The Night Below - your experiences?

[Psion]

Interesting that it was released as setting-neutral, rather than associated somehow with the Forgotten Realms. Perhaps someone of the old-school persuasion was behind this?

There was a fair amount of setting neutral black cover stuff back then (city sites, country sites, castle sites, monstrous compendiums collections, etc.)

 

[drscott46]

There was a fair amount of setting neutral black cover stuff back then (city sites, country sites, castle sites, monstrous compendiums collections, etc.)

I wonder what sparked that, after there being very little fitting that description between 1988 and 1996 or so?

 

[Thomas Percy]

I ran it. D = Below average but passing.
Dungeon crawlin' in the style of Icewind Dale 2 or NWN Hordes of Underdark.
A lot of stats to converse from AD&D.
A lot of plotline inconsistencies which had me frowning in consternation.

 

[Capellan]

I played in it, but alas with a very poor GM, so very little fun was had. We (the entire playing group) gave up in disgust halfway through Book 2. On the GM, as well as the adventure.

Seravin's Story Hour here at ENworld suggests that the module can be a lot of fun when handled by a GM who knows what he is doing

 

[RangerWickett]

It was my first D&D campaign. I ran it, and one of the players made a drow-hating ranger.

Heheheh. No drow in the entire module, if I recall correctly.

It gave me my love of mind flayers. I actually tried to run it a second time with another group a year after my first attempt, but I realized that was silly. Still, it was really fun, even if I had to beg and plead with one of my players for him to defy his parents and play D&D one last time, despite his guilt that it was evil and wrong.

Y'know what? I haven't dominated a PC in a long time. I'm going to make a point to do that next session.

 

[Kunimatyu]

This may already be common knowledge, but Night Below is also the name of the Summer 2007 DDM set. Food for thought.

(c'mon aboleth!)

 

[Enkhidu]

We played it over the course of a year or so, but only got through most of book 2 before we got sidetracked on something else.

I remember it being fun, but more for the intra-party interaction (Illiterate Paladin to my more than somewhat greedy dwarven rogue, as said paladin pointing to a shadow dragon's lair - "So this part on the map here with the strange markings, what does it say?" Me: "Uhh, it says 'to the glass pool!' Yeah. That's the ticket!") than for the meat of the adventure.

 

[jeffh]

I ran it, marbled with other adventures. My recollection is that the first book went very well on the whole (there were some problems with a particular player, but the adventure held people's interest), the second was in danger of becoming a real slog and so I ripped about half of it out and redrew the map, and that the third (also slightly truncated) made a good climax to the whole thing.

 

[Waylander the Slayer]

I ran this all the way through (10-13 yrs ago) and it was one of the best campaigns I had run. I know people have a lot of complaints about book 2 which is combat heavy. However what I remember the most was the vast amount of diplomacy and negotiations that the party did which kept things in their favor (the rock elves, gnomes, mind flayers and maralynth). The assault on the cities (first the druegar then the illithid) took a good amount of tactics and required all of those alliances.

The battle with the shadow dragon, which everyone assumed was a black dragon was classic.

 

[DM_Jeff]

Are you thinking about the Derro city? That was in book 2.

Yes, it's in book 2, not 3, sorry about that.

So books 1 and 3 ran as written, book 2 was tossed salad.

-DM Jeff