Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Seravin" data-source="post: 971721" data-attributes="member: 6783">Heck, it's great for a week.  It took my party a month or so of playing to even do half of those things - but then we only play 1 four hour session a week.What level did you start the characters at and what level are they now?  It sounds like they're right around 3rd or 4th level - which is about right for the bone-creature-cleric you created...You're going to have to be careful with the wandering monster numbers, or you're going to end up with more disasters like the warg-encounter.  Cutting down the hit points works reasonably well.  The danger of doing that however is that the damage potential of the creature still remains the same.  The monsters can still potentially deal out a lot of damage - for monsters weaker than the party this isn't a bad thing as the monster isn't going to stick around very long with the reduced hit points.  For monsters about the same strength as the party or stronger it can still be violently lethal.You'll want to check the treasure levels too.  I left them as is to see what would happen.  The end result is that the party is ridiculously rich - and they're happy for it.  As a consequence of all the extra loot and magic items I started to treat the party as 1 level higher for purposes of xp's starting about 9-10th level.  The party is pretty happy about things though.Did your group get the ring of water elemental command?  If so did they get it with all powers on?  Or do they get to work for it?Things to watch for in the first book:If your party tracks the red-haired man to the mines I suggest you ensure that they are at least 3rd, if not 4th level before they get to the bottom of the mines.  The final encounter is going to be tough.  Note that the fighter has boots of speed.Consider placing a large city within a few days of Milbourne or Thurmaster so the party has some place to sell their loot.All in all, the 1st book is the easiest to convert to 3e - it's mostly just a matter of watching the number of wandering monsters and making sure the party gets some xp's to match the encounters they're facing.Also for character conversions - consider using the warrior NPC class over fighters (reduces the cr by 1).  I did not do this for the named bad guys and I stopped doing it all together after the first half of book one (except for a brief stint on the derro in book two).For multi-class characters consider using the conversion book that WOTC put out with 3e.  It's still available as a pdf somewhere on the wizards site.  If I recall though, take the highest level of the character and add the value of their secondary class divided by 3 (So a Clr12/Rog9 would be 15th level).  Divide the resulting number amongst the the two classes.  I tended to favor the spell casting class over the non spellcasting class and made sure the converted character had the highest level spell slot available after the conversion.Things to watch for in the second book:The trolls.  I hate trolls.  There's like 30 of them between those two caves.  The only thing that made this workable is that I paid attention to the map distances.  I also decided that the trolls were never in a big hurry to actually start running towards fights until the the third or fourth foray the party made.The same thing about the trolls rolls over to most of the other encounters - most of the caves have large numbers of critters that can quickly overwhelm the party.   The hook horrors and quaggoths come to mind here.If you keep the critter numbers up then I suggest keeping the treasure vaues near the same.  Things are going to escalate pretty quickly through the second book.  The books assumes the party is going to be around 12th level or so by the end of the 2nd book - mine are higher than that and it changes the tactics.  But then the city is populated by classed-monsters - Notably there's a mind-flayer who's a 12th level priest.  Arguably he isn't really a 20th level challenge, especially due to a lack of gear - but he's still formiddable.  Throw in the kuo-toan dukes and there's some serious spell power going on (note that the converted dukes have a cr of around 16-17).If you tone down the number of critters and the amount of treasure you should probably think about toning down the monsters with levels - but that depends on your party's playing style too.For that matter think about how the bad guys are going to communicate with each other.  In my game I decided that most of the bad-guys were fairly isolated.  So when Broken-Spire was taken, the folks in the mines and the orcs in the caves were oblivious.When the orcs were taken, it took the mind flayers a month to find out that something happened (partly because the party deliberately tried to attract oozes to dispose of the evidence).  By the time the group hits the derro there should be a more organized resistance.  Anything done to the derro should be discovered within 2-5 days (presuming a total wipe-out) by the City of the Glass Pool.  With the assault on the city, I've had the upper level priests doing communes (I presumed that each priest was at the mid-point of advancement so had that many xp's to spend).  Worse, the city of Shaboath now has some idea of the party and their capabilities, though I've deemed the leaders feel pretty secure regardless.Also, I nearly forgot that the city was populated by priests.  Any important folk who die has a chance at a raise-dead from a surviving priest.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> That's the stuff that immediately comes to mind.  Apologies for the verbosity.edited by the grammar fairy</blockquote>

Verification