I'm currently DMing this module and my party really threw an interesting twist into it. They elected to find a boat to travel down the river! Rather clever and it shaved time off the journey south. However I still plugged in the random encounters and it was great fun. Right now they are just entering the 1st level and struggled with the bandits in the first room. That battle is HUGE and requires a lot of planning.
played this in '86 I believe maybe '87. it was at a cool transition for me and my friends where we were first beginning to really play the game by the rules with a solid grasp on how to play. I think we were in 8th or 9th grade, and before this we were pretty much typical kids doing the murder hobo, Monty Haul thing - getting ridiculously powerful magic items/artifacts etc.. but here in this adventure my friend Thomas prepared diligently to run the module and everything came together just right. Still one of my absolute best RPG memories!!!
I played this module as a PC and then DMd it years later. It is legendary in my group for being the most difficult and fun to play. The party I DMd made it all the way to Sakatha thanks to a spectacularly failed save by the Captain of the Guard that allowed them to bypass the worst areas in the Tomb Levels. Unfortunately, they were TPKd by the High Priest and the Lizard King himself casting a Cloud Kill. It’s been about 30yrs and we still recount the adventure.
I’ve run this adventure three times as DM, twice in a home game with only two returning players and once at Comic Con (the game was spread out over three days and all put one player returned for all the days). The home game players made it through mostly intact, I think it was because they worked well as a team supporting each other. The convention group did lose some party members but the group was 8 or 9 players levels 5 to 8. The preface PCs were single class level 8, dual level multiclass were level 6, and I had a few triple class at level 5. Each PC had some means to do damage to Skatha. At the convention there was an assistant DM that helped out, which was needed for such a large group. Each time was fun for me as a DM as having a good villain with goals makes it very easy to run this adventure.
Can’t believe I hadn’t watched this video yet. Need to make sure I haven’t missed others as I always enjoy the reviews by the Capt. As much as I enjoy my AD&D 1e/2e days, as the Dm for most of the games, I always had to dial things back cause I never, I mean NEVER, had 6 to 8 or in this case 7-9 players in a group..the game in a smaller town just didn’t have enough players. We tried running 2 players but for young teenagers, 2 characters became one really so we stopped that and I had to adjust the encounters…which was great for me to learn this aspect of DMing.
I did find the Railroad here annoying. Flame Strike to start. I dont enjoy the event based D&D style. Nothing we can do to avoid or prevent these things no matter how well we play, and no actual way to catch the assassin. Annoying. I Like the idea of a copy cat Lizard man trying to recapture former Lizard man glory. Oh and we weren't allowed to have an 8th level cleric cause they might turn the Vampire.
I always felt the king’s reluctance is out of a wish for a thing to not be true……I am sure you have experienced that before, where you suspect a particular cause to a crisis but you refuse to name it, perhaps out of some subconscious fear that it’s utterance will bring it to truth. And, until investigated, could have some other cause
I put my friends through this twice, their characters all died in both attempts. 1st edition was truly brutal sometimes. I loved the open ended modules, where all the background was privided and then you were on your own. I kept the module in the Greyhawk setting, since we were already there. Love your work, I really enjoy the depth of the content, and you always manage to capture the feel of seeing the AD&D world brand new.
Cool stuff, espacially the Count suggestion. Great stuff like always! Also, that Meme at the beginning... Haha! BTW; I'm curious; how would you rate this adventure with your new D20 score system?
Given the difficulty of the adventure, and the fact there's kind of a few things you either need to 'make sure they happen' or alter the encounters so they aren't quite as brutal I'd give it a 14.
Man I love your retrospective reviews. Would you ever consider reviewing the Basic Edition circa '89-92 (Black Box...my personal favorite since this was my introduction to the game) What about early 2e modules? Anyway keep up the awesome work. I look forward to more immersive reviews.
I’ve never run this! BTW, you pronunciation may vary, but (Weycombe) “coombe” or “cwm” is the old English (actually Welsh) word for valley - pronounced like (hair) comb or coom (as in tomb) ;)
What if you switched the two lizard kings, put Morrison as the final boss who really just wants to hang out and have the lizard man vampire terrorizing Paris, what A twist!
Love your retro reviews. Cant wait for you to do expedition to the barrier peaks. That one will blow everybodys mind. Thank you Capt. and have a great day.
I found the entire I series useless and stupid. Especially this one. (Just because I hoarded them when they came out, doesn't mean I enjoyed them.) Heck, even Ravenloft was overrated.) And the "big reveal" here was stupid. even back then. Hey, here's an idea; don't tack on powers to be "gamey" and 'avant guarde,' when you could just make him a smarter foe instead. --I was far ahead in my thinking back then, I guess. Gee, actually thinking and talking a way thru a module instead of having the peasants...what are the odds? A clever foe is more fun.
Too bad this module was ruined by a player revolt in my old college group. We switched DM’s so our original DM could play. Kept the same characters and got into the module. Everything went south when the new DM, a player in the same group decided to switch how deaths happened. We had played the old death at -10 and he decided when the first player went to zero he was dead. Players were not happy and the game group ended as it was.
I d be curious about a video regarding Frog God Games' Rappan Athuk from your point of view, if you ever had the joy to play it - always enjoy your vids. Greetings from Switzerland
Greetings! So great to hear that I have subs from across the pond, which is one of the cool things about having your own RU-vid channel. I'll be honest, I've never actually heard of this module, but a quick google search reveals it to be an interesting looking mega dungeon. Sooooo..... I see there's currently a 5th edition kickstarter going on, so I sort of backed it. Thanks. lol
Can you review Village of Hommlet, or preferably the whole Temple of Elemental Evil, please? I also liked the Slaverlords series, and any of the UK series of 1st Edition modules were very well done. Please review and share with the world.
i can! T1 the village of hommlet is an absolute classic and gives you an interesting look at how the game used to be played; for instance, gygax felt the need to list everyone's wealth and where it was hidden, the implication being that PC thieves would want to steal from these people... T4 itself devolves into a brutal hack and slash dungeon crawl that you and your players will want to BE OVER many, many, many sessions before it is actually over. the elemental nodes, in particular, suck.
Ran this classic a few months back. It's a very tough adventure, one encounter is 15 to 20 wights. Lots of level draining possibilities for evil DM's. FYI the black dragon is pretty cool too.
I ran Wights like this: a hit can drain a level, or gives a -1 to a random trait 50/50 chance. It was a disease either way. Additional hits could not remove more levels until the disease was cured, but more loses of traits could occur. When the player was cured, all lost traits returned, but not the level. Go to 0 in any trait and the character dies. Seems fairer to give the player a choice to cure or not.
@@bbb462cid Yeah I think we turned the wights and then realized the successful turning only chased off 1-12 of them .There were still 20 of the things to fight and then another 7 that came at us after the Turning wore off and the cleric failed his roll the second time. We lost at least three levels here . I think our thief might have lost two . We got through this module but I think the DM had to delete some of the trap rooms towards the end
Great video as always! I'm curious, were adventures motivated by gold/treasure rewards by a leader accepted by players back in the day? I've found that the players in my 5e game need more personal motivation (NPCs they care about in trouble, a town they like in danger, being personally affected by the bad guy, etc).
We were really simple back then. I don't think any of my first hundred or so characters even had family members listed, no parents, no brothers or sisters, no kids, nobody to slow my PC down when I could be gaining treasure and XP! Now, I feel that writing only one page of backstory is somehow cheating my character.
Very interesting! I would assume that it's largely due to video games existing. If you want to just kill random orcs and skeletons and loot treasure, there's a wide variety of games that you can play. So when you play a tabletop RPG, you have to be motivated by something else. Also I've found gold and treasure to be a terrible motivator in 5e since there's not a ton that you can spend it on.
I played this one back in 82 with my brother and another couple friends. I played an illusionist with a wand of magic missiles and a love of the spell, invisibility. My brother played a fighter (he might've been a paladin). I still remember the final battle as super fun, fighting Sss'kotha and his high priest. It was brutal, and I was the only one to survive, though thanks to the treasure we brought back everyone else. Ironically, if you remember, illusionists are very wimpy so I had expected to be the first to die. I spent a lot of time running away and hiding. Fun memories...
Love your reviews and the way you approach changing these for the better. I'm gearing up for running temple of elemental evil and return to the temple of elemental evil. Have you any thoughts on these adventures? Planning on doing a review on these anytime soon?
both of those modules are really complex. Especially ToEE. I don't see a video coming out soon, but what I can tell you is to not sweat sticking to the module as written. ToEE will take you a long time to complete, and RtToEE is an entire campaign. There is a LOT of material, and on top of all of that its unlikely your players will approach it as expected, so there is a LOT of adjustments you have to make. The way I did it was to just dump the module's plot as written and adjust it to the player's actions and thoughts at the table.
I think it's interesting that the Count doesn't want to give any voice to the legends because if you have a truly lifelike and complex character in him he may be secretly ashamed of his fears. It's not like the PCs can't learn this information in some way but I like that the Count holds it back without more aggressive means.
Then, yes, The Desert of Desolation series is actually a popular review request and most certainly one that I'll get around to doing. If you're familiar with my review style, I tend to make such a series a 'project', so I'd do a video on 'Pharaoh' Then 'Oasis of the White Palm', and end with 'Lost Tomb of Merek', giving trivia, history and pertinent commentary on running each. As you might imagine, that's a major undertaking, but absolutely I'm going to do it. And thank YOU for watching and commenting! Game on!
