[Stormdrake]

Getting back to AU I read it a couple times to see if I was missing anything and have to say that it goes nowhere. Really annoying after all the buildup of the four Dawn of the Artifacts books.  They had the opportunity to make some big changes (akin to that in Emergence) but decided to go with a collection of plot's that go nowhere and change nothing. As I am currently running my players through the dawn of the artifacts series I feel I am going to have to home brew an ending that won't leave them going "meh." They really missed the boat on this one.  Having said that I relies the current authors were picking up where someone else left off.  I like their style of writing and appreciate the new layout for missions.  There is a lot of material I can use it's just the meta story pretty much fizzles.

[Crimsondude]

No big changes? That's just false.


What were you expecting to happen?

[Mirikon]

Someone's got a DC universe view of 'big changes'. Just because they didn't do "Yet another Crisis/Reboot the world because we ran out of ideas", doesn't mean there aren't big changes there.

Read Praxis again. All those heavy hitters together in one place, some of them maybe not making it, and Ghostwalker jaunting off across the planes again? Are you seriously going to tell me there aren't big changes there? Artifacts Unbound is a springboard into all kinds of arcane goodness.

[Crimsondude]

Hell, read Too Many Secrets. If the runners fail, the Corporate Court will Thor Shot a city into dust.

[Wakshaani]

We don't know how long Ghostie will be gone, either.

What happens to Denver in his absence, for instance? And what happens when he returns? IF he returns...

A major player of the IEs is gone, now, argueably the most powerful magician of the bunch (Harley is her only rival) ... she's bound to have all kinds of contingencies in her wake, possibly a will of her own, and the removal of an immortal might make the others both more wary and cause them to move pieces around to make up for the vacuum.

There's the very salient point about Shedim.

And I had more to say, but after the 'Shedim' part, I had company over. Now, three and a half hours (At 2:30 AM!), they've left and I have no idea where my train of thought was going. Mrf. At any rate, yeah, there's fallout from the thing and expect more as the days go by.

[Crimsondude]

We don't know how long Ghostie will be gone, either.

What happens to Denver in his absence, for instance? And what happens when he returns? IF he returns...

 

(I desperately need a devil smiley right now)

Mrf.

I thought you were male. 

[Nath]

Hell, read Too Many Secrets. If the runners fail, the Corporate Court will Thor Shot a city into dust.

The book doesn't make that intent clear then. When it reads "the entire area is getting carpet-bombed", context rather suggest only Cermak Crater surroundings, not the entire Chicago metropolitan area.

[Bull]

Ok, since AU has been out a while, I'd love to get feedback on teh three sections I wrote.  I'll also answer questions and try to give some insight if needed.

I worked on The Great Seattle Artifact Rush, Little Dogs, and Already Here. 

Did you like them, were you amused by them, were they helpful, are you going to use them, or even did you hate them and never want to see me write again? 

Bull

[Catadmin]

I too am curious about a more thorough review of the different little plot hooks in the book. Constructive criticism is always helpful if any would care to tender it.

[Semerkhet]

I'll try to do a more thorough review when I read it more thoroughly but I have a couple things I can relate after a single read-through. 

I love, really *love*, the mid-sized story format.  IMO, full book adventures often get more detailed than they need to be because of inevitable GM customization, and thus material gets unused.  On the other end of the spectrum, I've seen SR books with very short story seeds that are great if you have time to develop them but really don't provide enough material.  The format in AU is just right.  The format gives me, as a GM, just about the right amount of material to let me fill in the gaps and customize it to my PCs but without making me do all the heavy lifting.

As dramatic and potentially metaplot-altering as the Praxis section is, it is extremely unsatisfactory to me compared with what I know about the original direction this story was heading in the unfinished Harlequin's Gambit adventure. 

The idea of the PCs running around using the artifacts to unlock caches of knowledge and goodies from the 4th Age in a big game of chal'han between Jane Foster and Sheila what's-her-name from the Atlantean Foundation is, frankly, awesome.  Also, unlike Praxis, the PCs actually get to participate in the big events.  This is not to say that the mid-size adventures in AU aren't interesting and fun; many of them are.   It's just that they seem like sideshows to the main event and the main event has no room for PCs to be involved.  There is no satisfactory culmination for the players who have played through the entire DotA series, no sense of climax after the long build-up of gathering all the artifacts.  They just separate and the PCs are left chasing some second-order unintended consequences of the artifact chase. 

The other problem (for my definition of problem) with the AU adventures is that most of them proceed from the premise of the artifacts "not wanting to be together," which I think is a pretty much crap idea.  Sadly, my group won't be running through much, if any, of AU because I'm definitely going to use the HG draft as a basis for a capstone adventure for my campaign.

I know this post won't be terribly helpful to the individual authors of the mini-adventures, as it addresses big picture issues none of the authors likely had much say over.  Still, I think it needed to be said and I'll read the adventures more carefully in the near future to give better feedback on those.