I don't recall the name, as I was a player, but there was this adventure where we had to assault a castle on a mountain, with the final boss being an orc ghost (druid?). This was long ago, so I probably mixed up some details.
We started in some small village. We encountered a corpse, and realized it had clues. We tried to use Speak with Dead, but the adventure demanded that we use Raise Dead instead. Eventually we did so.
We were told to follow this path. You HAD to have someone in the party with Track, or you couldn't do it. Our DM wouldn't give us any leeway there, so there were lots of failed Search checks.
We go up the mountain. We fight and kill orcs. We fight and very easily defeat half blue dragon/half giants (of some kind). Half-dragons are overused, and half dragon giants have such low Will saves that we toasted them... I don't believe the adventure was actually playtested. It didn't help that psions are a twinge overpowered in terms of how many power points they have; our psion was using maximum level powers and never running out.
We fought some high level orcs and were smoking them (our mage took out a bunch using Color Spray) when we were attacked by a dragon and two half-dragon/half-chimeras. More freaking half-dragons! These monsters were advanced 3.0 style so not at all balanced (but had lame AC). Our DM bluntly told us we couldn't beat them (since they had more hit points than the dragon) but since we hadn't yet really been challenged, we argued until we were blue in the face, then went back to our hideout. (We didn't have Resist Energy, but I think we could have won... even if we suffered losses.) I think our psion could have single-handedly killed the half-dragons, while the real dragon would have been a fun challenge.
The next day the dragon charms a PC and takes him away. Gee, do you think we should have killed the dragon when we had a chance?
For some reason we couldn't teleport to the top of the mountain, even though we could see it. So we had two options. We could go up the mountain, clobber wimpy creatures until we get to the top, or we could fly up on flying mount spells (with lame hp). I suggested teleporting to the point of the mountain we had reached before but for some reason no one else liked that idea. The DM advised us not to walk up the mountain, so we flew up. I kept complaining about the wimpy mounts... no one cared. We were assaulted by ridiculously overpowered 3.0 advanced air elementals; the save DCs were wickedly high for their CR. At least they weren't draconic! The air elementals wouldn't let us drop, not even when it could have caused us terminal velocity damage; eventually the psion PC killed most with Recall Death overuse (they had high saves; I swear it took ten rounds and we had a large party... much wasted time) and saved us with Dimension Door. He couldn't get everyone, as Dimension Door basically dazes you for a round after you use it; I volunteered to fall to my doom (as a warforged fighter with high hit points, I figured I'd live). Somehow the psion ensured I only took half damage. For some reason the air elementals dropped us over a convenient plateau on the mountain instead of doing the smart thing ... eg killing us by dropping us over a deep chasm. Then the DM complained we kept making things harder for ourselves (eg flying up on wimpy mounts)... he was half right. We should have teleported up half way (or all the way), but he did scare off most of the players by saying ... I don't remember.
We fought a skirmish with the dragon, freed (or killed?) our charmed PC friend, and our wizard missed an enemy with a Disintegrate ray because he was ten feet too far away and the DM didn't let him know that. I don't game with him anymore.
Inside, we fought this annoying trap; there were three iron golems (Int 0... not the way the DM was running them!) in a room with illusionary sunburst traps. I volunteered to fight the golems, figuring (correctly) I could take two, even while blinded (warforged are immune to poison!) but every tactic we used to keep the other one engaged failed (largely due to them being played with Int 10+). It didn't help that our wizard PC never prepped something useful like Otiluke's Resilient Sphere, as he was way too focused on ray spells; I wish I had been playing the mage that time as I'm really good at it. I think this took us days to beat as we couldn't just keep casting Remove Blindness.
Finally we got to the final area. We had no idea what to do. We fought an orc ghost; it possessed our rogue and due to a dumb DM ruling Protection from Evil didn't hedge it out. I was forced to kill the PC rogue. I broke all these magic stones, thinking that's what we had to do to win (the ghost was seriously kicking our ass... I think it was a druid but I'm not sure) and that ended up freeing the tarrasque. Wait... what? How the heck was I supposed to know that, seeing how the adventure had no clues whatsoever?
If anyone knows the name of this horrid adventure let me know. I'd like to read it so I know how messed up it would be if run by a semi-competent DM.
