![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So, today we did The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. For various reasons we had only three players (Rupert, Keith, and Amy), and, well, it's got three pregens.
We did it straight-up: two-hour time limit, AD&D v1.
This was complicated by a couple of things. First, as far as I can tell, there are only actually stats for Cair the MU/T. The other two, Myrrha and Rhialle, don't have stats. But you can reverse-engineer their levels from their to-hit charts in the module, you can surmise that Rhialle has a strength of 16 from his damage, and then you can have them roll up hit points based on their levels. Which is what we did.
The players took notice of the fact that it was a 2-hour game, and they took "the air down here is poisonous" very seriously, which was nice. In fact, without Aimee around, they played damn near perfectly, dashing through rooms, avoiding pretty much everything (they had a good conversation with the crab and crayfish, though), staying out of combat almost entirely (they fought the 11 zombies that weren't turned by Myrrha, which cost a lot of precious time, and the werejaguar, and at the very end, the amphisbaena). A lot of testing to see where the breeze, if any, was coming from.
However, they missed almost all of the cool Meso-American rooms and things. They just ignored the nereid and went for the door, and they picked up almost no treasure. Basically, they played it straight as a "you have two hours to escape". And I let them climb out the hole in the room with the amphisbaena, because even though the slope won't support them, because, well, the thief is damn good at climbing, and anyway, we had just less than two minutes left.
No party fatalities, although some bad wounding. Some good puzzle-solving, and quite a bit of caution. If Aimee had been there they'd all have died in the room with the giant hermit crab.
What I want to do now is have those three characters recruit a couple of others, and come in from the correct side this time, and do it as a straight-up exploration, in which they will hit all the squidgy horrors they missed when playing it as a dash for the exit.
The module itself...well, it's evocative. The set-piece rooms are very deadly, of course, and generally pretty unmotivated, but some of them are really nicely horrific. Xilonen is very Lovecraftian, for instance, and I really like Tecuziztecatl, the intelligent giant slug. You can run this straight for "this is one-weird-ass mythology, but it's trying to kill you, so you'd better take it seriously," but I can very easily see how it could also be run entirely gonzo. Which would be fun too.
It's a trap-fest, but it's surprisingly survivable if the players treat it as they're told to: touch nothing and get out as quickly as humanly possible. It's only when they start poking things that they get into real trouble.
The module itself cannot make up its mind whether to be a tournament module or a campaign module, and it suffers for it. Would stats for the pre-gens and having them separated into easily-trimmable pages have been too much to ask? The art's great. A lot of fine Erol Otus, and some good Darlene and Dee as well.
It's a good look at early AD&D (written for Origins '79), and is very Raiders Of The Lost Ark for something that predated it by two years. Worth taking out for a spin if you want to run something approaching Golden Age AD&D (I'd pretty much put D&DG at the end of the Golden Age; certainly, what came after it was on the downslope: much as I love me some flumphs, Fiend Folio isn't the same, and then, well, the wheels came off and we were in the Wonderful World Of Hit Point and Power Escalation when Unearthed Arcana came along).
We did it straight-up: two-hour time limit, AD&D v1.
This was complicated by a couple of things. First, as far as I can tell, there are only actually stats for Cair the MU/T. The other two, Myrrha and Rhialle, don't have stats. But you can reverse-engineer their levels from their to-hit charts in the module, you can surmise that Rhialle has a strength of 16 from his damage, and then you can have them roll up hit points based on their levels. Which is what we did.
The players took notice of the fact that it was a 2-hour game, and they took "the air down here is poisonous" very seriously, which was nice. In fact, without Aimee around, they played damn near perfectly, dashing through rooms, avoiding pretty much everything (they had a good conversation with the crab and crayfish, though), staying out of combat almost entirely (they fought the 11 zombies that weren't turned by Myrrha, which cost a lot of precious time, and the werejaguar, and at the very end, the amphisbaena). A lot of testing to see where the breeze, if any, was coming from.
However, they missed almost all of the cool Meso-American rooms and things. They just ignored the nereid and went for the door, and they picked up almost no treasure. Basically, they played it straight as a "you have two hours to escape". And I let them climb out the hole in the room with the amphisbaena, because even though the slope won't support them, because, well, the thief is damn good at climbing, and anyway, we had just less than two minutes left.
No party fatalities, although some bad wounding. Some good puzzle-solving, and quite a bit of caution. If Aimee had been there they'd all have died in the room with the giant hermit crab.
What I want to do now is have those three characters recruit a couple of others, and come in from the correct side this time, and do it as a straight-up exploration, in which they will hit all the squidgy horrors they missed when playing it as a dash for the exit.
The module itself...well, it's evocative. The set-piece rooms are very deadly, of course, and generally pretty unmotivated, but some of them are really nicely horrific. Xilonen is very Lovecraftian, for instance, and I really like Tecuziztecatl, the intelligent giant slug. You can run this straight for "this is one-weird-ass mythology, but it's trying to kill you, so you'd better take it seriously," but I can very easily see how it could also be run entirely gonzo. Which would be fun too.
It's a trap-fest, but it's surprisingly survivable if the players treat it as they're told to: touch nothing and get out as quickly as humanly possible. It's only when they start poking things that they get into real trouble.
The module itself cannot make up its mind whether to be a tournament module or a campaign module, and it suffers for it. Would stats for the pre-gens and having them separated into easily-trimmable pages have been too much to ask? The art's great. A lot of fine Erol Otus, and some good Darlene and Dee as well.
It's a good look at early AD&D (written for Origins '79), and is very Raiders Of The Lost Ark for something that predated it by two years. Worth taking out for a spin if you want to run something approaching Golden Age AD&D (I'd pretty much put D&DG at the end of the Golden Age; certainly, what came after it was on the downslope: much as I love me some flumphs, Fiend Folio isn't the same, and then, well, the wheels came off and we were in the Wonderful World Of Hit Point and Power Escalation when Unearthed Arcana came along).
