Expedition to the Barrier Peaks - your experiences?

[Plane Sailing]

I played in with my MU of the day. Like RobberBaron I spied the wolf in sheeps clothing and thought "You've got to be kidding" and hacked it with my Mordenkainens Sword, rolled two twenty's in a row and under the crit rules we had at the time did the poor beasty about 120 points damage in one blow.

Kablooie.

The only other recollection I had was that we found some power armour but I ditched it because it was less effective than the suite of defensive stuff I normally used anyway.

I've got no idea what level it was aimed at, I think my PC was 13th level and the others in the party were a little lower. We were very much hack and slash before they hack and slash you first (having just graduated from the Giant series)

Cheers

 

[Quasqueton]

I never personally played this module, but several people in my game groups through the years did. Like others here, I would love to have played in it.

Online, I've read many complaints that this adventure ruined D&D campaigns by introducing sci-fi tech to the campaign world. I re-read this book recently with attention to how that could happen, and I found that there is no way for the tech on that ship to survive very long in a D&D campaign. Everything ran off charges, and there's no way to get more than maybe a couple dozen charges in treasure. Even if the PCs didn't use up the charges in the adventure itself, the items in this adventure are no worse than finding a wand of fireballs with 5 charges remaining.

Even the power armor that I've heard complaints about had no more than 10 minutes worth of energy, and there's no way to recharge on the ship (states this in the text).

Quasqueton

 

[the Jester]

Played it as one of my very first dnd experiences and loved it. I didn't finish it- I was running a party of pcs all to myself, with just me and the dm.

I later played it again and finished it, ran it once or twice, and really really loved it every time! Weird flavor, a plethora of cool, weird new monsters (froghemoth, aurumvorax, etc), great treasure (that, as Quasqueton said, runs outta charges), etc.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I'd love to read the module - it seemed to be a sort of "metamorphosis alpha crossover" idea, and we were all used to playing metamorphosis alpha from the mid 70's (it was the first RPG I ever bought!) so it fit in well with our expectations

 

[Joshua Randall]

Played this back in the day with my other 12-year-old friends. We blundered around in the ship, discovering various things and most of the time ending up the worse for wear. For example, my personal PC shot himself in the face with the needler gun (damn that misleading picture). Several other PCs died to the froghemoth (coolest... monster... evar...!) while the rest of us ran away. In the end we didn't accomplish much, but it was tons of fun, and we laughed the whole time.

I don't really object to the sci-fi elements in Barrier Peaks. They were pretty self-contained, and certainly weren't any weirder than any of the fantasy elements in D&D.

 

[Aeolius]

One word - vegepygmy

Also, didn't the map of one of the interior walls spelled "E G G"? What significance does that have, I wonder.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

We kept starting and stopping this one in junior high. By the time we really sat down to run it, half of us had cheated and read through the thing. So the DM was really ticked off when our brave adventurers were TOTALLY AVOIDING A HARMLESS BUNNY!

The bunny picture was stupid anyway. Everybody knows that if the module has a picture of something then it's going to try to eat you.

 

[Henry]

OOH! OOH! My Favorite!

I have DM'ed this module 3 times in my life. Once I DM'ed it for a single high-level player Character (I was 13 at the time) and we enjoyed it - He even got 2 android NPC henchmen out of the deal.

The Second time I played it (about age 16), I turned it into a space-marines derelict ship, a la the second Aliens film. Remove Vegepygmies and other beasties, introduced Xenomorphs and machine guns, and the player loved it.

The Third time I ran it, they players never got below the top deck. They hit the controls to activate the ship, (I improvised a little and added a working power core and a bridge) the PC piloting it flubbed his rolls badly, and they teleported off just in time before it fell, and devastated half of a swamp that it was originally parked in.

In all cases, those laser pistols and rifles were LETHAL! 1 in 6 chance that a shot not saved against will kill the target!

 

[ephemeron]

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?

A few years ago, I got some friends together with the promise of a one-shot nostalgic dungeon crawl and sprang S3 on them.

There were five or six players, I think. I had them use pre-gen characters from the back of the module; there was a lot of speculation as to how the pre-gens could have reached their levels with such mediocre stats and so few magic items.

Unfortunately, they didn't get very far at all. After several hours of hacking at vegepygmies (oh, and discovering that 33,000 cu. ft. is a whole lot of fireball), getting annoyed at the color-coded doors, mapping, mapping, and mapping -- it felt like I spent more time describing and redescribing twisty corridors than anything else -- people started getting tired and bored and asked to end with a big fight. So we "skipped ahead" to the froghemoth and had a fairly satisfying battle.

They never saw the crazy high-tech gadgets, which is a shame. I thought the artists did a great job of illustrating them in such a way that players would be just as clueless as their characters about what they were, how to use them, or even where the business end was!

 

[kilamanjaro]

We spent what felt like forever trying to get into the power armor and never did figure it out. The wizard killed himself trying to figure out a laser gun. We all got mauled by some security robots with great armor classes. The frogemoth we killed, but we ran in terror from the mind flayer. (We all thought mind flayers were too awesome to fight for some reason. The first time I fought a mind flayer was in a first edition conversion of Undermountain. After my lone monk took it down I couldn't believe that we'd lived in fear of them for so many years.)
Anyway, great adventure.