Changing gears mid-campaign?

[NewJeffCT]

A little over a year ago, I read a couple of good adventures that started an adventure path - Burnt Offerings and The Skinsaw Murders - the first two parts of Rise of the Runelords. (I was using a version converted to 4E) I liked Skinsaw because it was a lot different than what I run normally.

However, once the party was into Skinsaw in game, I picked up the next three modules in the Adventure Path and was not really excited by them. They seem a bit too straightforward to me - Event A to Encounter B to Encounter C to Event D - without a lot of deviation. Plus, while there are some good encounters, it seemed a bit too standard to me (Ogres in Hook Mountain, then Giants in Fortress of the Stone Giants)

So, while I like the characters in game and everybody is at level 8, I don't really have much inspiration to continue on the current AP.

Has anybody run into this situation before? If so, how did you handle it? I'm going to put the question to my group later, but wanted some ideas first as well.

1) Start a new campaign from level 1
2) Continue with Rise of the Runelords, with me (the DM) sucking it up
3) Continue with the same PCs, but go in a totally different direction (any ideas for a level 8-12 adventure for 4E?)
4) Continue with the same PCs, but go in a different direction and keep Rise of the Runelords in the background (i.e., mix in a few RotRL events/encounters here & there)
5) Do something else altogether? (what?)

My initial idea was to run a higher level version of Kingmaker (another Paizo AP), but now I'm not so sure.

 

[Jack7]

I have run into this situation before, numerous times.

I think a lot will depend on what you want to do and what the players really want to do.

Since I have a world setting in which we have been playing for a long time now, I have some pretty easy solutions in my case.

1. go somewhere else in the world
2. the party is given a new or more important mission which over-rides their current one
3. I have a lot of different kinds of adventures and missions already on line, in various stages of development, so I can pick among those
4. I can go to something else and then come back to what I'm displeased with later when I've had a chance to modify or adapt or improve it
5. I can start different campaign along the lines of the reasoning given for 2 above - I keep about 2 campaigns on standby, and three or four secondary missions on stand-by at nay given time.
6. Play as a different party (there are 4 parties in my fantasy setting, one Byzantine/European, one African, one Asiatic, and one composed of creatures from another world, such as Elves, Dwarves, Giants, etc) - sometimes these different parties work together on a single mission, often they have separate adventures


If you don't have a world setting, just various adventure games, then to me the best choices you listed are:

3) Continue with the same PCs, but go in a totally different direction (any ideas for a level 8-12 adventure for 4E?)
4) Continue with the same PCs, but go in a different direction and keep Rise of the Runelords in the background (I.e., mix in a few RotRL events/encounters here & there)
5) Do something else altogether? (what?)

If you or your players like to occasionally play different games (for instance we play wargames and sci-fi games and ARG and pulp games and horror games in addition to fantasy), then you might try on a different type of game altogether, and come back to your current game later.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Let your players decide. Sprinkle a few hooks to other possibilities in the game along with the one that continues the AP. Your players will pick the one that sounds most interesting to them.

Develop a few notes about what is happening with these other situations and enough material to run a session for them should one of them be chosen. Once you know what the players are interested in, you can devote more time to fleshing out full adventures for that hook.

 

[NewJeffCT]

If you or your players like to occasionally play different games (for instance we play wargames and sci-fi games and ARG and pulp games and horror games in addition to fantasy), then you might try on a different type of game altogether, and come back to your current game later.

Good ideas overall, but I think most of the group is there for D&D. Plus, I don't really know enough about any non D&D system to run it even remotely competently.

Maybe somebody else can run a one-shot while I retool & re-energize?

 

[wingsandsword]

I once took a campaign and changed the entire tone of it in midstream. . .but it was part of the overall plot.

The campaign was set, at least at first, in a semi-realistic version of Earth in the late 12th century, with the PC's being pilgrims on the 3rd Crusade. Only one PC had any magic, and that was a wizard with a very weak spell list who had to hide his magic from the Church). Foes other than mundane animals and various humans were rare, I think they dealt with undead once in the catacombs beneath Paris, and they may have encountered one or two mythological monsters along the way.

Halfway through the campaign, after a long and gritty march across Europe into the Holy Lands, the PC wizard disappears one night, and he later comes back (in the same session, but a few nights later in-game) with a much more powerful wizard who wanted to reveal the truth about the world to the PC's to recruit them to a higher cause.

In truth, the world was far more magical in antiquity, but magic had been dying over the 1500 years or so because of the acts of a primeval goddess of chaos that was devouring all magic and seeking to reduce the world to a dead-magic husk where mankind would never be able to stop her from one day arising and devouring all life. The deity was a version of Tiamat (a blend of the literary Babylonian version and the D&D Dragon Queen) with Lovecraftian Cthulhu-esque aspects added on.

So, the PC's are now working for an order of mages trying to preserve what magic is left in the world, along with the few surviving demihumans (a few hundred elves and dwarves living in isolation, as the dwindling magic made the birth rate for demihumans and monstrous races decline, and most monsters were hunted to extinction in the Dark Ages).

The PC's ended up travelling the world, to fight the Cult of Tiamat to weaken her hold on the ley lines of the world to allow for a final battle where they would sever her ties to the magic of the world and let magic return normally.

I strongly implied as the DM that our "real world" was the world that would exist if they failed: a world where magic and monsters are only legends nobody seriously believed ever existed, and societal and environmental decay are making the long-term outlook for humanity pretty bleak.

In the end, when they destroyed the Temple of Tiamat on Atlantis, the world faded to white and when things came back, it was a 3e setting (this was my last AD&D 2e game), and as a postscript magic began to flow into the world, allowing Sorcerers to appear, the demihumans to slowly repopulate, and more and more clergy began to discover spellcasting instead of it being the very rare miracle-worker ect.

 

[Gilladian]

I burned out on Rise of the Runelords in just about the same place you did; Hook Mountain. I realized that as DM, I really like a more free-flowing game than the adventure path allowed. I wanted to be able to put MY adventures into the game.

So I would suggest talking to your players and either starting a new campaign, or allowing the game to veer off into some other channels. You can still use some RotR stuff, if you like it. But don't EVER force yourself, as a DM, to run what you're sick of. The game will go sour on everyone if you're not enjoying it.

If someone else can run a brief game (a one-shot, or even something that last 4-6 sessions) to give you a break, so much the better. That's what happened with us, and it worked very well.

 

[the Jester]

4) Continue with the same PCs, but go in a different direction and keep Rise of the Runelords in the background (i.e., mix in a few RotRL events/encounters here & there)

Caveat: I run a pretty sandboxy campaign and haven't read RotR.

But regardless of the adventure, I'd go for "Let the pcs decide" with a healthy dose of #4 here.

 

[NewJeffCT]

Caveat: I run a pretty sandboxy campaign and haven't read RotR.

But regardless of the adventure, I'd go for "Let the pcs decide" with a healthy dose of #4 here.

Thanks - the feedback I've gotten so far is to not start an entirely new campaign, but pretty open to anything.

 

[NewJeffCT]

As another aside - are there any adventure paths out there that you can just enter midstream? Kingmaker is not really the best for that, as the early exploration is kind of important.

 

[Krensky]

As another aside - are there any adventure paths out there that you can just enter midstream? Kingmaker is not really the best for that, as the early exploration is kind of important.

If you're wiling to adjust the encounters, Jade Regent starts off in Sandpoint and is a much more character oriented AP with the PCs escorting Ameiko over the Crown if the World and to Tian.

It is set a few years after Runelords though, four if I remember right and assumes Tsuto is dead and Ameiko is alive.