Wich AP to run: Shackled City, Age of Worms or Savage Tide?

[Huldaerus]

Which adventure path would you preffer to run or play (by post)? Which are the strong and weak points of each one? Which parts would you rewrite? What level of optimization do they require? Would you play them as written or would you make them into Pathfinder?

Thanks in advance!

[Stegyre]

I'm currently in (and enjoying) an Age of Worms pbp, hosted by DrK on giantitp. It's going well: up to level 7 currently and a running time measured in years. Our party is over-large (6 players) but not highly optimized. A more highly-optimized party should certainly be smaller.

By contrast, the same DM and many of the same players tried Shackled CIty, and it was painfully slow for pbp. We abandoned it after a few months while maybe having just reached level 2. All the traps and exploration (imo) really did not lend themselves to pbp.

Never (yet) played Savage Tide, so I cannot comment on it.

Bonus points to you if you run any of them and allow incarnum and psionics. :smallsmile:

[Florian]

Which adventure path would you preffer to run or play (by post)? Which are the strong and weak points of each one? Which parts would you rewrite? What level of optimization do they require? Would you play them as written or would you make them into Pathfinder?

Thanks in advance!

Shackles City can be done with any group, any classes, any background, no hassle.
Age lf Worms is fine, but later on it'll turn out that some choices are waaaaaay better then others. People will hate you if you didn't warn them.
Savage Tide is.... special. Later on, there're too many occasions when the game rubs you for not picking/picking certain classes. Hard.

All can be converted to PF without any trouble. In most cases, it'll be better this way, as most of the afore,entioned troubles cease to exist.

[Âmesang]

My last table group played The Shackled City for 'bout a year-and-a-half or so, getting more than half-way through, before we eventually had too many players move away and "unofficially" stopped. :smallfrown: A shame, as I had recently been retooling my character's backstory to fit in with the Suel people from the WORLD OF GREYHAWK® Campaign Setting and connect that with the overall plot of Shackled City, using the recovered BBEGs' notes to put her one step closer towards unlocking the secrets of the Invoked Devastation (mua-ha-ha! It's actually more of a happy coincidence since she's based on a character I made in some video games, and the Suel fit her appearance and personality with surprising accuracy; would be a lot tougher if she were Flan, no?).

Anyway… I've enjoyed the adventure and loved all of the detail that was thrown into it… unfortunately the group overall played the adventure rather loosely and did little-to-no roleplaying so a lot of that detail was wasted (doesn't help that we were all alternating as Dungeon Master — not a bad concept for individual, unrelated adventures, but terrible for a long-running campaign where few were aware of each others notes and the hidden, DM-only plot details were rarely shared).

I've the bulk of Age of Worms and Savage Tide myself (at least the issues of Dungeon Magazine, anyway), but my suggestion is to go through Shackled City first since it takes place chronologically before the other two (I believe GREYHAWK® Age of Worms officially starts in 595 CY, which means Shackled City takes place between autumn 593 CY and high summer/autumn 594 CY? Assuming each adventure spanned two years that would also mean Savage Tide ends in 598 CY, the same year as LIVING GREYHAWK®, I do believe).

EDIT: (Not to suggest one has to play any of the adventures in GREYHAWK®, but if you ever decide to run all three it could give an indication of overall time frame. I guess.)

[RedMage125]

I don't do PbP, but I HAVE run Age of Worms (until Spire of Long Shadows, then group fell apart). And I love it. So AoW gets my vote.

[Joshua Goudreau]

I don't do any one of PBP so I can't comment on playability like that but I can comment on the APs otherwise.

I ran Shackled City in 3.5 several years back and it was one of the funnest campaigns I ever ran. However, it required a TON of work to smooth it out. Back then there was a great AP assistance site called RPGenius that has, to my knowledge, been lost to the ether for quite some time. I'm more than happy to see if I still have my notes if you decide on this one.

I haven't run Age of Worms all the way through but I have cut it up and run parts of it. I ran parts with additions and conversions though not as extensive as Shackled City. I did the first third or so as a modern conversion to World of Darkness. The first two parts recently, the Diamond Lake chapters as part of a recent 5e sandbox game. And the Alhaster and forward chapters as a high level super module in 5e, though we didn't get to finish so I never had the opportunity to throw Dregotha or Kyuss at the party.

I decoupled Savage Tide into a series of adventures recently to run for an upcoming game. I wanted to run X1 but liked the fleshed out version that is the whole middle part of the campaign. However, we will have a newbie and throwing him into D&D at 5h level is less preferable to 1st. So I'm putting the first two chapters into a stand alone adventure with the possibility of a Isle of Dread follow-up. I haven't yet looked at a super module version of the final third of the campaign.

All told, Age of Worms is the most solid in my opinion though they all need some work.

[Mike Miller]

Shackles City can be done with any group, any classes, any background, no hassle.
Age lf Worms is fine, but later on it'll turn out that some choices are waaaaaay better then others. People will hate you if you didn't warn them.
Savage Tide is.... special. Later on, there're too many occasions when the game rubs you for not picking/picking certain classes. Hard.

All can be converted to PF without any trouble. In most cases, it'll be better this way, as most of the afore,entioned troubles cease to exist.

What would you consider the "better" classes to advise players to consider? For both AoW and ST?

[Eurus]

Having someone who can actually Turn Undead is extremely useful in Age of Worms, for one thing. Really, anyone who's good at dealing with undead, dragons, or aberrations is going to be in a good spot in the late game (and undead are a big thing early and late; dealing with allips at low level without a cleric definitely isn't fun).

[Telonius]

I've played tabletop on both Shackled City and Age of Worms. For Shackled City, I've played it 1-20 both as a player and then later as a DM; Age of Worms was just as a player. My general impression: Shackled City had a tighter plot, but its biggest fault was that it was made near the beginning of 3.5. I needed to increase the encounter difficulty, by a lot, to keep the players (ranging from beginner to halfway-decent optimizers) from stomping all over them. I ended up rebuilding about half of the main bad guys so they wouldn't go down in two rounds.

For Age of Worms, I only saw the players' side of the screen, but it had a much more episodic, "monster of the week" feel to it, with less of a connection to the over-arching plot for any given adventure. (Really not sure how much of that was due to the DM, who was very fond of hack & slash, not so much into the plotlines). The encounters were certainly tougher, but again I don't know how much the DM fiddled with the published adventure.