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Message: <blockquote data-quote="T. Foster" data-source="post: 1980923" data-attributes="member: 16574">I ran this pretty early in my "gaming career," when it was just me and 1 other friend playing. I think this may have been one of the first adventures I actually DM'd (though of course I was also running 2 or 3 characters). It took me a long time to convince my buddy to play it because he'd seen the monsters in the second book (the demon princes and such) and thought they were all included in the module -- I had to promise him they weren't  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> . I don't actually remember much about the actual play, but we successfully finished it and got all the treasure and had a lot of fun. Playing/running this was probably the highlight of those 'early gaming years,' at least for me.Years later I tried to run it again for my main group of players, and unsurprisingly it was a huge, embarrassing disaster (ironic that I believe this is the very module that mentions how DMs don't like to tell stories of the players' ignoble failures; I guess I'm an exception...). After making a big set-up with the poem and the legend and all that, the characters headed up into the mountains. First encounter -- "gray-furred snake." he players all laughed about how lame that was, and the leader, a fighter of 7th or 8th level, stepped forward to slay it. Lost initiative, bit, failed poison save, dead. The other players made so much fun of him that there was no way we could conduct a serious session after that. And, unfortunately, they never had any desire to go back and try to finish the module. I tried to tell them how good it was, but they didn't care.This is actually one of my very favorite modules, and one that I return to and re-read from time to time. The combination of wilderness exploration, roleplaying/negotiation (with the gnomes), tough dungeon-crawling combat (and it had honestly never occured to me how 'ecologicially dubious' this dungeon is until I came online and read people complaining about it -- you folks need to lighten up and appreciate it as fun on its own terms), some clever tricks and traps, plus a bunch of broader historical context that adds singnificant depth and detail to the World of Greyhawk and "AD&D cosmology," this module has just about everything you could ask for. And that's not even counting the second book which, before MM2 and UA was almost like a self-contained "AD&D Companion" all by itself -- new monsters (and not just 'gimmick' one-use-only monsters like most modules have, actual reusable new monsters), new spells, new magic items, even some new rules.  A definite winner. Heck, thinking about it now I think I'm going to have to pull it out and re-read it again tonight! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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