Temple of Elemental Evil - expectations

[NN]

Why was T1-4 a dissappointment to me?

- I just dont like Zuggotmoy. Oh no ! its a ...mushroom

- I expected Nulb to be Bizarro-Hommlett

- I wanted the Temple to be a believable, dynamic entity . With a supply chain and politics etc.


Its always puzzled me, why didnt Gygax turn his TOE campaign into modules? T1-4 as published is a sequel..x years later..to that game - I think the original rise and fall of the temple makes a better plot.

 

[Holy Bovine]

I think these "expectations" are a large part why mine and many other groups wound up on the critical side the fence for TOEE, it was obviously a module for a particular playstyle and very much a product of it's era,

Heh. I played ToEE in 1987. I was 17.

 

[cildarith]

My biggest dissappointment in T1-4 was primarily in its length. T2: The Temple of Elemental Evil published as a standard 32-pager would have been much more to my liking.

The likelihood of a published adventure module to be plugged into my campaign is inversely proportional to the length of the module. T1-4 is out of the question.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Let's face it: TOEE is no Forest Oracle.

It can be good with a DM who makes it active and plays up the factions. But I was personally hoping for something a bit smaller as a follow-up, perhaps something that might link to later Gygax series like G1-2-3. Sure, they did that when they re-released the supermodules, but by then it felt forced.

 

[Lidgar]

I have played and DM'ed it - but never all the way through exactly as written. Basically the first couple of levels (maybe not coincidentally the ones Gygax wrote) are good. But the 3rd and 4th I have never played or DM'ed as is - they just feel more like a collection of random encounters. In particular, Zug was always something different - maybe the same name, but a marilith or another substitute BBA. And we always played up the EEG - seemed more natural given the elemental temples and all.

The nodes can be real fun if done right. I had a memorable character death when my wizard got grappled by a roper, and the paladin's helm of brilliance missed it at hit him instead. Nothing like being poisoned and sent to the Abyss. Wee!

RttTEE was more of a slugfest to me. Those crater ridge mines got pretty darn repetitive...

 

[wilrich]

TOEE is a pretty good adventure but its very tricky to run right and surely isn't to everyone's taste. There are a number of things to keep in mind to keep it from being a giant slog.

[snip . . .]

Make no mistake this adventure is a difficult one to run without it being boring. It can be done but I would not advise an inexperienced DM to try it.

I basically agree with you -- all of the above would make a great adventure and the above approach was certainly implied in the module as written, but was definitely not "front and center" of the adventure as written. As written, the adventure was really presented as a giant dungeon crawl and bringing all of the above elements front and center required a lot of work on the part of an experienced DM. But, I largely evaluate modules and adventures based on how they appear on the page; if I have to do major reconfiguring to make an adventure good, then why am I buying the module and paying someone else to write a good adventure? If I have to most of the work myself to make it good, I'll just do it myself from scratch and save some money.

In sum, I don't think TOEE was totally worthless and there was a lot a good DM could mine from it to make a great adventure, but, as written, I was disappointed that it was nothing but a repetitive dungeon crawl.

 

[Hussar]

See, this is what confuses me. T1's adventure was the moathouse -- a quintessential dungeon crawl.

The Temple was a super-dungeon crawl in the same vein. So I don't understand how people were expecting something else. ToEE was exactly what I expected based on T1's adventure.

So whether ToEE was good or not, I don't see how folks could be disappointed in or surprised by it being a big ol' dungeon crawl.

Bullgrit

Sort of. A large amount of the appeal of T1 was the HUGE amount of detail of Hommlet itself. The actual "adventure" of the moathouse takes up only a very small fragment of the larger module. There is a boatload of detail in Hommlet that isn't really directly geared for the standard "see the monster, kill the monster, take its treasure".

I think a number of people, particularly DM's were hoping that T1-4 would follow the example laid out in Hommlet, not the Moathouse.

 

[MoxieFu]

Before ToEE was released I had played and DM'ed Village of Holmett. By the time I bought ToEE when it came out my original group had dissolved and scattered for college. I only read ToEE but I never quite understood how you were supposed to rescue the groups of prisoners scheduled for sacrifice.

I know about the two main ways into the dungeons but it seems unlikely if you left the dungeon that you could get back in again. How are you supposed to keep going back in and resuing MORE prisoners?

I can see possibly getting away with it once or twice, but weren't there at least three groups of captives?

 

[grodog]

[reposted from a recent and digressive discussion about EGG's Necropolis, on K&K]:

I haven't sat down and looked at ToEE in decades, much with more-matured mega-dungeon savvy eyes. A number of things disappointed me about ToEE, including:

• it was too self-contained: T1 suggests that the cult of EE may have started in a number of places, which suggested to me that it was a relatively-decentralized cult and that cells existed in Dyvers, the Wild Coast, and elsewhere within the overall region; T1 hints at the bandits/traders raiding far and wide, and an influx of humanoids into Lareth's service, etc., none of which is reflected in the sequel
• Nulb is clearly an afterthought in the design process, or it was completely winged in the games, since there's no meat to it at all
• the machinations of the various cults of EE are fine, but relatively flat and there's not much provided to help a DM really set things in motion (compared to say, the political dynamics provided in WW's Chicago by Night supplement, which provided good baseline details and relationships, goals, short-term actions and longer-term plans, etc. among the highly-competitive vampires of Chicago)
• the dungeons are too much of the same thing: if you compare the types of encounters in G1's dungeon level to those in ToEE, there's a disturbing sameness to most of the dungeon levels that makes them too repetitive in play
• the hints about the wider GH background/impact of the module are again sketched, but not really capitalized upon (the freeing vs. slaying of Thrommel; the destruction of the Temple; the relationships between Iuz, Zuggtmoy, and Lolth)

This is, again, all based on memory. I wonder how I'd feel about the ToEE if I read it again in detail now?

 

[Hussar]

Heh, I wonder if I was the only one who thought Lareth the Beautiful was a woman. I thought that way for years.