Re: Campaign pacing

In article <45ffe81a@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, tussock  <scrub@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>     With all modules, I have to redo them a bit to allow breaks, the 
>bad guys have lives too and all that. I mean, the PCs are allowed to 
>bite off more than they can chew, get in over their heads, that's all 
>part of the fun; but generally there's something out there for them that 
>they can defeat in detail and return home to drink away the horrid 
>memories of.

How do you do it?

SPOILERS for SCAP follow:

A pretty typical module adventure:  An evil priestess has waylaid a
priest who was returning to the city with some magic items needed
to prevent a flood.  The PCs get word of this.  They try to rescue
the priest, but too late:  they tangle with the thugs who killed
him, but the evil priestess has gone.  They track her down to her
underground lair and defeat her and her companions.  They then
return to town in time to stop the flood.

The PCs went up two levels in the course of this.  (I don't recall
exactly where the first level advance was:  maybe right after
the thugs.)

How do you redo something with a plot like that so that the PCs can
have significant downtime in the middle?  Or do you avoid using
anything with such a structure?  Most of the modules I've seen
are either frightfully, almost (to my mind) unusably short--one or
two encounters, basically, like the ones WOTC has on line--or cover
2-3 levels' worth of advancement, like the original Adventure
Paths or the SCAP or Worms modules.

If you run it as written, the PCs start out at 5th and are 7th 
a couple of days later.  It's not clear to me how you could stretch it
over months of game-time, unless you abandon the "we need to
stop the flood" time pressure.  And then it gets hard to feel that
the PCs are involved with their setting.

The material you write yourself is, I presume, much less encounter-
dense than most modules.  I know the stuff I write myself is.
But the modules really impose a pretty strong advancement clock.

Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@[EMAIL PROTECTED]