Scales of War - Feedback and Advice

[The Antra]

Hi!

Has anyone played/DMed through the Scales of War Adventure Path?

I´m looking at the entire thing here and considering running it, but I´d love some feedback and opinions before I sink my teeth into such a big campaign effort.

Anyone had any (good/bad) experience with it?

Thanks in advance!

Cheers!

 

[Stumblewyk]

I played through it from level 1-12 before we TPK'd. It was good time from a player's perspective, and certainly had varied and interesting combat encounters. I thought the 1/3rd of the campaign arc that I experienced was an interesting enough story.

 

[Pbartender]

I'm just finishing the Heroic Tier of SoW as DM...

It's okay, but nothing real special and there are definitely some oddities to the series...

For many of the adventures, it feels as if the writers didn't follow the advice the DMG gives for designing encounters and rewarding treasure.

Often, it seems as if there wasn't a very good concept of the overall scheme of the campaign, and little communication between the contributing authors. Played straight up, it feels more like a string of stand alone adventures only tenuously connected by common NPCs and locations (and sometimes not even that), rather than a distinct campaign.

We did have to deal with one TPK in the second adventure (be careful with the cliffside stairs -- the enemy's crossbowmen have a push that in conjunction with a 150' fall is deadly to 3rd level characters).

 

[Cyronax]

The optional background benefits for Scales of War are not really standardized and are overpowered IMO. They do not follow the typical background benefit structure found in the Character Builder, Player's Handbook 2, and elsewhere.

As for as playing Scales of War, I can't say that I have. Looking over the whole thing though -- it wasn't very appealing. It looked kind of vanilla.

I personally like to homebrew most of my adventures or take liberally from an old classic adventure from OD&D for conversion (Rahasia, Veiled Society, etc).

C.I.D.

 

[Riastlin]

I'm currently running it for one of my groups and have just started Lost Mines of Karak (the 4th mod). So far its fairly good though you need to be real careful early on. I would recommend reading through at least the heroic tier before starting play because there are some inconsistencies between the first few modules (Umbraforge is particularly bad in this respect). Rivenroar can be a bit of a slog so I actually cut out a few of the encounters but after that the modules tend to be better paced for the most part.

I haven't read through the entire path yet, but I have to say that it does seem pretty decent. The path really seems to gather steam when you hit late heroic and into paragon. To really tie a nice bow around it and make a good story with good NPCs for the party, you do need to do some work as the DM, but its far less work than running your own homebrew campaign. Finally, there's also a Scales of War subforum on the WotC site where there are plenty of good threads with some great ideas for tying the earlier modules together. Definitely worth a look there and the people on the forum are pretty good about answering questions as well.

In any event, best of luck with whatever decision you make.

 

[The Antra]

Thanks, guys!

I was looking for adventures that had a Frontier/War theme, a bit darker in nature (trying to emulate some Dragon Age vibe). The first adventure I came across was Heathen from Dungeon 155, which I actually liked.

Someone told me Scales of War would mix in well with Heathen (which I may or may not come to DM, depending on the rest of the campaign) and I decided to take a look. I skimmed through it and it seemed solid enough (and a good excuse to use my Aspect of Tiamat mini in the long run! ), but I know from experience that reading a module and actually playing through it are two very different things.

I don´t really mind having to adjust encounters and treasure, since I always do tinker with the advetures I DM. What may bug me more is the loose aspect of their linkage. While it is good to not stay on one theme only, I don´t quite get adventure paths that seem like a series of different modules trimmed together for levels purpose.

 

[Riastlin]

It takes a little bit for some of the connections to start to stand out, but for the most part, I think the connections are there. The problem is that to really tie them together, you have to improvise a little as the DM. I don't mind that too much since every group is different and will follow different hooks. A number of the modules are also pretty much pick up right where the previous one left off so its not all that hard to follow. I guess the biggest problem is that the first module has very little connection to the rest of the story (though there is some). Modules like Lost Mines and Den of the Destroyer seem somewhat unrelated to the story, but its easy enough to drop little seeds into Umbraforge for instance. Umbraforge is by far the most problematic module I've encountered though as it has the biggest continuity errors and is also very railroady if you are not careful (plus an entire encounter of wraiths is problematic for parties with no radiant damage -- hence 3 of 5 characters dying in my game). Oh well.

After Umbraforge though the quality of the modules seem to improve imho, and Bordrin's Watch has one of the best encounters I've come across so far in 4th Ed.

 

[Truename]

I DM'd it through the heroic tier. The encounter design ranges from good to outstanding. The plot is "okay" and the roleplaying is terrible. Very little backstory and few NPCs. The adventures (and the path as a whole) are very linear, too.

If your group likes lots of combat tied together with a minimalistic story, SoW will satisfy. If you're looking for something less linear and with better plot / NPCs, I'd recommend War of the Burning Sky instead (available with an ENWorld subscription). That's what my group switched to.

 

[malraux]

Having played/DMed this from level 1 to 20, here is my impression of the series. The first few adventures don't string together well. It doesn't begin to feel like a connected AP until the level 10-20 adventures.

It also has the problem of ridiculously complicated maps that no DM could draw out.

The layout in dungeon really works against easy understanding of what is happening, in the opinion of everyone who tried to run it. The delve format doesn't work right. To counter this, you really have to print out either the overview part or the encounters part and then reference the other half on a computer.

 

[rangda]

I'm just finishing the Heroic Tier of SoW as DM...

It's okay, but nothing real special and there are definitely some oddities to the series...

For many of the adventures, it feels as if the writers didn't follow the advice the DMG gives for designing encounters and rewarding treasure.

Often, it seems as if there wasn't a very good concept of the overall scheme of the campaign, and little communication between the contributing authors. Played straight up, it feels more like a string of stand alone adventures only tenuously connected by common NPCs and locations (and sometimes not even that), rather than a distinct campaign.

We did have to deal with one TPK in the second adventure (be careful with the cliffside stairs -- the enemy's crossbowmen have a push that in conjunction with a 150' fall is deadly to 3rd level characters).

I DM'ed SoW through the end of Paragon and I'll echo the sentiments above. And add that the deeper in it you go the worse it gets. Calling it an adventure path is stretching the definition of the term to the limit; it's really a collection of modules written by various authors that are supposed to be vaguely connected. In reality it varies from being somewhat connected to not at all connected depending on the individual authors in question. The campaign is split into 3 arcs one for each tier. However each arc feels like a totally separate arc shoved against the previous one just for the sake of doing it. The stories got so bad that at the end we were just going through the motions and I ended the campaign.

We're doing War of the Burning Sky now and while it isn't perfect, it's much more cohesive and has the feel of a continuing story.

If you do decide to run SoW I recommend you go over the fights carefully. There are a few fights that are very, very hard (that stair fight comes to mind) but there are many that are mind-numbingly boring. The module authors for this series never met a solo they didn't like and the solos (like MM1 solos) are ridiculously underpowered for even a moderately tuned party. A highly tuned party will cut through 95% of this series like a hot knife through butter w/o a major rework of all of the encounters.