Dragon's Crown - your experiences?

[Mark Hope]

Tenth thread of a series on the younger classic Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules. It is interesting to see how everyone's experiences compared and differed.

Dragon's Crown

Synopsis: The final adventure in the first Dark Sun campaign arc, Dragon's Crown pits the PCs against an epic-level conspiracy masterminded by a group of power-mad psionicists. The adventure takes the heroes from the cities of the Tablelands, to the depths of the Sea of Silt, through the Forest Ridge and into the wilds beyond. Encounters with Athas' newest avangion, crazed thri-kreen, halfling headhunters and the sorcerer-king of Urik himself make for a sprawling adventure of epic proportions.

Did you Play or DM this adventure (or both, as some did)? What were your experiences? Did you complete it? What were the highlights for your group?

(With thanks and a tip of the hat to Quasqueton for his ground-breaking series of classic adventure discussions.)

 

[Wik]

Um.... sort of.

I played in this one, back when a friend of mine and myself were *really* into Dark Sun. I remember making fairly high-level characters and running througha few of the encounters presented in this adventure - the GM more or less took the adventure apart and kept what he wanted.

THe Avangion become a big bit, although he died in our game (did he die in the adventure?). I don't remember anything about crazed thri-kreen, but that's probably because our GM loved Thri-Kreen too much, and by the time he ran (parts of) this thing, he knew we were onto him and was cutting back.

 

[Beckett]

I ran it. 2 players, using 2 characters each (which two it was could switch as they had the full 4 character tree).

The Avangion gets killed in it, before the players can get there to do anything. Thri-kreen were supposed to slowly go crazy (although they might have been able to use their psionics freely).

Most of my memories are pretty vague. I do know it is one of the reasons I've wanted to start up a 3E game. I remember some pretty cool fights, I can still picture a lot of the Urik adventurers, and I remember the soccer game. Most of the high-level monsters from the Dark Suns MCs showed up (drakes and cloud rays).

It was a world tour of Athas. From Tyr to Urik to the Sea of Silt , then back to the halfing infested jungles. I think that was a major plus for the module- it was a Dark Sun adventure. You weren't picking it up and placing it in, say, the Forgotten Realms without a lot of work. Black Spine, the other mega-adventure capping the other DS adventure path, while fun, could have been anywhere.

My favorite moment- one of the characters was moving toward an intimate encounter with an elf he met. This particular elf was a wizard/thief, and a hired assassin. So, mid-embrace:

Me: She backstabs you for a bunch of damage.
Him: What!?! I push her away, reach for my sword.
Me: She cast magic missile on you for more damage.
Him: I'm attacking her!

Ah, the good ol' days when a little description and maybe a picture would cause most teenage males to take a big ol' wisdom penalty. The same player would get suckered and charmed by a certain lass at the end of Tsojcanth (sp?), with the saving throw largely unnecessary to insure his aid.