For those that have run the adventure path modules...

SoulsFury

Explorer
I'm going to run a campaign starting with the Sunless Citadel and working its way up to the Bastion of Broken Souls. I was wondering:

Does the Sunless Citadel get 4 first levels to 3rd level like it says?

Does the Forge of Fury get the 3rds to 5th?

Speaker in Dreams from 5th to 7th?

The Standing Stone from 7th to 9th?

Since the Heart of Nightfang Spire doesn't start till 10th level, what adventure would you suggest to fill the gap or does the Standing Stone get them to 10th?

The Heart of Nightfang Spire get them to 13th?

Deep Horizon get them from 13th to 15th?

Lord of the Iron Fortress from 15th to 17th?

Since the Bastion of Broken Souls doesn't start till 18th, what adventure would you suggest to fill the gap or does the Lord of the Iron Foress get them to 18th?

Thanks!

Nik
 

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i can't speak for all of the modules, but i've run heart of nightfang spire, and it's brutal. i killed off more pc's in that module than i had previously in the whole campaign. i don't know if my pc's were just not going about it the proper way, but the difference in party levels really increased over the course of that module.

Just beware when you run it.
 


Don't worry, SoulsFury. Exact planning of leveling isn't needed, if you calculate experience based on each characters level, not on party average (so called Forgotten Realms method). That method corrects the levels to right average, even though PCs were killed and lost levels.

The experience table is self-correcting, I think.
 

I haven't run any of them (though I wouldn't mind running 'Sunless Citadel'), but my impression after reading through all of them but 'Sunless Citadel' was that they weren't particularly good and probably followed the usual TSR trend of making the suggested levels too low for the challenges involved. For a long term campaign, for most groups, the difficulty does not have to be tournament level. One has to remember that in the old days, the minimum suggested level of a module was often based on the assumption of 8-12 players, and even now, my suspicion is that the minimum suggested level of the adventure path modules is only going to playable for 6-8 characters in most cases with a reasonable tough and experienced DM.

I think one of the biggest problems with published modules is that even in the case of some of the best ideas the author doesn't have the space to tell you how he himself would run the story and much of the detail is left out. This means that there really isn't anything like 'run it as is'. I generally find I need one pages of notes for every 4 pages of published module before I feel comfortable running it, so in general I expect it to take a week to work up a regular sized published module for play. Expect to do that work, and be prepared to add a story to what is usually just a disconnected series of encounters. In particular, most published modules are woefully lacking in NPC's to have dialogue with.

If I'm running a whole series of modules I generally expect to link them to together with a bit of wilderness adventuring and semi-random encounters (meaning random encounters that have had the details fleshed out before starting the session). I very the length and number of these 'side-treks' depending on how many levels I need the party to gain. In particular, with the published modules you list the question is not whether the previous module can take the party to the minimum suggested level, but whether it can take a party to the middle of the range of suggested levels. I don't think that taking the party to the minimum level is a good goal for a long term campaign, as it is likely to result in a higher than desirable turnover in characters for even experienced players.

Drawing upon my personal experience as a DM, I wanted to follow the then adventure path of B1, X1. But B1 was woefully short on story, which forced me to completely rework the map so that a more linear progression would naturally occur, as well as introduce a few NPC's and flesh out other ones to give the PC's some knowledge of what they are involved in and a sence of purpose. Since X1 was to follow, it was reasonable to fill in the details of the temple with icons that pointed towards X1's final encounter. These weren't just random evil guys, these were would be servants of those that held the black pearl of power that would be the goal of the next adventure, and naturally they also had the map of how to get there. The adventures were then linked by a voyage to a seaport. Along the way the party killed a pair of ogre bandits that had been terrorizing a small farming community, fought off assasins of the evil cult, got in a barroom brawl with some orcs, and dealt with a pick pocket. In thier quest to hire a boat to take them to the isle of dread I introduced some NPC's I planned to make use of later. Once on the isle of dread I fleshed out a voodoo cult among the natives and added so forth.

So, basically what I'm saying is that while published modules can be alot of help, don't expect them to do your job as DM for you.
 

Great info guys! Thanks! I've run the Sunless Citadel before for 2 2nd level characters and they loved it and successfully navigated it. It was tricky for them but they did it farely well. I'll be keeping a close eye on the levels and probably throwing in a fair bit of side treks. I didn't know how tough these adventures were.

Nik
 

Celebrim - you just listed the reasons that I don't do many modules. We did RttToEE, just to say we did I think. We had some good game - despite what people say there's some good role play in spots. But I really don't think it saved me any work. All the time I spent making notes I could have just done it myself.
 

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