NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6231718" data-attributes="member: 4937">Have played and run it.Using the pregenerated characters and scenario mode (starting from the inside out), this is probably a more lethal dungeon than Tomb of Horrors because the players are put on a hard clock.  Tomb of Horrors allows the players to spend days or weeks investigating the environment without cost.  In HSoT the PC's will be dead within hours unless they rush headlong through a series of encounters that are well above their capabilities.  Playing it was a lot of fun.  Great atmosphere.  Interesting puzzles.   Suffocating to death was a major bummer, but had fun until we died.Running it 1e style was a chore, mostly because I'm now used to a coherent rules set and there is nothing like HSoT to expose the problems with the 1e rules set.   While the module tries to create rules subsystems for the various encounters on the fly, invariably the players are going to go out of the box in predictable ways (throwing another player a rope, trying to swim down and pull someone to the surface) and the module provides no guidance here.  You won't go 1 minute in this game without having to pull fiat rulings out of the air.  After the 100th or so fiat seat of the pants ruling in the space of an hour and a half, I was exhausted.   I spent probably 15 years DMing 1e, and after running this one retro style I look back at that and think I must have been insane.   I pretty immediately remembered why I'd given up on D&D in frustration back in the mid 90's.  3e catches flak for its voluminous rules, but the text of the module makes clear that 'old school' was paying for its silence in other ways.  Most of the encounters would take much less text to write in 3e than they did in 1e because the module often spends half a page creating a room specific rules set to handle situations the 1e rules are silent on.</blockquote>

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