D&D General Experiences with Empire of the Ghouls, Night Below, or Other Underdark Adventures?

[Orius]

Night Below tends to be something of a slog, especially in the second book. The main problem is that Book 2 is a lot filler designed to level up the players so they can take on the City of the Glass Pool at the end of the book, and in order to get the XP for that a DM really does need to fall back on GP = XP because there's really not enough monster XP to fill the gap.

Of course there's piles and piles of cash lying around and I suppose Sargent even assumed that only small amounts of it would be carried off if the DM enforced encumbrance, but he slips up with a magic item back in Book 1. This item is a little figurine of a cottage that can be used to create a full sized shelter. Well, my players quickly learned to dump all those piles of money in the cottage and use it to easily haul it back to the surface! And this isn't an isolated case, from other accounts I've read, other groups figured that out pretty damn quick too. There are limits on the cottage, but they don't really matter. It can only be used once or maybe twice a week, but it takes several weeks or even months to move around down there so the party has time on their side to abuse the cottage. There's a command word which must be learned through identify, and the chance to learn it is pretty low, but my players did eventually get lucky with the dice.

Night Below is okay, but there are a few flaws in it. I'd say Gary did a far better job describing an Underdark setting in a third of the pages with D 1-3.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

It is only a slog in the second book for your mentioned reason. I think if you convert it to 5e, you can skip a few parts, although most of them are actually fun mini adventures... probably it is best however to just be lenient with xp and only pick a few of those sidetracks. Also handwave travel time.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Or use milestone leveling, whatever edition you're running it in.

 

[thom_likes_gaming]

Well, there's Rise of the Drow, a whole campaign. I used a few things by AAW now and the and found them to be solid, if unspectacular. RotD has popped up
on my radar as quite worthwhile a few times, but I never really read it.

 

[jaycrockett]

I also really loved D1-3 when I ran it for a 3rd edition game. I have an inexplicable fondness for Kuo-toa.

 

[GuyBoy]

D1-3. One of my abiding memories (apart from the lich lying on his stony couch and the name Blibdoolpoolp) was the truly deadly drow spell, Tentacle Wall.
In a narrow corridor, with the party under attack from front and rear, a tentacle wall spell cast on the side walls.....pure terror!

 

[Shiroiken]

I have heard excellent things about Night Below, but have never played or run it (several people in my group have though).

I played part of Out of the Abyss and found it to be trash. The DM hated it too, finding it super linear, relying a lot on the DM to push the plot forward if the players get stuck (which happened often). In addition there's times that the DM is just expected to come up with adventures to level the characters, without providing advice on how to connect them to the main plot.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

I'm running an Underdark campaign, and as a DM I (for some reason) like to put more work on myself by scouring published materials for content to integrate into my campaigns. Currently I'm trying to look more into high profile Underdark adventures like Empire of the Ghouls and Night Below, though pretty much any Underdark adventure would be of interest to me. I'm looking for interesting encounters, environmental details, roleplaying scenarios, etc. I'm going to continue looking into these myself, but if anyone has any prior experience running or playing in these or other Underdark adventures I'd be glad to hear about them!

I recommend giving a peek at Downcrawl as an idea generator for filling in the Underdark in flavorful ways.

 

[teitan]

Kingdom of Ghouls is a very different sort of Underdark campaign. It's another of those no Drow in it because the setting doesn't have Drow by default, being Midgard. Instead it is a kingdom of, well, ghouls. I've read through part of it so far and it is pretty good.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Kingdom of Ghouls is a very different sort of Underdark campaign. It's another of those no Drow in it because the setting doesn't have Drow by default, being Midgard. Instead it is a kingdom of, well, ghouls. I've read through part of it so far and it is pretty good.

The book mentions drow, though, and some of the darakhul nobility are former drow.