Cult of Undeath 2?

I'm considering doing another adventure path conversion into a playable 5x5 Front, like I'm going to turn my original CULT OF UNDEATH project from the Carrion Crown adventure path into something that only vaguely resembles. For this new project, I'd be pillaging ideas from the Age of Worms, if I can make them work, which is a somewhat longer adventure path than Carrion Crown (12 vs 6 adventures, although the Paizo adventure paths were longer on an individual basis than the Dungeon Magazine ones.)

I'm not very certain that the Age of Worms will actually merit this much trouble, although portions of it will be salvageable. I may also, as I continue with my planned read-through of adventure paths, mix it with stuff from other paths, or just make up my own material to replace stuff from Age of Worms that I won't use. It's not like any of these adventure paths have been super innovative or clever in terms of set-up, premise, or story background, or anything like that. How many times can you run with the "evil cultists want to bring back some ancient elder evil" anyway? (Spoiler alert; apparently indefinitely.)

So I'll create a tag for this project, which I'll call ELDER EVIL, and we'll see where it goes. Nowhere too soon, I'm sure, since I'm tacking on it on the end of a long list of projects. But, since I'm reading the Age of Worms right now, I thought I'd take brief notes on it as I do, and the notes will be the first part of the tag.

A bit more context: I have three 5x5 Front proposals right now, and each one focuses primarily on one of the Three Realms. (The Hill Country, Timischburg, and Baal Hamazi.) Adding a fourth will necessarily duplicate some coverage. I'm going to put this in the northeastern portion of Timischburg, at least to start. Diamond Lake (or whatever I end up calling the town) will be north of Ubyr, upriver near the mountains from Mittermarkt, and very close to the boundary of the great Boneyard desert. When the Age of Worms starts inevitably doing things that will be out of synch with the differences I have from D&D I'll either look for or create material that fits that kind of no-man's land between the Three Realms. This may work out well; to be honest, the Free City, as I remember it, from Age of Worms, would be a better analog for Simashki than for Mittermarkt anyway.

I did actually play through the Age of Worms in it's entirety several years ago when it was still newish. I have both fond and frustrating memories of the experience. But I'm confident that I can distill the parts that I liked out of it and purge the parts that I don't. Anyway, here's my notes from reading the first part (of 12) although because this includes all the supplemental material, which tapered off as time went on, it's also the largest part.

Age of Worms conversion notes

Whispering Cairn

—Alastor Land is a ghost. You put him down like you put down any ghost; salting and burning his bones. You’re not doing a nice Caspar ghost a favor by burying him in the family plot, you’re putting down a monster by exhuming him from the family plot.

—The family plot has been disturbed. This is how you get the clues that some cult is working the area, as in the module, except that you don’t need them so you can rebury them and go back into the dungeon; you just follow them as is.

—As per usual, ignore 95% of any dungeon crawl for wilderness ambushes, and other exciting combat and intrigue activity instead.

Background: The whole Ursula the Sea Witch and her big spider backstory is pretty hoaky. I’ll use one of the Heresiarchs instead, if it actually even matters what the ancient backstory is (hint: it probably doesn't.) Actually, Jairan Neferirkare and Shimut the Flesheater are perfect… except I’ve already used Jairan a little bit. I think I’ll go with either Kefte Taraan, the Mistress of Forgotten Secrets, and a vile necromancer by trade (who could also stand in for Kyuss, come to think of it) or Seggeir Sherihum the Sangremancer, since his history of an early defeat that left him scarred and disfigured works very well. In this case, this isn't a call-back to a separate bit of setting lore; what’s the point of setting up Kyuss as the BBEG if you red herring the Queen of Chaos instead for a while? There’s just one BBEG who gets any mention at all.

I like setting Diamond Lake as a small town upriver from Ebenbach and Mittermarkt, with Mittermarkt standing in as the "Free City." This would be a bit north of Ubyr… I need to figure out what Ubyr’s like if I'm going to do that, I suppose.

Otherwise, the whole Filge business is perfect already, except maybe with less exotic creatures as his experiments. It's more horrible if done to humans, after all. And Diamond Lake is a perfectly serviceable starting town, if maybe a bit gratuitously tawdry and corrupt.

I like the idea of not allowing any players to pick any race other than human until they've encountered that race sometime during the course of the campaign, and need (or want) to replace a character. Let's keep the exoticness low for a time and really focus this first act on being a horror rather than D&D-like exploration mission. That said, the town has loads of non-humans kicking around. I'll probably convert most of them to humans, but maybe keep an orc and something else around just for kicks.

I've also read the supplemental material in the article immediately following the first adventure, as well as the "wormfood" article in Dragon Magazine. There's plenty of stuff to keep an enterprising GM busy in that material, but surprisingly little of it points towards the adventure. The adventure really kind of starts "just because" and without any coherent preamble, you're standing at the entrance to the titular dungeon.