Age of Worms Adventure Path

[Big Mac]

Hi,

Erik Mona just mentioned in the Flanaess Geographical Society that Paizo were talking to Wizards of the Coast about turning the Age of Worms Adventure Path into a book. It's a real shame that WotC didn't sort that out, as I would have liked the chance to buy another Greyhawk book. (I bought the book for The Savage Tide.)

Anyhoo, has anyone here played the Age of Worms Adventure Path?

What do you think of it?

Did you make any adjustments to make it fit in better with your own personal vision of Greyhawk?

[Milke]

Age of Worms is set in Greyhawk (with enough generic-ness that it can be adapted to most any world). The first adventure The Whispering Cairn is set just a ways outside of the Free City. I haven't played it, but I have the issues of Dungeon and I've read it. I've heard nothing but great things about this AP. I'm running my group through Shackled City right now.

[mortellan]

I ran Age of Worms from beginning to end. I liked the first few adventures. Whispering Cairn was a well done low level adventure and those set in/around Greyhawk City were good if not for mining material. There was a mid-AP one set in the Bandit Kingdoms that I liked because it was an urban crawl with some weird npcs. The later high level episodes were laborious but had some memorable BBEGs. I think Paizo learned from Age of Worms and its follow up Savage Tide, that 12-part 1-20 level APs are too long to slog through.

[MToscan]

I am playing the second adventure right now. The campaign fits quite nicely in my Greyhawk (year 596) so far, I don't really like the Ebon Triad concept but the adventures so far are fine. Some names had to be changed (Manzorian to Tenser, Balakarde to Bucknard etc.) other that that it looks almost canon.

[Big Mac]

I ran Age of Worms from beginning to end. I liked the first few adventures. Whispering Cairn was a well done low level adventure and those set in/around Greyhawk City were good if not for mining material. There was a mid-AP one set in the Bandit Kingdoms that I liked because it was an urban crawl with some weird npcs. The later high level episodes were laborious but had some memorable BBEGs. I think Paizo learned from Age of Worms and its follow up Savage Tide, that 12-part 1-20 level APs are too long to slog through.

I thought these Adventure Paths were kind of supposed to be the entire career of a bunch of adventurers.

Would you recommend some trimming of the higher level episodes? Would you cut any out entirely, or just remove some sections of individual episodes?

I am playing the second adventure right now. The campaign fits quite nicely in my Greyhawk (year 596) so far, I don't really like the Ebon Triad concept but the adventures so far are fine. Some names had to be changed (Manzorian to Tenser, Balakarde to Bucknard etc.) other that that it looks almost canon.

What's the Ebon Triad? Is it an organisation?

[stebehil]

I just found - to my astonishment - that the Ebon Triad even has a Wikipedia entry. How this is relevant enough for Wikipedia is beyond me, but here you are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebon_Triad
It is, in short, a fraudulent heretical cult of three evil deities cults, first described in Dungeon #125, "The three faces of evil", by Mike Mearls, published in August 2005 (damn! Now I feel old. Didn´t I read the AoW AP just yesteryear, not a score years ago?).

The problem with the high-level adventures was that the combat encounters had to throw high-level foes, either in numbers or with complex write-ups, at the PCs to present a challenge, leading in turn to extremely complex and protracted fights. These days, paizo generally limits their APs to around 15-18th level because of this.

Example? Male spriggan favored spawn of Kyuss rogue 12/Bard2. The stats for this worthy eat up a full page in the mag. Or things like the PCs facing 12 young adult black dragons, 10 adult green dragons and 6 mature adult blue dragons - along with a few much older dragons, hopefully not all at once...

[NetoD20]

I DMed Age of Worms for my college friends a couple of years ago adapted to Pathfinder, we went up to levels 8-9 I think finishing the Hall of Harsh Reflections, all the adventures were amazing, particularly Whispering Cairn. Going against the Ebon Triad was fun, but the fact that the deities are so much apart from each other; I mean, they're not even from the same ethnic pantheon; makes it all a bit weird. I read somewhere that the cult featured proeminently by the end of Shackled City AP, and that putting them in Age of Worms was an unnecessary and forced way to throw a link between the APs on our faces. As I said, I liked the cult, but seemed an unnecessary detour from the main plot of the AP. Can't say anything about the higher level adventures, though, I like the idea of the spriggan NPC example, though, I like complex NPC sheets with lots of stuff lol the dragons did seem a tad excessive, however.