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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mark Hope" data-source="post: 3300326" data-attributes="member: 27051">I ran this as part of my homebrew and changed huge swathes of the published adventure - actually, reading the responses above reminded me that I changed much, much more than I had originally intended (not least that the eponymous rod became a shattered torc).  I ditched Miska and the spydarr-feendz in their entirety, and made the Queen of Chaos a sort of subplot (a forgotten goddess trying to claw her way back into the Planes).Overall, it was fun - but (as with Dragon Mountain) only once I had gutted it and reanimated its corpse in service to the needs of my own campaign.  I made the aboleth a refugee from Great Shaboath (destroyed at the end of Night Below), and I kept the ruined temple.  I kept the giant wedding, but my PCs lured the giants out into the open and then slaughtered them in a highly embarrassing fashion, before laughing derisively and sauntering off in search of "something more challenging" <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" />.I loved the AD&D lore that oozed from the adventure, and enjoyed mapping this to my homebrew, but felt that many of the adventure's components didn't fit my needs (or were just lame - Miska, I'm looking at you).  Some interesting ideas here, mind you.  One criticism that I'd mention is a weakness that (in my humble opinion) the set shares with both Night Below and Dragon Mountain - namely that there are too many introductory adventures that lead into the main plot.  It's not as bad as Night Below (where almost a third of the set isn't really below anything), but I'd have preferred these mega-boxed sets to have cut to the chase a little sooner.  More meat, less croutons!  Maybe that's a flaw of the 2e design mentality, that there needs to be a believable narrative set-up before you enter "the dungeon".  It can work and has its place, but I think that it was overdone.  Neither 1e or 3e seem to suffer from this problem (which may, at the end of the day, just be my personal taste, and not really a problem at all).</blockquote>

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