Night Below: An Underdark Campaign...help me decide!

[Oryan77]

I'm wanting to run an adventure with a good mix of Drow, Illithid, & other classic encounters along with a good mix of roleplaying & fighting preferrably set underground. So I bought the AD&D Night Below boxset.

For anyone who has played this, which of the 3 books do you think covers most of the material I'm trying to provide in the game? I only want to run one of the books because I don't want to spend too much time with Drow, Illithid, underdark, ect.

Please explain what you liked about the book you chose. Spoilers will be helpful to me

Thanks.

 

[freebfrost]

I ran this set as the basis for a campaign set in the Forgotten Realms about 5 years ago. If your focus is truly on the horrors of the Underdark in all its varieties, I recommend the Perils book.

It has a number of challenging and varied Underdark encounters, which I think will give you the flavor you seem to be looking for in this campaign. The Sunless Sea book mainly focuses on the stronghold of the Aboleths, so it doesn't quite have all of the other "classic" Underdark monsters to the same extent.

 

[Staffan]

[sblock]Hmm. Not sure any of them will fit your bill, to be honest. The drow are (fortunately) absent, and IIRC mind flayers show up toward the end of book 2, but interested in helping the PCs rather than hindering or eating them. The main villains in the adventure are aboleths, and those don't show up until book 3 either.[/sblock]

 

[Psion]

Book 1 is not underdark at all

Book 2 is a slog, and features litte drow or illithid activity. Kuo-toa, OTOH...

Book 3 has a potentially friendly (!) interaction with mind flayers but only one potential encounter involving a former drow settlement.

I'd say that the adventure as a whole doesn't do much for you, but book 3 has the most potential a little in line with what you are looking for.

Personally, after a scrapped attempt at book 1 (which was great) and 2 (which bogged down), I scrapped most of book 2, and retooled a game to run the end of book 2 (the Kuo toa city) and book 3 by themselves.

 

[Kestrel]

Agree with Psion. Book 3 would probably fit your needs most.

However, that said, Book 1 was a blast to play. It has some great encounters and fun locations.

Book 2, while well written is simply not fun to play after a while. (Trolls...again?) The main problem with Book 2 is that it was based around leveling up the PCs through mindless slaughter of monsters. It was based on 2nd edition DnD, which required a ton of xp to level.. killing tons and tons of monsters.

Book 3 looked cool and was fun read. Unfortunately, after a year of playing, my game broke apart right at the Kuotoa City, so I don't know how it played.