Build your own adventure path

[Psychotic Jim]

Adventure paths are something I’ve always felt ambivalent about. On the one hand, they’re often filled with cool ideas and detailed to a high degree, useful to a dm with a lack of time or inspiration. On the other hand, many are fairly linear and aren’t really customized for the home group that homebrew adventures could be.

However, one idea I’ve been toying with is building my own adventure path. That is, taking unrelated adventures from various different sources and custom-fitting them together and filling out the blanks with my own material. That way, I think you could get the best of both worlds.

For example, one idea I had for a custom-built adventure path for 3e/pathfinder was what I called “When the Stars are Right”. This would start off with one or two of the first modules from the Pathfinder Second Darkness adventure path. Basically, ominous forces (the drow in the official Second Darkness adventure path) call down stars to fall from the sky. Since I’m a bit tired of drow at this point, I probably would follow this with a few fleshed out ideas from Malhavoc Presses’ When the Sky Falls. It’s a kind of an event book for adventures involving falling meteorites and the like. These would probably be a bit more free form and let the players have a variety of choices of what to respond to. Eventually, the catastrophes caused by falling stars might weaken the dimensional barriers enough for the events of Hyperconscious (also a Malhavoc book and vaguely linked to When the Sky Falls) to occur. Basically a lot of aberration and cosmic weirdness.

Where it would go after that probably would determine on the players. If they wanted to explore the stars directly, I might have them find a spelljamming ship and take to the stars. There’s probably something from Dragon star or Spelljammer I could run in that case. On the other hand, if they wanted to explore the planar breaches, I could have them explore some of the parallel worlds and built in adventure seeds from Beyond Countless Doorways.

So basically, this “build your own adventure path" idea is just mixing and matching different resources and altering them to fit your game. So I was interested to hear other people’s ideas of what they’ve done along these lines. What sort of “build your own adventure path” campaigns have people run or played in in the past? What Ideas have you thought about?

 

[Crothian]

I do this all the time. I don't call them advbentrue paths but it is a set of adventures linked together by an over all plot. The current camapign is that in only the loosest sence. It is a scavernger hunt of epic proportions. What they need to gether they get in remote places so I can use most modules in this without a problem. In between they have found an enemy force (mind flayers) working against them, had to win over some potential allies, and this week are going to talk to the High King of the dwarves, embark on a secret mission one of the PCs planned without telling anyone else, and then travel to the land of the halflings for information on their next travel location.

 

[KidSnide]

If not for the recent popularity of published APs, I would have described this as the "normal" way to build a non-sandbox style campaign. You take your own flexible story line and identify places where you can slip in the modules that you like the most. You can then either take the bad guys from the modules and use them more broadly in the campaign, or you can take your own BBGs and make them ultimately responsible for whatever the villains in the modules are doing.

This style of campaign has the additional advantage that you can respond to what your players are doing. Whenever you have a couple modules to choose between (and you like them both), you can set them up as a branching point at which the PCs can do one or the other. And, of course, there's nothing to stop you from starting with a published AP and ripping out half (or more, or fewer) of the modules, replacing them with other published adventures or material of your own making.

-KS

 

[meomwt]

I've gone even further: I decided that I'd write my own AP.

Yes, I know, I must be mad. Hear me out.

Basically, I started out the campaign with the PC's working in the Militia for a small town which had seen an increase in attacks from a nearby tribe of goblins. Having been instrumental in fending off an attack, they were sent to find out why the goblins were behaving in this way.

My over-arching plot has them beating up the goblin leaders and discovering that there is a new priest in town; following clues to an enemy castle and infiltrating it before a bunch of envoys from other tribes arrive; finding out that the priest in the goblin tribe wasn't alone and that there's a human cell in a nearby city; cleansing a nearby village of cultist troops; following clues into a major Dungeon Crawl to retrieve an Artifact to use against the Cult; before finding the location of their hidden Temple and storming the Inner Wards.

In amongst all the Cult stuff, there is also personal stories of a conflict involving a Thief who turns Assassin and undertakes a bloody revenge, a Bard who is not all he seems, and the morality of mercenaryness. It should take them all the way up to 15th level if it all works out.

Now, it would be silly to write all that out in advance, so I have been keeping just ahead of where the players are, so as to better tailor encounters or plotlines as things progress.

As it happens, the PC's jumped ahead of the Path (as it were), choosing to go to the Village overtaken by Cultists ahead of their trip to the City. It's meant re-jigging some encounters to take account of level differences and changing over bits of plot which were in the wrong order. And we're playing in another DM's game right now, which means I have been able to play catch-up and improve the Village encounters significantly. There are now opportunities for side-quests in that area if they want them, though they won't be essential to the plot.

Check out Genesis and An Arc (which looks at where my AP started) and Libram of BRICKOs (the tools I've been using) in my Blog to see what my design methods have been. When I get time in between writing the next adventure, I should add further updates.

Hope this helps!

 

[IronWolf]

If not for the recent popularity of published APs, I would have described this as the "normal" way to build a non-sandbox style campaign. You take your own flexible story line and identify places where you can slip in the modules that you like the most. You can then either take the bad guys from the modules and use them more broadly in the campaign, or you can take your own BBGs and make them ultimately responsible for whatever the villains in the modules are doing.

I too would have said this was the fairly normal way for the DMs of past to have built campaigns. Link together a set of adventures into a campaign of arc. Perhaps adventures from various dungeon magazines and published modules glued together with some work by the DM to have them fit into a single over reaching theme.

I thought adventure paths just helped further reduce the work load for the DM by taking away the need to glue several disparate modules together to form this larger campaign arc.

 

[Mark]

This might help -

http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/154448-free-adventure-path.html