Vocenoctum said:
Just as a question, but how much are you guys using the campaign as a campaign? I mean, it's a campaign from levels 1-20, like previous adventure paths. How do you "fit" that into a campaign? I know the adventures are relatively self contained and all, but if you're fitting individual adventures into your campaign, the "fit" will depend more on the adventure in question than any overarching Adventure Path concerns, nay?
I mean, if you're starting the adventure path at 1st level, as intended, then you need to make sure it fits in your chosen campaign world, sure, but you're not bound by what has come before in any great way.
Plus, you're talking months before it's even out and ready to be played. Seems like you have plenty of time for a TPK.
I think that perhaps some of us might think of the word "campaign" in a different way than you do. One of the difficulties with writing Forgotten Realms adventures for Dungeon, is that to adequately provide a good FR-specific adventure, you have to adhere to FR canon. You can't invent a leader of Daggerdale for the purposes of your module, because there's already a leader, and a fairly famous one, at that. It would be very disappointing to buy an adventure that purported to be a Forgotten Realms adventure, but put Waterdeep in the East, had an inserted backstory in which Baldur's Gate was levelled by giants, and in which Elminster had turned evil and was ruling the Dalelands with an iron fist. That's not what a FR fan would expect or desire.
One of the reasons I liked the Age of Worms campaign was because the adventure path provided me with some adventures that made use of Greyhawk canon, which is a pretty rare thing most of the time. However, if you're using a game world, published or not, that has its own canon, deviations from canon are just as odd and nonsensical as they would be in a published setting. Just as there is an established timeline of events for Faerun, there is also an established timeline for each individual Faerun and each homebrew campaign. If in Campaign A, Baldur's Gate was indeed destroyed, but in Campaign B it wasn't, then any published adventure that makes use of Baldur's Gate will require adaptation (or at least continuity handwaving) in Campaign A, but not in B. If you don't do either of these things, the players will start to ask, "Baldur's Gate? Didn't that get destroyed when we were playing that other group of characters?" The campaign isn't just one set of adventures, but all the adventures that hold to a certain set of continuity. For those of us who have long-running campaigns, throwing out continuity to start a new campaign from scratch might be a big deal.
This is just the problem with running written campaign settings. Eventually your group will deviate from canon. Certainly, you could do a "world reset" every time you rolled up a new bunch of characters, to snap back to a normalized canon, but for a lot of people part of the fun of playing is leaving a lasting legacy on the world, being able to--for example--put an X through Baldur's Gate on their map, and have it stay that way in future adventures.
Now, this is not usually a problem with homebrew settings. The homebrews are usually able to dump things like "the Isle of Dread" into "undiscovered territory", without disturbing continuity. But when "generic" books like the DMGII start publishing places like Saltmarsh, which are thereafter incorporated into campaigns, it starts to get hard to maintain continuity without avoiding these pregenerated locations.
The solution is, of course, to make the adventures generic and unobtrusive enough that they can be inserted without too much disruption. To a certain extent this means that you can only get involved in the world to a certain level. In AoW, it is possible that the Free City is destroyed, and if it happens to be Greyhawk City, it can make a major mark on continuity for future Greyhawk adventures. But AoW has few of those events. Most of the stuff that happens has no major effect on standard campaign standbys, and the locations that are provided are fairly easy to shuffle around, especially if you're playing in a homebrew. Even in a Greyhawk game, the locations are ones that are unlikely to have seen much use, and they seem to have been selected to flesh out locations that had not previously seen much use. Even if a group had previously played Doomgrinder, it's not likely that Diamond Lake had been written up by the DM in detail.
Using places like Saltmarsh which have recently been a subject of focus, and which are likely to already exist in many campaigns, obliges the DM to change things. Saltmarsh differs from Diamond Lake in that Saltmarsh has a write-up in a recent book, and therefore is likely to exist in many campaigns already, while Diamond Lake was until the Age of Worms simply a dot on the Greyhawk map. A lot of people are likely to be saying "Saltmarsh? But I put that over here," in Greyhawk games, FR games, and homebrew games alike.
It's not a big issue to make these little changes, but the likelihood that a particular location will tread on a campaign's continuity is something that probably should be taken into account when making these big, "official" adventure paths, even if we're given the caveat (which has been made by the Dungeon crew) that they aren't supposed to be canonical continuity. At any rate, it can't be a difficult thing to sidestep from a designer's point of view.
