Against the Giants - your experiences

[Quasqueton]

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

Against the Giants

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

 

[Chunklets]

Wow, it was awhile ago...

I think this was one of the very first AD&D modules I played, and my memories of it are fuzzy in the extreme. I do remember one of the party's clerics (the player was actually using the cute cleric from the sample adventure in the old Basic Set) getting killed, by a bear IIRC, and the party having to hole up for awhile while she was raised and recovered from that.

My imperfect recollections of playing the module aside, I still consider it a very fine piece of work, and I've actually sat down within the last couple of years and just read it, cover to cover. Rather than a lot of specific memories, it brought back an impression of what playing AD&D way-back-when was like. It actually set me to re-thinking about some of the aspects of 3E that I thought I'd been alright with. Don't get me wrong - I like 3E, but since revisiting Against the Giants I've been thinking of ways to tweak it to recover some of that feeling that we had back in the beginning. So, I guess you could say that the module has been extremely influential on my gaming experiences, albeit 20+ years removed from when I first encountered it.

I did download a couple of 3E updates of Against the Giants, and one of these days (not my current campaign, though), I'll step up to the plate and give a try at DMing it.

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

First module I ever ran (back around 1980). Party did well....until the big battle started (stealth was not their style). Would have been a TPK, but the thief was invisible, and cut the thumb of everyone's corpse so he could bring them back from the dead without hauling the actual bodies. It was a lot of fun.

Ran it again about 18 months ago, as a 3.0 conversion. A lot of fun (my kids and brother played--this was at Christmatime). They were much more stealthy, but we didn't have time to finish it. Maybe next Christmas when we're all together again.

 

[moticon]

I've been looking for 3e on this one!

I remember these and have been looking for a 3e conversion for integration into an existing campaign. The conversion boards are failing me though... Anyone know another place I can download the conversions? Especially the Frost Giant adventure.

Thanks -

Moticon

 

[dsfriii]

Going through the series now

Our DM is running the G series right now as 3.0. And man it is kicking our rears. Giants are a heck of a lot tougher in 3.0 than in the the earlier editions. We have been able to clear out 1 and 2 and are preparing for 3 right now.

 

[Sir Whiskers]

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?

Played all three about 15 years (??) ago. A friend GM'd, I was the only player. I ran a group of PC's a few levels above the recommended, but I only had four or five in the party, so we guessed it would be okay. I remember the GM decided to give the giants their Strength bonus to damage (in addition to using the MM damage range, so a frost giant would do (IIRC) 4d6+10 (instead of just 4d6). Made them a bit tougher, but that wasn't too much of a problem until the fire giants.

The first couple modules were fairly easy, even with a minimum of stealth. I completely missed

Spoiler

the dragons in the frost giant lair

. The fire giant lair was extremely tough. My party would have been wiped out more than once if not for all the npc's that I rescued, including

Spoiler

the titan

That adventure really was unwieldy - at one point, I think I had my PC's plus 6-8 npc's in the party. Really too much. Still, the party survived and it was a lot of stealthy hacking fun.

...and cut the thumb of everyone's corpse so he could bring them back from the dead without hauling the actual bodies.

My group did something similar, though it was the heads we cut off for speak with dead spells. Stole that idea from a Dragon article. We sure weren't squeamish back then...

edited to hide spoilers

 

[Squire James]

I DM'd a group of 2 players with 2 characters each in late 2nd edition days. They had little trouble with the first adventure, but the frost giants in the second adventure were tough. The fire giants were easy, primarily because the PC's found a certain hammer... I remember deciding to make the three giant leaders immune to the hammer's main power to avoid an anticlimax.

I put an alternate ending to G3 to suit my particular campaign, and because I had lost the D1-2 module at the time. Now that I've found it, I figure I could merge it with City of the Spider Queen and run it later! I also plan on altering Q1 into an epic-level adventure .

 

[qstor]

Try Google for the conversions. A few months ago I found some in the cached section of the old EN site.

Mike

 

[shilsen]

Played it in 2e, but the group broke up when we were only about 60% of the way through the first one. The main thing I remember was my elf fighter/mage opening a door (chief Nosnra's bedroom, I think) and having a waiting cave bear fall on me. I've been planning to run my group through a 3e conversion sometime.

 

[hong]

My group has just entered G3. They killed the two ettins and the gatekeeper, no prob. They killed the king, no prob. Then they got cocky and dim doored right into the midst of a dozen more giants including the queen, got squished, and ran away.

Good times.