Dwellers of the Forbidden City - your experiences?

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

Dwellers of the Forbidden 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

If I remember right, this was the module that introduced the Yaun-Ti. There is a great map of the Forbidden City in it as well, plus lots of snakey fun.

Dwellers

This was the second official mod I ever owned.

I DM'd it many years ago, probably as a first edition game/group. Getting into the city was fun as that part had been used as a tournament mod, if I recall correctly. Once in the city things bogged down as there were only so many set encounter areas. The rest were random encounters, but only so many times the party could be entertained meeting two apes.

The city, ruins really, put tremendous demands on my desceptive talents. Well, it wore them out so I resorted to putting the map open on the table and they could wander to the lettered areas.

I do recall the excitement of the 'fight' between the party's ranger and the chief of the tribal people. The ranger was lawful good so he had to fight fair, while the chief could fight dirty. Still, the ranger won and became their 'chief.' As they wandered the ruins some more, they would often encounter other members of the tribe who would want to embrace him.

Then there was the mage, Horan. In truth, there is no good or valid reason for them to simply invade his house and kill him. But, don't all party's feel the need to do so? Mine did. But, Horan, whose name they never got, escaped. Since I had placed this in Greyhawk in Hempmonoland [sp?], I had him flee to other jungle areas. Years later when I started to develop my own cities, I had him emerge in Fort Thunder in the Amedio Jungle. Some of the same PCs encountered him, now as an upstanding citizen who they did not realize they once wanted to kill.

I did use the entry/exit part with other groups, just as jungle adventures, but never used the ruins again.

I both played and dmed it, but it's a big area to explore. The map is awesome, and neither when I was playing nor dming did we finish it.

I remember the rasslin' tasloi leader.... *POKE IN THE EYE!*

i refereed this one many moons ago. it was a blast. had to break it up into multiple sessions over several months. the players kept diving in and coming out too beat up or too scared to attempt it again until they had more knowledge, skill, or training. still they never completed the whole adventure.

I played it once and DM'd it twice. Awesome all the way around.

Memories as a player: My paladin losing an eye to the dirty fighting tasoli chief. Oh well, the paladin never used missile weapons anyway. Much of our group biting it thanks to a well placed Cone of Cold courtesy of Horan, the BBEG. The adventure kicked our ass time and again. Doing nothing but healing up for days on end (and staving off wandering critters) before venturing out to explore some more. Ah, good times.

Memories as a GM: one time I ran the module "as-is" and the group was pretty ineffectual. Nibbling around the edges of the city, but generally getting to chewed up before they could do major damage to the bad guys. I had to scale the yuan-ti's WAAAY back before they wiped out the whole party. (This was back in the day where I did my utmost to avoid character/party deaths).

I ran it another time using the module as more of a template for a different adventure with a higher level group. There was a section in the back of the module with additional ideas for the Forbidden City. I took one of these ideas and ran with it. Basically, the group was lured to the city by rumors of fabulous lost treasures, and had to fight some pretty tough baddies while exploring the ruins. While in the city the group located some ghosts which were the slain nobility of the city before its downfall. Apparently, in the past, someone betrayed the city and allowed the yuan-ti to overthrow its rulers and run rampant thru the city, leading to its decline. The ghosts asked the adventurers to travel back in time thru a portal to when the city was in its prime and uncover the yuan-ti plot in its infancy. It involved ferreting out the conspirators inside the city and then traveling to a volcanic hideout in the nearby jungle which contained a hidden yuan-ti temple where the plot to take over the city was born.

All in all, a very cool module with tons of ideas for expanision. Hell, even the map of the city alone is worth the price of the module on ebay or pdf. I've used that map as a stand-in for other cities (forbidden/lost or not) countless times for games as diverse as Warhammer and Champions.

Loved the module, still love yuan-ti, hated the map. Sure, it looked all nice and purty but trying to explain a 3-D map to your players is an exercise in futility. I remember the "mapping delays" throughout the adventure as I was transcribing the map into a 2-D representation on graph paper.

The one time I ran the module as written, the party got pretty torn up by the sword of wounding wielded by, IIRC, the bugbear chief. They pulled out of the city and then other things happened and they never went back.

Quasqueton
(weakly veiled bump)

Quasqueton said:

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

Dwellers of the Forbidden 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
P.S. I'm having to use images from ebay auctions (not mine) because I can't find the old Arcaenum site. Any help pointing me to that D&D historical site would be appreciated.

Click to expand...

First off, here you go: http://www.acaeum.com/

I had many wonderful memories with this adventure as both a DM and a player. The last time I used this adventure was a little over a year ago when I ran it as a 3.0 conversion. The funniest moment in the game was when one of the pc's decided to become invisible and scout ahead down one of the entry tunnels to the city. He crept silently down the passage looking out for sentries while the rest of the party waited in the tunnel. As he emerged into the city ruins from the passage, he noticed two yuan-ti guards , one on either side of the passage. At this point he gestured towards either side of the passage, to warn his companions- completely forgetting that he was invisible! The whole table went ROFL as soon as we realized what he was doing. The players face turned slightly red for a moment then he was laughing with the rest of us. An important lesson about the limitations of invisibility were made crystal clear that day!

A great mod that shows the depth of potential in those early releases. Contained a tournament one-shot, another good one-shot in the form of the alternate entrance, and a full campaign setting in the form of the ruined city, awaiting development. The expansion ideas in the back of the mod had some really great concepts (I never got a chance to run any of them, however). I ran a group through this one back in the 80s and it was a lot of fun. Lots of good thinking situations, straight-up fights, and opportunities for diplomacy (with the mongrelmen, for example). I could easily see a 3.5 edition of this module taking players from L4 to about L10 with very little in the way of extra development by the DM.