Return to White Plume Mountain - your experiences?

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

Return to White Plume Mountain


Synopsis: Twenty years after adventurers reclaimed a trio of stolen weapons from the depths of White Plume Mountain, Keraptis' face has appeared once more in the volcano's smoke. Is the vile wizard immortal after all? Or is there an even greater thereat building beneath White Plume Mountain? A revisiting of the classic 1e adventure.

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.)

We hade fun with this one. I first ran it a few weeks after it came out. The group had played through White Plume Mountain in the same campaign about two or three years previous so it was a lot of fun to take them back and see how the mountain had changed and to explore the new level.

Are spoilers okay or should they be hidden? The end of this adventure was very cool but I want to know if it should be talked about behind spoiler tags or in the open.

funny I am re-reading it now.

Hi,
I bought it, but could not bring myself to run it. The concept of the False-Keraptis and the K-implants just didn't sit right with me.

I loved the surrounding info though. In fact, My 4e campaign is starting in the nearby town (I have re-named threshold), and 3 of the 4 PC are the grandchildren of the original weapn owners.

Not much help but that is my experience.

RK

Crothian said:

Are spoilers okay or should they be hidden? The end of this adventure was very cool but I want to know if it should be talked about behind spoiler tags or in the open.

Click to expand...

I'm sure that it would be fine to talk about spoilerish information - these are retrospectives of a sort - but maybe spoiler tags would be a good idea just in case

(As for the adventure, I haven't run it yet myself, but it got mentioned a few times in the general discussion thread for the younger classics, so I figured it would be a good one to re-start with. I have these ornate plans to run the original, plus Ex Keraptis Cum Amore from Dungeon #77, plus this one as a sort of White Plume Trilogy. Would be fun, I suppose...)

I enjoyed reading it immensely, lots of neat aspects and I like the different faction themes and the false Kerapti and the linking back to the original module.

I would not want to run it straight, the powerful items that take over PCs and eventually turn them into NPCs [sblock]the scrolls[/sblock]do not sit well with my style of DMing.

It did make me want to use vicious gnomes in my game though.

This was part of a long lasting campaign. Blackrazor had been found and destroyed, Wave was given to the sea god as a gift, and whelm was used by the dwarf in the party and a great NPC weapon. So, those weapons were not in the return to for us.

[sblock] I really liked all the wierd magical items and effects going on as the big K was looking for immortality. I had him be the long running villian in the campaign, I just changed his name to match. The fought him for so long and in the end to have the villian get turned into a baby was great. One PC was still willing to kill him, but the other two refused. The gathered up the baby, got the heck out of the mountain (the eye looking up through the lava freaked them out!!) and then gave the baby to trusted NPCs to raise. The kid grew up and I used him as an NPC in a few other campaigns and he come a very important character as his rebirth allowed him to follow a new path and one that was not evil. Yet, people who knew of his history (like many of the PCs in latter campaigns) never would believe he wasn't fully evil.[/sblock]

OK, hopefully I'm not too off-topic here, but I ran the 3.5 conversion of White Plume Mountain (Revised) that was released as a free download by WotC. A very cool thing for them to do, IMO

I used the DCC Legacy of the Savage Kings as a lead-in to the module, using that area to fill in WPM's Great Swamp. As LotSK also has a few other key elements seen on the north end of Erol Otus' White Plume map (I won't spoil them by going into detail), the two fit together perfectly.

To get the PC's into the mountain, I had a kidnap victim they were supposed to rescue (the daughter of a djinn from my AD&D Ghost Tower of Inverness/ DCC The Mysterious Tower/ HackMaster Demon Tower of Madness mash-up), as well as the promise of three powerful magical items that needed to be kept out of the clutches of Vecna's forces.

The only stuff I used from Return to White Plume Mountain were illustrations and maps, as well as drawing personal inspiration from the historical texts. I did the same with the HackMaster module White Doom Mountain.

It was lots of fun. I could explain away all of the weird stuff with "a crazy wizard made it" and it actually made sense.

As a note, I think that LotSK's is now out as a C&C adventure, which might work just as well with all the other WPM versions. Just be prepared to do some conversion work -- if rules matter in your game, converting AD&D/D&D/HackMaster to C&C on the fly will be frustrating to you. Not a big deal, just a heads up.


Spoilers Follow...


I used Stygoth the diseased adult black dragon from LotSK for WPM's undead dragon Dragotha. LotSK's mad hermit stood in for Thingizzard. Finally, I used LotSK's The Forge for WPM's Castle Mumos.

Keraptis was a huge glob of wizard tissue living in a vat -- something I stole from a William Gibson novel.

I gave the giant crab psychic intimidation abilities to match the drawing which featured what looked like circles of power emanating from it -- no real mechanical changes, just the addition of a giant crab monster piping out DEATH DEATH DEATH as it snapped the cleric in half. You can thank William Burroughs for that flavorful addition.

As expected, they ended up damaging the fragile bubble around that area, letting tons of boiling volcano water crash down just as they managed to close the first set of flanged pressure doors. We had to look up the word "flanged" of course. I had them racing to close all the pressure doors as I counted down on a d12. It was actually pretty tense and exciting.

The chamber of globes? Bad enough. Having one PC locked in there alone? Even worse. The fighter broke every single wrong orb in that room open before finding the key at last. I gave him a free action so he could lunge for the door to open it just as the shadows were about to finish him off -- and that was the only break from me that he got. He deserved it.

The Sphinx really didn't want to be there, and did his best to give the PCs a hand in surviving the crossroads, but he was bound by some ancient Sphinx code. He and the PCs had a mutual understanding that they all had to do what they had to do.