I played this one right after it came out. The GM had just bought it & wanted to run it right away. I enjoyed the back stories about how the various characters were captured. I was given the Fighter & we were thrilled to be given the chance to equip our characters off of the list provided. Like many others, we figured a "Ghost Tower" would be filled with undead, so we wasted a lot of our wealth on magic items useful against undead.
I recall lobbying for the Frost Brand for myself, but believe that I was outvoted.
We never really figured out the chessboard trap. The Monk (who had unfortunately started on the Knight's square) took a ton of damaged before he gave up & basically tried to leap across the room & thus touch the fewest number of squares possible. If only he had realized that he need to leap 2 forward & 1 to the side each time in order to avoid taking damage.
This would end up killing him later in the time travel room when he refused to buckle himself into one of the comfy chairs, as the damage from the acceleration coupled with the earlier damage from the chessboard proved to much for his monkish d4s.
The DM was anoyed in the prehistoric jungle when I warned the party about the danger of su-monkeys. He thought I had somehow read the module beforehand, but I was just being psychic about bad module design.
Of course, since we were playing the Tournament version, there were no "strange" monkeys, but the DM was weirded out nonetheless.
As might be expected, we suffered heavy attrition through the course of the module & only the Cleric & I (the characters with the most HP) made it through to the final encounter. Sadly, it did not occur to us that the flashing floor sequence was totally random, so we ran around the room trying to deactivate the sequence through a sequence of our own. Thus it was just a matter of time before we got sucked into the Soul Gem. Annoyingly, I had attacked the force field around the Soul Gem, but the DM made it sound like my attack had no effect, so I didn't try again. I was furious after the game when I found out that I likely would have succeeded if I had simply bashed the thing a few more times.
Lesson #1 of the Ghost Tower: "When in doubt, hack!"
I ran the module a few times as a DM, always remembering the lessons I had learned as a player in it. In the various tricks & traps, I gave the players enough feedback to allow them to make good decisions instead of effectively random ones. In that respect, this module made me a better DM.
After not having thought about the module for a decade, I ended up playing it again right before 3E came out. The DM of the campaign I was playing in at the time saw it in my AD&D library & was intrigued enough to run it as a side adventure when many of the regulars in the campaign couldn't make it. I did my best not to let player knowledge ruin the fun for everyone else, although it was a challenge watching the players make the same old mistakes I remembered making the first time around.
We were out-classed right from the start. The party consisted of just 3 characters - a Cleric, a Bard, & my Ranger - all below the suggested levels for the module & with less than standard equipment for their levels. Since the DM decided to throw in the non-Tournament encounters also, we were in way over our heads. It only got worse when the Bard unluckily picked up a cursed longsword, which meant that he could neither fight effectively nor cast spells.
He spent so much time at negative HP that we nicknamed him "Death's Doorman".
My Ranger topped him though by actually dying. I rolled a 1 on my Poison save when my character was bit by a snake hair while meleeing the Medusa blindfolded. Since this was 1E poison, there was no onset time & I died immediately after the failed save. Fortunately after the battle, the Cleric was able to use revive me using the scroll of Resurrection supplied by NPCs who recruited us for this fool's errand, but I permanently loss a point of CON as a result.
Anyway, we somehow miraculously got all of the way to the final encounter. I went straight at the force field, just wanting to end the farce quickly - player's knowledge be damned! - when the floor flashed & I rolled a 1 on my saving throw. The other 2 players were shocked to see my character & all of his equipment turn pure white. I had forgotten that the area you started in was the first one to suffer the Soul Gem's wrath.
Then I had to suffer in silence watching the rest of the party try to "solve" the room. Eventually I cheated & whispered to the Cleric "Rule #1: When in doubt, hack!" Taking the cue, he shattered the force field with a few blows from his morningstar.
The DM allowed my character's soul to be rescued from the Soul Gem, but his body was permanently chalk white from the experience - which was kind of cool.
Anyway, we refer to this module as the "Black Tower" or the "Tower of Death" to this day. Despite succeeding, we ended up weaker after the module than we went in. My character was down a point of CON & had lost all of his magical gear (de-magicked by the Soul Gem), & as a group we had expended so much consumable magic (potions, scrolls, etc.) that we had less magic gear than when we started. Other than the deep emotional scars we had nothing to show for the experience. Well, other than a ton of D&D horror stories, like this one.
