes, AoW is deadly. I nearly had a TPK a couple nights ago (although one player wasn't there and I should have accounted for this, but didn't). Here's my suggestions for making the Adventure Path more survivable.

1) Start them off at 2nd-3rd level.
2) Have more than 4 PCs and don't scale up the modules.
3) Give them Action Points or some-such.
4) Reduce or eliminate some of the encounters. There's too many fights, IMO, so this is something I am doing.
5) Encourage them to PLAN AHEAD. Brew potions, scribe scrolls, cast divinations, that sort of thing.

The modules vary in quality and difficulty. The ones that are most widely regarded as meat-grinders are: Whispering Cairn, Three Faces of Evil, Hall of Harsh Reflections, and Spire of Long Shadows. I haven't heard much about the later modules and I don't own them, so I can't tell ya how deadly they are. I know that Prince of Redhand can be quite difficult for paladins.

 

[demiurge1138]

My advice for Three Faces of Evil is to split it up. Put the three mini-dungeons in different areas around Diamond Lake. That way, you avoid the three-way gangpile issue, and you add some investigation and roleplaying to an adventure that'd otherwise be a straight hack-and-slash.

In my experience, the Age of Worms is going well. I've incorporated some things to make my player's characters not die all the time, many of them what Dungeon Blaster suggested - action points, 6 players with only occasional scaling, starting them off at 2nd level (although I did this back when there were only three of them). And so far it's been good clean fun. Except for those bits involving trudging through swamps or sewers.

The Whispering Cairn actually works very nicely as a one-shot, and is probably my favorite 1st level adventure ever. You might want to run your players through it, drop the written hints of bigger and worse things, and if your players don't bite, move on. But what there is to bite onto (worms in jars, cults in the mines) is cool enough that they'll probably go for it.

Demiurge out.

 

[ssampier]

I believe that several people have suggested running The Mad God's Key as a prequel to Whispering Cairn.

Search the Paizo messageboards and you will find tons of good info on everything related to AoW.
...

Hmmm, it looks like Dungeon 114 is out-of-print. They don't have a PDF to download as of yet.

Thanks. Maybe I can shoehorn Crucible of Freya somehow....

 

[TracerBullet42]

Well, the adventure has begun...

On saturday, we generated some characters and dove into the Age of Worms a bit. I was suprised at the mix of characters. We have a half-elven duskblade (scribe), halfling rogue (cook), human cleric of Olidammara (wine steward), elven monk (carpenter), gnome scout (miner), half-giant barbarian (hunter), and a dwarven wizard (architect/engineer).

If you look over that list again, you'll realize that with seven different people making characters, no two people chose the same race. I've got the freakin' United Nations of gaming going on here...

It was a fun beginning. We didn't get into the Whispering Cairn just yet, but spent some RP time in the local inn and had them run across the "other adventurers." I had them stop by the abandoned mining office from the Dragon magazine, but they didn't seem too interested in cleaning the place up. It just served as a private meeting place and somewhere to crash for the night. We concluded with them arriving at the Cairn, hearing the whispering/howling sounds echoing from within, and preparing to go in. We play again in two weeks. We'll see how things go...

 

[Festivus]

Hmmm, it looks like Dungeon 114 is out-of-print. They don't have a PDF to download as of yet.

Thanks. Maybe I can shoehorn Crucible of Freya somehow....

Keep trolling around on ebay and you might get lucky. I found mine (and a copy of 112 Maure Castle) after only a few weeks of looking.