The Age of Worms has Passed!

In 2013 I had not run a regular, ongoing D&D campaign for a few years. I was a player in a pretty fun monthly game, and DMing some kids through a mini-campaign, and running semi-regular installments of the Great Dungeon. But no real campaign as such.

It was a weird time: although I had played a ton of Third Edition, I was a little adrift. Fourth Edition had been out for five years, but I had been so turned off by WotC’s handling of the edition switch that I had admittedly never given it a chance. Fifth Edition was coming, they said, but I really didn’t have much interest. Instead, I’d just kept running 3.5e with occasional forays into Swords and Wizardry and Pathfinder. The latter seemed fine, but I had never completely embraced it, even though I had high regard for the Paizo team.

Several of my regular players were hankering for a new campaign, but everyone seemed really busy. And we were scattered across the state. I was hesitant to commit.

But part of me was missing a regular game, and even more so, my gamer friends. I was also hearing good things about the Roll20 virtual tabletop. So on May 2, I sent out a faithful email with five different campaign pitches, including Red Hand of Doom and the Savage Tides adventure path. The players chose my first pitch:

Age of Worms develops from a small town of Diamond Lake, leads to intrigue in the Free City of Greyhawk, and then on to a mysterious cult that serves as a front to bring about the events leading up to the Age of Worms. As the players encounter the various architects of the plot, they uncover the nature of the coming age, and battle the ultimate masterminds behind it.

AoW was only the second Paizo adventure path, published in twelve monthly installments of Dungeon magazine from July 2005 to June 2006 and covering a classic zero to hero arc: characters could go from 1st all the way to 20th level, and maybe further. Although written for 3.5e, I adopted it to Pathfinder, where it provided my first (and as it turned out, last) stress test of the system.

We convened a weekly Roll20 group later that May, the Tuesday Night Casual Encounterists, but not before I gave them all fair warning: “This campaign,” I wrote, “is supposed to be a real motherfucker.” We had five PCs: Braan Amher, a half-orc ranger, Greylen Stahl, a human cleric, Garrett Moore, a human fighter, Melvin the Helvin, a human half-elf rogue, and Fingolfin the elvish enchanter. The players were a good mix of role-players and min-maxers, and all of us had played together in several different games over the years.

Roll20 was a huge revelation: not very fancy and occasionally clunky, but serviceable and easy to use, making it convenient to meet a weekly 3-hour commitment every Tuesday night. You get a pleasant rhythm in a weekly game that you never quite achieve in a monthly or even bi-weekly one. And we did pretty well playing most weeks.

We played a little over two years—through almost 10 of the 12 installments—when the wheels finally fell off. It was a combination of different life events all at once, some really good and some really not. Most games end like this, with a whimper: you start skipping more and more weeks until finally you just sort of stop.

In 2018 we ran a face-to-face session to finish up the 11th AoW installment, “Kings of the Rift,” in an attempt to bring some closure to a campaign I think we had all enjoyed.

But this spring we were all sidelined with COVID-19. I had dusted off my Roll20 account and was running some Traveller and 5e games. But a couple of players suggested we finish off Age of Worms.

And so we did.

All told, it took 94 sessions and maybe something like 240 hours of Roll20. All of the players stuck with the whole campaign. At about the halfway point, Fingolfin retired and the same player introduced Herr Hexenmeister von Formen, an evoker. A few of the player characters were killed but restored with resurrections or wishes. In the end, AoW didn’t prove nearly as lethal as billed—though I did my level best!—but the adventure path was fairly entertaining. A high level Pathfinder game came with a pretty steep learning curve both for myself as well as the players, but by the end I think we did fairly well contending with artifacts, deities, and 9th level spells. (Roll20 macros and character sheets were probably a godsend here.)

For me, the promise of Age of Worms was the opportunity to finally use many iconic D&D elements that I’d never had a chance to use before. During the course of the adventure path the PCs were expected to visit the City of Greyhawk and collect several classic artifacts, some of which go all the way back to the Eldritch Wizardry supplement (1976), such as the Rod of Seven Parts and the Hand of Vecna. The central villain, Kyuss, goes all the way back to the original Fiend Folio (1981) and the loathsome Sons of Kyuss, a creation of Michael MacDonald: “Truly horrible creatures in appearance, these ghastly undead appear as animated putrid corpses with fat green worms crawling in and out of all their skull orifices.” Another major antagonist of the Age of Worms is Dragotha the Undead Dragon, who originated in a memorable Erol Otus map from the revised Module S2, White Plume Mountain (1981). In some ways, the Age of Worms reads like a D&D bucket list.

The execution of the adventure path, though, is a bit uneven. Some of this was likely due to Paizo’s relative inexperience coordinating such a large and complex adventure on a monthly deadline, working with different authors, and fitting it all into a limited page count. More than once you can see some slips that likely arose from the frenetic development pace: a continuity error here, a bum statblock there. Nifty ideas are raised but never really developed: for example, in “Kings of the Rift” the PCs are charged with finding Dragotha’s phylactery, with many hints that this fell item might prove a useful bargaining chip with the dracolich. But “Into the Wormcrawl Fissure” does nothing with this premise: the phylactery has no real benefit, and the PCs might as well destroy it as soon as they get their mitts on it. (Which is what my group did anyway.)

Similarly, the adventure path introduces some new mechanics like Fate Points or authority points but then does relatively little with them. Also, in the course of the early adventures the PCs can find some minor items that seemingly play no part until the very last adventure.

Some of the problems with Age of Worms, though, are fundamental problems with Third Edition, particularly high level play. Back in 2008 Merric Blackman wrote a tough assessment of the adventure path: How Paizo Made Me Hate 3e. Although the title is a bit tongue-in-cheek, many of his criticisms are dead on. Particularly at higher levels, 3e suffers from a huge disparity between classes, enormous modifiers to attacks and saves, and overly complicated mechanics. Each PC has multiple different actions each round that allow them to swamp many solo monsters just with action economy. 

The infamous 15 minute day, in which high level PCs can go nova in one encounter and then retreat to safety to recharge, is endemic to the later installments. Some of this might have been remediated through tighter adventure design: “Into the Wormcrawl Fissure,” for example, is supposed to be a harrowing race to confront Dragotha before Kyuss can emerge from his prison and unleash the Age of Worms. But there’s no real sense of urgency: in fact, the adventure encourages the PCs to complete a series of fetch quests before they face the dracolich.

One critique that Blackman had is somewhat ameliorated by the Pathfinder system. The adventure path relies too heavily on undead monsters, which are immune to sneak attacks in 3e, greatly limiting the rogue class. In Pathfinder, though, rogues can sneak attack undead, allowing our Melvin to shine in combat—particularly when he and Garrett could get into flanking position. But while the Pathfinder system makes a few of these problems better, it also makes many problems worse by adding new layers of complexity. High level play still remains a chore to run.

The most frustrating problems with Age of Worms, though, were ones completely out of the hands of Paizo: here I mean interference from Wizards of the Coast, which had to review and approve all of Paizo’s licensed work. One can occasionally spot WotC’s hand in the insertion of game elements pulled straight from the newest WotC books. Perhaps the most awkward example was a derro warlock riding a wyvern with levels in some weird aerialist prestige class, something that really didn’t make much sense within the context of the adventure. When I ran that encounter I simply substituted the halfling vampire that appears to have been the author’s original intent.

I mentioned earlier that the adventure path clearly suffers from a frantic pace of development. The original plan was for Paizo to release a hardcover “director’s cut” compilation edition that could have smoothed out some of these rough edges and added material that landing on the cutting room floor. Instead, WotC denied Paizo the opportunity.

But my biggest critique of WotC here was how they hamstrung the use of the Greyhawk setting. So many of the iconic D&D elements I wanted to see used in Age of Worms originated in Greyhawk and are tightly connected to that world. Many of the Paizo principals were unabashed Gryhawk fanatics: I first “met” Erik Mona on the old AOL Greyhawk boards back in the early 90s.

But despite this, for some inexplicable reason WotC severely curtailed the ability of Paizo to utilize the Greyhawk setting for Age of Worms. For example, WotC insisted that instead of using Tenser the Archmage, Paizo was forced to use an ersatz Tenser named “Manzorian.” Likewise, Greyhawk City becomes just “the Free City.” The result is a very unsatisfying, uncanny valley version of Greyhawk. It is a great credit to the Paizo team that they got as much authentic Greyhawk content (including several nifty Easter eggs) into the adventure path as they did, but overall this was a tremendous wasted opportunity.

These weaknesses aside, this is a damned good adventure path that could have easily been made great in a compilation edition. And if a few of the early installments are forgettable, the back six adventures are suitably epic and really pick up a load of steam. These final adventures feature some fantastic set pieces: the haunted jungle city of Kuluth-Mar, the Lost Island of Tindalos, the besieged giant city of Kongen-Thulnir, the Tabernacle of Worms, and the Spire of Shadows. As promised, I finally got to see the Hand of Vecna, the Rod of Seven Parts, even a sphere of annihilation in play! To say nothing of Dragotha or Kyuss himself.

I had never run a group all the way to 20th level in any edition, and had never had PCs fight a god, or even a demi-god. In the end, my players prevailed. They played smart, got a little lucky, and pulled out all the stops for the final confrontation with Kyuss. The Wormgod really didn’t know what hit him.

I’ve been blessed to have a few very fun, long-running campaigns that we were able to run to completion. But I’ve probably had just as many campaigns that either never took off or sputtered out well before their time. You don’t often get a chance to finish an abandoned campaign, and I’m so glad we had a chance to do so with Age of Worms. Well done, Braan, Garrett, Greylen, Hexenmeister, and Melvin!

Hexenmeister, Greylen, Braan, Garrett, and Melvin round on Kyuss.