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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6496884" data-attributes="member: 4937">Wasted opportunity.  There are a lot of bits of Gygaxian creativity to the module, but it's mostly just a large repetitive dungeon crawl that never develops its creative themes - 'elemental evil', the fungal demoness, etc. - as well as it should.  It's not nearly as evocative in its descriptions as 'Forgotten Temple of Thardizun', and features far too much Gygaxian kitchen sink for the sake of kitchen sink.   Gygax seems to be of the opinion that there is no limit to the number of times you can fight a large number of humanoid foes and it still be interesting.  I note that when Monte Cook tried to remake 'Temple of Elemental Evil', he tried to combine most of the best ideas from both.   Unfortunately, he also tended to just create high minded hack and slash that tended to be more repetitive than it should be.I've got a post around here somewhere about trying to expand on the themes there in and make the dungeon a true mini-campaign, that might be a good starting point for thinking about dealing with the text and improving on it.  <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?334623-ToEE-Help-me-flesh-out-the-elemental-caverns" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?334623-ToEE-Help-me-flesh-out-the-elemental-caverns</a>!  In addition to making the nodes more interesting, you'll need to work on making the dungeon itself more interesting.  I'd love to see more proactive inhabitants, more evocative locations, more hints and plot building, more diversity and history in the structure an so forth.   When you do a mega-dungeon like this, it's the whole campaign, and the last thing you want is the whole campaign being a series of grinding combats that the players aren't necessarily invested in.I'd also want to create reasons for the players to leave the temple and engage in some side quest to get items they need to advance in the main dungeon, similar to the very interesting structure used in 'The Whispering Cairn'.</blockquote>

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