Help a 3e Kid Out - Night Below?

I started with 3e, so I never got the opportunity to play the old stuff. Given how much fanfare they are given on the boards, I thought I'd pick up a few and see if they could hold up, or if it's more nostalgia. For this reason I've picked up B2 off Ebay. (After reading a breakdown of B2, I was sort've amused at just how many different humanoids they crammed in there.)

But one thing that's elusive for me is the Night Below boxed set. Namely, I can't find the story anywhere. I know it's set in the Underdark, but aside from that, I know jack about it.

Is anyone willing to give me the spoilers, to lay out the plot outline for me?

Basically, in Night Below, there's an aboleth city building artifact towers that, when completed and combined, produce a nearly irrestible, large scale mass mind control effect. To build their plot device, they sacrifice spellcasters - generally ones kidnapped from the surface.

Aboleth -> Kuatoa (whatever the fishpeople who live underground are called) -> some intermediary monsters -> death cults. Illithids are sort of go betweens. The first part of the adventure is dealing with death cults who have been kidnapping spellcasters. The PCs defeat two such groups and move on to the orcs (casters have been passed along to the orcs instead of being killed).

The orc cavern is connected to the underdark, so going after the kidnapped casters means heading into the depths. However, the passage the bad guys use is heavily warded so the PCs basically have to fight their way through the underdark with lots of monsters before getting to the Derro and fishperson city. This second phase of the adventure is by far the weakest part, IMO. It's too long, for one thing, and seems like a prerolled selection of random encounters. Then the PCs have to overthrow the city with strategic attacks. There are several chances for making helpful alliances with good, mostly neutral, and simply less evil NPC groups.

The final phase is attacking the aboleth city, leading up to disabling the secondary towers (tied to the schools of magic) and then head into the main tower to defeat the big bosses. There are a few new possible allies, plus some of the previous groups will offer some limited aid.

Each phase of the adventure has numerous side quests.

Thanks, Victim!

Victim said:

The orc cavern is connected to the underdark, so going after the kidnapped casters means heading into the depths. However, the passage the bad guys use is heavily warded so the PCs basically have to fight their way through the underdark with lots of monsters before getting to the Derro and fishperson city. This second phase of the adventure is by far the weakest part, IMO. It's too long, for one thing, and seems like a prerolled selection of random encounters. Then the PCs have to overthrow the city with strategic attacks. There are several chances for making helpful alliances with good, mostly neutral, and simply less evil NPC groups.

Click to expand...

While googling, I noticed that was said several times. I wonder if it's easier to replace some other adventure site with it. I'd say 'add an area with a separate plot, as a nice diversion, or just a mini-adventure', but I don't know how easy that is with this campaign.

The final phase is attacking the aboleth city, leading up to disabling the secondary towers (tied to the schools of magic)

Click to expand...

Hmm. I wonder how hard it would be to convert it to psionics. I mean, not 'Evocation = Kinesis" or replace Wizards with Psions, but just wave your hands and say 'the towers and aboleths are psions, but they're sacrificing mages for... well, it's convenient for the story, dangit'.

Each phase of the adventure has numerous side quests.

Click to expand...

Oh, that's good. As long as it's not just steady crawling with the same strung-together plot.

The best approach would be to cut some of the encounter areas out all together. I think one of the issues was that PCs are coming out of book 1 at around level 5, and probably level once or twice clearing the initial hurdles in book 2. But they have to be several levels higher to be able to deal with the city area. A faster leveling rate (as exists in 3e) would mean that fewer monster lairs are needed to properly season the PCs.

Also, the adventure was designed for 2e, so many of the encounters are rather large. The PCs go from fighting like 100 orcs to fighting around 40 trolls - trolls that gained lots more power from the edition change than the orcs did. Many of the fights will be unreasonable if you don't thin out the enemies. Some of those battles required effective battlefield control and hit+run strategies before and weren't easy then - so under 3.x they'd be pretty much impossible. Other encounters use lots of really weak guys - like the Kuatoa city. There were plenty of classed baddies to fight too, but changes in the power curve make the ordinary fish people far effective than intended, I think. So changing encounters to maintain challenge would be required.

You could do that, but it'd be harder to integrate some of the other elements of the adventure and doesn't go so well with the official backstory which includes some divine blessing from the aboleth goddess. So if you're going to have some divine magic in there, then you might as well have arcane too. You could have their plan go from arcane+divine to a triple threat though, if you wanted to make some enemies psionic.

Thanks, Victim. Though the only thing that you said which made me scratch my head was this:

Victim said:

Some of those battles required effective battlefield control and hit+run strategies before and weren't easy then - so under 3.x they'd be pretty much impossible.

Click to expand...

What do you mean that battlefield control and hit and run battles are impossible in 3e?

No, I mean that given that you needed those strategies to win in 2e against relatively weaker monsters, in 3e, those battles will likely prove to be overwhelming regardless.

Hey, just thought I'd chime in since I DMed this campaign in the 2E days. Overall, the plot was really cool (I thought) but my players did indeed have a rough go of it. They got stuck somewhere around the kuo-toa city (couldn't figure out how to destroy it/get past it/whatever) and pretty much gave up on the campaign. We were in junior high though, so a more experienced group of players could probably handle it.

As previous posters have noted, you would have to be really careful about balancing encounters if you wanted to do a 3E conversion. We had enough PC deaths as it was (heh heh).

While it lasted though, this was one of the better (more fun) campaigns we played in 2E. It's also one of the only published modules I ever ran in that edition.

I just finished running this ccampaign for my players. It rocked, but required some tweaking.
You'll find a 3e conversion in the conversion library. It needs some hard editing and a careful look through, but it's workable. The third book is probably the weakest conversion, but I was busy when I wrote it.

Spoilers below:

From a player perspective, Book I opens up wiith a delivery job to the sleepy little county of Haranshire. There they become involved in investigating the disappearance of a wizard's apprentice. One thing leads to another and they discover bandits are behind the disappearance of her and many other spellcasters. They in turn find out that the bandits are being paid well to turn those spellcasters over to a tribe of orcs living beneath the ground.
A visit to the caverns of the orcs reveal both the sinister hand of Mind Flayers behind the orcs and some svirfneblin that might be new allies.
That ends Book I

Book II opens with the party having to prove themselves to their new allies by investigating the Night Below. Their first task to earn the trust is to wipe out a lair of trolls. 40 trolls spread out over several hundred feet of cavern space. Depending on what the party did prior to this, they should be around 6th level.
Presuming they are successful they will have begun to earn the trust of the svirfneblin and will be told that the slaves are being taken to the City of the Glass Pool, a kuo-toan citadel. The party is given a map and instructed to make their way there for the answers they seek. They are also instructed to slay all the derro they find - apparently there's a lot of them.
After many encounters, good and bad, the party finally reaches the City of the Glass Pool. There they will most likely have to slaughter a large number of Kuo Toa and the Mind Flayers that lead them in order to reach the passageway that leads further down. For the City is but a way stop on the slave trade of spellcasters.

Book III opens with the party taking their first steps into even deeper tunnels, eventually finding their way to the Sunless Sea, a massive body of water below the earth. Exploration will reveal enemies as well as allies of uncertain intent. Eventually the party will make their way to the lair of the architects behind all the kidnappings, the City of Shaboath, full of aboleth and their minions. They will also have learned the aboleth's grand scheme; the total domination of the underdark.
The aboleth have constructed the Towers of Domination, a massive artifact that will extend their natural enslavement ability to every place beneath the earth. The towers are not yet complete, but they will be soon.

The climax of the book III is when the party assaults the City of Shaboath to achieve certain tactical goals and to ultimately assault the towers of domination. If all goes well, the party will meet the magical genius behind the towers as well as the savant leader of the aboleth.

-----

Having run it through to completion I'd make some different emphasis' through the module.
1. Determine where the derro minions come from. There are hundreds, but they have no city of their own; yet the svirfneblin hate them with a passion.
2. The magical architect of the city is a derro wizard - yet there is no mention of him at all until the party meets him.
3. Under 2nd Edition, the party was expected to be around 14th level when they completed the module. In real play, my party was 14th by the time they hit the end of Book II. Some were 20th by the time they finished. That...changes things. Plan accordingly.
4. Plan on some additional out of dungeon encounters for variety. Most complaints I've heard is that Book II is a dungeon slog....way too long. If it's broken up with some surface adventures though it won't be too bad.

I'm sure there are other things, but those are off the top of my head.

I've got a story hour (link in sig), which currently goes up through the middle of Book II. I haven't had any new additions to it for a couple months, but there will be additions.

Given that there's a huge emphasis on many, many weak opponents, I might want to wait for 4e, with its capacity for droves of monsters.

Seravin said:

From a player perspective, Book I opens up wiith a delivery job to the sleepy little county of Haranshire. There they become involved in investigating the disappearance of a wizard's apprentice. One thing leads to another and they discover bandits are behind the disappearance of her and many other spellcasters. They in turn find out that the bandits are being paid well to turn those spellcasters over to a tribe of orcs living beneath the ground.
A visit to the caverns of the orcs reveal both the sinister hand of Mind Flayers behind the orcs and some svirfneblin that might be new allies.
That ends Book I

Click to expand...

Eeeh. Bandits? Guess they aren't as death culty.

Actually, this makes me wonder how easy it could be to say, meld the Keep on the Borderland with the Night Below - making the priests in the Keep the cultists giving the spellcasters.

Also, I had the thought of turning the illithids into one of the allies against the aboleths. Aboleths and Illithids, I think, wouldn't get along.

4. Plan on some additional out of dungeon encounters for variety. Most complaints I've heard is that Book II is a dungeon slog....way too long. If it's broken up with some surface adventures though it won't be too bad.

Click to expand...

I'm wondering about replacing Book II with something else, some other adventure that might mix in, maybe.

Thanks, Seravin!

Rechan said:

Also, I had the thought of turning the illithids into one of the allies against the aboleths. Aboleths and Illithids, I think, wouldn't get along.

Click to expand...

In Book III there is in fact a group of illithids who don't trust the aboleth plan -at all- and fear they'll be dominated along with the other races, and offer another group of potential allies to the PCs.