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Post by Finarvyn on May 7, 2010 8:14:00 GMT -6
Sadly, ProBoards doesn't have a real "thread split" admin function that I've ever found. I can, however, create a new thread and do some copy-paste to put together a "frankenstein" thread with the right ideas in it.  Here goes..... |
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Post by Finarvyn on May 7, 2010 8:15:42 GMT -6
I am about to start a Fomalhaut campaign in a couple of weeks and am very excited about it. I've inserted the city-state Zothay into the peninsula north of the bay of Tridentos, near the Mountains of Monoculus. Apart from all the "official" adventures and encounters to choose from, I'm also going to chuck into the mix The Illhiedrin Book (JG) to start the party off, Alphonso Warden's The People of the Pit, which should fit nicely with the nearby Land of the People of the Worm, Matt Finch's The Spire of Iron and Crystal, an off the map journey to X1 The Isle of Dread, with I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City located on the island's plateau, a beefed up The Forgotten Isle by Magique Productions Ltd, and two modules by Expeditious Retreat Press The Flaming Footprints of Jilanth and The Seven Shrines of Nav'k-Qar. I'm even contemplating slotting in Arneson's The Temple of the Frog and Michael Curtis' The Fane of St. Toad. Exciting stuff, lots of possiblities and probably a couple of years of gaming. Thanks in advance for all the fun Gabor and thanks too for posting your design notes, it's been great reading them. |
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Post by Finarvyn on May 7, 2010 8:16:17 GMT -6
greyharp, that's the spirit -- the modules I have read from among those you mentioned could be easily repurposed for the campaign, and Zothay would find a good place in Tridentos. The People of the Pit association didn't occur to me, but you are right - very fitting! And as for the Temple of the Frog -- that's an absolute must, I think (I used The Fane of St. Toad in a different part of the campaign, but I forgot that one of the PCs was playing a follower of Tsathoggus, so they couldn't properly loot the place -- ooops!  Since you are playing in the Tridentos area, you should also PM me with an address. |
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Post by Finarvyn on May 7, 2010 8:22:35 GMT -6
Greyharp, I've been wanting to write an article about using other people's modules in your game. I think some people have trouble with this and it's an important skill for old-school DMs who want a campaign world but don't have time for Tekumel-style obsessive creation of every detail. I wonder if you might want to write something on that for us sometime (or Melan, or me...maybe it could even be a group effort). |
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Post by Finarvyn on May 7, 2010 8:23:10 GMT -6
Blimey calithena I don't think I have the confidence (or probably the skills) to write such an article. It's not something I've ever thought about, but just what I do to make up for my lack of a fertile imagination. I have a logical brain, which can be a curse, but it makes it easy to sort and collate information. So bringing together diverse elements to make an homogeneous whole is a lot easier for me than trying to create something from scratch. I'll try to come up with some notes or ideas that could probably be used for such an article and maybe expanded upon by others as you suggested. |
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Post by Finarvyn on May 7, 2010 8:23:48 GMT -6
I think a group effort is a good idea. Maybe a collection of short descriptions of what people have done to specific adventures to rework them for their own campaign? Perhaps answering the following question on their favorite third-party adventure or most-recently-used third-party adventure? 1. Why did you want to run that adventure? 2. What were the big changes you needed (if any) to make it fit your campaign? 3. What problems (if any) did you run into? I'd be happy to help collect these notes into an article. These are the questions I ask myself when I'm using a third-party adventure: 1. Why do I want to run this module? 2. What’s really going on? Why are the NPCs there, and what purpose does the location and treasure have? Replace the important ones with my own NPCs, locations, and treasure if they exist. I find that the biggest glue to a third-party adventure is the location. As soon as I decide where the adventure is, serendipitous connections start glowing. 3. Identify my weaknesses and fix them. I tend to fail at extracting descriptions for the players from long descriptions for the GM, so I’ll pre-write flavor text for crucial encounters. Quick notes on adventures I’ve used in our current game: 1. Chagmat. Scripted an opening scene in a bar to draw the PCs in. Placed it in the forest of the Wandering Trees. Wrote out flavor text for some rooms. Put a Druid that fits our campaign into the place of “Cosmo” then made sure the Druid also existed in the community. Why was she there? Her father was eaten by the ogre. That's her father's rope of climbing that the PCs are likely to find. Renamed all of the captives and made sure I knew who their parents were. 2. Fell Pass. Re-imagined it as a way station and entertainment center for an ancient divine civilization. Added names of campaign locations to the snippets of exposition the PCs were likely to run into. Added a new level. I actually retyped the entire adventure, because one of our players had been in the original, and I didn’t want him to see what I was running until it was too late. 3. Currently working on Caverns of Thracia. The lost tablets of civilization. The god of death (Thanatos) is Tawhiri or Enki, the lord of the abyss. His incarnation will appear draped in seaweed. Those whose souls it snatches will have inexplicably drowned. The two civilizations clashing are Saurians and an ancient Sumerian-like human culture. |
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Post by Finarvyn on May 7, 2010 8:24:16 GMT -6
Hopefully I've done a good job in editing to keep the right comments in the right thread. Resume discussion....  |
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Post by greyharp on May 7, 2010 15:53:03 GMT -6
I must admit that I don't put in anywhere near the thought and analysis into the process that you do capvideo. If I were to write such an article I'd probably call it something along the lines of "A Lazy Man's Guide to a Great Campaign"?
I would basically start by praising the incredibly prolific creativity of people like Gabor, but then go on to point out that not everyone has that level of imagination, or in some cases simply lack the time necessary to devote themselves to that intense level of creativity. I would discuss the process of building a campaign around someone else's module or campaign, then expanding it with modules and encounters by other authors. The focus, from a lazy man's point of view, would be to make this eclectic process as simple and minimal as possible, while maintaining the illusion of seamlessness. In such an article I would also discuss player expectation and how that can be met with this style of play.
Having said that, I would find the type of article you're describing capvideo an incredibly interesting read.
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Post by capvideo on May 7, 2010 19:13:57 GMT -6
Well, the simple questions are: (1) why did you choose that particular adventure (whichever one you're choosing to answer the question for), and (2) what did you change (nothing is of course a valid answer).
I think a collection of those answers from different people would make for great reading.
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Post by kelvingreen on May 8, 2010 14:53:52 GMT -6
I did very recently run Death Frost Doom, but I converted it to a game which is not old-school (although I suppose you could make a tenuous argument for it being so), so it probably doesn't count.
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Post by capvideo on May 12, 2010 0:15:38 GMT -6
Kelvin, I think Death Frost Doom with any game is old school. I’d love to hear about it even if it doesn’t become an article.
Chagmat
Chagmat has been one of my favorite adventures since I first saw it in Dragon in 1982. It’s got everything: spiders, underground temples, mysteries, and even a dinosaur. So when the PCs in our latest game decided to travel six hundred miles through very rural Highland to meet the Elves, I immediately thought of the spider temple.
The first thing I changed was to put Little Boy Mountain into the northwest of the forest of The Wandering Trees. I replaced encounter 10, Mission on the Downs, with Little Boy Mountain. This put the “high road” through the north of Highland running right through the west edge of the Wandering Trees, with the temple of the Chagmat completely inaccessible unless the trees open up.
Then I started renaming things. The High Road runs at the edge of the Celtic lands, and their culture reflects that. Little Boy Mountain became Dowanthal Peak. The “small, pleasant farming town of Byr” became Weaving, “a small way station on the High Road known for its rich farmland. Among connoisseurs of northweed, Weaving is known for Weaving weed. Though smokers assume the plant is grown throughout the north, the tobacco is grown in Erventon, and traded through Celtic traders and other travelers who go through Erventon. Though few know it, there is much trade between the Celts and Weaving through Bailabann up the Dowanthal river.”
“Cosmo”, the captured Druid, became one of the captured teenage girls: Riana Carlyle. She lived outside of Weaving with her father, both of them Celts who immigrated to the area. Riana’s father was the source of the magic rope, which I moved from the dinosaur lair to the ogre lair: he had died at the hands of the ogre while trying to rescue his daughter.
The Broken Web and Akron Oheeyo became the Weaving Well and its owner, John Cover, an ex-pat from Pirate’s Cove. “A wiry old man, with a neatly-trimmed beard and a gold earring in his left ear, greets you as you walk in. He has just stepped out from the kitchen on your right and sits at a table with some other people. He would be out of place here even without the earring, but the townsfolk take little notice of him.”
The PCs were introduced to the adventure when some of the parents in the Weaving Well panicked because one of their daughters was missing.
There weren’t many other changes. This is a great adventure. One minor problem came because I’d changed it so that the bonesnapper came from the depths of the earth, and the PCs initially tried to follow the dinosaur’s route back into the mountain. This wouldn’t have been a problem if they had: the passage replaced the secret tunnel beyond the altar at the Mission on the Downs, so they would have ended up in an adventure of some kind regardless, but it could have delayed them long enough for the Chagmat to complete their rituals, killing the girls and summoning the spider horde. The biggest “problem” is that it can be hard to open the door to the temple. But PCs who find a magic bell and don’t ring it incessantly deserve lesser treasure.
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Post by calithena on May 12, 2010 3:51:41 GMT -6
Good, Capvideo.
I used Monte Cook's "Demon God's Fane" pretty much as is for a 3e adventure. But we tied it into the setting by putting the golden lake area into a woodland on my map where some of the PCs had adventured at lower levels. We made up some backstory together - not a lot, just found a couple people in the town who the PCs had supposedly known when younger and tied them in with some vague memories of things that had happened in this campaign world back in the early eighties real world time.
This created instant investment in what was going on and made the 'set piece' of Monte's dungeon much more rewarding throughout.
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Post by capvideo on May 12, 2010 18:48:25 GMT -6
We made up some backstory together - not a lot, just found a couple people in the town who the PCs had supposedly known when younger and tied them in with some vague memories of things that had happened in this campaign world back in the early eighties real world time. Things that (some of) those players had experienced with different characters, back in the eighties? |
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Since you are playing in the Tridentos area, you should also PM me with an address.
