Curse of the Azure Bonds - your experiences?

[Mark Hope]

I played in the tabletop game. It was crap.

As much as I can recall it, you almost literally were just following the stars of the novel around helping them do the stuff from the novel.

Interesting - a couple of the novel characters do appear here and there, but there isn't any real element of helping them do stuff (if anything, it's the opposite). Still, I guess that different DMs might have approached it differently. By the adventure as written, though, these NPCs are bystanders to the PCs and their actions - pretty much the reverse of the standard "DMPC" schtick.

I seem to also recall a journey to Shadowdale to ask Elminster for some salient advice, and getting two pages of babbling "Elminster-Speak" for our trouble (the theme of it was "I'm not going to do anything")

Don't remember this. You might well be right, though. I didn't set my version in the Realms, so any references to Elmonster will have been excised from the adventure and my memory with equal disdain ...

I had always suspected that the adventure could run as a lame railroad tour of the Realms (like the PC game upon which it based) - that's how it read to me when I bought it. I suppose I just got lucky when running it that this wasn't a problem...