Next Steps....

Blair at Planet Algol has more than once noted that I should think of putting together an Adventure Path for Savage Swords of Athanor, a thought I have left to stew in the back of my head for a while. Of course, given the general wisdom in the Old School community that upholds the sacred status of sandbox settings, I think that doing something like this will revoke what little OSR cred I might have, but the idea isn't such a bad one. But my concerns about this plan revolve around two issues: writing adventures, and setting up a fixed path.

The former is a tough thing to consider. There are some good adventure writers out there — for instance, I like Melan's wacky adventures, and I like James Raggi's moody and stylistic pieces. But  I have always run games off loose notes and vague ideas of the future. I don't plot out ten games in advance, I write up some ideas, run a game, and adjust. The idea of plotting out an adventure path is, well, weird.

Right now, I'm playing in a 4e conversion of the 3e big-ass adventure Red Hand of Doom, and I often feel that part of the game has involved us looking for the right clues to follow the plot, and those portions of the experience have sucked. And RHoD isn't a terrible railroad-y adventure (like, say, all of the original Dragonlance modules), perhaps even less so than the venerable classics of the Slaver series or even the Against the Giants series. Before I even think about this, I may need to consider classics like the old TSR U-series modules as well as Bad Axe Games' Slavelords of Cydonia to get some inspiration before even considering anything else.

If I do this, I suspect the final product will be a bit more sparse and open-ended than, say Paizo's Age of Worms or Rise of the Runelords and more like old TSR modules.