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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8780326" data-attributes="member: 6670763">Against the Cult of the Reptile God regularly comes up as the first recommendation for old AD&D adventures and I've run it twice. And it really does hold up. It's a good adventure. And that in a merket in which nearly all adventures are pretty terrible.It's not immediately accessible and I had to read the whole thing twice over several years before I felt like running it, and a third time to actually really understand how it works. But the second time I ran it closer to the source, it worked really amazingly.The secret cult hidden in the town works quite well, but I think the actual reptile lair could really use a stronger cult presence. That's where I want to to see the madmen in robes and the sacrifices on altars and such. The lair is fine as a dungeon, but it could need some dressing up as a temple instead of just being a muddy hole in the ground.The big flaw with the adventure is that as written it wants to be an adventure for 1st level characters but insists on a boss monster that's way too strong for a first level party, and tries to solve this issue with the worst way possible in the form of a powerful NPC wizard to get the coals out of the fire for the players. Make the adventure for a higher level party or make the big monster weaker, or really anything but that.I also think that the journey from the town to the lair could be expanded upon, but that's not really something necessary to make the other parts work.Against the Cult of the Reptile God doesn't make it on the typical list of most famous D&D adventures. But in discussions by people who actually know a lot of old adventures and have experiences with them, it regularly makes the top of the list.Unlike many other old adventures, it does have a plot. And unlike newer adventures, it's not a railroad. It doesn't have a set of scripted scenes that have an order to them. All the structure there is is that the players have to learn the information about where the strange events in town originate. Going there to kill the big beasty is assumed, but there's not really anything that requires it.The main issue I had with it was that the last time I ran it was my first adventure running D&D 5th edition and those rules make it trivial to take prisoners. And the adventure doesn't really consider the possibility that the PCs will capture the first cultist that attacks them and question him about what's going on and where his friends are. That is something a GM running this should really think about in advance.</blockquote>

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