Lost City - your experiences?

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

Lost City


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

One of my all time favourite modules. I first played it and we made it halfway through the fourth level before a random enc ounter wiped us out :\ Not the best experience to be sure but once I started DMing I got ahold of this little baby and ran with it. My gaming group played it for over a year battling down to meet Zargon himself (sadly they just couldn't beat him and were forced to retreat). They made alliances with some of the factions (I converted a lot of it to AD&D and had one of the factions CN - unstable but the alliance was only meant to be temporary anyway - the PCs ended up betraying them too!) and really got into it. I always meant to expand the hidden city under the tomb but never did.

Years later I revisited this module and converted it into the tomb of a fallen titan from the Scarred Lands. That worked ok and there were some memorable moments from it (like the level that had been cleared out by a massive ochre jelly - only some spectres were left and they attacked by materializing through the stone floors and walls and energy drainign everyone - that was a tough fight! PCs overcame it and eventually killed the jelly (one of the fighter PCs got swallowed by it ignited his flaming axe - it was a race to see who would drop first!).

In short I love this module and the map is fantastic!

ran this module multiple times for many different groups.

it is one of the best ROLE playing modules from the early days. absolute must to help n00b referees.

i have it slated currently for my new OD&D campaign.

I think this module is as close to perfection as old D&D got. It is pretty well the platonic ideal of the perfect module in every way. Unfortunately, it is tough to fit into an existing campaign -- it is more like the launching point for a campaign which would be heavily derived from the module.

Fun module, I think it is the first one I every owned and we must have gone through it like a hundred times.

I love this module. I've now gone looking for this module and have come to realize my brother "borrowed it" , looks like I'm holding his original copy of Runequests "the big rubble" hostage until we can arrange a swap. I think he was running his 15 year old son and friends through it. My brother turned this into a greyhawk mini campaign in the desolate wastes when we ran it as kids. SOme good memories.

You haven't played The Lost City until you've played it in Call of Cthulhu as a city lost to time in the middle of the Egyptian Desert!

The Lost City is a lot of fun, but it requires a good DM to really make it shine.

Well, to run this mod now would certainly require some flexible DMing. The three gods each worshipped by wierd combinations of character classes (which one was it that was worshipped by Magic-users, elves, and clerics IIRC).

Still, a very Howard-esqe module.

One of the best aspects of this module, that reflects much of what was good about 'old school' mods, is that much of the area around the module is undeveloped, free for the DM to develop on their own.

I remember my own copy of the Lost City full of hand drawn maps of the buildings and locations n the lost city.

Like a lot of its contemporaries (B2 Keep on the Borderlands, X1 Isle of Dread, T1 Village of Hommlet, etc.) The Lost City was as much an outline of a mini-campaign setting as it was an adventure. The DM could run it as a "find and kill the bad guy" type adventure, or he could develope the lower levels of the pyramid and the city and tunnels below into a full blown campaign. Like Diaglo said, this is one of the best adventures for showing how role-playing can be incorporated into a fairly standard dungeon crawl.

I've always thought that you could shove the entrance to B4 into the Cave of the Unknown in B2 and have all the campaign material you'd ever need.

Some people criticize the monster distribution on the lower levels. Unlike the top few levels, the lower ones are perhaps the worst examples of "what's a dragon doing in a room that small?" type dungeons. I don't have a problem with it, myself. The DM just needs to use a llittle creativity. The Blue Dragon, for example, has polymorphed himself into a human and is posing as a priest of Zargon, but is secretly trying to defeat him and take his spot as ruler of the Lost City.

R.A.

johnsemlak said:

One of the best aspects of this module, that reflects much of what was good about 'old school' mods, is that much of the area around the module is undeveloped, free for the DM to develop on their own.

Click to expand...

Or, as some of us would say, it's not finished.