For the past several years, I've been running two campaigns. One campaign has (mostly) been a homebrew set in the World of Greyhawk. Yes, I'll adapt adventures to it from time to time, but the plan it follows - if any - is my own. The other campaign uses published materials, generally adventure paths, for its adventures. The Age of Worms, Savage Tide, and now the Wizards Heroic series of adventures - we're most of the way through Pyramid of Shadows at present.
When my homebrew campaigns were at their best, the players were well invested in their PCs and the setting. In particular, they cared about the recurring NPCs they met and they had a sense of where their home was.
Part of that came from having the time to interact with those NPCs, and adventures which the NPCs cared about as well as the PCs.
I've written before on how I really enjoyed the initial settings of both Age of Worms and Savage Tide - Diamond Lake and Sassarine are both great home bases. However, the promise that those settings gave was lost with adventures that took the PCs away from their home bases for too long. For AoW, you get the first adventure set around the town (and the Whispering Cairn), then you reach Three Faces of Evil and... oops... you're trapped in the mine for the duration of the adventure. In Savage Tide, off you go to nearby islands for the first adventures, and soon enough, you're on a boat to the Isle of Dread and you never see Sassarine again!
Why did we have all this background for these home bases when we weren't going to use them?
Both Keep on the Shadowfell and Thunderspire Labyrinth have strong home bases. Keep is exceptional in that it pays some attention to the changing reactions of townsfolk to the PCs as they go on their initial adventures. I feel it could do more once they hit the Keep, but for the duration of the adventure, the PCs are trotting back between the Keep and the town, and so it remains relevant (and there are also several NPCs worth interacting with).
Thunderspire has the potential to be a lot better than it was when I ran it; structurally, it's nicely set out and the PCs are going back and forth from the setting and the adventure sites. The NPCs in the home base also do care (somewhat) about what the PCs are doing and are happy to set their own quests. What it lacked, at least for me, were good sympathetic NPCs to engage the PCs. The Hall ended up being a place they went back between adventures to rest, not to catch up with friends - which is quite different to how Winterhaven worked in Keep, where the players liked several of the NPCs and built good relationships with them.
That aspect, of getting the players to care about the NPCs of the game world, can't be overemphasized in my opinion. We're happy to write heroic adventures where the PCs save the world, but all of this works so much better when the players care about the world they're saving!
This brings me to Pyramid of Shadows and some of the reasons I've been having so many problems with it.
The initial premise of Pyramid is actually quite good: it's the prison of a Tiefling ruler who came afoul of the drawbacks in pacts with fiends. At one time he ruled the area the PCs have been adventuring through in the previous two adventures, so this adventure should give them lots of insight into the past history of the 4E D&D setting!
Sadly, no.
Pyramid of Shadows displays one of the great weaknesses of the published 4e adventures and, no, I'm not talking about NPCs (which haven't been that bad). What I'm talking is about is providing an exploration component to the adventure and the ability to discover things.
Pyramid is a closed environment from which the PCs can't escape. It's also the longest of the heroic series (4 levels of adventure). That's a long time without access to the outside world and, unfortunately, it also means that any rapport you've been trying to build with the setting is also lost.
It's made worse by the encounters: basically, one fight after another. There are precious few opportunities to roleplay and, unfortunately, they're betrayed by all the NPCs being out for themselves: there is no-one the PCs can trust and build a rapport with. I'm particularly unimpressed by the first couple of times you meet manifestations of the Big Bad, he's unable to speak at all. Yes, the reason that he can't speak is great for the DM to know, but you've got to communicate it to the players for otherwise they'll just see it as One More Battle, and what a lot of battles this adventure has!
To be fair, the DM does have the ability to impart to the players what's going on, through the Remarkable Talking Orb, but I'm not happy with that solution: it's basically the only device there is, and feels tremendously forced. The PCs aren't given the tools to work out what's going on themselves: the DM has to explicitly tell them. Urg.
I would rather have liked to see the Pyramid littered with remnants of the Big Bad's past triumphs, allowing the PCs to realise how far he's fallen. As it is, it's too easy to run as One Battle After Another and with no NPCs and no exploration... it's turned into a rather tedious adventure.
I'm looking forward to finally moving on to P1, which doesn't seem as obscure as H3 is.
Is my dissatisfaction with Pyramid of Shadows partly due to my changing tastes with regard to D&D adventures? Honestly, I have to say that's part of it. I'm less satisfied with megadungeons and more interested in adventures that have some sort of point - and allow the PCs to interact with the campaign setting in ways beyond "we blow it up!"
Cheers!
When my homebrew campaigns were at their best, the players were well invested in their PCs and the setting. In particular, they cared about the recurring NPCs they met and they had a sense of where their home was.
Part of that came from having the time to interact with those NPCs, and adventures which the NPCs cared about as well as the PCs.
I've written before on how I really enjoyed the initial settings of both Age of Worms and Savage Tide - Diamond Lake and Sassarine are both great home bases. However, the promise that those settings gave was lost with adventures that took the PCs away from their home bases for too long. For AoW, you get the first adventure set around the town (and the Whispering Cairn), then you reach Three Faces of Evil and... oops... you're trapped in the mine for the duration of the adventure. In Savage Tide, off you go to nearby islands for the first adventures, and soon enough, you're on a boat to the Isle of Dread and you never see Sassarine again!
Why did we have all this background for these home bases when we weren't going to use them?
Both Keep on the Shadowfell and Thunderspire Labyrinth have strong home bases. Keep is exceptional in that it pays some attention to the changing reactions of townsfolk to the PCs as they go on their initial adventures. I feel it could do more once they hit the Keep, but for the duration of the adventure, the PCs are trotting back between the Keep and the town, and so it remains relevant (and there are also several NPCs worth interacting with).
Thunderspire has the potential to be a lot better than it was when I ran it; structurally, it's nicely set out and the PCs are going back and forth from the setting and the adventure sites. The NPCs in the home base also do care (somewhat) about what the PCs are doing and are happy to set their own quests. What it lacked, at least for me, were good sympathetic NPCs to engage the PCs. The Hall ended up being a place they went back between adventures to rest, not to catch up with friends - which is quite different to how Winterhaven worked in Keep, where the players liked several of the NPCs and built good relationships with them.
That aspect, of getting the players to care about the NPCs of the game world, can't be overemphasized in my opinion. We're happy to write heroic adventures where the PCs save the world, but all of this works so much better when the players care about the world they're saving!
This brings me to Pyramid of Shadows and some of the reasons I've been having so many problems with it.
The initial premise of Pyramid is actually quite good: it's the prison of a Tiefling ruler who came afoul of the drawbacks in pacts with fiends. At one time he ruled the area the PCs have been adventuring through in the previous two adventures, so this adventure should give them lots of insight into the past history of the 4E D&D setting!
Sadly, no.
Pyramid of Shadows displays one of the great weaknesses of the published 4e adventures and, no, I'm not talking about NPCs (which haven't been that bad). What I'm talking is about is providing an exploration component to the adventure and the ability to discover things.
Pyramid is a closed environment from which the PCs can't escape. It's also the longest of the heroic series (4 levels of adventure). That's a long time without access to the outside world and, unfortunately, it also means that any rapport you've been trying to build with the setting is also lost.
It's made worse by the encounters: basically, one fight after another. There are precious few opportunities to roleplay and, unfortunately, they're betrayed by all the NPCs being out for themselves: there is no-one the PCs can trust and build a rapport with. I'm particularly unimpressed by the first couple of times you meet manifestations of the Big Bad, he's unable to speak at all. Yes, the reason that he can't speak is great for the DM to know, but you've got to communicate it to the players for otherwise they'll just see it as One More Battle, and what a lot of battles this adventure has!
To be fair, the DM does have the ability to impart to the players what's going on, through the Remarkable Talking Orb, but I'm not happy with that solution: it's basically the only device there is, and feels tremendously forced. The PCs aren't given the tools to work out what's going on themselves: the DM has to explicitly tell them. Urg.
I would rather have liked to see the Pyramid littered with remnants of the Big Bad's past triumphs, allowing the PCs to realise how far he's fallen. As it is, it's too easy to run as One Battle After Another and with no NPCs and no exploration... it's turned into a rather tedious adventure.
I'm looking forward to finally moving on to P1, which doesn't seem as obscure as H3 is.
Is my dissatisfaction with Pyramid of Shadows partly due to my changing tastes with regard to D&D adventures? Honestly, I have to say that's part of it. I'm less satisfied with megadungeons and more interested in adventures that have some sort of point - and allow the PCs to interact with the campaign setting in ways beyond "we blow it up!"
Cheers!
