[Almost OSSR] Savage Tide Adventure Path

[RelentlessImp]

So, I need to get some vitriol out, due to being full of rage lately for one reason or another that I cannot seem to expel in my usual ways, so I'm going to take it out on a level 1-20 adventure path from Paizo, before they started sucking thousands of barrels of cocks and using teeth. Now, this adventure path would be eligible for an OSSR next year, as it started being printed in Dungeon Magazine in 2006 and ran for 12 issues. Coincidentally, this adventure path is made up of 12 ... I don't want to call them adventures, as, as you'll see, they're more like scenarios that are loosely connected via plot threads.

This "Adventure Path" was designed to start at level 1, and take characters all the way to level 20. Each scenario was written by someone different, so if it seems a little schizophrenic at times, chalk it up to there being literally 14 different writers throughout its lifespan (Adventures 5 and 6 had two writers). Oh, and for extra shit-your-pants rage, such writers include notables like Jason Bulmahn, Keith Baker, and Sean K. 'Shitlord' Reynolds himself.

Here is a full list of scenarios:
Adventure #1: There Is No Honor (James Jacobs)
Adventure #2: The Bullywug Gambit (Nicolas Logue)
Adventure #3: The Sea Wyvern's Wake (Richard Pett)
Adventure #4: Here There Be Monsters (Jason Bulmahn)
Adventure #5: Tides of Dread (Stephen S. Greer & Gary Holihan)
Adventure #6: The Lightless Depths (F. Wesley Schnider & James Sutter)
Adventure #7: City of Broken Idols (Tito Leati)
Adventure #8: The Serpents of Scuttlecove (Keith Baker)
Adventure #9: Into the Maw (Sean K. Shitlord)
Adventure #10: The Wells of Darkness (Eric Boyd)
Adventure #11: Enemies of My Enemy (Wolfgang Baur)
Adventure #12: Prince of Demons (Greg A. Vaughn)

Now, I'll be honest. I don't recognize most of these names. This might be for my disinclination to attribute things to authors unless they really catch my attention and do so consistently, or it might just be because I don't keep up on the whole D&D writer scene. However, I do like this Adventure Path, even if it has a bit of stupid in it; I've ran it as a MC once to completion, and have always had a sort of soft spot for metaplots that start at level 1 and go all the way to 20. The batshit insanity of high level play is, as you may have guessed, never addressed, and the characters are fully expected to be playing the same characters the same way from level 1 to 20 - but what can you expect? This was 3.5 when people were holding onto bullshit grognardism from D&D and AD&D - something that still hasn't completely gone away.

So, let's dive right into Adventure #1: There Is No Honor, written by James Jacobs.

And right away, we get a splurge of text that is ostensibly to help set the mood - but this was the shit reserved for the DM's eyes only, with the big secret backstory dosed out to you right here and there. I will say this, though; the concept artists attributed are Ben Wooten and Warren Mahy, and a lot of this is fucking GORGEOUS and very evocative. Just look what's on the first page here:

Okay, it's pretty basic, but one of my favorite images in the world is a water-choked, overgrown post-apocalyptic city, so I'm a sucker for shit like this. This is on a page with the following text:

"The first savage tide has already touched the world. Unleashed from the cruel heart of a shadow pearl[/i], the tide swept over an ancient civilization, transforming the citizens of a proud city into feral, cannibalistic fiends. The hateful architects of the savage tide watched, taking pride in the ruin they had wrought. Now, after a thousand years, the savage tide is about to return. Yet this time, the doom will not be limited to one hapless city. This time, all of civilization waits unknowing on the shore, blissfully ignorant of what the tide is about to bring in."

Okay, some of the "artsy" language aside, this is pretty fucking evocative. It's fairly standard evil-of-the-past-returning, but I'm of the opinion that clichès can be used well and badly, and simply using them isn't bad in and of itself. Now, these things are from the Savage Tide preview, so when we get to There Is No Honor itself, of course they go and fuck it up by expanding this shit, discarding the concept art, and basically ripping out any sense of evocative imagery by spelling everything out for the MC.

The first savage tide has already touched the mortal world, yet none who live today recall this time of red ruin. Unleashed form the cruel heart of a fell seed known as a shadow pearl, this savage tide swept over an ancient city perched atop the crown of a remote island. The tide transformed beggar and noble, merchant and thief, resident and visitor into feral, ravenous fiends. The fruits of centuries of labor came crumbling down in a matter of days, and when the survivors tried to stem the tide by destroying the pearl, the resulting blast of power sunk their city into a boiling lake of death. Through it all, the Abyssal architect of the savage tide watched, taking pride in the ruin. When the tide's final ripples had faded, what was left became known as the Isle of Dread.

Now, after a thousand years, the true masters of the Isle of Dread look upon new targets, new cities beyond the horizon, compelled by the hateful will of their demonic lord Demogorgon to prepare for the coming glory. This time, the doom will not be limited to one hapless city. This time, all of civilization waits unknowing on the shore, blissfully ignorant of what the incoming tide brings in.

"There Is No Honor" is the first chapter of the Savage Tide Adventure Path, a complete campaign consisting of 12 adventures that will appear in the next twelve issues of DUNGEON. For additional aid in running this campaign, check out DRAGON'S monthly "Savage Tidings" articles, a series that helps players and DMs prepare for and expand upon the campaign. Issue #348 of DRAGON kicks off this series with details on six affiliations based in Sasserine that your players may wish to join. And if you're running Savage Tide in the FORGOTTEN REALMS or EBERRON, make sure to check paizo.com for the latest conversion notes for each adventure.

So out of ripping out the sense of myth and wonder in the blurb and straight into the whoring out of Dragon and your site. Nice going, guys. Oh, and the bits about Forgotten Realms and Eberron? No, I'm not going to cross-reference the Dragon articles, but they were by and large just basically filing the serial numbers off and shoving the first scenario into an already-established city in the world or just adding Sasserine to them. Which isn't terrible.

I wanna talk a minute about using the motherfucking DEMOGORGON as the "hateful architect" here. Demogorgon has been used in fucking everything D&D. First appearing in the 1976 Eldritch Wizardry, he has appeared in every edition since, in AD&D's Monster Manual, the Basic set's Immortals Ruleset (as a female), AD&D 2E's Monster Mythology, 3E's Book of Vile Darkness and Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss and 4E's Monster Manual 2. He's big, he's bad, and he's completely fucking overused.

He has appeared EVERYWHERE. He corrupted Paladins in Oerth into the first Death Knights. He appeared in a Dragonlance short story in Dragon #85 as having been placed under a wizard's control, a wizard that was subsequently defeated by Tasslehoff Burrfoot. He appeared in Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal as being sealed in the Watcher's Keep (which could be accessed from Shadows of Amn, too), voiced by no less a dignitary than Jim Cummings. (For... one line. Way to use Cummings' talent, guys.) He appeared in NetHack as a random-chance summon by other demons.

For a fucking Prince of Demons this guy gets more screen time than any big fuckoff penis extension NPC, save for Elminster, and most of these have been him being killed. I've drawn a lot of these references from Wikipedia, having not known about the Dragonlance short story or the fact that he was a she in Immortals, but Demogorgon has been a pretty solidly consistent 'Fuck You' NPC for 39 years now. And oh my god, am I tired of Demogorgon. I am sick to death of this prick. His entire schtick is he is the biggest, baddest representation of Chaotic Evil who rules because he can't be beaten by other demons. I honestly would like Savage Tide more if they didn't (twice now, once in the Preview blurbs about the adventures and once in the opening to There Is No Honor) spoil his reveal so early on. Just reading this bit in DUNGEON when it was published made me want to throw the fucking thing in the garbage. Now, admittedly, this is because a lot of DMs in the past had "Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies" take the form of Demogorgon showing up and fucking you up, but also because BG2 and Bastion of Broken Souls helped to overexpose me too.

Anyway, let's get on with this shitshow.

There Is No Honor
This opens with, as you might expect, an Adventure Background, and Synopsis, and the Background actually makes me take a shine to Sasserine. It very briefly and quickly outlines a city emerging from a century of oppressive rule in which the thieves' guild was destroyed and now minor guilds squabble for control in the underworld. And... time for an eyeroll. The one that stands head and shoulders above the rest is called Lotus Dragons, led by a "charismatic and ambitious woman" named Rowyn Kellani, the daughter of a noble family. And... that's all we get on the city. The Player's Guide goes into more detail on it and again ruins this pretty decent blurb by expounding endlessly on the minutiae of the city and introducing shitty feats available to PCs who are from the Wards of the city. You're not taking these feats. They're worse than +2/+2 skill feats.

Anyways, the background goes on to explain the fact that everything that gets the player characters involved is because of a prick named Vanthus Vanderboren, and if that name alone isn't enough to make you hate him and think him evil, the fact that he murdered his own parents by smuggling barrels full of alchemist's fire into their new boat and exploding it should.

Now, the synopsis very quickly goes over the adventure and we run into the biggest problem of adventure paths, that of the on-rails nature of them. There is no option to take over the Lotus Dragons - it (and the later scenarios) assume you straight up murdered them all.

Part One: A Noble In Need
Moving on to that, we get an Adventure Hook, which has the players think up something that earned them "notice" in the past week or month or so. Which... I don't know. This is still 3.5, and these are first level characters with 0 experience. Anything that made them 'notable' probably should have included making them at least second level. They are then delivered a letter by a Venerable halfling woman inviting them to meet her mistress, Lavinia Vanderboren. (Are these names making you want to punch this society in the face yet?)

Of course, this is the introduction to the scenario and ostensibly the characters have no connection to each other - they are literally meeting for the first time outside of the Vanderboren Manor. We get a few Gather Information type things but they're based on Knowledge (nobility and royalty) and Knowledge (local) and are at a DC low enough to auto-pass at first level (10, 15 and 15) so you might as well just hand the information right to the players anyways and spare them the grief of taking Knowledge (nobility and royalty) to learn that Lavinia is the eldest daughter of a noble family in this city. The Knowledge (local) check is kind of forgivable because hey, recent news, the Vanderboren elders were burned to death in their brand new ship, and Knowledge (local) is a skill a person might not feel shitty about taking.

So, we get going on and the characters are met at the Manor's door by the wizened halfling that gave them the letter, who is an Expert 3 and thus has a higher BAB than the Fighter and could probably kill him. So the party is escorted to a waiting room and then encounter Lavinia's other guests - a prick of a human ranger, a clichè of a half-elf rogue, a dwarf druid (Okay, that made me chuckle a little) and a human sorceress. The human ranger throws off some bullshit at the party and then exeunts stage right, and there's nothing about letting the party engage these people in discourse AT ALL. Which, I assume is because later adventures hinge on these people being alive and being called "help" brought in to do "chores" is so totally not disparaging at all and couldn't possibly make the party want to kill these pricks. They're all level 3 here, but (as we'll see later) horribly built and an optimized first-level party could seriously take all of them down with a sleep spell and coup-de-grace them - except the Druid, maybe. They're still under the cut-off point for color spray being "You Win", too, so maybe they shouldn't be dicks to the party in their first encounter. I don't know.

Once they have left without giving the PCs a chance to respond to that bullshit, they're escorted into a dining room to meet Lavinia for dinner. She explains that she's inherited her parents' estate due to her parents being tragically killed in a boat fire and, oh no, her parents left her a huge pile of debts and she can't get into the family vault due to it being arcane locked and requiring a signet ring to open - a signet ring that's gone missing. Her mother's was stolen (one guess as to who) and her father's was hidden away on the family's other boat but it's being held as leverage by an asshole pirate even though she paid the due mooring fees and...

Yeah, it's basically "Go be murderhobos". The Watch is useless and won't help, unless the PCs go be murderhobos in which case Lavinia is prepared to deal with the law. She's willing to up the pay from 200gp each to 300gp each, without even a Diplomacy check, just for asking so if the PCs don't think to ask for more money they don't get it, and the players knowing they're going into an adventure path (and all that entails) probably didn't even make a Face sort of character and thus are without Diplomacy so it won't even occur to them to ask because they have nobody with "Fuck You" skill ranks. Also, if you were wondering if Vanthus Vanderboren is evil still, there's a portrait in this room and the PCs can ask about it. Here's the portrait:

All he needs is to be voiced by Tim Curry or Tony Jay and he's Villain of the Week material. If any PC doesn't immediately suspect this asshole of being evil, I am surprised.

Marching orders received, the PCs are sent off to investigate and reclaim the Blue Nixie from this Soller Vark asshole (jesus christ, even now I keep trying to type it as Voller Sark), and here we run into our very first problem. The Blue Nixie is anchored away from the dock. The PCs' only recourse is to be able to fly or take a longboat (that nobody seems to notice them taking) out across the harbor and to the Nixie. The reason they've done this is they've got a hold full of "exotic" animals and they're preparing to sail out beyond the harbor walls to trade them off to someone else. Anyways, you're supposed to hold parley with these assholes from the longboat because OF COURSE they see you coming even after dark and they're all prepping the ship to cast off.

An Intimidate check will let two people onto the ship while someone goes off and gets Soller Vark. Here is Problem 1: it's a DC 10 Climb check to climb some sea-slick ropes up to the deck, otherwise you're not engaging in combat due to being out of line of effect and line of sight. Strength is commonly a dump stat for any character not Strength-focused, so Climb is likely a negative modifier for a lot of your party, and a DC 10 is seriously more than a 60%+ chance of failure for any of them with an 8 Str and no ranks in Climb.

Problem 2: There are 7 Thugs (seven male, one female), who are level 1 Warriors who start out using crossbows and swap to rapiers (attack modifiers crossbow +1, rapier +2). Soller Vark is an elite human Warrior 2 (crossbow +4, masterwork rapier +5). Now, the balancing factor of this is it takes a few rounds for those not already on deck to get up there, and for Vark himself to enter combat, but seriously - just with the Thugs and Vark alone, this is an Overpowering encounter. But they all have shitty Will saves (all of them have a -1 Wis mod and are fucking Warriors) so I guess sleep is always going to win this fight straight out.

If that's not bad enough, a couple rounds into combat a bullshit monster called a rhagodessa breaks out of the animal cages below decks, kills its handler, and the handler winds up setting fire to the ship because Vark screams for her to burn the animals. Apparently this gutters out on its own. So the rhagodessa is a complete closet troll who attacks anyone who goes down to check out what all this fucking smoke's about, has two +7(!) pedipalp attacks (at 0 damage) and a +5 bite (at 1d8+6) and is a grapple beast with a +11 grapple check. If it hits with one of the two +7 attacks it starts a grapple, and probably wins, at which point it gets to bite them for free. This thing gets to act before the character who went downstairs, is obscured by smoke, so he is making an attack against Flat-Footed AC, and has the damage potential to straight up kill a first level character at 1d8+6.

One party, when I ran this, included a Catgirl Shadow Warrior who said "Fuck you" to the thing's grapple and then pasted it in one round. But I'm wagering a lot of parties just straight up lost a party member to this thing, and more to Vark's thugs because people don't like memorizing sleep and color spray at first level.

Anyway, after Vark's down and the rhagodessa is dead, the party can search the ship and find both Lavinia's lost money (100 platinum pieces) and a signet ring. And they find a scrap of paper that says "Chimera looks to sunrise, cyclops looks to sunset, Medusa looks to sunrise, umber hulk looks to sunset, basilisk looks to sunrise". If by line two you said "Puzzle" FUCKING DUH! It's a numbers puzzle later on to the Vanderboren Vault - as if needing a signet ring wasn't enough - having to do with the number of eyes. How many people remember that Umber Hulks have four eyes? Hell, if someone was running this with the SRD - which was not uncommon even in 2006 - they would not even know what an umber hulk was, as it's apparently product identity.

Anyways, the question is never raised whether or not the PCs return the 1000gp to Lavinia, and that is a question that should be raised. Lavinia offers the PCs 100gp a month as troubleshooters, and the adventure then proceeds to the Vanderboren Vault with Lavinia in tow, as there might be a construct guardian there. Oh, there most definitely is, but it's one laughable monster (an iron cobra that this helpfully tells me is from Fiend Folio) who has a total of 17 AC and 31 HP and a +2 bite at 1d6+1 and poison, which is an Injury, Fort DC 14, 1d4/1d4 Strength, and it's got three doses of that shit.

If the party succeeded in conquering the Blue Nixie, then this is laughably easy. At which point they're free to take 20 to find the switch that causes the pillar it's on to cause its snake motif to writhe, twist aside, and form an archway to the vault entryway proper, where the PCs get to solve the riddle. It's made more obtuse that the riddle's "answer" doesn't even reference the 7 creaures in the room; there's a roper, a red dragon, an aboleth, an ettin, a spectator beholderkin, a gray render and a monstrous spider. Making it more obtuse, but not unsolvable... if you know that ettins and umber hulks have the same number of eyes. Once they turn the pillars these things are on, they are finally given access to the Vanderboren Vault...

...which is empty. So yeah, I guess Lavinia's mother's signet ring didn't go missing after all. Well, it's not entirely empty; the eyes on the statues are agates worth 2gp, there's maybe 1d4 silver pieces left in each of the 20 chests, but there's one chest full of 2,900gp worth of coins and gems. Also ledgers, so Lavinia knows who the fuck her parents owe money to.

And this final chest also contains the plot hook to the next, not one, but TWO scenarios: documents written in Sylvan that include maps of jungles, coastlines and other regions that present "some unknown tropical location". Anyways, on the way out, the PCs or Lavinia can ask whether anyone else has visited the vault, and oh shit, Vanthus has! He got into the vault with a series of DC 20 open lock checks and stole all this shit, which is a nice way to bypass the fuckin' riddle.

The next bit of the adventure is all MTP - unless you really want your players, involved in an adventure path which, even then, were known for being combat heavy and about as full of roleplaying opportunities as a Shadowrun Missions module, to set skill points on fire with Gather Information for the following DC 20 check which is modified on which district it's made in. Lavinia suspects her brother has changed, but jesus christ lady you can't look at that fucking portrait up there and know he's evil? It's like you're unaware what genre you're in. Apparently no, because she and Vanthus were apparently close as children, til Lavinia went off to finishing school for five years and Vanthus apparently turned into a raging douche hanging out with a crowd the Fonz would have beaten to death, culminating in the asshole hitting his sister and leaving. So, now the plot moves to find Vanthus, except you might as well skip to the point where they spend a day or two "fruitlessly searching for Vanthus" (the path's words, not mine) they're approached by a half-elf named Shefton who offers up Vanthus' location for 5gp and even lead them to a hidden trap door on a place called Parrot Island. That name makes me want to set the entire place on fire, but it's at least an easier to remember name than Sasserine, Lavinia or Vanthus.

Anyways, once the PCs go to the hidden trap door and climb down into the underground tunnels, Vanthus emerges, stabs Shefton in the back, and then shoves Shefton's corpse into the hole, cut loose the rope they used to climb down, acts like a raging asshole ("Say hi to Penkus's ghost for me while you're down there!" or "Serves you right for messing around with my sister, you thugs!") and laughs at the PCs when they try to talk to him. Then he closes the trap door, rolls rocks on top of it, and leaves, trapping the PCs.

Let's just talk about this fucking scenario. This completely fucking falls apart if anyone has ranged weapons or, you know, something like sleep. But since Vanthus's stats aren't presented in this scenario, I guess he's the fucking Lady of Pain. When he is presented (in Adventure #5, Tides of Dread) he's a CR 14 encounter... with a +3 will save. It's almost like multiclassing Aristocrat 1/Rogue 5/Fighter 4/Tempest 2 is a bad idea. Seriously, even at that level he gets fucking punked by a color spray but I guess at SR 22 you're just supposed to suck it. Except, oh wait, this wasn't the way he was when you first encountered him, between now and then he got changed into a fucking lemorian. So even if he had all those class levels THEN as a CR14 encounter, he still fucking dies to Will save-or-lose spam because A) It's the start of a day, no encounters yet, B) he has a will save of +3 at CR 14, C) has no magic items that help protect him from this fate and doesn't yet have the SR 22, and D) Doing so would be a surprise round because he just laughs at your ass.

Or, you can just charm person his ass (+3 will save, he's still a humanoid here) and turn him friendly, have him secure the rope so you can climb out, then go straight to color spray spam and kill his sorry ass.

And honestly? That's what the party did with the game I ran to completion. The party straight up fucking killed his ass in their first encounter for trying to trap them in a hole and got shit that pushed them off the RNG for a couple levels and I had to ad hoc some shit about the Scarlet Brotherhood (who the pirates were going to sell the exotic animals to) to keep the plot going.

So, so far, we have an overwhelming encounter of 7 Warrior 1s and an Elite Warrior 2, a closet troll, a laughably easy iron cobra, and a 'trap' that is just bullshit on any level including a wizard, sorcerer, or beguiler. I mean, this is kind of hilarious.

Right now I'm trying to remember what it is I liked about this path, and with the first three encounters I'm having a real hard time. I think it was Adventure 5 in which I started liking this; it pulls a Red Hand of Doom with a Victory Point mechanic and variable things you can do, but isn't quite as much bullshit.

What's good about it so far? Well, the art doesn't completely suck (Though Lavinia kinda looks derpy to me) and honestly even with Demogorgon in the distance the story isn't completely full of failure (just sorta) and the tips are actually sorta okay. The dialogue - what's written - with Lavinia is pretty good and believable, and the maps are top-notch - the Blue Nixie map, being a three-level construct (fo'c'sle, deck, hold) is actually arranged nicely enough to be able to clearly tell where each level leads to the other.

I'll cover the latter half of Scenario 1 later, as it includes not one, but TWO lengthy dungeon crawls, one of which can be more or less bypassed if your players invested in Swim (hint: they probably didn't) or if they straight up charm and murder Vanthus (they probably will).

[mlangsdorf]

I'm also a fan of Savage Tides. The quality of the adventures are fairly uneven and you have to pull a lot of the bullshit D&D3e encounters apart and rewrite them, but there's plenty of good stuff to loot. I haven't run the full path and never would, but I did run Bullywug Gambit, Sea Wyvern's Wake, and Here There Be Monsters for my group (with a lot of modifications) and they worked okay.

Three things I'd quibble with in your review:
1) There's explicitly an option for joining up with the Lotus Dragons ("Switching Sides" breakout box, p44). It does assume that you've slaughtered a fair portion of her guards when you meet her, but see above about bullshit encounters that need to be rewritten. That option is supported through at least Tides of Dragon, with other short breakout boxes explaining how to handle the change. It's not heavily developed, but it's there at least.
2) Vanthus' low Will save can readily be handled by having him stay out of sight: he can taunt the PCs without them being able to see him. Reading the adventurer text it could go either way, but I'd play him smart enough to not expose himself to a bunch of murder hobos he just pissed off.
3) The ship maps, while they look good visually, don't actually resemble how ships are laid out. But that's just a quibble with the ridiculousness of Stormwrack's ship designs in general.

Aside from those minor quibbles, I'm looking forward to the rest of the review. Except for Lightless Depths, which just reads like such an awful experience that I've never finished reading it.

[RelentlessImp]

Part Four: Peril Under Parrot Island
So, assuming the party doesn't just charm person Vanthus's ass then color spray stunlock his ass to death, they are now trapped in the caves and tunnels beneath Parrot Island. There is a decent map of this place, but it's absolutely tiny. So, let's go room by room, shall we?

See something odd? Don't worry, we'll get to it.

First off, the encounters the characters have had have been worth 413 and 150 experience after splitting to account for 4 people, not including a possible additional 150 experience for solving the riddle or opening locks. Those doing addition in their heads or popping open Calculator apps see this is very much less than the 1000 experience needed to reach level 2.

Well boy howdy is that about to fucking change.

First, the room in which you start in has DC 20 Climb checks to climb up the walls - why you couldn't do that and bash Vanthus in his fucking face is a good question. The trap door has an iron-plated underside but you can bash it down (Break DC 32, hardness 10, hp 60) but doing so releases the rocks to do 2d6 damage to everyone under it. So, assuming they don't do that, they move on to a hallway in which they can go west or east. The rooms to the east have no write-ups and thus are empty, even though they have more space in them. Assuming they go West on these rails, they enter P2 which has a pool, which is ostensibly connected to Sasserine's harbor, but only Tiny creatures could fit through the (50ft long) tunnels, and Small creatures have to make a DC 30 Escape Artist check to get through them. There's also 5 Small Monstrous Crabs in this pool, worth 188xp to a 1st level party. This brings them to 901 total.

Also, there are "Ravenous Zombie Pirates", 9 of them, CR 1 creatures, wandering the halls in groups of 1-3, and Mister Cavern is encouraged to throw them at the party "whenever the suspense calls for zombies". The examples given are laughable ("opening a door", "finding a bit of treasure", or "turning a corner") There's a bit of backstory here in which these are the last people trapped here circa 200 years ago, who were killed and eaten by their Cleric, who was then cursed by his god (Olidammara, of all fucking people) into a Huecuva after he tried to cut off his own foot and eat it. It suggests throwing the Huecuva into one of the groups of 1-3 roaming the tunnels.

So being interrupted by crabs, zombies, and a motherfucking huecuva Cleric 1 (bringing their exp total to 1801), the party is meant to explore to the West only.

P3 turns out to be a sea cave, with the water split between shallows and deeps that is a pretty nasty drop-off (one foot deep/ten foot during high tide, none/eight feet low tide) and here is where your party can just fuck off out of here. There's a five foot tunnel underwater here that you can get out of here to the bottom of the harbor through a 70ft underwater tunnel. It's talking about fucking DC 15 Swim checks and Search checks, with a DC 28 Search check to find the tunnel if you're not willing to go in the water after the fucking crabs.

P4 has to have its door bashed down because it can't be picked. Vanthus, being the dick we've all come to know and love, locked people in here before the party, and one of them managed to get past the undead and make it here, but he'd gotten beaten on by the huecuva and contracted huecuva blight, so he was dying from 1d2 Strength/1d2 Con. And starvation. He has some neat swag if you didn't straight up murder Vanthus earlier; masterwork studded leather, a ring worth 120gp, and a masterwork dagger.

So, this guy, Penkus, scrawled out a note before he died, basically saying that Vanthus is fucking evil and that this guy is pissed off about being left here to die enough that he gives you the next plot coupon, that the entrance to the Lotus Dragons' hall is underneath the Taxidermist's Hall and asks that you kill Venthus and tell him it was for ol' Penkus.

P5 has swag. DC 25 open lock checks for...

Are you fucking kidding me. 7,500 copper coins (75gp), 1,500 silver coins (150gp) in one chest. Another has 10 bags full of 100gp, and two pouches of 250gp worth of gems. Third chest has three CLW potions, a potion of lesser restoration, of invisibility, of barkskin +3, cure serious wounds, an elixir of swimming, a wand of mage armor with 11 charges, and a small jade coffer worth 300gp.

There is also a handily identified (by a strip of paper with it) a small brown gem resting on a silk cushion, and it's an earth elemental gem. This thing summons a fucking Large elemental as if summoned through summon nature's ally as cast by an 11th level druid. If players actually ever use this fucking thing to escape I would be surprised, this thing is so far out of their expected power that it should be hoarded like an Elixir in a Final Fantasy game. This is Summon Nature's Ally V for 11 friggin' rounds. This thing could fucking SOLO the next part in 11 rounds.

Anyways, after the PCs escape, they can totally level up and rest... except they have this whole revenge thing on Vanthus, and it looks like he just killed the harbormaster. Well, fuck. Anyways, they can give Penkus's note to Lavinia and tell them her brother fucking sealed them in a cave (or tell her their brother tried that and got fucking killed for it) at which point she asks the characters to try and catch him alive... or kill him quick.

I guess it's a chance for the characters to level up and rest or something, but I don't see most people taking that time because they are legitimately hot on Vanthus's trail at this point. They can take this time to try and Gather Information on the Lotus Dragons, or they can just head straight to the Taxidermist's Hall, at which point some asshole thief uses Sleight of Hand to slip a note into someone's pocket and runs away.

The note's one of those hilariously ineffective "Back off or it's curtains for you, see" notes that doesn't even have a black hand on it. And if the PCs keep being dicks by poking their noses into the PC's business, they get ambushed by 3 CR 1 Lotus Dragon Thieves (Rogue 1s). These guys ... could possibly be threatening if they set up flanking? The PCs have shiny new hitpoints, and these guys could conceivably set up flanking on someone and stab him to death. But let's be honest, they're CR 1, with 1 HD, they go down to fucking sleep with their +0 Will saves.

If you take any of them alive, you can make them give you a map of the Lotus Dragon Guildhall under the Taxidermist's Hall, which doesn't include areas D18-D19 or D26-D33. They can also pick up the useful information that their leader is called Lady Lotus or Dragon MIstress, depending on her mood, and the more useful info that she has two subchiefs: Vanthus Vanderboren and Kersh Reftun, and that the guy running the Taxidermist's Hall, Nemien Roblach, is an ally.

Here's the map:

So, let's be honest here: in the Taxidermist's Guildhall is the first real threat the PCs are facing. It's a Human Illusionist 3 with charm person, color spray, daze, hypnotic pattern, and invisibility prepared. Annnnnnd let's talk his tactics.

First, his first action is to cast invisibility, then do minor image to make all the stuffed animals around the hall look as if they're coming alive. This might actually make some of them try to waste resources on them, except... well. This is the problem with adjudicating illusions. Can you cast spells at an illusion? Anyways, after that he uses a silent image to create an image of himself running away, except none of these spells are silent so he's making it easy to pinpoint his general location.

If this guy had some backup, 1-2 rogues maybe, so he could color spray and hypnotic image the PCs and be assured a TPK. As it is, he can hypnotic image them and just leave, if he rolls well on the 2d4+Caster Level to see how many HD wind up Fascinated. A DC 15 isn't outside the realm of possibility of the PCs all failing at this level.

But, as he's alone, once he's out of color spray and hypnotic pattern, he goes down like a chump. After that the PCs can loot his hall and his bedroom and just take 540gp, 20pp and 600gp worth of gems.

There's an awful lot of "If captured alive" segments in this yet offers no surrender options. Sure, the first encounter suggests making pirates surrender or leap overboard and swim for it if they take damage, but that's just throwing the PCs a bone. Anyways, he's another 225xp, which is the midpoint between level 2 and 3 (2026exp).

So once the players get the location of the entrance of the guildhall, either by beating it out of Nemien or searching for it (it's in G8, which has a secret door leading into the guildhall) and it's apparently underground.

So, the Guildhall. It has "up to two dozen thieves", with only 14 in the guildhall if it's "at rest", half of which are asleep in D3, while on alert they're all there and on fucking guard. There is no declarative text as to whether they should be resting or on alert, but the path assures me the descriptive text is for it being on alert, which is what most MCs are going to go with because it's fucking easier.

So, coming down through the Taxidermists' is at D1. You can go either to D2 or D18. Again, I'm just gonna go through these numerically.

D2 is a fucking trap. You got two doors, with the south door left open so the two guys inside can watch for people approaching, at which point they raise the alarm and call more guys. Plus, 20% chance every time you enter a room of an ambush, though there's only two ambushes.

So you take down two more Rogue 1s. D3 is empty, but it's ostensibly where half the guys sleep when the guild's not on alert. D4 is the Rum Storage, and apparently the rum works on an honor system because "locked doors have no meaning in a thieves' guild". Apparently drunk thieves get tossed into a place called the Crucible so it works, I guess?

D5 holds a worg. Just one. He was raised from a pup by the Dragon Mistress (Rowyn) and he eats prisoners that are no longer of use. He's smart enough to not attack guild members, apparently. Worgs are fucking Int 6, they're smart enough to have levels in classes. Anyways, it's just a standard worg, he dies.

D6 is a cellblock, but they're empty unless a PC has been captured by the Lotus Dragons, and a DC 30 open lock check can free them (or a DC25 Strength check due to rust).

D7 is "the Guestroom" as the thieves "jokingly" refer to it, but it's pretty obviously a well-maintained and often-used torture chamber. Unless the PCs are here they haven't gotten to use it in weeks, which is something the torturemeister is sad about. CAN YOU MAKE THESE ASSHOLES ANY MORE IRREDEEMABLY EVIL?!

Why yes you can! If the guild's on alert, the keeper, Kersh Reftun, plays a trick on the PCs here, you see. He changes his glamered chain shirt to resemble rags and ties himself up with slipknots he can slip out of (DC 16 Use ROpe check to see that this guy is fucking with you). What the PCs see is basically a torturer who is heating up pokers in a fire and getting ready to "torture" Kersh. He fights to the death because "this thief isn't about to surrender in front of his boss". Kersh spins a fucking yarn , makes a Bluff check, gets Sense Motived. If the PCs believe him, he follows them and waits for them to get in a fight and attacks them.

He's a Rogue 1/Fighter 2, and "likes to fight barehanded and bullrush people into iron maidens". Anyways, he dies pretty much whenever, he's only marginally tougher than the Rogue 1s. He's MORE dangerous if the PCs don't buy his bullshit because he attacks with a 1d6+4 plus 1d4 fire weapon as opposed to... a 1d3+4 fist.

D8 is just Kersh's quarters, add another 234gp and a set of FUCKING FLENSING KNIVES worth 200gp to any discerning collector.

D9 is the Crucible. Hoo boy. this is basically a drowning trap. It's full of water and fills with water at a rate of ... one foot per minute. The thieves watching the room unleash a crocodile on the PCs, which is kind of scary, maybe? They're grapple monsters, so. Oh wait, no, it's a regular crocodile. It ... kinda dies. Meanwhile three thieves are being assholes and peppering the PCs with arrows but numbers 2 and 3 take 3 and 5 rounds to get their shit together and start firing, respectively.

So the PCs wind up probably finding the secret doors out of here long before they have to worry about the water, or they start firing through a one-way illusory wall to try and kill one of the thieves and fire at the two firing from archer nooks in the walls, all of which have effectively total concealment.

D10 is the Ring of Ruin, and it surrounds the Crucible and apparently the asshole archers are in here. D11 is hidden by the one-way illusory wall, and only contains the three thieves necessary to spring the trap. D12 is a visitor's lounge, which isn't a joke like the "guest room".

D13 is where visitors sleep and contains a scrap of paper from Vanthus with a lot of failed combinations on it while he tried to work out the combination to the Vanderboren Vault.

D14 is empty unless the guild's on alert and contains Cruncher the Worg from earlier. He howls when he attacks and alerts the rest of the compound. You're an asshole, Crunchy.

D15 is an interview room, and randomly if the guild's on alert the table in it is missing.

D16 is a waiting room. Four thieves are in here, and they actually use something approximating tactics; they hide behind the table from the previous area and fire crossbows at you. If you enter from the east. You probably don't. You fucking kill them.

D17 is the "Smuggler's Pond" and it contains a tribe of ixitxachitls, which I have no clue what these fucking things are. There's up to six of them ready to stab you when you get in here. They are, bizarrely, scout 1s. They have bite attacks. They're CR1s despite having better attributes than anything else in here (Str 15, Dex 21, Con 16, Int 10, Wis 12, Cha 10). Six of these things have a legitimate chance to kill you, even if their Bite is only at +3. They're also the first things to have a positive Will save (+1) aside from Vanthus.

At this point you cross the 3000xp threshold for level 3.

D18 is an Urchin farm where the Lotus dragons gather their poison from sea urchins.

D19 contains more rhagodessa. You can let them out and let them rampage through the compound if you came here first, but why would you deprive yourself of exp? Anyways these things are identical to the one on the ship, only now there's three of them. They still might grapple and kill someone, or three people at once with their +11! grapple check and their 1d8+6! bite.

D20's the mess hall. There's a half-dozen birds in cages that sing like canaries and can alert the cook in D21.

D21, you might have just guessed, is the kitchen, who is a kobold named Churtle, who is currently boiling and distilling the sea urchin poison, of which there is ten doses. If you come in here from D20, and the guild is on alert, she launches that fucking cauldron at you with all ten doses of poison. Churtle's long gone by that point, though.

D22 is a pantry and has some treasure in the form of 10 vials of urchin venom found by a search check, just in case you didn't get enough urchin venom when it was boiling.

D23 is Churtle's room and holy fuck she's an Expert 4. I know NPC classes don't mean much but she is literally a better fighter than 99% of the Lotus Dragons. Yet it describes her as "close to ineffectual in combat". Just. Why? Anyways she hides under a bunch of blankets, if she's found she tries to run away, if she's hit without being killed she pleads for her life and offers 53gp as a bribe to let her go. If you make her friendly, she offers to be your personal cook and assistant until a chance to escape to the swamp comes up. Also, people's low opinion of literally abhuman races shows through here - Churtle's an Expert 4 but only useful for "persistent source of comic relief" and her "skills could make her a useful scout or sentry". She's literally higher level than a good chunk of a default campaign setting by the DMG will ever achieve.

Anyways, D24 is a lavatory, and has "the latest technology in chamber pots". Hurr.

D25 is a training hall, and there are six lotus Dragons here if it's on alert. 6 more Rogue 1s for the fire. This could kill a person, as they're hidden initially then initiate a surprise round by leaping out at the PCs and flanking and working together.

D26 is an evaluation room, where Rowyn, Vanthus and Kersh meet with thieves who need evaluation, either to be promoted or fed straight to Cruncher. Goddamnit, book. You weren't doing too well with how you treated Churtle now you tell us these people don't just feed slaves who've outlived their usefulness to your goddamned worg - which is bad enough - but you feed your own fucking guild members to him. Goddamn.

D27 is a guardpost guarded by another rhagodessa on a chain that gets wound up if Rowyn's expecting visitors but it's slack when it's on alert letting it go everywhere in the chamber.

D28 is the war room where Rowyn meets with Vanthus, Kersh and other contacts to plot their evil shit.

So this, but less subtle.

Oh god we're almost done with this. I'm sorry about how dry this is but there isn't much I can do to punch up "clear out the thieves' guild".

D29 is a guard room, which has a zombie bugbear created by a wand. The only way this thing is dangerous is by this point you're probably running low on resources.

D30 is Rowyn's private bath/sauna.

And finally D31 is where you meet Rowyn herself, and her personal felldrake rogue 2 pet Gut Tugger. There's some text to indicate that Rowyn offers them a legitimate job but quickly looking ahead you'd be veering into off-the-beaten-track by working for her as there's no support for working for Rowyn. So she attacks with Gut Tugger.

EDIT: As pointed out, there IS a sidebar for switching sides, but it's pretty dry. The full text in the spoiler.

Switching Sides
Of course, there's a chance that the PCs end "There Is No Honor" by accepting Rowyn Kellani's offer. While this Adventure Path assumes the PCs turn her down, it can certainly continue if they don't - the adventures to come simply take on a much different tone. As their first job, Rowyn may ask the PCs to perform any number of increasingly dangerous and sinister tasks to set things into motion for the Lotus Dragon takeover of the harbor. Eventually, when Vanthus doesn't return from his journey to rob the pirates in Kraken's Cove, she'll send them to investigate.

While it's a nice thought, Bullywug Gambit gives another sidebar I'll cover when I review it, but none of the rest of the text supports it, nor does the end-scenario stuff support having switched sides. I guess you still get the same rewards for dismantling the Lotus Dragons until it comes to light, at which point I'm not really sure what's supposed to happen. It also seems to hint that Rowyn and Lavinia are two mutually exclusive paths, and I don't see why if you keep your involvement with Rowyn secret.

Rowyn is a Rogue 3/Bard 2, which means she has the same Will save as fucking Vanthus - +3. She's too high level for sleep, but still goes down to color spray spam, as she's a melee character with a +3 attack but with a +6 ranged attack. She has Combat Expertise to boost her AC up but she uses Inspire Courage first and lets Gut Tugger attack first - assuming he wins initiatve. If she actually manages to get a kill she uses the wand of animate dead to raise the PC's corpse as a zombie. It's actually a pretty clever little setup let down somewhat by the fact that she would have to make a UMD check to use the fucking wand and her UMD is +8 so she only succeeds on a 12+; 60% chance of failure.

Rowyn and Gut Tugger go down and give up some magical gear - +1 leather armor, rapier, mwk hand crossbow with 10 bolts poisoned with black adder venom - which is actually her most dangerous attack here, as it does 1d6 Con/1d6 Con. Earrings worth 300gp, necklace worth 200gp, and the key to every lock in the place. Gut Tugger's got a collar of armor +2 (as bracers of armor +2). She has a 5 charge animate dead wand, a potion of cure moderate wounds, of gaseous forms, and a wand of charm person with 35 charges.

I'll be honest, Rowyn and Gut Tugger can actually present a challenge if your party's low on resources by this point. The poisoned bolts and the 3d6 worth of sneak attacks the two can pull off can be pretty dangerous. But they're not doing anything exceptional at this point, so they get killed in pretty short order.

There's more treasure and I can assure you it starts to push the characters out of WBL pretty quickly. If they sell the wand of animate dead, for instance. There's about another 3000gp in this room. Then another 1000gp in perfumes in Rowyn's bedroom (D32). D33 is the GUild Treasury with two traps - a poison dart trap and a footlancer trap. At the end is a chest with 5,450gp of stolen goods, and 8,600gp worth of gems that Vanthus stole from the Vanderboren Vault.

Wrapping up the adventure, it says Rowyn is supposed to get away, which ... might actually happen. It assumes so because she shows up again in Scenario 3. But Scenario 3 has actual switch-ups in it in case she does get killed, so that's actually a bit of welcome foresight and departure from railroadiness that adventure paths are known for. Anyways, the PCs wind up invited to a banquet due to the Dawn Council hearing of them disabling the Lotus Dragons, and are presented with the Spire of Sasserine there, a medal of valor for services to Sasserine. It grants a +2 circumstance bonus to DIplomacy and Gather Information checks in Sasserine. It's not a bad little bit of kit. It suggests that a valorous party will return the 8,600gp worth of gems stolen from the Vanderboren Vault and that Lavinia will reward them handsomely for their honesty, but that's never brought up again, and she gives them another 1,000gp anyways for their services and asks them to go after Vanthus. All she wants is to see her brother face justice for his crimes at this point, mainly because somewhere in this word salad you also found some letters Vanthus sent to Rowyn. I'll just post the image here.

tl;dr: Vanthus is kind of a complete dick.

And that's There Is No Honor. In the "about the author" blurb at the very end, we find that James Jacobs was Editor-in-Chief of Dungeon, he thanks David Cook and Tim Moldvay for "The Isle of Dread" which served as inspiration for Savage Tide, David Noonan for giving Sasserine a name, and Chris Thomasson for coming up with the idea for the Adventure Paths in the first place. "Turns out, it was a pretty good idea, Chris!"

So, my verdict? It's... forgivable. It's the first part of an adventure path, is a bit heavy handed on the railroading, and the fucking Lotus Dragons guild is way too fucking long. This is seriously something I can see taking up an ENTIRE session, and going well over allotted runtime. Imagine trying to play it in Play-by-post or via text. All the incidental combat would take MONTHS for PbP, and text would take maybe two sessions.

The plot seeds are planted, nothing's really truly offensive, but none of it stands up to an optimized party. By the end of this, the characters are well past the midpoint of level 3, on their way to level 4 (5476exp by my count), and if they've survived they're going to start feeling like real characters once they spend all their swag - especially if they take out Vanthus early.

The only truly unforgivable thing I will give them is making Vanthus's first appearance a "Rocks fall, you're trapped" scenario. A CR 14 encounter with Will +3 is just NOT someone you're going to be scared of, ever. And the party has no reason to suspect he's CR 14, so a charm person thrown at him might actually enter their minds, at which point the path just straight up breaks as Vanthus is the driving factor until at least the end of Scenario 5. He's in line of sight and line of effect long enough for it to happen, and his +3 will save is just pathetic.

The buttload of Rogue 1s and generally low HPs means that a PC is probably going to die at some point during the assault on the Lotus Dragons' guildhall. The Training Hall is probably the point it's going to happen, too.

All in all, There Is No Honor is ... competent, but not overly so. It's a solid challenge to go from level 1 to 3. It just kind of has that super-charged energy that's narrowly focused that crops up in all adventure paths, and I can't even blame them for that because at level 1 your methods of interacting with the world are narrowly focused. The rhagodessa closet trolls feel out of place, though, especially the one on the ship.

Anyways, I'll hit Scenario 2, the Bullywug Gambit, some time soon.

[RelentlessImp]

1) There's explicitly an option for joining up with the Lotus Dragons ("Switching Sides" breakout box, p44). It does assume that you've slaughtered a fair portion of her guards when you meet her, but see above about bullshit encounters that need to be rewritten. That option is supported through at least Tides of Dragon, with other short breakout boxes explaining how to handle the change. It's not heavily developed, but it's there at least.

I honestly never saw that sidebar until you pointed it out, but I added it into the review and what I thought of that option (there's no more than vague suggestions).

2) Vanthus' low Will save can readily be handled by having him stay out of sight: he can taunt the PCs without them being able to see him. Reading the adventurer text it could go either way, but I'd play him smart enough to not expose himself to a bunch of murder hobos he just pissed off.

Can be, but not according to the text:

Vanthus may take a few rounds to taunt any PCs he sees looking back up at him, shouting things like...

3) The ship maps, while they look good visually, don't actually resemble how ships are laid out. But that's just a quibble with the ridiculousness of Stormwrack's ship designs in general.

I'm giving those a pass mostly because A: They are how ships LOOK to be laid out in popular media, and B: Three-dimensional space for a battle grid has always looked ugly when you attempt to graph it onto paper. While It's Wet Outside is an okay book and it gets ship layouts pretty badly mangled, it serves its purpose for mapping 5ft squares onto things of odd shapes.

I'm getting the feeling that by the time I reach the later adventures where the party is expected to be around levels 9-11 I'll just keep pointing out "And this breaks because Wish" because that was mostly my experience to the point where even the players got sick of it and then Wish wound up used exactly 24 more times, to give everyone +5 inherents, via a shapechange scroll and Zodar fuckery and was never used again.

[hogarth]

I'm also a fan of Savage Tides. The quality of the adventures are fairly uneven and you have to pull a lot of the bullshit D&D3e encounters apart and rewrite them, but there's plenty of good stuff to loot. I haven't run the full path and never would, but I did run Bullywug Gambit, Sea Wyvern's Wake, and Here There Be Monsters for my group (with a lot of modifications) and they worked okay.

I played up to and including Tides of Dread, and I had a lot of fun. Vanthus Vanderboren was definitely a character we loved to hate. And Tides of Dread makes a decent ending point for a truncated version of the adventure path.

I wanna talk a minute about using the motherfucking DEMOGORGON as the "hateful architect" here. Demogorgon has been used in fucking everything D&D. First appearing in the 1976 Eldritch Wizardry, he has appeared in every edition since, in AD&D's Monster Manual, the Basic set's Immortals Ruleset (as a female), AD&D 2E's Monster Mythology, 3E's Book of Vile Darkness and Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss and 4E's Monster Manual 2. He's big, he's bad, and he's completely fucking overused.

That seems backwards to me -- if a big, bad guy is everywhere, then getting the chance to actually kill him is pretty cool, in my book. It's way more interesting than killing Bob, The Super-Powerful Guy You Never Heard Of Before This Module.

[RelentlessImp]

I wanna talk a minute about using the motherfucking DEMOGORGON as the "hateful architect" here. Demogorgon has been used in fucking everything D&D. First appearing in the 1976 Eldritch Wizardry, he has appeared in every edition since, in AD&D's Monster Manual, the Basic set's Immortals Ruleset (as a female), AD&D 2E's Monster Mythology, 3E's Book of Vile Darkness and Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss and 4E's Monster Manual 2. He's big, he's bad, and he's completely fucking overused.

That seems backwards to me -- if a big, bad guy is everywhere, then getting the chance to actually kill him is pretty cool, in my book. It's way more interesting than killing Bob, The Super-Powerful Guy You Never Heard Of Before This Module.

You know that old almost-but-never-quite-formalized rule of killing a demon on the Prime banished it back to its home plane for a century? It's the same thing. It's repetition, and while that sort of thing can thrill people every once in a while (the last campaign you killed Xivicalzet the Balor and he swears revenge on you, a hundred years later he comes for your descendent) it wears if it keeps happening. It's the same deal with Elminster, he keeps showing up. Once in a while is cool, but all the time? Whether it's an omniscient Wizard or the Prince of Demons, if he keeps showing up it starts to feel trite and played out.

Mind you, it can be done well (why else would Cobra Commander, Skeletor and Mumm-Ra, not to mention all the comic book villains like the Joker, Darkseid, et al., have their staying power otherwise) but it almost never is when it comes to tabletop RPGs. It's really more the thing you expect in a superhero fantasy game like Mutants & Masterminds which lends itself very well to returning villains, while D&D fiction (and those like it) doesn't. It's a matter of theme, I think.

[Lokathor]

Well then it just comes down to how seasoned your players are, right? If you've got players new to DnD or even just new enough that they haven't actually faced off against Demogorgan before, then it's cool. And if they have done that, it'll seem trite. If you have faced against Demogorgan before, you probably have the campaign managing skills to adjust the adventure path and use another demon prince.

It's like the old GDQ1-7 adventure path. You kill Lollth once, and it's cool, even if others have done it before, you haven't, so you can enjoy it. You have fun, kill a god that has 66hp and giggle some, and the group gets a cool spider spaceship or whatever at the end.

[RelentlessImp]

Scenario 2: The Bullywug Gambit
By Nicolas Logue

So, confession time. A lot of my time in the tabletop culture has been spent reading modules and adventures, as I live in BFE and finding a gaming group that meshes with my playstyle (I lean towards Logistics & Dragons, everyone I've met tends to lean towards Conan) has been pretty difficult. My most read modules are the Shadowrun Missions "campaign", Seasons 3 and 4. I think Shadowrun really works better for these sorts of prepackaged adventures, even if they fall down when it comes to creative solutions (so do D&D modules), and the Affiliations in SRM are better fleshed-out than the ones hinted at in "There Is No Honor" and are things your players might actually give a shit about.

However, that does come with some pretty big drawbacks. Even the most roley of "ROLEplay, not ROLLplay"ers are hesitant to put shit like families, affiliated groups, et al. into their backgrounds because the MC is just all that more likely to use it to fuck with them. Why do I bring this up? The advice given for running this adventure as a stand-alone module.

One of the "adventure hooks" given for doing that is having someone in the player's backstory kidnapped by pirates and being tracked down to Kraken's Cove and giving Mister Cavern carte blanche on whether or not this person survives before the party even gets there and has a chance to do anything about it. This sort of "dicking with your players" bullshit has to stop. The other adventure hook is if one of the PCs is macking on Lavinia, and after some other schmucks do "There Is No Honor" she sends you out to bring her brother, Vanthus, to heel.

Now, in and of themselves, these are not bad suggestions. The first one smacks of Gygaxian bullshit, but maybe I'm reading a bit too far into it. The second one is... well, bringing romance to the game table is every group's decision, I just wish they'd added a third option so you don't run the chance of having your Lady Love being roleplayed by Beardy McBeardson.

Sir Grognard, I request you go and hunt down my Brother. When you return, we shall be wed, and the schmuck RPing me will describe in graphic detail the things we do on our wedding night, and will probably devirginize me just to try and piss you off.

...Ugh. I think that's really a kettle of fish best left alone. No, I'm not bitter in the least of most of my experiences being with horrible MCs with the Gygaxian mindset, not at all. I'll try to keep it from coloring stuff in the future.

So anyways, we get an Adventure Background and a Synopsis and, what do you know, the background has Vanthus being a colossal cockmunching shitlord yet again. As might be suggested by the letters from the previous adventure, he's wooed a lady just to get at things she has access to, thus being unfaithful to Rowyn and this new lady, Brissa Santos. Brissa is... actually an interesting character, so of course she doesn't survive unless you have access to magic way above your paygrade.

This module also introduces the savage tide, and the savage fever that turns people and animals into savage (race) creatures. Savage. Savage savage. It's not even a word anymore. In the interests of getting it out of the way, here's the low-down on the way these creatures get to inflict the savage fever on others, and the savage template itself.

So, first off, all savage creatures get a Bite attack that, at a DC of 10 + 1/2 racial hit die + Con mod, inflicts a Disease with an incubation time of 1 minute upon which it deals 1d6 Intelligence damage, then does it again every day. Once you reach 0 Intelligence, you die rise again as a Savage creature, with your Intelligence healing at the normal rate.

Now, the savage template itself is pretty simple; it's a host of immunities (more on that in a minute), ability score changes, skill bonuses, some resistances, and a bite attack. However, once the game starts throwing savage creatures at you, it stops fucking around in its entirety. It's a welcome step up in difficulty.

So, the template grants +4 Str, +4 Con, and -6 Int. The immunities it provides are disease, mind-affecting, stunning, and pain-related effects - also known as the vast majority of the level 1 win buttons (sleep, color spray, power word: pain) that usually last pretty long into the game as valid strategies. If you've got a player playing a Beguiler, really consider letting them play another character til this adventure's over, you don't get to encounter anything BUT savage creatures.

In addition, the template provides a secondary Bite, the Afflicted (Ex) ability which basically just says if you cast greater restoration with a caster level check against DC 10 + 1/2 creature's hit dice + creature's Cha mod, you return them to normal. Damage reduction 5/magic, Darkvision 60ft, resistance to acid 10, and...

Ferocity. Basically it says "Fuck you, take me to -10 HP" because it lets them keep fighting while disabled and dying, without penalty. So it's basically just +10hp for everything. As a final fuck you, if a player gets hit with this template, they also gain +3 LA. What? This thing is a worse Lolth-Touched with some immunities. Because fuck you, that's why.

I would seriously consider pushing things up by 1 CR because of Ferocity and the host of immunities, making it a CR +2 template at least. This fucking thing is DANGEROUS and can quickly render your party unable to level. At all. Ever.

As a follow-up to switching sides in the previous module, there is a sidebar detailing what changes if your PCs joined Rowyn. It basically boils down to "Rowyn doesn't trust Vanthus to come back with her share, go find his ass" and when she finds out that he's fled, they want the PCs to sneak into the Vanderboren place and check and see if Lavinia has any information on where he went, while bullywugs are attacking the place, and if they can steal more of her shit, the better.

Still nothing on what happens if you're playing on both sides.

So, basically, what happens literally, quite literally, and I'll quote the module here

"Although Vanthus has already left for Kraken's Cove, the actual point at which the pirates arrive and Vanthus, Brissa nad their hired mercenaries make their move is scheduled to occur a few hours before the PCs reach the area, no matter how long the they take getting there."

literally a couple hours before your PCs get there no matter how long they take chasing Vanthus (or maybe they have a couple sidequests, why the fuck not) is this. There's a big-ass pearl that they want, they're gonna take some mercs and steal it from the smugglers bringing it into the Cove.

So anyways, the start of this is basically the party having to decide how to get to Kraken's Cove in

Part One: To Kraken's Cove

This consists of the three ways the PCs can get to Kraken's Cove: Buying a rowboat for four at 50gp and rowing there (40 hours without stopping rowing, 5 days if you row 8 hours a day), a DC 25 Diplomacy check for 8gp per person/20gp per person otherwise on a round-trip ticket on an actual ship that takes 16 hours. Or they can ... fucking walk through horrible wilderness at which point it says "Check out Dragon for suggested random encounters" because PCs can never just get to where they're going if they take the pleb's way. Nevermind that you just handed them about twice their WBL for level 3 last time, they have plenty of fucking cash, with maybe enough left over to buy some gryphons. As was noted in Frank's Red Hand of Doom spiel, having a flying mount has a tendency to just straight up destroy any sense of consistency and continuity the way they want you to do it, as they never take this shit into account. If they DID they'd probably suggest just killing the mounts. Fuck.

Nicolas Logue, I want to like you because you presented three legitimate ways of getting to the next plot point, which is more points of granularity than anything in the previous adventure allowed, but you have already lost a lot of points by again giving zero chance of affecting anything even if the players have blitzed the shit through everything by being not linked to depleting resources.

One more thing to note is that this is tangentially linked to the Age of Worms adventure path that came before this (and I probably should have done a review on it first, but I've never played it NOR ran it) by introducing the Wormfall Festival. It's the one-year anniversary since some other murderhobos went and took down Kyuss and his cult and stopped an apocalypse, so these people legitimately have something to celebrate - another solar cycle of NOT living in a crapshit world.

Still, last year they had to deal with Kyuss' plot, this year the Savage Tide wants to render them into soup. This world (default Greyhawk) is just drunkenly reeling from one Extinction Event to another, isn't it? Five or maybe ten years wouldn't strain credulity so bad, but this is Eclipse Phase levels of "Why the fuck should I care about this shit?" because it hasn't had any time for people to fucking RECOVER from Age of Worms.

I guess that's why all of these adventure paths tend to be highly fucking localized, though.

Alright, once the players choose their path to Kraken's Cove, we move to

Part Two: Kraken's Cove

That was quick. Kraken's Cove is an actual cove. If you come by land, you get to see a shitload of ships burning in the harbor (save one) and get to cross a walkway to the cove itself, which, you having chosen to walk, are in mortal fucking danger of dying because as you cross a ship breaks its mooring and destroys the middle of the walkway. If you come by rowboat or ship, someone is obligated to make five DC 30 Profession (sailor) checks to get you around the dangerous shit in the water and into the cove, otherwise you get to land to the north of the cove and walk the rest of the way.

The module assumes you crash or land to the north or walked here. Why? It introduces an EL 3 encounter of 4 CR 1 savage monkeys "before they reach the cove". This is where PCs get their aforementioned rude awakening, because they have all those immunities and the PCs have likely gotten very used to ending encounters with color spray and sleep. Once that doesn't work, the monkeys do nothing and die quickly with 6hp and 16 AC - oh, sorry, 16hp and 16 AC. If someone gets bitten by the monkeys (+4) they take 1d4-2 and take a DC12 Fort check to avoid getting inflicted with the savage fever.

Then again, all the PCs can wind up getting infected here, and the adventure's now on a time limit to do shit before they wind up being zombies.

So, the cove itself. Here's the map:

See something weird? Every square is 10ft so if you wanted to use this as a battlemap, fuck you. This place is twice as large as it looks, too, and impressing that on the PCs with this thing is going to be difficult.

EDIT: One thing I forgot to add originally: see that ship that isn't on fire? This is the ship The Sea Wyvern and you are given a lengthy description to read out to your players about it. This thing comes into play later on. I'm going to go right ahead and spoil it: this is the "gain a ship" portion of a jRPG. You can't leave here now with it (requires a bigger crew) but in The Sea Wyvern's Wake you become Final Fantasy protagonists with your first vehicle.

So, let's go through this area by area (again):

K1 is the beach, where the players get to see a bunch of corpses, viscera, and missing limbs that have been bitten in two by a single bite. If they head towards any of the tunnels, they get ambushed by 2 savage warriors (EL 4?) who have 10hp (so really 20) and shitty AC. Nothing big.

Moving on, K2 is a tide pool, and getting across the planks is a DC 10 balance, and a DC 15 Knowledge (nature) or Survival check that says the water probably houses an underwater passageway. A DC 15 Search finds a passageway that leads to K11 on a DC 15 Swim check.

K3 is a big-ass mess hall that the Crimson Fleet pirates ate in. There's some story about a pirate cook that made spicy food and chopped off the fingers of people who bitched about his cooking. He's still here as a savage creature, but he doesn't get a unique statblock so he's still just 20hp savage warrior and it's just a couple hundred words to help you make sense of this guy chopping up a dead crewmate while two of his comrades are seated at the mess hall tables, waiting for dinner. The three of them attack for an EL5 encounter.

K4 is guarded by a savage phanaton (Dragon 339 62, Appendix 2) rogue 3. It's an Init 7, AC 17, 22(32)hp humanoid that has a 30ft speed, a 20ft climb speed and the ability to glide. He's a lone rogue but the savage fever makes him stupid so while he might have had a chance to get an attack in, his hooting and cawing at the PCs means he gets identified immediately and thus goes down quickly. He apparently is CR4 and makes for an EL 4 encounter. He might actually warrant it if you ignore his flavor text.

K5 would be loot central - a shitload of silk - but it got damaged by a fucking leak despite hanging from the ceiling. Anyways, there's a savage deinonychus in this room, and with 42(52)hp and 19AC, talons at +9, 2 foreclaws at +7, and a bite at +7 for a 1d8+6, 1d3+3x2, 2d4+3 attack routine he is the singularly most dangerous individual in this path your party has come across yet. A fucking dinosaur priced at CR4. Not the Thief who ran the best thieves' guild in the city nor a metal pirate chef, not the CR14 noble cocksucker Vanthus, but a goddamned Dinosaur named Ripclaw. I wish he wasn't immune to mind-affecting, but you should be permitted to wild empathy this fucker and turn him into an animal companion or mount for a small character as he's the best NPC yet.

Furthermore you can salvage 1d8 pieces of silk worth 50gp each and find 200gp worth of rare tomes. Holy fuck has the treasure dried up.

K6 leads to a laboratory that has a barricade that has to be broken down (hardness 5, hp 30) or gets shoved aside with a DC 18 strength check. You get to find the corpse of a pirate who locked himself in here and accidentally broke the glass containing his violet fungus specimen, which quickly killed him. This thing is CR3 but it has 4 tentacles for +3 and 1d6+2 and a DC 14 1d4 Str/1d4 Con poison. So it's a fucking closet troll that only gets to act by the PCs wandering near it.

You get a preserved mind flayer in its larval stage as treasure here. Okay, you just fucking got me back on your side here, Nicolas Logue. Everything is forgiven, this is a pretty fucking cool bit of treasure worth 1000gp to researchers. You also get some poisons, but seriously - pickled mind flayer larva. I don't know if many parties would actually try to sell this, but you get points for the imagery. ("Two foot long tadpole with a mass of four facial tentacles and a lamprey-like mouth.")

K7 is full of slave pens with 11 savage prisoners, who are identical to the savage pirates, and killing all of them gets you exp as an EL 9 encounter. Except they're locked up in cages with their cellmates that didn't get consumed by the savage tide (who were quickly killed and eaten) so they don't even present a challenge if you've got a decent archer, even through the DR 5/magic.

K8 is a trophy room full of shit like a tyrannosaurus' skull (what) lots of shark jaws, a sahuagin's head, jars containing fragments of tentacles (...) and a set of dragon turtle teeth. Also scavenged ship nameplates, which include such worthies as the St. Asmod's Hope or the Wavereaper. The one the path draws your attention to is a barnacle-encrusted plate that has only the legible letters of "T M AUT". Also a heavily rusted ship's bell with the nameplate Sea Ghost.

Nothing but treasure in here - it doesn't even hint that you sell the trophies to collectors. It has a 300 year old set of leather-bound nautical charts which are apparently more accurate than modern ones (...what. Just ... assume I said something about continental drifts and shelves and shit and frothed at the mouth). They provide a +4 to Profession (Sailor) checks. Three locked chests full of 120gp, 448sp, 683cp, 60 gp worth of garnets, 50gp emerald, and 500gp worth of pearls. Not to mention whatever you can get selling off the trophies.

K9 is a Krenshar kennel. There's three Krenshar corpses, and two still alive, ready to attack you. They would both get slaughtered by Ripclaw. Just two CR2s.

K10 is a storage room filled with weapons, blankets, clothing. 120 bolts, 3 short swords, 5 rapiers, 2 longswords, 2 scimitars, a glaive, 2 guisarmes, a halbered, 2 light crossbows, a heavy crossbow, 2 battle axes, 9 throwing axes, and a greataxe. Kind of a schizophrenic list of equipment for pirates.

K11 is the Tributary Chamber. This is where you run into Brissa from the background. Brissa was a pickpocket as a youth who turned to art as she matured. A surprisingly large amount of her art still graces walls in Sasserine (mainly pubs and inns in the Azure and Merchant Districts) but she wanted more than being an artist. Vanthus exploited this, got information about the shadow pearl coming in with the Crimson Fleet, and planned with Brissa to take it. The pearl broke, the mist inside of it came out, turned people into savage creatures, and Vanthus beat feet (no, he didn't get turned) after shoving Brissa into the water to die. She's a savage human rogue 2/fighter 1 and... I don't know. She's AC 18, has evasion, and a +5 attack with her rapier. She's not exceptionally dangerous, but she's probably about the equivalent of your party fighter at this point. She's CR4. Vanthus is a prick.

K12 is the so-called Savage Maze, which isn't a maze at all as you can see as either the right-hand OR left-hand rule will take you to the end. There's 3 savage pirates for an EL 5 encounter in the maze.

K13 is the chambers of someone named Kigante. He was a pretty badass pirate, as he took five of the savage pirates with him. All six bodies lay at the foot of Kigante's bed. There's a +1 rapier with a bronze hilt in the shape of a griffon, which is nicely flavorful. A ring of swimming is on his finger, and a darkwood buckler's strapped to his arm. There's 70gp split between some silver bars and vermillion ink. Fare thee well, Kigante. You were probably the second-most badass pirate here.

K14 is introed as the PCs hearing a fight. Here's another nicely flavorful NPC: Harliss Javell is backed into a corner in this cave, and is the reason this is called the Bullywug Gambit. She's using a table as cover to fend off a half-dozen savage pirates, and there's a dozen corpses on the ground already. She's already suffering from savage fever, though. There's some description here that's a word salad of adjectives ("bold beauty" "hair that flows like the deepest shade of midnight against deeply tanned skin") but some of it's pretty evocative (leather armor studded with fire opals and pearls, curved rapier and dagger fighting style). She's also the first NPC that a module describes as pretty that I would agree with:

Okay, so even I can tell she's basically Catherine Zeta-Jones in Mask of Zorro, but I don't care. I've got a Nostalgia Critic-like crush on miss Zeta-Jones.

So she kind of deserves her badass reputation by the dozen corpses: she's a Swashbuckler 3/Rogue 3/Scarlet Corsair 7. This makes her a CR 13 encounter. And yet she only has a 22 AC. Her saves are way better than Vanthus' (+9/+16/+7) who is a CR higher than her. She's got a +2 rapier and masterwork dagger, +3 studded leather armor (with its evocative studding), a ring of protection +2, a cloak of resistance +2... she's pretty goddamned well-equipped. She's got Combat Expertise so she is probably actually in ZERO danger from the rest of these pirates.

This thing suggest playing up her "imposing presence" and "puissance at swordplay" and says to "feel free to have her bail out a PC about to meet death at any moment with a hurled dagger". It goes on about her being poetry in motion, dances among the zombies, and her blades flash impossibly fast.

...You're kinda creeping me out here over your NPC descriptions, Nicolas. Tone it down, huh? Anyways the PC can save her and then they talk.

She threatens them in the bluff pirate way ("Speak up! Your names, lubbers! If only so's I can cut 'em inta' yer chests and save the undertaker some asking 'round!") and here you learn she's meant to make more appearances in Savage Tide. Anyways, Harliss eventually introduces herself and tells you this was all Vanthus' fault, AGAIN, but Vanthus dropping the shadow pearl and cracking it open was her fault 'cause she stabbed him and got blood on the pearl. She has a nice description of what the mist does to people while they're making their saving throw:

"After that... things got a bit weird, mind ye. A green mist filled my vision, and I felt strange. Like someone else were in my head. Someone... someone hungry! And the rage! Rage like I never felt 'afore! And then, just like that, it were gone."

I like shit like that. Anyways, she says Vanthus ran away again, and you learn Kigante is the guy you took the nice griffon-handled rapier from and was the cavekeeper and a Captain.

Anyways, once you start pressing for more information on Vanthus, and she will freely admit she just put a hit out on Vanthus - starting with Vanderboren Manor, to start with his sister, any family and friends he has, and so on, sending her right-hand man to lead the assasination. At this point it tells you to make the party member with the highest Diplomacy check and to make a note of it. DC 4 or less, she apologizes to them, says they must be friends of Vanthus, and tries to kill them. She's a MUCH harder fight than Vanthus because her Will save is actually respectable. DC 5, she tells the PCs to leave and stay away from Vanderboren Manor for a few days if they don't want to get hurt and figures they might want Vanthus dead as much as she.

DC 15 she winds up Indifferent, she bluffs the party and tells them they shouldn't stick around for when reinforcements arrive, but she's just gonna cut her losses and head for the Scarlet Brotherhood fort after fleeing on foot.

DC 25 Harliss believes that the PCs are after Vanthus and becomes Friendly. She encourages them to race there, giving them a note (if asked) to take to her half-orc first-mate to get him to stop, even though she knows he won't believe it.

DC 40 and she becomes Helpful, and gives them one of her marilith earrings to get her first mate to stop the assassination and a note, the earring to ensure he believes it and stops. She honestly regrets setting up the assassination on the Vanderborens.

If you kill her, the MC is encouraged to have a note on her body or in the immediate area that contains all the information, addressed to a Crimson Fleet commander.

At no point does she offer up the information that there's a tribe of bullywugs gone with her first mate to help with the killing.

At long last they mention the PCs might be able to kill her ass. "Her gear represents a major haul for characters of this level. You should consider adjusting treasure found for the remainder of this adventure and perhaps the next as appropriate." Fuck you, they earned it for killing a legitimately decent CR 13 beatstick that's still pretty far behind the curve and you put in the option for her to fucking attack them in the first fucking place.

Now, I like Captain Harliss Javell, even her later appearances. If I ever got to play this path I'd immediately try wooing her (if the MC was someone I could trust to handle that). She's slightly stereotyped as a pirate woman, but I can handle that. Plus her resemblance to Catherine Zeta-Jones. But holy fuck is the descriptive text for her just a tiny bit creepy, Nicolas.

So the party has a trip back to Sasserine, and have earned enough XP to level twice, which is where D&D sort of bites you in the ass as you can only gain enough experience to go up a level once per session. Throw that fucking rule out the window, because they just went from 5476 experience to 10985 (more, if they had to fight Ca- I mean, Harliss) experience clearing this place out - clearing the 6000 experience threshold for level 4, and the 10000 experience threshold for level 5, and you should just let them level twice on the ship ride back to Sasserine.

Part Three and Four to come soon.

[Schleiermacher]

If the party has a Cleric in Kraken's Cove, can't they use Make Whole to repair the water-damaged silk and make a fortune?

[RelentlessImp]

If the party has a Cleric in Kraken's Cove, can't they use Make Whole to repair the water-damaged silk and make a fortune?

This sort of thinking is, say it with me now, not addressed. I don't think Make Whole fixes waterlogging, but prestidigitation does.

[hogarth]

You know that old almost-but-never-quite-formalized rule of killing a demon on the Prime banished it back to its home plane for a century? It's the same thing. It's repetition, and while that sort of thing can thrill people every once in a while (the last campaign you killed Xivicalzet the Balor and he swears revenge on you, a hundred years later he comes for your descendent) it wears if it keeps happening. It's the same deal with Elminster, he keeps showing up. Once in a while is cool, but all the time? Whether it's an omniscient Wizard or the Prince of Demons, if he keeps showing up it starts to feel trite and played

In all seriousness, how many times have you killed Demogorgon in your DnD games? In my experience, the number of campaigns that reach high levels is vanishingly small, so the idea that you're meeting demon lords "all the time" is laughable.

[mlangsdorf]

I wanted to run Tides of Dread for my group, but we lost interest in the game / my work schedule interfered, I forgot which. Sea Wyvern's Wake and Tides of Dread are definitely some of the better parts of the AP.

Bullywug Gambit isn't too bad. I ran a heavily edited version of it (in GURPS) so I can't really comment on how it works in D&D, but I'd think it's playable. A lot of the bullshit D&D3e single foe encounters need to be dropped and/or merged, but that's manageable.

The thing that most annoyed me about BG (and one of the things that annoyed me about the whole path, really) was the complete lack of attention to the direction of the winds. It's a game about pirates on sailing ships; every overland map (at least for the gold economy portions of the game) should include the direction of the prevailing winds. Okay, so I'm a nerd obsessed with things that don't matter for rip-roaring adventure but sheesh. Attention to detail helps set the tone.

[Starmaker]

Scenario 1

I wanna talk a minute about using the motherfucking DEMOGORGON as the "hateful architect" here.

I guess I know how you feel, because I that's the way feel about Graz'zt. Fuck Graz'zt. Fuck him with a [Sonic] cold iron poker.

a prick named Vanthus Vanderboren, and if that name alone isn't enough to make you hate him and think him evil, the fact that he murdered his own parents by smuggling barrels full of alchemist's fire into their new boat and exploding it should.
They are then delivered a letter by a Venerable halfling woman inviting them to meet her mistress, Lavinia Vanderboren. (Are these names making you want to punch this society in the face yet?)

The surname sounds more Dutch than noble-douchey, although this family has been dicks since Shackled City.
Lavinia is Roman, so more likely to be evil on the basis of name only in a printed adventure, although I like the name. Definitely looks derpy.
Vanthus in Russian is this:

If any PC doesn't immediately suspect this asshole of being evil, I am surprised.

Looks immensely trustworthy, metagame-wise. If I saw the picture while playing the module, I would immediately think Lavinia was really evil and was going to betray us and try to convince the party to confront her and cooperate with her out of their own free will.

The Knowledge (local) check is kind of forgivable because hey, recent news, the Vanderboren elders were burned to death in their brand new ship, and Knowledge (local) is a skill a person might not feel shitty about taking.

Knowledge (local) was often interpreted to be location-specific, like, Knowledge (Sasserine).

Which, I assume is because later adventures hinge on these people being alive and being called "help" brought in to do "chores" is so totally not disparaging at all and couldn't possibly make the party want to kill these pricks.

That was in Shackled City, too. One of the adventures around level 10 or so hinged on a Vanderboren prick getting himself killed by the official bad guys, who have lain low so far. Needless to say, I had to come up with an alternative hook in my game.

It's made more obtuse that the riddle's "answer" doesn't even reference the 7 creaures in the room; there's a roper, a red dragon, an aboleth, an ettin, a spectator beholderkin, a gray render and a monstrous spider. Making it more obtuse, but not unsolvable... if you know that ettins and umber hulks have the same number of eyes.

This is why it's a puzzle rather than a laundry list. The players don't need to know how many eyes the umber hulk has, they need to realize this room is the second half of the puzzle (fucking obvious, because it's yet another random monster list of which there was only one), try to match the lists and realize the number of eyes matters ("look" is a hint), then ask the MC to describe the statues and roll Kniwledges for the monsters on the list. If your players like puzzles, it's solvable. If they don't, they won't bother solving it.

Lavinia suspects her brother has changed, but jesus christ lady you can't look at that fucking portrait up there and know he's evil? It's like you're unaware what genre you're in.

I've been looking at that asshole for ten minutes now and I still don't see it. Is it the facial hair? Because he's got the most Young Patriarchal Noble Good Guy facial hair I've ever seen.
Warning: image is HUEG.

There's an awful lot of "If captured alive" segments in this yet offers no surrender options.

Spells that fucking not-kill you, or subdual damage. Important, ideologically driven and therefore interesting enemies in modules more often than not have "herp herp herp fights to the DEATH", so it always makes sense to go for cheap and effective nonlethal options. And these are levels where sleep and color spray are royalty, so some enemies are going to be captured alive accidentally.

---

Scenario 2

As their first job, Rowyn may ask the PCs to perform any number of increasingly dangerous and sinister tasks to set things into motion for the Lotus Dragon takeover of the harbor.

By this time, she's probably the only Lotus Dragon left alive. How the fuck is it supposed to work?

Even the most roley of "ROLEplay, not ROLLplay"ers are hesitant to put shit like families, affiliated groups, et al. into their backgrounds because the MC is just all that more likely to use it to fuck with them.

I am very roley, and I don't do it for another reason entirely. The MC is very likely to fuck up the depiction of whatever I came up with. My character's backstory is part of my character, and leaving their past history and motivation under the MC's control is a gaping backdoor to shitting all over player agency. The most common case is simply tacking on my character's supposed primary motivation to the plot in an offhanded way, "Oh, and your guild sent you here to investigate." Second, this stuff gets fast overridden by the reality of a cooperative team game: no matter what my character's motivation used to be, now their primary loyalty is to the other party members and their primary drive is to kick the current foozle's ass. No one in the party gives even the slightest fart about my brother getting kidnapped, including me. I'm not saying no one whatsoever can make any use of backstory as motivation, but it's usually handled in a shitty way, as evidenced by all the related MC advice in published modules I've ever seen. A good backstory is something other players can play with. "I have a family" is not it.

Hence my comment about Lavinia above: if she was a major villain, she would be very likely one of the best-realized characters in the adventure, and my character would have a readymade detailed place in the world by working for her.

I just wish they'd added a third option so you don't run the chance of having your Lady Love being roleplayed by Beardy McBeardson.

Somehow, I never had bad experiences with my Lady Loves being roleplayed by Beardy McBeardsons. Maybe because I am a chick and was playing dudes.

This fucking thing is DANGEROUS and can quickly render your party unable to level. At all. Ever.
...
Then again, all the PCs can wind up getting infected here, and the adventure's now on a time limit to do shit before they wind up being zombies.

Er, greater restoration? Nothing really prevents players from continuing to play their characters if they had at least 9 Int, which someone is bound to have had. If your MC is a dick and rules Int 1 and 2 character unplayable, the players can decide to blindly follow their playable packmates and regain playability. Everyone goes back to town to get greater restorationed and stock up on remove diseases.

See something weird? Every square is 10ft so if you wanted to use this as a battlemap, fuck you. This place is twice as large as it looks, too, and impressing that on the PCs with this thing is going to be difficult.

I assume they had to fit it into however much space they had available on the page, and smaller 5 ft squares would just look ugly.

which include such worthies as the St. Asmod's Hope or the Wavereaper. The one the path draws your attention to is a barnacle-encrusted plate that has only the legible letters of "T M AUT". Also a heavily rusted ship's bell with the nameplate Sea Ghost.

St. Asmod's Hope and Tammeraut are from Dungeon adventures, and I just love that Sea Ghost's bell is "heavily rusted". No idea what The Wavereaper is.

It has a 300 year old set of leather-bound nautical charts which are apparently more accurate than modern ones (...what. Just ... assume I said something about continental drifts and shelves and shit and frothed at the mouth).

300 years, what drift. It's more likely here to imply Things Were Better in the past (before the last Savage Tide?), except the geography of a D&D world is super unlikely to stay unchanged where there's a world-changing cataclysm happens every day and two on Sundays.

Brissa is... actually an interesting character, so of course she doesn't survive unless you have access to magic way above your paygrade.
She's CR4. Vanthus is a prick.

Yeah, between immunity to mind-affecting and Ferocity, she's not likely to survive.

which is where D&D sort of bites you in the ass as you can only gain enough experience to go up a level once per session. Throw that fucking rule out the window

"Once you've gained a level, call it a day and stop playing D&D". Who the fuck came up with the rule.

In all seriousness, how many times have you killed Demogorgon in your DnD games? In my experience, the number of campaigns that reach high levels is vanishingly small, so the idea that you're meeting demon lords "all the time" is laughable.

So, confession time. A lot of my time in the tabletop culture has been spent reading modules and adventures, as I live in BFE and finding a gaming group that meshes with my playstyle (I lean towards Logistics & Dragons, everyone I've met tends to lean towards Conan) has been pretty difficult.

I'd hazard a guess RelentlessImp is sick of Demogorgon for the same reason I'm sick of Graz'zt. (My SC players teamed up with the designated foozle and killed the fucker. Yessssssssssss.)

[RelentlessImp]

I guess I know how you feel, because I that's the way feel about Graz'zt. Fuck Graz'zt. Fuck him with a [Sonic] cold iron poker.

I have the same hate-on for Orcus, too. Mainly it's just how often they're referenced AND when they show up it's disappointing.

Knowledge (local) was often interpreted to be location-specific, like, Knowledge (Sasserine).

That hasn't been true since 3rd Edition, while Forgotten Realms tried to tie it back to regions in 3.5, Knowledge (local) was made a generic "shit on the street" skill no matter where you were, so it's something a player might not feel shitty taking as it's always applicable.

This is why it's a puzzle rather than a laundry list. The players don't need to know how many eyes the umber hulk has, they need to realize this room is the second half of the puzzle (fucking obvious, because it's yet another random monster list of which there was only one), try to match the lists and realize the number of eyes matters ("look" is a hint), then ask the MC to describe the statues and roll Kniwledges for the monsters on the list. If your players like puzzles, it's solvable. If they don't, they won't bother solving it.

There's still the problem of the MC knowing Umber Hulks have four eyes, which if you were playing with the SRD only you wouldn't know - but then, a few other monsters in these things aren't in the SRD either, so it's kind of a wash. At least this thing reprints the important stuff.

I've been looking at that asshole for ten minutes now and I still don't see it. Is it the facial hair? Because he's got the most Young Patriarchal Noble Good Guy facial hair I've ever seen.

Mostly he reminds me of Tim Curry as Cardinal Richelieu:

So if mustache+goatee = evil, then mustache + chinstrap should equal evil, too. So yeah, it's kind of the facial hair, but it's also the sound of his name, too. English, at the very least, has certain sounds that sound sinister, and "Vanthus" most definitely does. Maybe it's just cultural.

Spells that fucking not-kill you, or subdual damage. Important, ideologically driven and therefore interesting enemies in modules more often than not have "herp herp herp fights to the DEATH", so it always makes sense to go for cheap and effective nonlethal options. And these are levels where sleep and color spray are royalty, so some enemies are going to be captured alive accidentally.

Sleep is for CDGing people at low levels, so they're dead, and color spray is so you beat the shit out of them so they might accidentally live, but aside from the boat-scum and the illusionist nothing tries to surrender or even run away.

By this time, she's probably the only Lotus Dragon left alive. How the fuck is it supposed to work?

I guess by leveraging her knowledge of the city and using the PCs as her thugs, she's still got her connections in Sasserine.

Somehow, I never had bad experiences with my Lady Loves being roleplayed by Beardy McBeardsons. Maybe because I am a chick and was playing dudes.

That makes you fortunate. Or just smart.

Er, greater restoration? Nothing really prevents players from continuing to play their characters if they had at least 9 Int, which someone is bound to have had. If your MC is a dick and rules Int 1 and 2 character unplayable, the players can decide to blindly follow their playable packmates and regain playability. Everyone goes back to town to get greater restorationed and stock up on remove diseases.

First off, there's a line in the savage template that says you lose control of your character ("...when he awakens, he immediately seeks out fresh prey.") This result still takes around [(Int)/3.5]-1 days to happen, so you probably have time to finish the adventure, hit level 5, and have your newly 3rd-level capable Cleric of casting remove disease before the template gets anywhere near you.

Second, there's a Savage Tide Player's Guide, that shows that Sasserine is built according to the DMG. It's got a population of 15,650 so it's a Large City, and has a GP limit of 40kgp. It's a Conventional city (the power rests in the hands of the Dawn Council, ostensibly). Maximum level of a Cleric is a 1d6 roll + Community modifier (9) which makes you roll 3 times; so, on average, your three highest level clerics are level 12.5, maximum 15 so there is a miniscule chance that Sasserine has a Cleric capable of casting 7th level spells. There are a couple of Clerics described in the Player's Guide but no stats are given to them - they MIGHT be in one of the Dragon articles. I'm not hunting them down to find out.

Overall if you wind up with the template there's a very good chance you're stuck with it and with a +3 level adjustment until your Cleric reaches level 13. But there's only a small chance you're going to wind up with it or even approach the coma state where your Int starts healing back upwards, unless you're playing something silly like a Feral Mineral Warrior and have a huge Int penalty to begin with - it takes 2 days on average to shove an 8-int person to that point.

300 years, what drift. It's more likely here to imply Things Were Better in the past (before the last Savage Tide?), except the geography of a D&D world is super unlikely to stay unchanged where there's a world-changing cataclysm happens every day and two on Sundays.

Pretty much. The last savage tide was a millennia ago, so they're not quite THAT old.

"Once you've gained a level, call it a day and stop playing D&D". Who the fuck came up with the rule.

My guess? Skip Williams. But it's common practice to blame Skip for everything ever.

In all seriousness, how many times have you killed Demogorgon in your DnD games? In my experience, the number of campaigns that reach high levels is vanishingly small, so the idea that you're meeting demon lords "all the time" is laughable.

Killed? If you include games I've run, twice (Bastion of Broken Souls and some guy's custom campaign). 3 if you include BG2 but he got trapped to death there. Had him show up to fuck the party over? Five, in the bad old 2E days where the MC was encouraged to fuck you over at every step of the way, and all of them were with MCs that were otherwise semi-okay til you did some out of the box thinking. So sure, I'm a bit prejudiced here.

[hogarth]

So the party is escorted to a waiting room and then encounter Lavinia's other guests - a prick of a human ranger, a clichè of a half-elf rogue, a dwarf druid (Okay, that made me chuckle a little) and a human sorceress. The human ranger throws off some bullshit at the party and then exeunts stage right, and there's nothing about letting the party engage these people in discourse AT ALL. Which, I assume is because later adventures hinge on these people being alive and being called "help" brought in to do "chores" is so totally not disparaging at all and couldn't possibly make the party want to kill these pricks.

Maybe our GM was making stuff up as he went along, but our party had barely any interaction with The Jade Ravens at all (although they did inspire us to name ourselves The Millennium Falcons). In the end, I think some or all of them died with no help from us, but they were so unmemorable that I forget. There certainly didn't seem to be any adventures that hinged on them being around from our point of view.

Killed? If you include games I've run, twice (Bastion of Broken Souls and some guy's custom campaign). 3 if you include BG2 but he got trapped to death there. Had him show up to fuck the party over? Five, in the bad old 2E days where the MC was encouraged to fuck you over at every step of the way, and all of them were with MCs that were otherwise semi-okay til you did some out of the box thinking. So sure, I'm a bit prejudiced here.

Ah, now I understand where you're coming from.

[RelentlessImp]

Before I continue on, I want to point out another problem with the savage template for a moment. The savage creature template has an Alignment shift (Alignment: Always Chaotic Evil). They also gain the [chaotic] subtype. Thankfully by this point your Paladin is immune to diseases so this isn't gonna make them fall, but what about other classes that have alignment requirements? Your Monk's gonna lose his ability to progress (so much the better, but still) as a monk, for instance. Your Bard and Barbarian are gonna be A-Okay, though.

This is just a stupid trap on par with the Helm of Opposing Alignments, and really should be fuckin' ignored.

Anyways, on with:

Part Three: The Wormfall Festival
The PCs are probably starting to feel the pressure of time right now. They know they have to get back to Sasserine before the pirate assassin (and, unknown to them, his bullywug friends) kill Lavinia. Also in this scenario we get fed Lavinia's stats; she's an Aristocrat 2/Swashbuckler 1 with the Elite array for stats. She's not really built for combat. I just wish people would stop assigning NPC classes altogether.

Anyways, it goes into detail that the Wormfall festival is in full swing and is in honor of a band of powerful adventurers from the nearby city of Cauldron who went all Action Hero on the monsters pouring out of the Spire of Long Shadows who probably would have destroyed the city, and in honor of those who died in the moments they were loose. This is the sort of thing that really, really benefits from playing consistently with the same group, and from having played Shackled City and Age of Worms with that group, because you see elements from previous campaigns and it's always cool to have a shout-out to your PCs from previous campaigns. Leaving it in without it being the same people playing with you, though? Eh. It loses its impact.

Anyways, we have another problem of quantum timekeeping depending on what method your PCs use to return to Sasserine, as the villains' actions are once again tied to your timetable. Now, if the party had taken out a rowboat or walked then yeah, it would kind of suck for their five day journey to mean they arrive too late to save Lavinia, but that's a consequence of choice. Actions should have consequence, but people who write these modules are fucking terrified of assigning consequence to anything but a one-off, mainly because it means they have to write more. But by this point the PCs have their own hate-on going for Vanthus (if they didn't kill him) and reasons to keep going after him, so you could have completely killed off Lavinia here and involved the Council of Dawn and nothing would have changed (except for a later one-off interaction of the NPCs).

Mind you, it also goes in the other direction; if the influx of wealth from There Is No Honor was invested in some flying mounts, then you should probably be able to get back before Harliss' first mate and his bullywug friends even get out of the sewers to attack the Vanderboren Estate, so you can just straight up circumvent the whole assassination plot. Once again, never addressed.

So Sasserine is caught up in all their Wormfall celebrations, the streets are clogged with people and celebrations, decoration everywhere, and the PCs can trace their path on the Sasserine map but: "no matter what route they take they find the going slow and frustrating. And of course, the crowd contains a few surprises for them along the way."

So there's 3 different random encounters the PCs can have on their way: A drunk gnome and his half-orc Barbarian friend (CR 1 + CR 5), a runaway float in the parade (EL 3), and a bunch of assassins from the Kellani family who are very upset at the PCs shaming their eldest daughter, Rowyn (EL 6). Once again, the plot thread of you working for Rowyn is ignored, but this is pretty understandable as it's from Rowyn's mother, Heldrath, not Rowyn herself. You think Rowyn might put a stop to it, though.

Let's go through these encounters real quick and move on to the Vanderboren estate. You can defuse the drunk gnome with a DC 20 Diplomacy check until his half-orc friend catches up with him, or if you do any lethal damage to the gnome the barbarian goes into a rage and attacks ruthlessly. Except he's a Barbarian using unarmed attacks (with the feats to support it at least) so he goes down like a fucking chump without doing much to the PCs. Either way you get EL5 experience.

A float bearing papier mache version of Kyuss gets loose and barrels towards a tavern. The PCs have 3 rounds to stop it with a DC 25 Strength check, blowing up one of the wheels (AC 15, hardness 5, hp 15), creating a 1000 pound obstruction (dislodging a bunch of stacked barrels with a DC 20 strength check). Here, though, Nicolas Logue proves himself at least capable of some creative thinking - he says straight up that web, shatter, and soften earth and stone, or warp wood can stop the cart. Good job, Nicolas Logue, for actually thinking of some of these options.

If they don't stop it in three rounds, the lanterns making the Kyuss figure's eyes glow break and shatter oil everywhere and set the tavern on fire when it crashes into it. DC 20 Diplomacy arranges everyone nearby into a bucket brigade, but again Nicolas Logue proves himself by saying a gust of wind can put out the fire, or even more surprisingly, that pyrotechnics can be used to control the flames.

So, Nicolas Logue, really fucking good job on the Worm's Revenge encounter. It's worth an EL3 experience reward.

The last one is Kellani's Killers, an EL6 encounter. It's a group of rogues posing as stilt-walkers in the parade. That's ... actually pretty fucking cool, and puts me in mind of the Lion Dance of Once Upon a Time in China. Anyways, the PCs get their way blocked by stilt performers who dance and such, and a DC 20 Sense Motive check lets them see the group's coming for them. Diamondback herself is a battle dancer 4 (it was a Dragon class reprinted in Dragon Compendium; it's a Cha-based Monk, more or less, including Cha to AC) with really good ability scores (Str 12, Dex 20, Con 13, Int 10, Wis 8, Cha 18). Good job again, Nicolas Logue, for realizing Monk expys still need better ability scores than pretty much ANYONE else.

She has with her 6 Rogue 1s on stilts, who might actually hit one of the PCs. The problem here is the crowd, making it difficult terrain, so the fight might actually pose some problems to the PCs. Then again, it's a fucking sleeptacular fight, but color spray might actually get you in trouble by hitting innocent NPCs. The stiltwalkers ignore the crowd due to stilts.

Anyway, this fight draws the guards, but the PCs can get away before they get there, or spend a couple minutes answering questions. There's enough witnesses around to help corroborate the PC's stories and that they were defending themselves, so the guard lets 'em go.

I don't know. After the creativity of the gnome/half-orc dynamic and the runaway cart, this one just feels the weakest despite being the most powerful encounter on the way to the Vanderboren estate.

So that brings us to

Part Four: Frogs In the House
aka: The Reason This Is Called The Bullywug Gambit
This is where the Jade Ravens come into play again. Harliss's first mate engaged the clan of bullywugs that the pirates of Kraken's Cove have an alliance with, the Trub Glorp tribe. Yes, that's stupid. No, I never pronounced it properly. It's the ENTIRE tribe, so you're more or less committing native genocide here, but at least it's justified. They massively slowed down Drevoraz, so that's why they haven't already killed Lavinia by the time the PCs get there.

Anyways, the Jade Ravens were in the estate when the bullywugs attacked, so they've been defending the estate. The common bullywug hunters you encounter are bullywug Ranger 1s with Str 14, Dex 15, Con 19, Int 6, Wis 8 and Cha 4, and have Favored Enemy: Human. So they're ... okay as threats, but they're high CR 1s while your party has become level 5 since the last time CR 1s were a threat.

There's also a neat little thing about Lavinia being inspired by the PCs, so she takes a level of Swashbuckler, but the fluff for shit like this (or even just leveling up/multiclassing) has never been consistent, so whatever.

Vanderboren Estate is HUGE.

Four floors, including a basement, and 26 rooms. I'm not sure if anyone appreciates the blow-by-blow but I am a detail-oriented motherfucker, so I'm gonna do it one more time at the very least.

First, it suggests the DM just hand the PCs the map because they've been here several times by now. That's nice, the PCs getting an advantage of how to plan out their assault. We have another "if on alert, apply the Developments section, otherwise, the bullywugs are unaware" and there's actually some text in the Tactics section of each room on whether or not the bullywugs raise the alarm when they notice you and no quantum encounter numbers.

Three more things: The Jade Ravens' presence means everything has taken 1d6 damage by the time you get to it, and the bullywugs all fight to the death because they hate humans.

Lastly, a lot of rooms have treasure listings but it says 'honorable parties probably aren't going to loot their employer's home.' That's probably true, but again, this game has been nothing but murderhobos so the PCs are probably taking anything not nailed down.

V1: So the atrium has a chandelier you can cut and drop on 2 of the 3 bullywugs for 2d6 damage which has a chance of knocking them to 0hp outright. If you remember what it said about the Jade Ravens having been fighting them, so subtract 1d6 from everything's HP, then it can almost kill them outright if you roll high. If the alarm's raised (in the first room?) they're hiding behind tapestries and waiting to ambush you. It's still 3 CR1s.

V2: Statuary. Basically full of busts and sculptures of the Vanderboren line. This is the first room with treasure, and it's a doozy; it's a gemmed silver dragon engraved with a stylized depiction of a demigod of earth, water and hidden treasure (the Earth Dragon). It's worth 1100gp. There's an odd golden likness of half of a cow's head (what the fuck) with a ruby eye, worth 800gp.

V3: Library. There's a diary written in Suel with the initials "L. of G." burned into the cover. Its current page has a bookmark that is a callback. It's a flexible, gray card that opens doors in the dungeon of metal hidden deep in the Barrier Peaks. It's worth 15gp.

V4: The Vanderboren Elders used this study to meet guests. It's dusty.

V5: This gallery is basically empty, as Lavinia sold a lot of artwork to help pay off the debts her adventurer parents left her. I wonder if she had any of Brissa's works?

V6: A Trophy hall full of hunting trophies. Apparently her parents made use of the illusionist in There Is No Honor and have stuffed smilodons, a deinonychus (Ripclaw NO LIKE!), a pony-sized toad (Giant Frog!), and a goddamned aurumvorax. Good callout with its description, Nicolas, I could actually google it based on the description (badger-like creature with golden fur and eight legs). Not to mention a bunch of mundane leopards, wolves and bears. There's a secret door here into V15 that you can discover with a DC 25 Search check.

There's 3 more bullywugs in here who are, I shit you not, worshiping the Giant Frog. 3 more CR 1s for the fire who are hiding behind Giant Frog if the alarm is raised and they get a surprise round on the PCs.

V7 is the courtyard and here's the first hint you get of the Jade Ravens, because three bullywugs are dead here, one with throwing knives (half-elf cliche), one with a blow to the head, and the other riddled with lots of magic missile burns. There's also a dead badger, who was the dwarf druid's animal companion.

V8 is the kennels, and have 3 mastiff hounds who were kenneled in here and couldn't be let out. If they're calmed with a DC 15 handle animal or wild empathy check, the party gets a group of hunting dogs with riding dog stats. You can just let them out and let them go attack the bullywugs, too, they'll rush for the scent of bullywug and attack.

V9 is storage, and doesn't have anything special in it, just a description that it's full of cleaning supplies, sheets, pillows and "other necessities of the household".

V10 is the servant quarters, and apparently the serving staff make do with 10x10 rooms. The wizened old halfling lady who served you with the invitation and met you when you came to the Estate is the only current resident, and she's not here - she's dead in room V27.

V11 is the ballroom, and is empty.

V12 is the private dining hall where you met with Lavinia just before the Blue Nixie. This room features one of the unique bullywugs: Huntress Lorb-Lorb Tub, mate of the Chief. She's apparently sulking in here because she thinks it's ridiculous and she doesn't want to take any part in the raid, but she's sitting in a chair smoking a box of cigars she found. She greets the PCs warmly, then orders her 3 Hunters to attack. She doesn't do anything til all of her hunters are dead or she's attacked.

She's a Barbarian 2/Ranger 3, who immediately Rages and attacks when triggered. She's a TWF Ranger, so she dual wields handaxes. She's got Fort 11, Ref 4 and Will 0 (+2 while Raging), so Color Spray destroys her. This is an EL 6 encounter.

V13 is a washroom with a tub and washbasin.

V14 is a privy with three fine porcelain lavatories and what the fuck. Why are they detailing bathrooms in this adventure path. First the Lotus Dragons guildhall and now the Vanderboren estate. Well, at least they have indoor plumbing. I guess it's a nice change of pace that some details are paid attention to?

V15 is a hidden armory accessed from the secret door in the trophy hall V6. The dwarf druid of the Jade Ravens, Kaskus Kiel, is hiding in here after the other Jade Ravens were captured. He didn't know about the magic missile trap, so he set it off for our party, and nearly died to it - it was on the coffer full of healing potions. Irony? Anwyays he stabilized at -7 so the party can heal him and find out what happened to the Jade Ravens, where he starts tearing up at recounting the death of his animal companion who was killed by Harliss's first mate.

Anyways, there's a silvery bastard sword, a light crossbow, a glowing dagger (+1 keen), a suit of studded leather armor, a light steel shield and the aforementioned coffer of healing potions, which lays on its side with its contents (several potion vials and a pair of boots) strewn on the floor. Four of the potions are smashed but there's four cure moderate wounds potions left, and the boots are boots of striding and springing.

V16 ... even says "there is nothing of interest in these chambers".

V17 is a laboratory. It's where the Vanderboren elders have biological samples from their journeys and they apparently made alchemist's fire and potions in here, too. It's dusty because it hasn't been visited in a month (ever since Lavinia's mother died, who used the room the most. Just like the industry to make the woman the potion-maker. Hey, stop hitting me, it's a joke). Anyways there's a shrunken head of a tasloi that's apparently worth 20gp, a green worm floating in alchemical preservative worth 50, a one-eyed bat thing mounted on a board whose body gives off an eerie soft glow worth 100gp, and a stretched leathery skin with the tattoo of an eye with an arrow crossed over it (the Carcerian sign), worth 25gp.

V18 is the Family Shrine, where we learn the family worships Fharlanghn, my favorite Greyhawk deity. (Favored weapon: Bastard Sword and the travel domain? Fuckyeah. Also he's usually depicted as a completely metal old man). You can take the offerings; cinnamon worth 5gp, a rare orchid worth 10gp, a ruby brooch in the shape of a bat worth 300gp, a small silver offering bowl with a crescent-shaped base of bone worth 60gp which is currently filled with dates from a far-off desert (20gp worth) and a white oak staff of passage with 1 charge remaining.

V19 is a training hall, with a bunch of masterwork weapons: an axe, two daggers, four rapiers, a ranseur and a spiked chain. It also has a strange-looking crossbow which is, in fact, a +1 repeating crossbow.

V20 is the laundry room. They're currently hunting for some silk robes because one of the bullywugs (Bua Gorg, the bullywug cleric 6) has taken a liking to the fine clothing in the estate and wants to take as much back to their swamp as possible. The bullywugs battle to the death - they all do, but these especially, because it's mentioned and because they're protecting their master's "treasure". If the alarm has been raised they're in the next area instead.

V21 is a balcony. The bullywugs from V20 are here watching the street for reinforcement. It's a nice little balcony with a view of Sasserine with three reed chairs to sit in.

V22 is the kitchen, and all that's in here that shows it's being used as of late is a wheel of Lavinia's favorite cheese (Hollowsky port) and a loaf of hardened bread. Lavinia apparently even sold her family's wine collection to help pay the debts (but Vanthus drank a lot of it before she did. You are the biggest dick, Vanthus).

V23 is the basement and where the bullywugs emerged from the canal system into the manor. Apparently the chief has a pet rust monster he used to eat through the protective grating. There's muddy floor here that serves as difficulty terrain. Chief Lorpth is down here, and he's got a chair to sit in and watch as his rust monster torments a human woman - Liamae Teslikaria, the human sorceress of the Jade Ravens. There's what I assume is a typo here ("Having cast all of her prepared spells" - sorcerers don't prepare spells) and she's biding her time for the opportunity to run away. The 'game' Lorpth is playing with her is she's been stripped and made to wear a sheet through which the bullywugs have threaded lots of silverware.

Lorpth apparently told her if she can keep one piece of silverware away from the rust monster (named Chunkus) til they're ready to go, he'll let her go free, otherwise he eats her. She's got 3 spoons and 1 fork by the time the PCs arrive and she throws out her last spell to distract Lorpth, a charm person - which honestly probably works, he's got a Will save of +0 and 11 Cha vs Liamae's 15. She also has Spell Focus (Enchantment).

So the fight is Lorpth, a rust monster, and 3 bullywug hunters for an EL7 encounter. And this is actually one of the few times I've seen the PCs be on the backfoot of action economy here, in a 5v4 fight.

Can I just say how assholeish it is to ever include a fucking rust monster? Nicolas, buddy, I'm loving the latter half of this shit, but a rust monster? That's the MC saying "Fuck you, fighters, you don't get nice things". You seemed on board, man.

The PCs can save Liamae's gear just by showing up because the rust monster goes for the party and follows their chief's orders. Lorpth is only a Fighter 5, anyways, so he doesn't do anything interesting. Limae's gear is here, but you probably don't take it from Liamae; ring of protection +1, potion of false life, wand of mage armor with 10 charges, a wand of shocking grasp with 30 charges and 78gp. Liamae is another option to learn of the Jade Ravens being scattered and captured in the courtyard.

V24 is the reservoir of water pumped through the house.

V25 is Lavinia's room. It's been hers since childhood, and she's not comfortable taking the master's bedroom. There's a bullywug corpse in here as Lavinia managed to kill one before being captured.

V26 is Vanthus's room, and it's empty. Except for the obvious treasure of his satin sheets and silk drapes, there's a bunch of empty bottles of wine and lots of fine drinking vessels, one of which is a tankard with the words "Grog's" engraved on it.

In his cabinet is a ring with a blue stone worth 150gp, a key of ivory worth 60gp, and a collection of signet pins of strange colors and crests - a mushroom on one, a whip on another, and a pair of spiders on the third. The pins are worth 100gp and are probably another reference to either Shackled City or Age of Worms.

V27 is the master bedroom. This is the biggest encounter the PCs have faced yet: Harliss' first mate, Drevoraz Kabran, a male half-orc Fighter 6, bua Gorg, a bullywug Cleric of Dagon 6. Along with Lavinia, the other two members of the Jade Ravens are here - Tolin Kientai (Ranger) and Zan Oldavin (half-elf rogue), and the old halfling woman is dead, her throat cut. Tolin and Zan are unconscious but stable at -4, and Lavinia is conscious.

So if the alarm's up, you get the Cleric readied an action to cast Summon Monster III if he sees someone enter, and Drevoraz is standing near Lavinia, ready to kill her. Drevoraz wants the PCs to throw down their weapons unless you make a DC 40 Diplomacy check, or have a note PLUS one of Harliss' marilith earrings, he wants safe passage out of the city. That enrages the bullywug who immediately attacks the nearest PC and Drevoraz tries to run away.

Otherwise, Dervoraz tries to kill Lavinia, at which point he finds out she's worked her hands free and she lunges out of the way and initiative is rolled. If Drevoraz is higher he makes an attack on Lavinia, if Lavinia is higher she runs for the PCs and the safety of being behind them. At least she's an INTELLIGENT NPC.

If the PCs heal and free the Jade Ravens they join the fight but they're only a level 3 ranger and rogue, so they probably don't. If Drevoraz is badly wounded the bullywug tries to heal him with a wand of cure light wounds, and Drevoraz tries to flee at under 15hp. The Cleric mostly spends his time summoning monsters, as most of his spells are expended already. Bua Gorg fights to the death, and so does Drevoraz if he's cornered.

Once it's over the PCs have a lot of shit to either take or return to their rightful owners. Lavinia's stuff is a potion of CLW, a masterwork rapier, a ring of protection +1, a pair of golden earrings worth 200gp, and a jade ring worth 80gp. Tolin, theranger, his stuff is a +1 chain shirt, two masterwork short swords, a composite longbow scaled for +2 strength mod, 40 arrows, a cloak of resistance +1, and 56 gp. Zan (the rogue)'s stuff is +1 studded leather, a masterwork buckler, a masterwork rapier, a masterwork shortbow with 40 arrows, goggles of minute seeing, and 14gp.

So if the PCs have already rescued the other two Jade Ravens, the adventure is over. If not, the Jade Ravens and Lavinia try to recruit them to rescue the druid and the sorceress.

Lavinia rewards the PCs with 100pp each, and increases their monthly stipend from 100 to 200gp. It goes on to say if you use the upkeep variant rules from DMG page 130 she instead gives them an extravagant lifestyle as long as they remain in her employ. That's nice, Nicolas.

The PCs now have some time off. Some legitimate downtime before the next adventure. Lavinia will be going through all of the notebooks recovered in There Is No Honor before she approaches the PCs for another job, and it turns out they are detailing a place called the Isle of Dread (DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNNNN). Apparently her parents managed to establish a relatively safe colony on an islet near it, and planned to return there with supplies and more colonists but never got to due to Vanthus. But they need another ship... hey, there's one still at Kraken's Cove. But that's covered in the next adventure.

Verdict? Holy fuck I think Nicolas Logue might be one of my favorite writers here. This adventure is nice, varied, and isn't too long. There's a creepy moment while you're reading Cath- Harliss' flavor text, but the rest of it is legitimately good, flows nicely, and has some pretty flavorful shit in it (pickled mind flayer larva, holy shit).

If anyone knows any other modules this guy's written, let me know. This is my favorite scenario so far just because of this guy willing to help less experienced MCs if their players think outside of the box. His creativity is a cut above the previous adventure, too. Parade stiltwalkers, gnome/half-orc friends, and the runaway cart? It's common enough but these sorts of things are more or less uncommon in D&D modules. I absolutely love this one. The naked sorceress with the sheet and the silverware and the rust monster? Aside from the rust monster being a "fuck you" to the melee character in the party, that's pretty goddamned cool, even if some people would call it degrading to women for it to appear in a written work that way.

Anyways, that's The Bullywug Gambit. The appendix goes into more detail about the shadow pearl that was broken (short version: the mist that comes out of it skips the savage fever and just straight up converts you into a savage creature unless you make a DC 15 will save). It only breaks if anointed with a sentient creature's blood. After one minute, it breaks and spits out a mist that teems with evil spirits and gnashing fangs. The mist persists for a minute, and it's the mist that has earned the title "the savage tide". It deals 1d6 acid damage to anyone in it and forces a will save or become a savage creature, otherwise you're nauseated for one round. Apparently this is not the savage pearl, just an imperfect copy, but they're still pretty much minor artifacts themselves.

At the end, we learn a little of Nicolas Logue. He's apparently a monk 5/thespian 6/freelance writer 7 (apparently this is a pretty optimized build since I liked this one better than There Is No Honor). There's some silly fucking around about him being killed by Richard Pett and Greg Vaughan, but a clone spell brought him back to life. He dedicates this adventure to the Frumjoys, his oldest brother Dr. Christopher Logue, and Jimmy Buffett who "all taught Nick everything he knows about the pirate's life".

Good job, Nicolas Logue. This one is above-average and, in truth, is pretty good. All the little flavor details add up to something pretty memorable. There's an almost unforgivable use of quantum mechanics in when things happen, but eh, it happens a lot in D&D modules so it's understandable if not exactly good. There's a nice bit of continuity by having everyone be down 1d6hp from the earlier fights, and having people have spells expended, and that's a sort of detail that's often overlooked.

The biggest, hugest sin to me here is twofold. First, treating CR-appropriate beatsticks as legitimate threats and not giving them any kind of defenses against something as simple as color spray like good will saves, but eh. You can't have everything, and some issues of theme when it comes to D&D are going to always be a problem for people having to write for a general audience.

Second, Harliss. You put in an option for her to outright attack the PCs - and this is the time where they are legitimately in danger of a TPK outside of lucky/unlucky rolls - and she might actually kill someone. And then you go on to tell the MC to start stripping out treasure if they kill her - which they might, but she's a legitimate threat (unlike Vanthus) and thus at the level you encounter her, dangerous (later on she falls prey to BDF syndrome like every other character that doesn't have a fly speed). The paragraph about her gear being a windfall just doesn't even need to be there, nor does she need to attack the PCs if they fail a Diplomacy check. That's just one colossal failure, Nicolas Logue.

For experience, these encounters push the PCs up to 14798 exp, which... is just so, so close to sixth level. The next one says there's a possibility they won't have reached 5th level. I really, really don't see how, unless they went straight for all the mission objectives and skipped a lot of combats. But killing everything, they're 202 exp away from level 6, assuming they did Rowyn's Killers (which is the one I would personally use, despite it being boring mechanically it's also the coolest in theme to me).

Included in the following Dungeon was a scenario for 5th-level characters involving intelligent weapons set in Sasserine. I'm probably not gonna cover it (it's about the same length as a Savage Tide scenario) but it's suggested as a side-mission during the downtime following The Bullywug Gambit, which would push your PCs even further ahead of the curve. It's just really weird and leads me to assume they never did the experience math.

[mlangsdorf]

Maybe our GM was making stuff up as he went along, but our party had barely any interaction with The Jade Ravens at all (although they did inspire us to name ourselves The Millennium Falcons). In the end, I think some or all of them died with no help from us, but they were so unmemorable that I forget. There certainly didn't seem to be any adventures that hinged on them being around from our point of view.

The early adventures in the AP make it sound like the JRs are going to be a big deal in the later adventures, but their appearances are pretty minimal:
1. In TINH, they rudely go past the PCs on an errand for Lavinia that makes no sense. In my game, I had that get annoyed about their lack of pay and head out to do some treasure hunting.
2. In BG, they get beat up by some bullywugs.
3. In SWW, they attend a party or two and get into some wacky off-screen shenanigans that basically amount to further tanking their terrible optimization. Seriously, the sorceress becomes a Favored Soul/Mystic Theurge.
4. They don't appear at all in HTBM.
5. In Tides of Dread, they fight some foes off-screen and can be persuaded to do annoying tasks (like fight troglodytes) that the PCs don't want to do.
6,7. They don't appear at all in Lightless Depths or City of Broken Idols.
8. In Serpents of Shuttlecove, they take the Blue Nixie to chase after the Vanderborens, get to Shuttlecove before the PCs (assuming the PCs don't cast Wind Walk / Teleport to get there first because the PCs aren't dumb), and get gruesomely killed off by absurdly high level pirates.
9-12. Any appearances of the JR in the last 4 adventures are strictly GM ad-libbing.

So they're pretty lame overall, and if you didn't have much interaction with them, it's probably because the adventures that they get the most onscreen time (SWW and ToD) are the ones that are already NPC interaction heavy and something had to give.

[mlangsdorf]

As for the Bullywug Gambit, I think you're a bit insane for going room by room in these reasonably large dungeons, but the effort is appreciated.

The rescue mission in the latter half of BG works fairly well in play and is, as you noted, reasonably well written. It's clearly intended for unoptimized PCs groups with a blaster mage, a healbot cleric, a flanking rogue, and some kind of loser fighter, but if you read the Paizo forums on the topic from 2007 or so, you'll see that unoptimized party is somewhat ahead of the curve of the loser failures that people brought to the table (seriously, 2 swashbucklers, a melee rogue, and a warmage? That's your party?).

The lovingly detailed loot at the Vanderboren house is intended for groups working with Rowani, who would want them to kill the Vanderborens and steal all their stuff after Vanthus' latest betrayal / screw-up.

I'm always amused when looking at the map of the manor that Lavinia's childhood bedroom is literally larger than my first 3 bedroom house. I understand that D&D has problems because of 5' squares and the need to have maneuver space with 8 combatants in a fight, but it's still very silly.

[RelentlessImp]

Bullywug's Gambit is probably the only one that hinges on them being alive, if only so they keep Lavinia from being killed outright and deal some damage to the bullywugs. They serve as exposition mouthpieces when you find them.

Lavinia's bedroom isn't that huge. My current bedroom is about that size, taking into account that it shares a similar floorplan to Lavinia's bedroom. The Vanderboren Estate has a lot of wasted space design and decoration, though, which you find less and less of in modern housing. If you want to see economy of space, look at modern-styled homes and RVs, but if you want to see it wasted, look at homes designed like the Vanderboren Estate.

Anyone else mildly interested that Lavinia and her parents' room both have a Queen size bed while Vanthus was making do with a twin?

[mlangsdorf]

Your bedroom is 25' by 45' with a 10' by 25' annex? 1375 square feet? That's a reasonable 2-3 bedroom house. How big is your house overall?

[RelentlessImp]

10'5"x14'9" annex and 10'4"x20'. So, about half the size. I need to stop posting when I'm tired and, well. One of my biggest problems has always been visualizing volume.

[hogarth]

By the way, our (incomplete) Savage Tide play-by-post campaign can be found here:
http://paizo.com/campaigns/SeekersPathfinderSavageTide/gameplay
It was a Pathfinderized version that took place in Eberron.

At the end, we learn a little of Nicolas Logue. He's apparently a monk 5/thespian 6/freelance writer 7 (apparently this is a pretty optimized build since I liked this one better than There Is No Honor). There's some silly fucking around about him being killed by Richard Pett and Greg Vaughan, but a clone spell brought him back to life. He dedicates this adventure to the Frumjoys, his oldest brother Dr. Christopher Logue, and Jimmy Buffett who "all taught Nick everything he knows about the pirate's life".

Years later, Mr. Logue took on a bunch of pre-orders for various products that he was going to write, but he procrastinated ao long on actually writing the stuff that he panicked and vanished off the face of the internet. Eventually he made some sheepish apologies and people got their money back, but it didn't make him look too good.

[RelentlessImp]

Years later, Mr. Logue took on a bunch of pre-orders for various products that he was going to write, but he procrastinated ao long on actually writing the stuff that he panicked and vanished off the face of the internet. Eventually he made some sheepish apologies and people got their money back, but it didn't make him look too good.

That's a shame and reminds me of my early attempts to do pbp campaigns before I really knew what I was doing in a text-based format over a face-to-face format. I can sympathize but yeah, that's kinda shitty.

[RelentlessImp]

So I'm taking a day-break from doing this, but here's a quick overview of War of the Wielded, included in the Dungeon following the one that contained The Bullywug's Gambit, written by Michael Kortes. It details some of the underworld's power vacuum following the dissolution of the Lotus Dragons, but goes into detail on some of the guilds that popped up during the century of oppressive rule spawned out of a group of radicals (The Oquons) and displaced nobles (the Cabanites). Their private war killed a lot of people and as it was winding down, they created some intelligent weapons capable of dominating people and continuing their private war. Gradually the weapons fell into the hands of private collectors and museums, until the executors of a private estate made the mistake of each picking up one of the weapons whose Ego scores dominated them and started the whole thing over again.

The PCs get involved while investigating a rather messy murder in an alleyway, which is the aftermath of the duel between the executors who picked up the intelligent weapons; a short sword named Sabrehawk from the Oquon faction and rapier Czarina Valora of the Cabanite faction. The murdered party the PCs run across is an Oquon recruit carrying Sabrehawk. The PCs get to investigate the murder and browbeat a beggar who saw everything, but they eventually get Sabrehawk who then tells them what happened. His wielder was tracking an "evil Cabanite" agent back to her lair, where the short sword thinks one of his missing comrades was taken. The sword further goes on to detail his powers (more in a minute) and invites the PCs to wield him for glory.

So, Sabrehawk is a +1 silver speed short sword, with Int 10, Wis 14, Cha 14, giving him an Ego score of 10. He can speak common and has sight/hearing in a 120ft radius, and saves of +9. He gives the iwelder the capability of casting clairvoyance once per day, and has 10 ranks in spot. Sabrehawk's personality is very much the "noble knight" personality, who respects his wielder and expects respect in return, so long as they don't try to stop him from killing Cabanites. The art for Sabrehawk shows the sword to be more of a fantasy-stylized scimitar than anything with a real world analogue and a hawk-shaped grip.

Sabrehawk directs the PCs to a bathhouse, which is more of a mudbath spa than anything else, and have to navigate their way in, usually with less than a gold piece for entry for non-members. As they work their way through saunas, massage parlors, and such, they run across members of the Cabanites who try to reason with the PCs and recruit them to the Cabanite cause as opposed to the Oquon. They can pick up the intelligent weapons The Dutchessas in one of the encounters. They eventually find their way to the mudroom, ostensibly closed for repairs, where they interrupt a Cabanite ritual led by a Sorcerer 4 wielding Czarina Valora.

They are attempting to seal away another intelligent Oquon weapon by burying it in mud and turning it to stone. The Sorc 4 has three scrolls of transmute mud to rock but has to hit a DC 10 Caster level check to activate them. If he doesn't succeed or the PCs interrupt him, they get to recover another Oquon weapon, Hoardcutter - not to mention Czarina Valora, Countessa Invicta and Lady Akanara, but if they get away the PCs get to pursue them to the arboretum, where they die.

So, five more intelligent magic weapons; Hoardcutter is a +1 mighty cleaving thundering greatsword with Int 10, Wis 14, Cha 14, Ego Score 9, 120ft vision and hearing. He has enlarge 3/day, 10 ranks in Intimidate. He's very much the brash brute with a thunderous voice and if the wielder ever shows mercy to a Cabanite he turns into a roaring, furious monster.

Countessa Invicta is a Rod of Flailing with Int 14, Wis 10, and Cha 14 who can speak Common, draconic and Elven, 6 all saves and an Ego score of 11. She can cast zone of truth 3/day, 10 ranks in intimidate. She can turn from a slender azure rod and into a dire flail with heads carved from black iron. Countessa's personality is very much the 'Dominatrix' sort of archetype, capable of sympathy and sadism, with a man-hating complex tacked on.

The Dutchessas are a pair of +1 returning daggers of venom, Int 10, Wis 14, Cha 10, 9 saves and Ego Score 9. They can cast bane 3/day, and summon monster I 1/day. They are the 'quiet assassin who takes too much joy in their work' archetype.

Lady Akanara is a Sword of Subtlety, with int 14, Wis 10, Cha 14, speaking Common, Elven and Infernal, with 6 all saves and Ego score 9. Can confer the benefit of an elixir of sneaking 1/day, and grants the Deflect Arrows feat. She is the 'quietly determined, success at all costs' sort.

And finally, Czarina Valora is a mithral rapier of puncturing with Int 17, Wis 10, Cha 17, can speak Common, Draconic, Elven and Sylvan, has telepathy, 120ft darkvision and hearing, 8 all saves and an Ego Score of 15. Capable of casting Hypnotism 3/day, 10 ranks in Bluff and Diplomacy, and can detect Oquons within 60ft at will. She is the leader of the Cabanites, and ... well, she's an Evangelist Leader. She preaches about the Cabanites and against the Oquons.

Anyways, the PCs are now in possession of two Oquon weapons (Sabrehawk and Hoardcutter) and three Cabanite weapons (Dutchessas, Lady Akanara and Czarina Valora) and have to hold off Ego scores for wielding them. They're not very good weapons, really. Your Rogue might appreciate the Dutchessas or Czarina Valora but good grief the Ego Score on Czarina.

Once out of the bathhouse they are approached by a fallen Paladin named Larcos Dengrin, who had his Paladinhood stripped from him during the last small-scale outbreak of the Oquon-Cabanite war. He was one of the ones who helped to funnel the weapons into private hands, away from the war, and now he's got a plan to destroy the weapons - Cabanite and Oquon both. He approaches the PCs and gives them the lowdown on how the Cabanite and Oquon weapons came about ("to carry on the war") after asking them to put the weapons somewhere else so they don't hear him. He pleads with the PCs to help him destroy the weapons. His plan involves capturing an old, legendary rust monster named The Kogoloxen and using him to eat the weapons.

He provides the PCs with a covered wagon and horses to pull it along with an ironwood cage to trap the Kogoloxen in. They make their way to the Corroded Caves which is kind of a really weird, long lair that only has one encounter - the Kogoloxen himself.

The Kogoloxen himself is an advanced fiendish rust monster sporting 9HD and the fiendish template, and is more or less a puzzle monster - how to get it into the ironwood cage, and then getting it out of the cave and back to Sasserine.

Following up on Larcos's plan, they return to Sasserine. Larcos has broken into a place called the North Marshalling Dome, and has used some marvelous pigments to rig the exits so he can seal them all by pulling one lever, and has sent an message to the Oquons and the Cabanites once the PCs return, inviting them to a council to discuss a treaty between the two factions.

This place looks kind of like a foundry. Anyways, the delegation comes, lead by the Oquon weapon The Solo Hand and the Cabanite weapon Princessa Cathandra (if the PCs captured Czarina Valora earlier). Any weapons they didn't capture are also here. There's supposed to be six people, all wielding either the original intelligent weapons, or clones of them, from both delegations.

Once they're all there, the PCs release the Kogoloxen into the dome and Larcos springs his trap. What comes out of this is a four-way brawl, as the Cabanites and Uquons ostensibly unite to kill the rust monster, but they get caught up in their own rivalry and try to kill each other at the same time. If the PCs are wielding any of the intelligent weapons, the weapons turn on the PCs and try to kill them. The fight keeps going until three out of four parties (PC+Larcos, Oquons, Cabanites, rust monster) are dead, leaving only one victor. At which point the intelligent weapons can be destroyed and end the shadow war.

Two more intelligent weapons involved here - The Solo Hand (Oquon) which is a +1 cold iron dancing bastard sword with an Ego of 16, command and longstrider 3/day, sprays dust of tracelessness 3/day, and can detect Cabanite weapons and wielders within 60ft at will. He's more or less that intelligent weapon from the Drizzt books, always seeking a better wielder, willing to discard his current wielder if a better one comes along.

Princessa Cathandra of the Unseen Edge (Cathandrite) is a +2 shocking short sword with an ego score of 9 who can cast Tasha's hideous laughter 1/day. Something kind of neat about this one, it has a permanent invisibility spell cast on it, rendering it invisible til it hits someone. Cathandra, unfortunately, has the personality of a kender - quick-witted and always insulting people, even her own wielder.

There's one more Oquon weapon that's never directly referenced; Triage, a +1 defending ranseur with an Ego score of 13, with cure light wounds at CL 5 3/day on the wielder only and deathwatch continually active, producing a Keoghtom's ointment 1/week. He acts as a periapt of wound closure as long as he's within 5ft. He's the "CHARGE!" personality, fearless and upbeat forever, and constantly encourges his wielder to strike first and ask questions later. If there's cowardice in his wielder, he tries to withhold his healing, so he's just as much of a dick as any others.

On the one hand, this adventure is pretty short and sweet and details a pretty interesting war you only get in a fantasy world - intelligent items outliving their creators and carrying on their wars. On the other hand, this thing is kind of unsatisfying on all levels. The intelligent weapons are kind of bad weapons, D&D's combat system is full of MTP when it comes to non-statted traps and capturing things, and the plot is about as subtle as a Saturday morning cartoon show. The intelligent weapon personalities are caricatures but they never approach the level of amusement as Lilarcor by their descriptions, so they're ultimately forgettable. Larcos really needed a bit more going for him as to how he fell in the shadow war to be more than a "these fucking weapons fucked up my life and I wanna see 'em destroyed" sort of character.

Ultimately, it's definitely just a "side quest" that can give your PCs some pretty interesting but ultimately irritating weapons and it assumes your PCs want to destroy them all. I don't think I've ever seen an adventure centered around intelligent items, but I think it could be done at least a little better than this. Plus you're asking the MC to roleplay them constantly. This is more or less why people don't bother with intelligent items; between alignment clashes, Ego scores, and putting yet another NPC for the MC to keep track of, having all this extra shit to keep in mind is just more bookkeeping in a game system that's already heavy on bookkeeping.

It's not bad. It's just not good.

[rasmuswagner]

Plus you're asking the MC to roleplay them constantly. This is more or less why people don't bother with intelligent items; between alignment clashes, Ego scores, and putting yet another NPC for the MC to keep track of, having all this extra shit to keep in mind is just more bookkeeping in a game system that's already heavy on bookkeeping.

It's not bad. It's just not good.

If Wraith: The Unplayable taught us one thing, it's that players can and should play the whispering voice influencing their fellow PC. Now I'm getting inspired to run a campaign around intelligent artifacts.