The Night Below - your experiences?

[Brakkart]

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

Not quite. There's one crazed drow male called Otyl Erys, in Book 3 (I think) who thinks he is a God of Fungus. He has a bunch of wererat minions and some tamed fungoid monsters with him. He made for a fun encounter in the campaign I ran of this (not least because one of the players was playing his half-drow sister who'd been sent by his family to terminate him so he wouldn't embaress them anymore).

 

[jim pinto]

A different path

This is single handed-ly one of the best campaigns I've ever played in.

Fantastic.

We played for over a year in it I think.

Mike Leader (over at AEG) was the DM for three people (Lenny, Dave, and I) and we literally used every single word from this adventure and more.

Perhaps the smartest TSR product I've ever used (certainly there was smart stuff I never got around to using).

And certainly Mike's best DMing. We did so much more with it than they ever could have intended.

We hired mercenaries, built a tower, killed a baron, had amazingly complex inter party relationships, had characters exit and return, we had a suicide, and fantastic subplots that I'll never get involved in again.

Thanks for bringing up such great gaming memories.

Wow.

This thing rocked.

 

[RangerWickett]

Not quite. There's one crazed drow male called Otyl Erys, in Book 3 (I think) who thinks he is a God of Fungus. He has a bunch of wererat minions and some tamed fungoid monsters with him. He made for a fun encounter in the campaign I ran of this (not least because one of the players was playing his half-drow sister who'd been sent by his family to terminate him so he wouldn't embaress them anymore).

Oh yeah. And back then I totally didn't get the joke. Thanks for reminding me.

I recall in that encounter there were exploding fungus. The PCs cast 'item' on them to shrink them, then put them in tiny glass vials, lashed them to arrows, and made missiles with which to assault Shabboath.

 

[frankthedm]

Not quite. There's one crazed drow male called Otyl Erys,

An Erol Otis reff...

 

[Seravin]

I'm DM'ing it using the conversions posted in the Conversion Library: http://www.enworld.org/downloads/index.php?cid=9

So far I love it, but it does need some tweaks, especially when converted to 3.5.
Adding some side quests to break things up a bit is almost a must; and many encounters rely upon massed assaults by low-HD flunkies (the derro caves have 100-ish derro who can respond to an assault). I too quickly got tired of trolls. The kuo-toa and derro also became tiresome after awhile.

Even not used as an adventure it's a good source for ideas with plenty of evocative descriptions and interesting situations. I like that a group of demons approach the players to ally with them against the BBEG's. The use of social collapse points was also an interesting way to figure out when the kuo-toa city was going to fall.

We took a year long break due to various issues, including losing some players, but we're picking things back up and my remaining players are looking forward to continuing on and finishing it. See my story hour if interested on how it's going.

 

[carrot]

Of all the campaigns I've ever played in, I have the fondest regards for this one. Our group really loved this adventure.

We almost completed it too, but got TPK 'ed in the second to last room thanks to the illegal use of a goat. (dodgy tactics and rubbish dice rolling might also have had something to do with it)

 

[Duo Maxwell]

It was the first AD&D campaign I ran for my friends back in high school. It took us nine years to complete because after high school, it was extremely difficult to get all 5 of us at the table again (some of us enlisted in the military, some went off far away to college, etc.). The game ended on our 9th anniversary last year as a TPK at the gates to the City of the Glass Pool. While the players were extremely bitter about how it ended, they loved the funeral scene I gave them for the epilogue session the following week.

We had some awesome and memorable experiences from everyone that came to our table during those nine years.

 

[thedmstrikes]

I have run this classic several times and each time it gets better...unfortunately, none of my groups has ever been able to finish it. Not because of any real reason, just life breaking us up. I have found that the material as it stands is just not enough for a campaign as a stand alone, so I have added all kinds of stuff. Now, the players have options and will not get a chance to check them all out, simply cause they have to choose which path to take and the other path is played out off scene. I use the forgotten realms exclusively and have placed the setting in an out of the way place just south of the Sea of Fallen Stars and to spice things up a bit, I made it a colony from Cormyr. What none of the players have ever found out is that the leading family in charge of the colony is really an exiled family from Cormyr pretending to have established a colony for Cormyr, but are secretly planning a "revolution" to break away from Cormyr and the players will get to choose to either support the cause or put a stop to it and turn the area into a real colony for Cormyr. This sub plot works exceptionally well each time since every group I have had has a member that wanted to be a part of the Purple Dragons (the official military of Cormyr). To bad I never got to see this played out....would have made for a great story....

 

[radferth]

I have run this one twice, both times heavily modified. Neither group passed the Kuo-Toa city. It is probably my favorite module. It does have quite a few plot holes/weird things best avoided, but that was easy enough to fix. Highly recommend, but do not recommend trying to run it right out of the box.

 

[Ulrick]

I wonder how easy/difficult it would be to convert this module to 4e? I own it, never ran it.