Anyone Played Spiral of Manzessine (Dungeon #94)?

[Chaldfont]

I am about to DM this adventure and would like to hear your experiences with it.

BTW--did anyone notice that the tactics almost always include someone performing CdG on stunned PCs? Shouldn't the editors catch something that obvious?

 

[Psion]

That sounds familiar. Is that the one with the half-machine templates?

 

[muhcashin]

That's the one that ties with City of Spider Queen, where the PC's run through some prison. I've never played it, though.

 

[Chaldfont]

Its a prison-break in a mind flayer prison. They wrote it as a tie-in to the City of the Spider Queen. The original plot is that a massive cave-in in the Underdark forces the PCs to detour through a mind flayer prison. The only way out is through the prison.

IMC the players have to bust out an NPC that they need to acquire a rare tome they need for a ritual. I was hoping someone might give me some idea of how the encounters played out--especially the first one. The plot hinges on the PCs making a frontal assault. Since my players have an almost pathological fear of having their brains sucked out (cowards), I am sure they will try to sneak or talk their way in.

 

[Chaldfont]

I'll bump this one last time. I am surprised no one has played it, with all it's PC-brain-extracting potential.

 

[Breakstone]

I used is as inspiration for a quick little side-track adventure, but I didn't run any of the real encounters from the book.

I still smile when I think about the looks on the players' faces when I described one Mind Flayer eating another's brain in excrutiatingly gory detail...

 

[Plane Sailing]

I'm planning to run it soon (the PCs want to take a fight to the mindflayers and have heard about this prison demi-plane where they might be able to kill mindflayers in the raw (instead of astrally projected versions of them which is all they have seen to date).

If you end up running it before I do, I'd like to see how it worked out for you!

Cheers

 

[Calico_Jack73]

Looked through it but as my campaign didn't involve the underdark at that time it would have felt forced to my players.

 

[Westwind]

I ran this under 3.0 rules and, like much of the City of the Spider Queen, it was tough. I allowed my players to min-max more than normal since the modual was a break from our regular campaign and I realized that it would be really tough otherwise.

If a character has access to a spell like Ghostform (from Tome and Blood) or can go ethereal, things are a little better but a frontal assault is suicide. A lot of this boils down to "every round you have at least a 5% chance of death" which isn't cool for players.

One of the things I did to make the paperwork easier for me was photocopy the map and keep track of who was where (you could blow up the copy and use little tokens to mark certain NPCs for just keep a running tally in the margin). In enclosed spaces with a set number of named NPCs this helps the DM to coordinate tactics.

 

[Chaldfont]

I ran the first session of this last night. When I get a chance, I'll post a summary of the game on the Story Hour board.

It turns out that mind-flayer's really don't like it when a sorcerer uses true strike to hit them with a dimensional anchor through an arrow slit and then another true strike to lob an elemental gem into their guard post (which is barely large enough to fit the mind-flayer guard, much less a Large earth elemental).

My players rock.