Carry On Carrying On

A very long time ago I played through the CARRION CROWN campaign for Pathfinder, and good fun it was too.

Also a long time ago but not quite as long ago a time as when I played Carrion Crown, I pondered rewriting the campaign. I never did get around to that rewrite, but when clearing up some old blog posts last week I uncovered my preliminary notes for what I was planning. I don't know if I'll go any further with it -- time has moved on, I have moved on -- but in the hope that it may be useful or at least interesting, here it is.

(Please bear in mind this is all based on decade-old memories and also that I was a player, so I didn't get to read the adventures. I also won't be going into rewrites of the individual adventures here, although most of them were fine. It's the campaign as a whole that needs work.)

Carrion Crown has a great central concept: each of the adventures is based on a classic horror monster, so there's a werewolf adventure, a Frankenstein adventure, a ghost adventure, and so on. It's a bit artificial but otherwise a very strong hook for the campaign, so we're absolutely keeping that.

The general plot is functional: a conspiracy of cultists wants to resurrect an ancient lich king, they need a bunch of items to do so; get the quest tokens before they do! A multi-part fetch quest isn't the most innovative setup but it is tried and tested, and anyway it's the classic monsters concept that's the selling point.

Except...

art by Kurt Jakobi

None of it matters. The cultists do the ritual anyway, whether the players have seized the "essential" items or not. They don't summon the big world-ending lich king, but they do summon a big end-of-campaign lich boss, and there's very little practical difference.

(I don't know if, as written, there's any possibility for the original ritual to succeed, but I'm fairly confident in guessing that there is not.)

Carrion Crown gives the impression of flexibility and an open quest, but it's an illusion. At the beginning of the campaign, the players are given clues about the ritual and the items needed, but it's only possible to make sense of the clues -- and go to find the next piece -- when the campaign says so. The cultists are always already there waiting, so the race against time is just as illusory.

In short, despite appearances, there's no meaningful choice and no real control over the outcome. And that's terrible.

So, how would I fix Carrion Crown?

Well, as mentioned above I'd keep the classic monster theme, and the lich resurrection quest is acceptable and easy to comprehend. I would invert the ritual; rather than needing the items to complete the resurrection, I would say rather that the items can be used to weaken the lich if he does return. In fact, they were used to defeat him last time, which is why there is a legend/prophecy written about them. This may require some rejigging of the items; again it's been a long time since I played and I don't remember what all the quest tokens were.

I would give the players the full set of clues right at the beginning, and let them decide where to start. The clues can be partial and require visiting a person or location to fully understand, but in general the players will have all the information they need to find the items.

(I would also chuck some alternative "solutions" in there. One thing Eternal Lies did well was provide different options for resolving the campaign. From Eternal Lies I'd pinch the possibility of recruiting a Lesser of Two Evils type entity to deal with or distract the lich king. Enlisting allies to help out is another "item" the players could find.)

Right away, the players are faced with a choice: they can go straight to the ritual site right now to stop the cultists, or they can try to find some or all of the items to make it easier. It should be difficult for a bunch of level one characters to stop the ritual, but it also should be possible in theory. Think of Frodo and Sam in Mordor; it's a different sort of campaign, but the, er, path is there if the players want to, um, find it.

In my version of the campaign the cultists would not be everywhere, mere minutes from claiming the plot tokens just as the players arrive, because that's rank nonsense. Instead, the main bulk of the cultists will be where they should be, preparing the ritual, with a couple of "strike teams" out and about, searching for the prophesied items. I would probably also randomise their destinations, at least at the beginning, so maybe the cultists are where the player-characters are, or maybe they meet on the road as they head to different locations.

There's potential here for the players to lose quest items as the cultists get there first, but this is good and interesting as it creates tension, and as the items have gone from essential to useful, it doesn't tank the campaign. It also encourages recurring baddies, if the same cultists keep turning up.

art by Dave Rapoza

In terms of levels and balancing, I think there are probably two main approaches. One is OSR-ey, setting up the Frankenstein adventure -- for example -- to be suitable for -- for example -- level four characters, letting players go in over-or-underpowered, and seeing what happens. I favour this approach, although it wouldn't work well for Pathfinder and some players may find it frustraing. The other option is more Quantum Ogreish, scaling the individual adventures to be an appropriate challenge -- eight Frankensteins instead of one, or whatever -- for the player-characters. I like this less and it would probably be more work for the GM.

One last, but important, thought. It's vital for me that the campaign feels like it is -- ironically -- alive. The cultist strike teams should be moving around, causing trouble. The ritual should be in progress from session one, and should complete at a certain time. The players should feel like they are not only racing against time, but literally racing against the cultists. If the players miss the ritual, the lich king returns and starts stomping about, and the players will have to decide what to do. One final big battle against the lich king and his followers, with whatever allies and items the players have managed to gather? Or do we finish and consider it a loss, because a bad ending is still an ending?

Of course if you're playing in a more old school style, or with an ongoing campaign, then a resurrected lich king is just a new element for your campaign setting. Enjoy!

That's about it for what I found in my ancient notes. Specifics are beyond me at this point, and I feel a bit of a fraud because it seems like anyone could have come up with these vague suggestions -- except for Paizo's editors, obviously, ha ha -- but I hope there's something useful in there.

Maybe I will find time to delve deeper and do a full rewrite at some point -- the vampire adventure is a complete mess -- but for now there is much to do.

Scarface Was a Good One

Remakes are weird. Cover versions of songs are accepted and often applauded but in film -- a few exceptions aside -- the words "remake" or "reboot" are more often than not greeted with an all-consuming dread. Remakes seem to be far more uncommon in the literary world, beyond retellings of the classics, but I could be wrong about that because I am rubbish at reading.

Unless you count new editions of rulebooks, remakes don't seem to be that common in tabletop games either. Yes, there are umpteen versions of Keep on the Borderlands, the D&D people do love to rehash the big name classics every so often, and I have seen a few bloggers dissecting various adventures and offering suggestions for improvement -- one of my favourite things Zak S has done was when he condensed the aforementioned Keep into two one page dungeons -- but I can't think of many instances of an actual full remake of a role-playing adventure.

At this point, I expect the comments to be full of the many rpg remakes I have overlooked in my ignorance. It's okay, I am prepared.

I considered it myself after I played the Pathfinder campaign adventure path Carrion Crown; it has a good central idea but the structure of the campaign adventure path ruins everything, so I thought it would be worth a rewrite. I put that project aside for boring mathematical reasons that aren't relevant right now because I want to look at King for a Day.

(Or KIIng for a Day. No, I don't know why.)

According to the notes by the author Jim Pinto, King for a Day started out as the AD&D2 campaign Night Below, but as he tinkered and tweaked the adventure ready for play, Pinto realised he was more or less rewriting the whole thing and decided to release it as a unique product.

I played Night Below once in 1998, I think. I remember playing a fighter with 10 or 11 in all his statistics and I remember our party getting ambushed by bandits as we crossed a river. I recall nothing else about the campaign, so perhaps that encounter ended in a TPK, or maybe we all decided it was naff and we'd play Shadowrun or Call of Cthulhu the next week. As such I can't make a full comparison between the original campaign and the remake, but from what I can tell -- see Charles' discussion of one element of Night Below here for an example -- King for a Day does feature more or less the same individual elements as the original campaign, arranged in a different order, with different connections between them and different consequences attached.

One notable difference is that King for a Day puts much more emphasis on events above ground; most of the book's 300ish pages consists of an exhaustive gazetteer of people, places, and plots in a remote rural valley, but the original campaign devoted only a third of its overall page count to its equivalent.

(This isn't a review as such, but the formatting of the gazetteer is strange because it's written as if it's a web page, with lots of hyperlinks; a location, for example, will have links -- complete with little icons -- to the people that can be found there and the plots that involve the place, but of course none of the hyperlinks work because, well, it's a book. The detail-obsessive part of me appreciates the structure of this even if in practical terms it is bonkers.)

Once events draw the player-characters underground, King for a Day seems to be in a rush; there is a handful of locations -- albeit a couple of them are vast -- and then BOOM! there's the climax and it's done. Again, this isn't a review, but the underground bits do feel a bit underwritten, in particular the finale; I don't know what happens at the end of Night Below but I hope it's a bit more of a meaty finish.

The end result of all of this is that the remake seems broad but shallow; I don't mean this as a complaint, because it would be churlish and inaccurate to claim that the huge amount of content Pinto has generated for the main, above ground, part of the campaign is in any way superficial. Rather it's an observation on the structure of the adventure; it is more of a sprawling rural sandbox with a small but significant jaunt underground, and as such is more or less a total inversion of the original.

That's what I find most interesting about King for a Day. It is still recognisable as Night Below -- even to someone like me who has little knowledge of the original -- but at the same time it's quite different and you could play both and still be surprised. Reluctant as I am to encourage remakes, the success of King for a Day as a proof of concept makes me wonder what else is possible; maybe that Carrion Crown rewrite isn't such a bad idea after all.