Savage Tide Adventure Path

I finished the Savage Tide adventure path. I've said before, my Dungeon and Dragon magazines are all in boxes in storage right now, but I found a fan compiled version on Scribd and read it there. The fan compilation has not only the twelve adventures of the adventure path, but about nine or ten additional articles; either related side-quest adventures from Dungeon or related articles from Dragon. In all, it was over 650 pages, so it's probably the longest single game product that I've ever read. (Not counting the Iron Kingdoms setting books, since they were split into two books.)

Of course it's a totally different kind of product. What do I think about these early adventure paths, especially this one, now that I've read all three of them and played a fair bit of them too; all of Age of Worms in fact. First off, I think a campaign that goes from level 1 to level 20+ over the course of 10-12 modules is way too fast. In Savage Tide, we're told in every module that you should start at one level and gain two levels during the course of the adventure. How can you even settle into your new levels at that rate before you've barreled off into the next level already? With the scaling issues that high level D&D has, I can understand the theory of wanting to play high level D&D, but I honestly don't understand the practical reality of attempting to enjoy it. 

The Savage Tide in particular struggles with this. The last four adventures are all planes-hopping strike force into the Abyss and dealing with iconic supervillains with a storied D&D history (some of them, anyway—others are more recent creations.) Want to fight Saint Kargoth the Betrayer? Orcus? Charon? Demogorgon? Iggwilv? Well... actually, as it turns out, these adventures are really frustrating railroads where these iconic characters will dick you around and you're supposed to just take it because you kind of have to by fiat in order to progress in the adventure. I have to admit; I didn't even enoy reading these very much and I can't imagine playing them without being extremely frustrated and looking for any alternative at all to the plot that the writers wanted me to accept. What a shame, really. The opportunity to have adventures with these guys was a great concept; the reality didn't—and maybe couldn't—possibly have lived up to the promise. 

I also felt like the premise of the modules was a little all over the place. The twelve modules can be more or less divided into three "acts", which shows that whomever was in charge of overall planning of the arc (Erik Mona? James Jacobs?) has at least remembered some rudimentary middle school English lessons. The first two modules are my favorites, taking place in the (sadly abandoned after this) wretched hive of scum and villainy town Sasserine. With pirates and organized crime, and some pretty edgy stuff with the Vanderborens, this stuff is right up my alley. Would have fit in well to a Freeport-style game. 

The third module is the connective tissues between this and the next act; you have to take a long sea voyage to the Isle of Dread. They try to come up with stuff to make the journey interesting, but honestly, it felt way too much like it was filler that had to be done to get you to the next part, which takes the next four adventures. Five, maybe, depending on how you count them, where you are shipwrecked and have to explore the King Kong Isle of Dread and deal with demonic-themed pirates. In the last (if you count this section as five modules long) you leave the Isle of Dread to put an end to the pirates once and for all in their own headquarters near Scuttlecove, the town from the (in)famous Book of Vile Darkness tie-in module from a few years earlier. This section is way too much dungeon-crawling for me, but I admit that that probably doesn't bother most players. The last section, as I said earlier, is going to the Abyss (and a few other places, but mostly the Abyss) meeting, greeting (and occasionally fighting) famous D&D characters from the 70s and early 80s. 

Of course, this was the end of Paizo's run on Dungeon and Dragon, and so while they invented the concept of the Adventure Path, which seems to have been a big hit, they had to do it on their own format and in their own publications after this. They did this to great success (for a while, at least—famously, they allegedly outsold D&D 4e during much of the late 00s and the 20-teens.) In my experience, they continued to have many of the problems of the original run, but one thing that they did was drop the higher levels, and have adventure paths that only went from levels 1-14 instead of to over 20. It was still too many and too high and too fast, but it was a marked improvement, since without fail the final highest level adventures in the original adventure paths were the hardest to write, run, and play. 

I've read the next adventure path, the first "independent one" at least twice, I think, and I played at least half of it as well. This time I'm going to read the original modules in 3.5 format rather than the compilation for the Pathfinder system that was released later. Sometimes updates aren't better, or at least, I want to experience it in its original form this time around. I remember thinking that the first module, "Burnt Offerings" was a pretty decent low level module; kind of a classic really, but it's the second two horror-themed modules; "The Skinsaw Man" and "The Hook Mountain Massacre" that really are the stand-outs of this adventure path. They're better horror modules, in fact, than any of the entries in Carrion Crown which I won't get back to for some time, but which is the explicitly horror-themed adventure path. 

Anyway, I'm over the initial Adventure Path hump, and now Paizo, freed of their ties to WotC, is starting to settle into the Adventure Path routine. Prior to this, the format was still an experiment. A profitable one, I believe, and successful, but they still hadn't until after Savage Tide, stopped to think about what is really the best way to do this anyway. They feel like it too; like I said, the adventure paths struggle a bit at the higher levels, and bounce around a little too much thematically. Not going to suggest that they were perfected; honestly, I think the one-book campaign structure of WotC was a better format in the end, which is why now, belatedly, Paizo is going to adopt that too.