The Veiled Society - your experiences?

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

The Veiled Society


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?

Quasqueton

never saw this one...what is the "special cut out section for adventure play" ?

This was the first adventure I used to christened my 3E/3.5 campaign. I had never played it back in the day but I bought it at a B. Dalton's when I was in Junior High school many moons ago.

[Crothian - the special pull-out section were little figures kind of like SJG "Cardboard Heroes" that you could use during the adventure. There were guards and some of the Veiled Society members and other characters from the story. There were also little houses and buildings that you could cut out and color and put together. It made it easier for some of the chases through the city streets to have the three dimensions on your battle map].

My group of players got very frustrated with the adventure, and in hindsight it was not a good adventure to use with a group of newbies. I had wanted to show them that my campaign was not going to just be about "kill the monsters and take the treasure" and I thought that the murder-mystery aspect of this module would be a good way of doing that.

There are a lot of power groups in the adventure (three main families, plus the mysterious "Veiled Society") and my players had trouble keeping them apart. They continually got confused about who did what, and when it was finally revealed who the murdered was it was a little anti-climactic. Add to that some really random encounters with some hobgoblins digging under a woman's house (I never can remember what they were doing there) and it was a bit too much.

On the plus side, I set up the Veiled Society as a kind of good early level main campaign villain, and several members that escaped from the characters the first time have returned time and again to harrass them. I even had the one family that starts with an "R" try to rebuild themselves and become legitimate again, but of course they were still into some bad stuff.

All in all, it was pretty fun. It just wasn't a good choice for a first adventure.

Not my favorite. There really isn't a whole lot to this module when compared to the B-series adventures before it and the one directly after it. This definitely had more the flavor of the AC series, specifically AC3 and AC8, which had similar cardboard cut-outs and wafer thin adventures.

Many of the characters and much of the plot of this adventure was later adapted in GAZ1 Grand Duchy of Karameikos, and this adventure might be of some curiosity to fans of that setting.

The murder mystery is o.k., and it probably would have worked well in a full-sized adventure. In the space given, they simply didn't have the space necessary to detail the 'players', their actions, or the geography of the city in a way that satisfied me. Sketchy is the best I can describe it.

R.A.

I never ran this adventure per se, though I did use the city map in this adventure as the jumping off point to my longest running rpg campaign (mid-2003 to late 2004). The three families also inspired three noble houses in my campaign world as well. The name 'veiled society' also inspired some later campaign developments, but overall this adventure wasn't that interesting.....its meat was all gristle. The outer edges were good though.

Overall I thought this adventure was a good attempt for an OD&D urbran adventure, but it fell far short IMO. I think early adventures like parts of X3 - The Curse of Xanthanon better captured the urban paradigm better than this one.


C.I.D.

This is one of those sad adventures that go into the 'could have been good, but wasn't' drawer. If it had been fleshed out by about another dozen pages it would have been a lot of fun, I used it as a framework, but it took a lot of work.

The Auld Grump

I made good use of this for kicking off a campaign once. You need players who are ready for more than stabbing, though.

Great ideas, needs some extra care on the DM's part.

DMed it without reading thru it in advance and had some PCs play along with my brother’s PCs in 1984. Great adventure, and remember that it was close to the first city adventure of its type (only Assassin’s Knot came close to it). We had about a dozen players and henchmen, and we got into a mega battle with 20 Veiled Society members and lost by a nose, but it was a good scrap.