Queen of the Demonweb Pits - what's so bad?

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Forgive me, but one poster's unexplained opinion is pretty thin to begin asking questions about what is so bad about a module when the greater than majority actual opinion of the module over the last 30+ years has been that it is fantastic.

Citation?

Because there weren't a lot of people discussing AD&D online for much of that time, and no one I knew felt it was "fantastic," even though we ran it as the culmination to more than one campaign.

 

[The Shaman]

It's not a "maze" - it is the Demonweb, strands crossing one another in the void of the Abyss.

Once you figure out the pattern of crossings then you can navigate through it.

I liked how magic changed in the Demonweb, particularly the disconnect between clerics and their deities. This disconnect is also what makes the alternate primes so important - this is where you need to go to rest-and-refit, and each one is a world all its own. They are my favorite feature of the module.

 

[Beginning of the End]

What's so bad about Q1? I've never run it or played in it, but I have read it, more than once. And I thought it seemed like an interesting module. (But then, I also really like T1-4 Temple of Elemental Evil, and many people were highly disappointed with that product.)

What are the problems?

Depending on how you look at it, the module is either structurally broken or unplayably incomplete (or possibly both).

On the one hand, the primary content of the module seems to be the multiverse of worlds that you can access through the Demonweb. In an ideal world, it would play something like Stargate: Spider Hell. But none of those worlds are actually fleshed out in anything even remotely resembling playable content. So what you end up with is a bunch of undeveloped pitches for hypothetical Stargate: Spider Hell episodes.

But without those worlds, the Demonweb is a really, really boring dungeon. It's too large, too repetitive, and the encounters are spread too thin.

Okay, let's say you decide to flesh out all the multiversal stuff. For example, you take out the Nightworld of Vlad Tolenkov and replace it with I6 Ravenloft. You whip up actual maps for Lolth's Prison. And so forth. Now the Demonweb is serving its proper role as just a conduit between Lolth's many schemes on many different planes.

Unfortunately, the more you spruce up the epic multiversal portion of this adventure, the more anticlimactic Lolth's spaceship ends up being: Even laying aside the genre clash most people have with it, it's too small to really hold its weight as the epic conclusion to a 7-part mega-adventure (which also now has a dozen multiversal excursions added to it).

So to make Q1 work you need to (a) redesign the Demonweb to make it more flavorful and less barren; (b) flesh out all of the multiversal content; and (c) expand or completely replace the final confrontation with Lolth.

At that point, though, you've replaced the entire module.

By contrast, T1-4 just has some organizational issues which make it difficult to run effectively. Q1 has vast swaths of missing content and the content which is there is inadequate and unthemed.

 

[LostSoul]

I had no idea Lolth lived in a spaceship.

That's pretty awesome.

I can't help but think of elves as aliens now.

 

[Stormonu]

Q1: Arriving in the abyss, the players see the scene I've described above of the incomprehensibly vast and infinite web. Fortunately, the can also see Lolth's Palace, a mountain sized fortress city of towers and smoke stacks bound together by webs in the distance. A wilderness jouney ensues, with the PC's having to deal with the spirits of dead Drow (possibly including some vengeful ones they slew in life), the hazards of an alien plane, and the Meddling of the Queen of this place in a 400' high wraithlike form.

Of course, at the levels this is occuring, you have to be careful of spells like teleport. It would probably be best if Lolth's palace isn't so easily obvious/visible/breeched upon entry and the characters need clues to get to it location (after all, the plane is "endless") Searching for the palace also gets the charcter to flex some of their muscles using Divination spells, or seeking ou helpful clues/artifacts to get where they're going (a planar scavenger hunt, starting with the Egg from D3?)

Also, although I like the mechanical spider, it doesn't really fit and I'm not fond of the idea of steampunk drow. Perhaps changing it to "chaos tech" or making it an enslaved gargantuan demon spider powered by souls (and chambers for Lolth and her minions within abcesses or the spider's organs) would be more fitting.

And instead of some CEO, perhaps a robber baron for the queen? (mixing elements of the old and new use of the term)

 

[RainOfSteel]

I think that if this module had been submitted to Dungeon, it would have been rejected

If it had been submitted to a magazine that didn't exist at the time? Really?

I also think that had this work been contracted out by Pazio

Paizo? The above assertion about Dungeon is already invalid, but this one goes even further down this road.

Basically what you're saying here: if Q1 had been done later, it wouldn't have been well-regarded.

If Star Wars had been released today, it would not have anywhere near the success it did.

Let's begin with the title: 'Queen of the Demonweb Pits'. Now, this title invokes certain awesome images immediately in the mind.

But the final module itself comes far short of the grandeur of even the most niave imaginings about what the Demonweb Pits are like.

You created false expectations for yourself and then you dashed them.

The idea of an Escher like maze is fine, but the implementation is lacking

No more so than the G1-3 or D1-3. There were only so many pages in each module.

most especially from the perspective of one within the maze. Ultimately, the Demonweb Pits aren't a place of remarkable terror, but a mundane dungeon maze.

Whether it was a terror or not is a personal matter, but to criticize a dungeon module for having a dungeon in it is a bit much.

The vast and incomprehensible terrors of the Abyss are rendered down

Not to beat a dead horse, well, yes, to beat a dead horse: there were only so many pages, there simply wasn't room to do that.

The Abyss, suitable for swallowing worlds, is here presented as a narrow basically linear corridor.

It wasn't the whole Abyss, it was just one corner of it. Also, back then, nobody knew what the Abyss was "like", so all of this type of expectations-based disappointment on your part is moot (beyond you).

I certainly brought no such expectations to the table when I read Q1.

Over and over again you are putting modern glasses on when attempting to create critical points.

The doorways to other worlds are extraneous to the plot, have nothing to do with the adventure, and are basically throwaway devices better suited as 'suggestions for further adventures'.

That is a legitimate comment, however, I feel that "nothing" is not accurate.

Intelligent players could find allies in some of those other worlds to fight against Lolth, as well as to rest, get healing, and for clerics to pick up spells as the rules were, I believe, that clerics could not refresh spells above level 2 while in the Abyss. So, actually, those other worlds were key player restoration and resupply points.

The players are chasing Lolth because of interference on Oerth through the drow elves. Through the other worlds, the players get to see that the demon goddess is out for more than just them.

Those other worlds were great sparks of imagination.

Consider also how the dungeon,

For the lower levels of the Demonweb, I'll give it to you that most of your comments are correct, but I disagree with your conclusions.

I did not see any encounters in the lower levels of the Demonweb that were, in any way, inferior to what was presented in G1-3 and D1-3. Not better, but not inferior. D1-3 had wild inconsistencies in power levels, from the weak to the immensely strong, splattered about in both set and random encounters.

As made obvious further above, I found the top level of the Demonweb to be extremely interesting and necessary to the adventure.

The spider ship was also a bit wonky, but it was the Abyss, you know, the place of Chaos, which also includes randomness and the unexpected. To me, this sort of thing was to be expected.

I'll give it to you that there was no story whatsoever involved in any part of Q1 beyond following up on finding Lolth due to G1-3/D1-3 (and A1-4 earlier on if you ran that). While I am ready to admit it would have been an improvement had this occurred, I am also ready to admit that the storyline in G1-3/D1-3, while it fired the imagination, was itself fairly thin to begin with. This issue is hardly worth shooting down Q1 given that G1-3/D1-3 hardly did better.

and find it is a spaceship.

I always thought it was a walker, not a spaceship. [Goes off to read Q1: Yup, it's a walker.]

Why isn't Lolth known as the Captain of the Spider Ship, rather than the Demonweb Pits?

Who said she isn't also known by that? It just wasn't covered in the 32 page module.

fit mythologically with Loth being the great foe of Corellon Larethian?

Was that even established then?

In any event, she's a force of Chaos, does whatever she wants, and the stranger it seems to you, the happier she becomes: with evil sprinkles on top.

Ultimately, this is an example of giving a player something and then taking it away - a practice which a DM should not do too often because it leads to player frustration.

You mean, like all of D1-3 did with all that drow adamantite magic gear that disintegrated when taken back home?

At the time it came out, it was reviewed as

This topic is the first time I've heard anyone come down on Q1.

It's just strange seeing it get boosted over so many years and in so many "best" modules topics (yes, right along with G1-3/D1-3), but nobody, not once, in this contentious nitpicky world of message boards, ever stopped to single out Q1 as being the boat anchor of the mega adventure.

I've never run into someone in RL who didn't like Q1.

I guess I'm just the hick in from the countryside.

Q1:
Q2:
Q3:

Sounds good. I'm expecting three 32 page modules from you, with maps sufficient to cover three sets of double covers.

 

[Beginning of the End]

If it had been submitted to a magazine that didn't exist at the time? Really?

You'll note that Celebrim explicitly said that. He also explicitly compared Q1 to modules both of its time, before its time, and after its time. It was a pretty comprehensive take down, and much of it is pretty much objectively incontrovertible. (Like the fact that Q1 is both smaller in scope and less thematic than the D series and less challenging than the G series.)

Of course, at the levels this is occuring, you have to be careful of spells like teleport.

Notably doesn't work in the demonweb according to Q1. I'm guessing Celebrim was intending to keep that sort of "magic works differently here" aspect of the adventure intact.

 

[haakon1]

I had no idea Lolth lived in a spaceship.

A steampunk spaceship shaped like a giant spider! (And apparently it may NOT have been capable of spaceflight, according to later posters. I dunno.)

The movie "Wild Wild West" had an homage to the giant steampunk robotic spider (which wasn't a spacecraft).

Anyhow, I think how you react to this module has a lot to do with whether you read it, or played through it.

I went through it as a player, and found it very exciting and intriguing. I have no idea where the module ended and the DM's creative began, but I suspect a lot of it was down to our DM.

Specifically I remember:
-- Dwarven fortress city under siege in a cold, cold mountainous winter. We used a dragon to dive bomb the attackers and drive them back.
-- A planet with pink lemonade seas and lizardmen with Conquistador era ships exploring an archipeligo like the Caribbean. The lizardmen had gunpower cannons, totally unheard of our version of D&D to that point.
-- A planet with centaurs and elves threatened by drow
-- The spidership. When we nearly bested Lolth the first time, she teleported out. We followed. She was rebuffed, but we killed her again, this time for keepsies while low on spells.

 

[Celebrim]

Of course, at the levels this is occuring, you have to be careful of spells like teleport.

Granted, but having already established that we are willing to nerf the players stuff, having the fortress not set 'Teleport OK' would hardly be surprising. And as for hopping on the magic carpet and flying there, well, that would not seem to me to be a bright idea considering we were facing a spider queen.

It would probably be best if Lolth's palace isn't so easily obvious/visible/breeched upon entry and the characters need clues to get to it location (after all, the plane is "endless")

I have no problem with that, but I was also imagining what I could write in 32-48 pages.

Also, although I like the mechanical spider, it doesn't really fit and I'm not fond of the idea of steampunk drow.

I'm not particularly fond of the anachronisms either, but I'm bringing them up as a nod to the few that seem to like the module as an example of how the module could be made better while still retaining its ideas.

 

[LostSoul]

Was Lolth's "spider ship" really steampunk, or was it an actual sci-fi spaceship? I find it hard to believe it was steampunk, since that genre didn't really exist back in the early eighties.

I should probably get my hands on the module. I like sci-fi in my D&D fantasy; it just seems to fit.