Oh, have I played this. To quote a former RuenQuest player of mine who had a series of elf sorcerer characters killed in rapid succession (about one per adventure) - "I'm going to keep doing these until I get one to work".
Run One (ca. 1987):
I played the original series, using the pre-gen characters and 1st Ed. D&D, up to the beginning of DL12, at which point the game folded because we all went our seperate ways to universities. No-one ever really connected with the pre-gen characters and, let's face it, only Raistlin and Tasslehoff have any character beyond "brooding fighter". It didn't *feel* as rail-roaded as people make out, mostly because the direction is fairly obviously broadcast and my players were of the sort to take a proffered plot hook rather than go their own way just to be bloody minded.
General observations:
DL1 - yeah, there's that army that shunts you towards Xak Tsaroth. Didn't factor into it, everyone did what they were asked. The initial meeting with draconians was a stand-out point, as was a fight descending into Xak Tsaroth on the "lift" and the use of the wicker dragon.
DL2 - Stupid "PCs must be captured" element, and a lot of listening to elves talk. Pax Tharkas was fun.
DL3 - Ugh, Fizban and his "wacky" snowball fort. Skullcap interesting concept but don't look too closely at the logic of its construction.... Mostly, players didn't care less about the refugees!
DL4 - Elistan heading towards "2 Kewl 4 Jou" NPC status, but the Tomb of Derkin is a good playground, and the climactic battle was one of the best fights we'd ever played in D&D. Long standing quote originated from that:
Player 1: "You're down to one hit point"
Player 2: "Don't worry, I *cruise* on one hit point".
Dl5 is sourcebook. Too much about Innfellows for my taste.
DL6 - Ack! Split the party, force them now to play drippy Laurana, boring Elistan and stupid Knights. How did that knight become entombed in ice? Battle at the Ice Folk camp is good, but Feal-Thas is a weedy villain. Ice Wall Castle okay, but not a very exciting setting. And no-one was sure quite *why* they needed the Dragon Orb.
DL7 - Again, players really didn't care about the elves and their civil war. Too many additional NPCs to manage (Silvart, Silvart's dog, Vanderjack, Theo the gnome, Theo's pet sabre tooth kitten, etc.) but Foghaven Vale and the Stone Dragon again are cool playgrounds (again, some wierd dungeon-ness, like a stone juggernaut trap in a monument/temple for no good reason). More standing around while DM talks to himself when Silvart is confronted by Fizban.
DL8 - cool concept, poor execution. The first part of the adventure is a terrible sort of "choose your own adventure" style pathway to whizz the characters from Ergoth to the High Clerist's Tower. The HCT is presented on a huge poster map that is far too unwieldy to use at the gaming table, and most of the areas are dead zones anyway. Players circumvented it all with a levitate spell and that whole module was completed in one evening. Encounters too underpowered - at one stage is supposed to be a one-one combat with a Dragon Army champion. "Sturm" killed him in one round.
DL9 - This one is quite good fun, although again players were unimpressed by the supposed horror and treachery involving the good dragon's eggs. Sanction and the undercity are quite good settings, again I think there is a "PCs Must Be Captured" element. The climactic battle, where PCs on good dragons fight in the skies with evil dragons is... over in moments. Mainly due to the pitiful HP allocation of 1st Ed. dragons.
DL10 - Quite a creepy one, but the whole split parties real/dream business begins to drag on too long. Once again, complete lack of empathy by my players - "You stupid berk" was about the sum of their feelings for "tragic" King Lorac!
DL11 - War game thingy. We didn't play it. I still keep finding the little cardboard counters in unlikely places.
DL12 - As far as we got. This one is a strange mix of skeletal outlines and the by now standard plot-railroading. There's enough here that you could run it more free-form than any other of the DL adventures. I think we got as far as the underwater Istar stuff before play stopped, and I recall that once again the "boss monsters" are woefully underpowered compared to the PCs by this point.
(I also think that Elistan was killed in DL9 and Goldmoon in DL10 so, in fact, there were no good clerics left in the world again. Yes, I eschewed "Obscure Death").
DL13 and Dl14 - never played, but they both seem to have a lot of details that, like DL8, could probably be by-passed quickly. The BattleSystem stuff for DL14 takes place in a setting with very little interesting terrain.
Still here?
Run Two (ca. 1998):
A PbEM, using RuneQuest rules and player-created characters. The idea: to be more free-form. Characters started either in Solamnia or near Solace, and I planned on soloing everyone at first and hopefully they would meet up. In any case, character actions would have repercussions on other characters at a remove. It was sort of inspired by the concept of "Ta'Varen" from the Wheel of Time series. It was a good game, but unfortunately the pace was similar to Wheel of Time as well.
There were three characters in the Northern Group, who never met one another. Ferreth Shortnose, kender mage, became embroiled in Dragon Empire espionage to bring down the Palanthus government from within. Althan the Smith joined forces with Lady Katarina, Knight of the Sword, to defeat a corrupt Solamnic Lord Knight and Elias Silverbane ended up in Kalaman working both for Kitiara and the local resistance.
In the Southern Group, Shaman's Daughter Garimori of the Que-Shu took the Goldmoon role and travelled into Xak Tsaroth with two companions to rescue The Goddess (i.e. Mishakal) whilst mercenary Konrad Schattenstein (who was to have been Kitiara's half-brother) tried to elude draconians at every turn. Tallie, an itinerant and spoilt merchant's daughter ended up working at the Inn of the Last Home for a while before fleeing Seeker guards and draconians, aided by Rexhun the Dwarf. Meanwhile, in Haven, sorcerer Armic Smedsson tried to proved that the Seekers were deluded by the powerful new spellcasting cleric, Verminaard. Tallie, Armic, Konrad and Rexhun all met up in Darken Wood, but eventually split again when they went to Haven and all but Konrad were captured by the Dragon Armies. They were again re-united in Qualinesti, where they also met Garimori.
It was a fun game to run, and *much* better for not using the pre-gens, but it suffered from the same problem as all PbEMs - it took years to get anyhere and just as it got going, people started to drop out.
Run Three (2005):
Another attempt to use RuneQuest to power it, this time face-to-face. Rather than run the modules as is, I tried to freeform it more, and pad it out with extra stuff. There were a lot of elements to the setting that I'd played with, modified, removed, added and so forth.
(
http://www.physiol.ox.ac.uk/~sl2/dl/dlmain.html)
Again, it worked *quite* well, but never made it very far. Most of the players were taking a break from a long-running D&D game and went back to that as soon as it got going again.
Also, the characters were a bit *too* wierd, including two gnomes and a minotaur.
Further, although it didn't factor into the PbEM so much, there are balance issues with RQ, especially if you have a tough, heavily armoured minotaur in a party of otherwise weedy characters. Anything that can challenge tough characters can also wipe the floor with weaker ones. That, and the fact that I'd not factored in how much effort it would be to convert everything to RQ and improvise interesting encounters made it hard work for me.
Notable points:
- The players, disappointingly, didn't mess about with the fun stuff in Xak Tsaroth (e.g. the lift).
- They acquired a goblin servant, called Dripslime.
- Gnomes are fun, but hard work, if you rule that their devices actually work.
- For example, a clockwork spying bee later modified to deliver poison is a potential game killer!
- Fun was had when the PCs tried to rouse the citizens of Vingaard to invasion. Whilst one gnome was accidentally killing Solamnic Knights with a ballista (Fumbled miss), the other was climbing around the outside of a cathedral tower, Harold Lloyd style, pursued by draconians, and the minotaur had got drunk and was captured.
- Again, nobody cared about the squabbles of the elves.
- Crowning moment of the game was, for me, in the Heart of the Stone Dragon. Silvara (in this version the dragon-blooded daughter of Huma and the Silver Dragon) was showing the PCs the pool of Dragon Metal. Accompanying the party was one Lord Gerant, Rose Knight who was, in fact, a shape-changed Aurak. No one suspected a thing. The game ran something like this:
Me: "Silvara says that only she now knows the secret of tempering weapons with the dragon metal. Gerant asks her if she's sure and she replies yes. 'In which case...' says Gerant and runs her through with his sword."
Players (Still discussing what to do with the dragon metal): "So could we treat my axe with it? What about the clockwork spy bee? Where does it... wait... *what* did you just say?" The looks on their faces and the ensuing panic were one of those moments that makes a GMs life worth living!
Final Thoughts on DL:
- One day, I'm going to do one of these that works!
- Nearly all the modules as written follow the pattern of wilderness trek, followed by dungeon. In most cases, the railroading comes in the first part. The quality is variable, some have really fun and inspiring dungeon settings (DL1, DL4, DL7), others are a bit bland (DL3, DL6). Some are ambitious but don't quite carry it off (DL10, end of DL9, probably DL13 and 14).
- Don't even think about using the pre-gens. Even if you are using the modules as written, allow the players to make their own characters. Pre Gens have their place as disposable characters in tournaments, but not for an epic saga with pretensions towards pathos.
- For me, there are too many illogical things in the setting and adventure but YMMV. Some of them probably don't really matter and come under the Hitchcockian "fridge door logic" heading, but I doubt I'd run them un-adjusted again.
- Which for me means too much work converting them!
- As well as ditching the pre-gens, it works a lot better if you get rid of any sort of story immunity, obscure death or specific splot sequences. Let the dice fall where they may. For long saga campaigns this means progressively more work as the game goes on, due to the decision tree nature of the beast. I'll be interested to see how War of the Burning Sky copes.
- As written, for 1st Ed., some encounters are very underpowered. But boosting the dragons the 3rd Ed. might make some encounters really overpowered. If converting, keep an eye on those CRs!
Thank you for paying attention this far
Edited to fix link, and to add:
PS The stupid thing is, I didn't really like the books!
