Shackled city

[Iuliano05]

Hi, So i have been reading the forums for a while and trying to get some good insight before i made any post but i have to ask. Can i get some tips on the Shackled City adventure, I am going to start DMing shortly and it will be my first time DMing. I play with some very experienced players (they started in 1st edition) and i am the young guy of the group. I already asked them to keep it basic on me while i learn the ropes but i figured i would ask you guys about the adventure itself to see what i might come up with from here. I know to read through the adventure and also buy rules compendium and read through that. Thanks in advance.

[Telonius]

One thing you should be aware of for this particular adventure - there is a large difference between the difficulty of most encounters, and the difficulty of the final BBEG encounter. Prepare the group for that. Our final battle took over two sessions worth of combat.

My group found most of the encounters ridiculously easy. (I might add that I was playing a VOP Monk at the time. Yeah. It was that easy). Our DM was rather new, too; so he didn't amp up the difficulty. I would strongly suggest beefing up at least some of the encounters, or you're going to start having PC's rout the opposition on a regular basis.

I would strongly advise banning the Radiant Servant of Pelor PrC. The campaign is undead-heavy, and an RSOP will wipe the floor with most of the undead encounters.

[TwystidMynd]

I'm currently running the campaign for my group, as well. We just got through to Chapter 2, and I've noticed that my party (Cleric, Fighter, Ranger, Rogue, Wizard) has been blazing through most of the encounters as written. I've also noticed that my PCs are currently 1.5 levels above where the SCAP believes they should be... we're not even halfway through chapter 2, and the PCs are already almost 5th level. For reference, Chapter 3 suggests that the PCs should already be 4th level, or nearly there.

One of the things I realized is that the Shackled City Adventure Path (SCAP) was written before 3.5 came out, and in 3.5 WotC buffed a bunch of the classes quite a bit. So I'd suggest that you take that into consideration when running the encounters; personally I've been adding a bit of HP to most of the monsters, and re-arranging the encounters so that there are fewer of them per dungeon, but the ones that exist are bigger, so more difficult for the PCs to handle. Since I don't *add* any creatures, however, they don't end up getting any more XP than they would otherwise, so I can slow them down a bit so they don't end up being level 20 before the last chapter =P

As far as the role-playing aspect goes, I found a tremendous amount of auxiliary material at this website, which I've been using to great extent: http://therpgenius.com/index.php

[Galdor Miriel]

We are at level 12 now in shackled city and it has been awesome. I do not think that the encounters are that easy, as we have some experienced players with optimized characters dieing off. Our dm does change some of the baddies tactics, and swaps out some of the feats sometimes when they do not make too much sense. We have had a lot of fun playing it, and our dm sure enjoys it as well. I would recommend you buy the book as it makes life easier, and when you consider how much time you will spend playing it is well worth it monetarily. The adventure path itself should bring you up to speed as you go, just make sure you read it in advance and think about the kinds of tactics that will work in play so you get a good flow.

Enjoy

Galdor

As to the previous posters comment about being undead heavy, not true so far, we have found it to be demon heavy and we have a paladin who is enjoying herself immensely. In fact the only undead we see are the lumbering servants of our favored soul of wee jas.

[DrowVampyre]

Depending on your players, keep an eye on WBL guidelines - you may have to adjust treasure up or down (probably down - there's a lot of stuff that can be looted that the writers counted o people not looting).

Also depending on players, add (or stick to - I forget if there's on there or not) a timeline of events so that they can't just take a bunch of time off to make custom magic items and such. Give them some time to do things, but not a ton of time.

Update the enemies' spell lists. Make sure to include protections/counters for divinations, unless you like your party to run scry and die tactics...a lot...