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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grue" data-source="post: 1671299" data-attributes="member: 11989">My group's experience with the Axe wasn't so good.  We played through all the 'Tomes' adventures pretty much without much alteration or shoehorning and our consensus was that it was the definitively the weakest module in the series (and the Return to the Tomb of Horrors by far the most memorable\fun).The biggest problem I thought was that it relied too heavily on two main strategies and it played those cards early and often from the get go.  The first is with the starting encounter the party should *absolutely* know it's facing a high level wizard BBEG who will likely be staging the standard wizardry 'hit and run' tactics.  The second is that it will be depending heavily on 'mob tactics' (oft parodied by Knights of the Dinner Table) using goblins throughout.  Our group generally works well together and are fairly well experienced players so this kindof setup past more than one or two encounters in a row is just asking for trouble.Needless to say the party prepped to watch for and take out the wizard if he popped in or track him down, isolate, and kill him once we found his base.  We basically slogged our way to the dwarf hold (and figured out that we were going to be dealing with a heck of a lot of goblins since we were a 14th level party at the time), snuck in and set up a hidden base near the entrance (and protecting ourselves from scrying), and spent the next couple of days magically scouting the hold.We managed to ambush the evil wizard and take him out quickly with a anti-magic grappler (I think the fighter used a 2nd ed protection from magic scroll... we beat him senseless and used a amulet of life protection we had been saving for this sort of occassion to make sure he had no way of coming back).  With the heart of the defense cut out the rest was just clean up.  The party used several Walls or Iron and Stone to block off the known choke points\escape routes throughout the complex and then mostly gassed the goblins (and after we were sure they didn't have any shamans left we started animating dead).  Admittedly the whole genocide theme to the approach led to some morality debates in the party (except for the dwarves) and isn't much fun for the dm, the way the module was set up there wasn't a whole lot of good options in order to avoid a pc buying the farm in the stilted hackfest Skip wrote.The hardest encounter we had was with the 20 HD Shambling mounds with the electricity generating wooly humanoids (I don't remember what they were called).  Some of the fungi and oozes about also were a bit challenging (the rust monsters weren't as that's one encounter our group starts prepping for once the fighter gets his first suit of plate and a decent magic sword;-).  Overall my feeling was that a group that approached the module head on was just going to get its butt kicked (and laughed at by the dm because of the 'it's only goblins' factor).  That and the BBEG was one of the lamest ones I've ever seen (for a canned module) with a prime motivation that takes the cake (he starts the plot rolling just because he hates dwarves, no reason for it, he just hates'em).For a d20 conversion I'd start by starting from scratch on the plot and adventure hook (and also avoid a straight-up conversion as I think a good number of the strategies suggested in the module are no longer viable in 3e).  I'd absolutely drop the original BBEG (or at least totally rewrite him so he has a decent plot tie in and doesn't come across as such a doofus).  Handling the goblins would be a lot better under 3e as a dm could afford to move away from reusing the same tactics over and over.  Leveling up some goblin leaders\ncos and maybe replacing the BBEG with either some Genghis Khan of goblins or some diabolically evil entity (a demonically possessed goblin) would be a good move I think.  If that's too much work, some of the encounters are salvageable for ideas and the maps are certainly reusable</blockquote>

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