Dragon Mountain - your experiences?

Fifth 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 Mountain


Synopsis: Embark on a quest to find a plane-shifting mountain that is home to an ancient red dragon and her clans of kobold underlings. Just finding the place is a challenge in itself...

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.)

Spoiler Alert!

Never played - but I did just recently convert it to 3.5.

And promptly threw up.

This is one of those adventures that looks just amazing - until you get into the details. Oh, the details. This had to be one of the most disappointing adventures to come out in years. I had two major issues with it: One is the 'vast tracts of land' (dungeon) that is completely empty. I hate it when they do that. The other is based on mechanics - get this: the adventure is for ridiculously high (for 2e) characters, but they put you up against kobolds. Kobolds! The author(s) feed you this complete crap about how this adventure "proves kobolds are fearsome if the 'DM plays them well'" (I'm paraphrasing) - and then goes and makes a bunch of (crappy) rules changes specifically back up their already nonsensical kobold statement. "DM plays them well" indeed. Wankers.

To the author(s) of Dragon Mountain: "You suck!"

But it is definitely salvageable - no question. And better yet, it certainly is more mechanically sound in 3e than in it's original 2e form. Creepy.

I have some vague memories of this adventure from my days in high school. If I remember correctly there are a series of artifacts that need to be recovered in order to make the mountain appear. These were a blast to play. One in particular is defending a village from on onslaught of 150+ kobolds wielding magic wands. Planning the strategy was about as much fun as carrying out the combat. Think of the movie Saving Private Ryan when they are planning their defense against the Nazis. It may be one of my most memorable DND moments.

Getting into the mountain was where the adventure turned sour. Levels and levels of kobolds hidden in the walls, firing through secret doors etc, tons of traps, etc. The levels were so broad (similar to Undermountain) that we eventually jumped to the end to battle the Dragon.

I guess in summary it was a mixed bag, but fun overall. If you trim the dungeon crawling it may be even better.

I got it but never ended up running it. It just never grabbed my attention in the same way that alot of Ravenloft modules of the same time did. I'd have to say it's reasonably bland- I've read it twice in preparation to run it and can't really remember much about it except that there are several different kobold tribes, some dwarven undead, and a big red dragon at the end.

I joined the group as they were heading into the mountain proper. I understand everyone had a great time with the preliminary quests.

My experience was that it was fun for a while, but just got old. We had some great characters, with lots and lots of personality, but I think it would have been pretty boring otherwise.

The biggest disappointment was that the module changed some basic rules instead of providing a legitimate challenge. Lazy authors.

For the record, we did not finish the module. Once things got to the point of "wash, rinse, repeat", we scrapped it.

A lot of the fun for me was my character who was a variant wizard from Spells and Powers (fatigue caster). He had almost no damage spells, but had three or four different variations of the Item spell, including one that was duration: permanent. He carried decks and decks of cards (instead of cloth tokens) of items with him. The kobolds slowly wore through them and we picked up some other toys along the way -- you'd be amazed at all the uses for an itemized door.

Man, was I ticked when the kobolds managed to fireball my last feather bed.

I went through this as a player first, then later I DMed it (both in 2e). As a player I enjoyed the variety of quests necessary to locate the mountain and get the pieces of the amulet. I was really, really impatient to reach the mountain itself, certain that it would be a monstrously cool dungeon that would totally roxxor my soxxors. The DM flubbed some of the rules, allowing the party to maraud about the place ethereally and avoid many of the killer traps. He used the kobolds pretty well, though, including a whole bunch who had strapped flasks of greek fire to their bodies and would charge us madly like diminutive suicide bombers, blowing themselves up in gory sacrifice.

He had replaced the standard dragon with some twinked-out monstrosity of his own making - a kind of evil avatar-dragon that had captured Elminster and was draining his life-force (yeah, it was an FR game where we had to rescue Elminster, heh heh). We had a completely insane battle against the dragon (during which Elminster was killed and turned to ash in my arms, oh happy, happy day!). In the middle of the battle, our wizard's faerie dragon familiar suddenly turned out to be a gold dragon in disguise (wtf?) and joined in the battle with us. We killed the avatar-dragon with her help. Then Bhaal (FR death god) turned up and killed us all with a wave of his hand. Then the gold dragon turned out to be an avatar as well, and banished Bhaal and returned us all to life with a wave of her hand. I suspect that the DM got carried away at some point during the final battle, but I'm not quite able to put my finger on the exact moment....

When I ran it as part of my homebrew, all the dragons of the world were dying and Dragon Mountain was their only hope of escaping their doomed planet. I changed many of the initial quests to suit my own game and had the mountain beseiged by a number of dragon and dracolich-led armies. As for the mountain itself, I added a bunch more dragons, making them the brood of the mountain's uberdragon, each with their own lesser broods and factions of dragon-humanoids beneath them (I removed the kobolds completely and replaced them with the dragonmen as I thought that kobolds were lame for a 15th-level game). I also added a City On The Mountain, established on the slopes of the mountain by those who accompanied it on its planar travels, but were never allowed entry into the mountain itself - a parasitic society of planar dreck and "pilot-fish". We played about a dozen sessions in all, very enjoyably, in a combination of religious/political intrigue and kick-ass battles against invading armies, indigenous dragons and factions of dragonmen. I had this whole plot about the dragonmen seeking to liberate themselves from the harsh rule of their dragon overlords, and various broods of dragons struggling to take the place of the ailing uberdragon. The plane-shifting mountain remains a part of my campaign, now occupying a central place in the gameworld's mythology.

In essence, I agree with those who have said that the adventure doesn't run very well as written. I had lots of cool expectations about what it would be like, and very few of them were realised. So when it came to running it myself I replaced all the bits I didn't like with those realised expectations and me and my players were satisfied with the outcome. As written, I think it's a missed opportunity for draconic coolness. Instead you get a pale imitation of Tucker's Kobolds and one rather dim dragon. My final version was so heavily reworked that it might as well have been a different product. A real could-have-been product that should have been something else.

Rise from the dead!!

I'm bringing this thread back to life because I'm running it for 3.5 and want advice on how to make it cooler. The beginning quests are not being used. The group is in Hammerfast (the great 4e town supplement) and I'm using that to eventually lead to Dragon mountain. There is a dragon that is being awwakened and that is all happening at Dragon Mountain. The final dragon will be some odd dragon infused with Hydra blood creature.

I'm going to focus a bit on kobold politics because we have a kobold in the group. The Kobolds of Dragon Mountain though are ones that failed in a rebellion of the Kobold nation and escaped to here.

General thoughts?

Kobolds are at their best when they are fighting on their own turf using lots of traps and tricks that really piss off PCs. As DM this is hard to pull off since you basically have to outwit a whole table full of players.

The best example I've seen of this is the Kamikaze Kobold Korps in a module called Out of the Ashes that appeared in an old Dungeon magazine. There was also a Living Greyhawk module that did a pretty good job of it. Alas, I've completely forgotten what it was. There was also a great post on the WotC website back in the 3.5e days that had some kobold traps that were quite clever. I'm sorry I don't have anything more concrete.

This may be obvious, but in general be absolutely unfair to big folk and intruders wherever possible. Imagine how you would fight giants given decades to prepare. Do that to the PCs.

Thoughts:
1. You want lots of secret doors and lots of maze-like passages that are too narrow for medium-sized creatures to enter without squeezing.
2. Every wrong turn is a different trap but add something that encourages PCs to hurry and not check assiduously for traps. (Example: Kobold pickpockets valuable magic item and flees so that PCs will pursue quickly. Example: tunnels rapidly filling with water or some worse liquid.)
3. Attack en masse when PCs are at their weakest. Don't let them disentangle from a trap before attacking.
4. Anything that wears at dignity is good. Examples: Goo that makes armor so sticky you can't move. Green slime. Slippery floors. Etc.



:AMN:

IIRC, the author took Tucker's kobolds from Dragon #127 and made them in to shadow-wearing green berets or something like that. Or maybe that was just my DM back in college. I would definitely play up the Tucker's kobolds angle though. I think the dragon keeps the rest of the kobold factions in separate regions and in constant combat with one another in order to maintain control. I think there was some quasi-deity worshiping going on too, but my mind's fuzzy there.

Upsides? There were too many besides the above in the actual adventure from my reading of it. Downsides though? There were quite from what I can remember. It is way to big and the maps are almost entirely vacant. There are some exciting rooms and a few page-sized cardboard maps worth focusing on. I wouldn't actually use the original maps except perhaps as part of a wilderness trek, not as a mapping experience. They are not that exciting as mega-dungeons go, IMO.

The teleporting mountain aspect could be made more interesting. It needs effects on the PCs to coincide with those teleportations. In hell? The alignment of the plane effects them, as do plenty of other details like heat effects, penalties to NPC morale, etc.

All kobolds all the time can get a little boring too. I seem to remember fighting an animated suit of armor in this adventure, which we took for a death knight and ran from several times before being corned and killing it more easily than expected.

The dwarven tomb is a centerpiece besides the dragon's lair itself. I would keep that.

Another very cool aspect added by my college DM was a recurring villain who was really a 0-level commoner who had picked up a cursed item. Some classic amulet or something I can't remember. Anyways, he thought he was a vampire, so he was tricked out in all sorts of magic items which allowed him to emulate the powers of a real vampire because he had thought he had lost them. That included spider walking slippers, cloak of the bat, cape of the mountebank, fingertip claw gloves, fake fangs, a mind control ring, etc. Everything a 2E D&D vampire should be able to do. And for a long time we thought a vampire was stalking us.

Honestly, I wouldn't stay true to the module as its' just too big and isn't savory enough to spend as much time as it would demand on it. If you really are looking for a sizable "boxed set" adventure, try piecemealing portions from other, better adventures and build a little microcosm in there under the dragon's half-hearted control. Variety really is the spice of life and one of the signs of a good adventure.