This post is part of a series that covers the preparations I do for my current D&D campaign. You can follow it here.
Yay! Hopefully we’ll have a game this week. Eric, Franky and Yan have confirmed their presence, I just need Math or Stef to confirm and we’re good to go.
My players are hooked on phonics planar adventures. Since the last game, Yan loves the Beastlands, Eric wants to go visit Lillee and her goddess and Math, who missed the last game wants to swing by Arborea and go high five his god…
..and here I am stuck with a crappy published adventure… (Expedition to the Demonweb Pits).
Every time I open it to plan what’s next I’m tempted to throw it out the window and create my own… but then I sleep on it, and hacking possibilities appear to me.
Once again this week, armed with a basic idea and my friend Graham as a sounding board (and de-facto co-DM it seems) we hatched a devious game plan.
This week, I plan to play the next part of the prophecy the PCs have…
The bitter ice hides a giant’s sword to crack Abyssal Armor
So we have a land of ice and a another demon-slaying sword to fetch.
As written, the adventure follows this model:
- Get to gate to new plane
- Follow path, deal with environment
- Reach scene
- Fight monsters
- Take sword
Zzzzzzz. No decisions, no variance.
So here’s what I plan to do, in no particular order.
- Let players meet up with representative of the Powers (that’s Planescape speak for gods) of the Beastlands to get a rundown of the Demonic invasion of the upper planes. They’ll probably offer to help.
- Have Math’s character meet up with them with dire tales of Ptolus taking a serious beating and falling into Chaos.
- Use prophecy to point out toward next tool to fight the demons.
- Drop a few hints on what’s really happening and who’s pulling the strings in all this.
The idea is that the troubles need to be addressed at it’s source and not try to fight it from the bottom up.
When they’ll be ready to go after the other sword, I have a nice tribute to Advanced D&D lined up for them. Probably an adventure they’ll remember for a lonnng time.
I’ll start from an available published adventure, make it more planar than it already is, add a few story elements to tie it with the rest of the campaign and address some of the players motivations (Franky is overdue for some storytelling love).
Plus it’s going to be about ice… Yan’s pyromaniac Swordsage will have a blast, literally…
Finally I’ll need to work a way to introduce the 6th player for the session afterwards (as I think this arc will take about 2 sessions to play out).
Once again I can’t leak details as, you know, player read this… but I’m sure clever people will piece together what the players are going to be up against…
I promise a cool write up afterwards.
What, no link even? Pfft!
(I’m pretty sure 90% of my traffic comes from here.) 😛
I do believe your players will enjoy this one.
And if nothing else, it will teach them a few things. Things about evil, and danger, and… ice, I suppose.
Yay vagueness!
I seam to remember a demon we fought in some previous game that could create ice wall… Axe’s Minion (One of the previous game bad guy).
What was their name already?
Oh well… To lazy to go fetch the monster manual to check their name…
That being said whatever it is. It’ll die like the rest of it’s brethren, but this time in a fiery ball of fire! 😉
Graham: Link added 😛
Yan: Bone Devil… but don’t get you’re hopes up!
I hear you on the Expedition modules. I am running a side-campaign using Expedition to Undermountain. The players in the campaingn (Hack and Slashers mostly) are loving it, but it’s driving me bananas. It’s one of those moments where the players request it, so I dove in without doing my homework.
If it was a well-written easy to use hack and slash adventure, I’d be fine with it. But the format, the encounter levels, and the overall lack of cohesion between levels add up to a real pain in the rear adventure to run or modify. Did I mention it’s a pretty boring adventure too? At least most of it, there are some good bits closer to the end. I wish I could find out which designers wrote which sections.
To top it all off, it’s a casual campaign (3 sessions in 6 months), one we decide to run when we find out we have a free weekend coming up. So I don’t really want to put a lot of effort into making it work. There is a lot of winging it.
The best thing I did with that module is change the focus from a standard adventuring troop to a non-good party. That added an interesting spin on things, and feeds my creative hunger some. So at least on that aspect it’s going well. I just wish it was a better adventure.
Okay, enough about me… 🙂
Your campaign sounds very cool and exciting. The fun thing about planejumping is that absolutely anything s possible.
Malhavoc Press had a book of alternate planes called “beyond countless doorways”. A neat resource, and the variety of new planes are something that will catch even the most experienced player off-guard.
Of course, just as you are looting and pillaging various adventure modules, I fully plan on looting and pillaging this blog!
You are more than welcome to loot anything you like.
Might I suggest, for those casual games, that you switch to Paizo’s Adventure path? Just use the one closest to your player’s level and use as is. They are fairly easy to hack and have little of the quirks seen in the Expedition format…
Also, I will obtain a copy of Monte planar book for 4e, as planes will no longer be the Cosmic Wheel thing and various non aligned planes will be a nice addition to my campaign tools.
Thanks for the reminder
Actually, I would love to switch to the Pathfinder series for a casual game. That idea is on the back burner. Unfortunately, I don’t know if I could get enough gametime on it in before I move to be worth running. Also, these particular players are Undermountain fans, and specifically requested that module.
Ding (lightbulb over head). Now I’m thinking abandoning the Expedition to Undermountian Module, and try and convert the Pathfinder series to Undermountain. Change the starting town to spiderhaven, set everything underground, set the major city to skullport… Hmmm… that might work, I’ll have to look at it again. I’m not the biggest Forgotten Realms guy, but i think I know enough about Undermountain from what I’ve researched online and read in Expedition to fool my players. Besides, if they catch me on anything inconsistent, I’ll just blame the Spellplague.
I do have another side campaign going, so far it was just a one-shot to run on a night that we couldn’t do our regular game. The players had so much fun I have thought about expanding it. I was going to use the Wicked Fantasy Factory Modules (the one-shot was their El Cheapo intro) but Pathfinder may be a better choice for that. They share some of the same over-the-top feel.
I’ve wanted to use those bloodthirsty goblins ever since the goblin song came out.