Age of Worms

[Supplement Four]

Now that I've got my first Conan campaign planned out (a short one taking the PCs from 1st to 5th, or so, centering around Arenjun), I'm looking to set up the second campaign.

As I haven't played D&D in tons of years, the whole wide world is open to me. I see that Mongoose has some neat new Conan adventures coming out, so I may go that route.

But, one campaign in particular has caught my eye. The Age of Worms. It's an Adventure Path set of scenarios, taking the characters from 1st to 20th level, first appearing in Dungeon magazine.

It's a set of 12 scenarios, and the setting is Greyhawk. But, I can convert. What I like is that it has a lot of elements that would fit well in a Conan campaign: A cult attempting to awaken an ancient god; necromancers; snake men (lizard men); the PCs as gladiators; scholars on ancient rites; and other nastiness.

Has anyone played this mega-campaign?

 

[Majestic7]

It is apocalyptic and very, very high magic. It would require a lot of tuning to make it fit for the Hyborian Age. In its present form it involves a lot of undead, worms possessing people and so forth. I appreciated the Lovecraftian elements, but I can't see a way to fit it in to Conan D20 without doing a lot of converting. In that sense, it would be easier to use some Call of Cthulhu campaign for the same purpose. Whether the player characters manage to prevent the apocalypse or not, it will profoundly shake the whole world. Mega-epic stuff. Characters are taken from level 1 to epic levels.

I was a player in a campaign that kind of got frozen in time, taking place in Eberron. It was interesting, especially as it was from the viewpoint of bad guys saving the world because they want it for themselves. I don't know if we plan to continue it later, especially with the Fourth Edition having come out now. I'd certainly like to, my character was interesting.

Edit - Let me elaborate on the difficulties of a possible conversion. Encounters in AoW are often quite difficult. Many fights are outright deadly and there are dangerous obstacles. They are designed with the high D&D magic level in mind, based on D&D 3.5 spells and magic items. It is assumed that the player group can, for example, fly with relatively little difficulty to win certain fights and pass certain obstacles. Thus converting the campaign for Conan would require replanning of a lot of dungeons and monsters. Finding a good balance between difficulty level of the enemies and the capabilities of the characters would be very difficult without either having total party kills happen all the time or breaking the relatively low/dark magic spirit of the Hyborian Age. (With D&D magic and/or showering the characters with magic items.)

 

[Supplement Four]

Edit - Let me elaborate on the difficulties of a possible conversion. Encounters in AoW are often quite difficult. Many fights are outright deadly and there are dangerous obstacles. They are designed with the high D&D magic level in mind, based on D&D 3.5 spells and magic items. It is assumed that the player group can, for example, fly with relatively little difficulty to win certain fights and pass certain obstacles. Thus converting the campaign for Conan would require replanning of a lot of dungeons and monsters. Finding a good balance between difficulty level of the enemies and the capabilities of the characters would be very difficult without either having total party kills happen all the time or breaking the relatively low/dark magic spirit of the Hyborian Age. (With D&D magic and/or showering the characters with magic items.)

I see your point, but from me looking it over (and I've only scanned it), I think it's going to fit perfectly into the Hyborean Age...with some work, of course.

I just got the Hyborean Beastiary, so I will change the types of things fought. Of course I'll take out a lot of the magic. But...I see a lot of potential in this adventure for a Conan game. I really do.

Start bringing in ancient Zhemri magic and gods....might be just the thing.

I've already got a small campaign, but I'm thinking of taking this on, making my small campaign a mega-campaign.

Need to do more reading first.

 

[Sting52jb]

I've read through this campaign and at one point was actually planing on using it in my world which like similar to Conan with only limited magical item.

Majestic 7 is right it is a lot of work to converted over to Conan but it is not impossible and a dedicated GM could easily do it in a day or two of hard work. I really enjoy doing this and have converted many an adventure designed for higher characters to suit my needs.

Good luck Supplement Four and if you enjoy this adventure you should check out the Shackled City adventure and the Savage Tide adventures they are both also great mega adventures.

 

[Majestic7]

Sure, if you feel like going on all the trouble of conversion, go ahead - just warning that it might not be worth the trouble and might be rather difficult. I think levels 1 - 10 are easy enough but after that things turn so high magic that it requires a lot more work. Still, good luck with your project. If you pull it through, be sure to report how it went on here and perhaps provide some conversion notes for other people.

 

[warzen]

I suggest trying to adapt the first episodes of Savage Tide (the last AP).

W.

 

[Hervé]

I agree Savage Tide would be easier to adapt to Conan. Age of Worms, though intersting, would require a tremendous amount of work to fit correctly in the Hyborian world. I'd be curious to see the result, though...

 

[Supplement Four]

I agree Savage Tide would be easier to adapt to Conan. Age of Worms, though intersting, would require a tremendous amount of work to fit correctly in the Hyborian world. I'd be curious to see the result, though...

More than likely heading that way...

Lots of changes, of course.

 

[quigs]

I have actually ran both adventure paths. I did AoW with Conan, and it went really well and they got all the way up to the arena adventures, which I think was the 5th adventure or so, then we ended the campaign.

I did Savage Tide with regular D&D rules. The first few adventures are fun, but then it gets kinda lame. The overall story ends up being "now go and save Lavinia from X" and the group got tired of that really fast.

 

[Sting52jb]

I really enjoyed the first few Savage Tide adventures also but found the later ones to be quiet boring and not really fitting in to my style of gaming.

 

[Majestic7]

I really enjoyed the first few Savage Tide adventures also but found the later ones to be quiet boring and not really fitting in to my style of gaming.

Yeah, there are some really tedious dungeon crawls at later stages. HUGE dungeon complexes full of stuff to kill.

 

[warzen]

I really enjoyed the first few Savage Tide adventures also but found the later ones to be quiet boring and not really fitting in to my style of gaming.

Yeah, there are some really tedious dungeon crawls at later stages. HUGE dungeon complexes full of stuff to kill.

I completly agree. For Conan, you should stop after the pirate's attack on the small colony near the island of dread.

W.

 

[Supplement Four]

I thought about going with Savage Tide and making the horde orcs some invaders from Shem (Shemite nomads).

But, Age of Worms has this whole "dark-god" thing going for it, that makes it very "Conan" to me.

 

[quigs]

What orcs? Savage Tide doesn't have any orc hordes that I can recall.

Some of the conversions for Age of Worms you'd be looking at though are as follows, not necessarily in order:

Lizard men should be replaced by human attackers, a barbarian tribe would work best.
Make the doppelgangers serpent men.
Most of the undead should work as is, but don't use any of their high magic attacks.
Probably remove the dragons, including the dracolich, and replace them with vampires/mummies etc.
Anything "wormy" should be left as is. But scrap the worm-ridden dragon babies, remove that whole room probably.
The arena fighting teams should be converted to humans. Keep the big bad monster at the end.
Make that Satyr guy human, probably a cultist.
The sphere of annihilation should be removed, replace it with a bane weapon or two that will work against Kyuss.

And obviously, remove most of the treasure, and all magic items unless they are key to the plot/story. I tend to prefer replacing some useless monster encounters with either empty rooms, or some simple traps. The hardest part about the conversion is removing the whole "dungeon-crawl" feel to the adventures. The first 2 magazines are almost all within dungeons, with the 3rd being mostly outdoors. Generally, scrapping useless dungeon levels or making them a lot smaller will keep the dungeon-crawling theme to a minimum.

 

[Supplement Four]

What orcs? Savage Tide doesn't have any orc hordes that I can recall.

I may be mixing up my Adventure Paths

Some of the conversions for Age of Worms you'd be looking at though are as follows, not necessarily in order:

We're definitely thinking around the same lines.

I may run Trial of Blood instead of Worms, though.

There's not room in a single campaign for both.

Wait-n-see.

 

[quigs]

Trial of Blood looks quite good, yeah.

In my old AoW game, I had the Whispering Cairn in Corinthia I believe. The group was a stygian scholar, a cimmerian barbarian, a hyrkanian nomad, and a hyborian soldier. The scholar hired the nomad and soldier as muscle to explore some ancient Acheronian ruins (the cairn) and the barbarian showed up later. Most of the cairn was run as is, but I removed the elemental and the townsfolk were changed to hyborian races. The end boss necromancer was a Zamorian spider cultist I think who used undead to defend his lair.

The Ebon Triad adventure was run in the same town in a mine, just like the magazine. I kept the grimlock part as is, and made them a degenerate subteranean race. The Vecna/kenku part was replaced by a stygian cult of Set, and the Hexor cultists were replaced by something else, can't recall. The demon was run pretty much as is, but minus all it's spell-like abilities.

Blackwall Keep's lizard-men were replaced by Shemite Asshuri raiders, who were operating out of a set of ruins inside a mountain (rather than the lizard-man swamp). I scrapped the egg room part of this adventure.

The Hall of Harsh Reflections was run in a nearby Corinthian city. The doppelgangers were replaced by serpent men (awesome twist, the group never suspected a thing). The giant octopus works as is, and the Illithid and drow were replaced with humans.

The Free City Arena adventure was next, and I had the other gladiator teams consist of a troupe of Bossonian archers, a group of Hyrkanian horsemen, and some Nordheimir barbarians. We got through the initial melee, then our campaign kinda died off.

My longer term plans were to replace Dragotha with a Mummy, and that vampiric silver dragon chick with a regular human vampire.

The spire of long shadows and the wormcrawl fissure will probably be the hardest adventures to convert because they are full of monsters. There was another adventure that had a galla or ball I think that I was aching to run, but unfortunately didn't get to.

The finale adventure in the city against Kyuss would have been awesome and probably would have had a number of PC deaths.

 

[rabindranath72]

The "Freeport" series might be a very good fit for a Conan game, both from a theme point of view, and for the flexibility of the setting and the adventure.

 

[Edhel]

My 2 copper pieces:

I think it would extremely easy to take the plot lines and most of the encounters from Age of Worms and Savage Tide and turn them into a conan-esque adventure. I don't see any trouble converting anything since you don't have to do it 1:1 (duh).

Savage Tide's ending could be tricky but then again I would stop the campaign in the Island after the temple in the mesa is destroyed.

I don't know the details of the ending of AoW but I doubt there's any problems there either. Killing the BBEG could be done by getting a macguffin from mount doom and then using it against him/her/it.

Having said that, the plots are a bit off from the typical sword and sorcery adventure that are mostly character-centered. AoW and ST are about saving the world.