All week long, we have been showing off what is inside the first volume in the Prelude to War Adventure Path: The Rose of Death. Monday we started with the cover, sharing it with you as wallpaper for your screens. Yesterday, we shared with you some details on how the adventure starts. Today we share with you some details about the various sections after the adventure of this volume.
The two most distinguishing aspects of an adventure path are a series of linked adventures that form a campaign and additional material with each adventure. This additional material serves many purposes. When your players decide to do something that is not covered by the adventure itself, you are not left with nothing. You have a basis to improvise an adventure. Similarly, you can plan your own adventures that take place in the same locations and have a basis from which to start. So if you do not want to run this specific adventure, you can base an adventure in that location (or simply move the planet to elsewhere in the OTU or anywhere in your own homebrew). Some articles will expand on the culture of a people or a planet. Other articles will detail ships or vehicles that are common to the region. Sometimes we will feature Contacts, Allies, Rivals, and Enemies (or C.A.R.E as we call it) that you can give to your players during chargen that are designed to be integrate well with the adventure path. Each volume of the adventure path the articles will change up but will be relevant to the campaign.
For this volume we have four articles: a gazetteer to the planet Cornath, details on the Army of Unity (the bad guys for this volume) with a full map of their asteroid space station, a C.A.R.E article, and a few ships found in the Cornathian Empire. As you can see in the picture above (click on it for a larger image), I’m going to talk about our gazetteer of Cornath. The players land in the starport of Cornath City, they don’t get to see much of the planet. However, that doesn’t mean that they won’t go off and do their own thing, as players are known to do. Nor does that mean that they won’t come back between adventures looking for work. Take New Zhodane for example. This region to the south of Cornath City is where a large number of Zhodani defectors settled. If a character ran away from the Zhodani Consulate looking for a better life, he will easily find him- or herself among friends here without being ruled by psionic mind-adjusters. Or if your players are looking for work where they get to shoot up something, look no further than the Northern Plains. This region is littered with farms that are having trouble with wild animals killing their livestock and destroying their crops. Players can hunt down packs of beasts and maybe discover another problem along the way. *evil GM grin*
One other thing I neglected to mention. Anything I write, I like to throw in little easter egg references to tv shows, movies, video games, and anything else I enjoy. My favorite reference for this volume is in the Cornath articles. Fans of the tv show Burn Notice will know the name Chuck Finley. A variation of that name makes its way onto Cornath. I just hope Bruce Campbell fans enjoy this as much as I do.
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