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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Erik Mona" data-source="post: 2618226" data-attributes="member: 2174">As the editor-in-chief of the magazine in which Maure Castle appeared and as one of the two editor/developers who updated and expanded it for the new edition, I can certainly understand how a party trying to slog their way from room 1 to "the end" would get bored. Honestly, I think that's a challenge of any adventure, from any era. For what it's worth, the adventure itself has more than just one adventure hook, as someone suggested above. In addition to seeking out Eli Tomorast, the DM might also choose a hook that involves a snatch-and-grab of some mysterious papers held in the dungeon, a hunt for a specific chamber tied to shadow magic, and a scouting mission for Mordenkainen or Bigby. Several suggestions are provided regarding the "in and out" style that was so common to many of us who played D&D in the early days.Allow me a second to tell a story that speaks to this thread. A while back, after college, I fell in with a great group of gamers in the Minneapolis area, where I was living at the time. I'd met these guys through local conventions and game days, and I was always impressed by the problem-solving and roleplaying techniques. Eventually, I offered to run them through one of my favorite classic adventures, "The Village of Hommlet," because they had come to the game for the most part in the early days of 2e, and didn't have the obsessive knowledge of the "classic" stuff that I did.I've run "Village of Hommlet" about a half-dozen times in my life, with varying levels of success each time. About the only constant has been that the green slime at the bottom of the stairs leading to the moathouse basement always, always, always kills a PC. Friggin green slime.Anyway, these players, used to "pushing through" to get to the end of an RPGA scenario in four hours, thought it would be a good idea to apply the same approach to one of the "classic" first edition dungeon crawls. It didn't work. By the time they faced the insidious Lareth the Beautiful, they had about three hit points each and a couple members of the party had already fallen into negatives. And did I mention that Lareth has a staff of striking?As far as these old adventures are concerned, in my experience there are two kinds of players, and they break down roughly by when the players learned how to play D&D. The groggiest of the grognards know when to retreat. They know to be careful because the traps and monsters are not always 100% appropriate for the level of the characters in question. Sometimes, they remember, Lareth the Beautiful has a staff of striking, so if everyone's wounded it's best to retreat, regroup, and come back later.The other style of player (and I realize I'm oversimplifying this considerably) is more likely to assume that the challenges are more or less perfectly balanced for their character, and that the dungeon essentially exists to be defeated, and to be defeated rather handily and easily. These guys are more likely to press forward even when everyone is approaching 0 hit points, because they want to "finish" in one go."Maure Castle" is not a great adventure for the latter type of player. It is very definitely in the classic style, and it is ideal when it is entered and exited several times during the course of play.The idea of a huge, unbeatable dungeon has a lot of pedigree in this hobby, starting from the earliest dungeons from the very first campaigns (Gygax's Castle Greyhawk, Arneson's Castle Blackmoor, Kuntz's El Raja Key/Maure Castle). These locales provided literally years of fun to their players, but the biggest problem with reading them today is that they can seem really, really boring (this is also true of modern attempts at the same genre, in my opinion). In order to keep things less boring, it's best to insert a lot of compelling background material. While a lot of this material might seem difficult to work into play, it's important to keep in mind that characters appropriate for Maure Castle have a lot of divinitory resources at their command, have good bardic knowledge skill, etc. Plus, a lot of that background keeps things interesting for the DM, which shouldn't be overlooked."Maure Castle" is meant to be a hub of an ongoing campaign. If the players want to stay within it from the moment they enter until the moment they clear it out, that's certainly one way to do it, but the environment is meant to support "foray" play, and the edifice is best when it stands on the horizon of the campaign, serving as a destination irregularly throughout the heroes' career.--Erik Mona</blockquote>

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