The Night Below - your experiences?

[Staffan]

Geez! Holy thread necromancy, Batman!

(Or should that maybe be unholy?)

I ran this over a summer of rather intensive gaming, when I was home from Lund visiting my parents. We got through, and enjoyed, the first third a lot - exploring Haranshire and figuring things happening there out. Then the second third came, and that wasn't nearly as much fun. Around halfway through that, summer ended, and I went back to Lund, the campaign unfinished.

It feels in a way as if Sargent wrote a great starting section, possibly a great ending section (I only skimmed that, but it seems to have potential), and then realized that the ending section was five levels higher than the starting section and built the middle section as a string of encounter areas intended mostly to build up the PCs' strength to where it needed to be for part III.

 

[SDOgre]

This is one of my (and my players') most fond memories of D&D. And like others it had a lot to do with the things that happened outside of the module.

The first book was great but yeah, they got bogged down in book two and never quite got to the Kuo Toa city.

Some memories:

1. The drunk dwarf went splunking
The dwarf in town went with them into the Underdark. That's when they met the trolls. Holy crap. We still talk about that fight more than 10 years later. First two trolls, no prob. Then two more. Okay. Then three more. Crap. Then two more....

The fighter yelled out in his best impression of Aliens, "Adventurers, we are leaving!"

The dwarf's move was less than everyone else and he got left behind. As they backed off the last they saw of him was him getting swarmed, screaming, and body parts and pieces of beard flying up into the air.

2. The Orc Occupation
To break things up I had the town get occupied with orcs. I wanted to run a fight with tons of low level creatures. I threw in a few moderate level casters and man... what an epic fight.

The mage cast earth to mud and sunk the inn. There were orcs everywhere. An orc cleric killed a character with heat metal...

3. The Death Toll.
The party went through so many characters... they hired mercenaries at one point then I filled the entrance cave with hill giants. TPK. So many characters...

4. Creative Camping
They ended up using a spell stoneshape, I think, by the cleric to get in a cave and close up the entrance except for an air hole. They hated getting atatcked while resting.... Create food and water... what spell was it that created a magic area if the enemy walked over they went boom?

So much fun. So long ago...

Man they should make a return to the Night Below...

 

[the Jester]

Never played, dmed or even read it.

Now I really want it!

 

[jdrakeh]

Since this thread has been revised, I might as well ask. . . how did you get around Book 2? After reading several of these threads, it seems that this is the universal hang-up point for Night Below. After reading Book 2, I came away with the impression that it's combat encounter filler that has little or nothing to do with the rest of the adventure. Has anybody created a substitute for Book 2 or a list of encounters to avoid/replace in order to keep this leg of the 'adventure' from killing a Night Below campaign?

 

[Jan van Leyden]

Since this thread has been revised, I might as well ask. . . how did you get around Book 2? After both reading several of these threads, it seems that this is the universal hang-up point for Night Below. After reading Book 2, I came away with the impression that it's combat encounter filler that has little or nothing to do with the rest of the adventure. Has anybody created a substitute for Book 2 or a list of encounters to avoid/replace in order to keep this leg of the 'adventure' from killing a Night Below campaign?

When I was running this thing and the group entered the second part, I set up those beholder adventures ("Eye of ...") to replace the endless dungeon crawling. Sadly, the characters ran into the grell, suffered a (nearly) TPK and were fed up with the campaign.

If I'd run NB again, I'd probably remove the second book from the very beginning, replacing it with other adventures.

Ah, here comes one memory! Wandering the Underdark, the party encountered a random hill giant who carried a sack with random treasure: among other things he had two snuffboxes. Half a day later, they encounter another random hill giant, carrying - you guessed it - three snuff boxes.


Since that the players a paranoid about the big hill giant snuffbox conspiracy...

Huldvoll

Jan van Leyden

 

[Mark Hope]

Wow, I had completely forgotten that I had done these threads. I used to have a link to the index in my sig but lost interest after a while and removed (I am fickle like that... )

Since this thread has been revised, I might as well ask. . . how did you get around Book 2? After both reading several of these threads, it seems that this is the universal hang-up point for Night Below. After reading Book 2, I came away with the impression that it's combat encounter filler that has little or nothing to do with the rest of the adventure. Has anybody created a substitute for Book 2 or a list of encounters to avoid/replace in order to keep this leg of the 'adventure' from killing a Night Below campaign?

Well, I removed the whole Rock Elf storyline. It was a cool storyline but didn't fit my game. I concentrated on the svirfneblin as a running element and made a big deal out of the behir and the dragon. I seem to recall that I kept the trolls in, but I don't think the PCs stuck around to fight them. As for a hard-and-fast list of what to include and what to leave out, I'd say that a DM would be better served by analysing the needs of his own game and cutting stuff accordingly. When I removed elements, for example, I replaced them with several encounters specific to my homebrew. I got a lot of use out of Book 2. For me, it was Book 1 that got ditched - I had no use for it whatsoever, although it seems to have been very good for other DMs.

Edit: Here is the list of discussions that were posted:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?t=181030
There's also a link there to Quasqueton's original list of classic adventure discussions - some excellent reading in those! Maybe I'll resurrect the idea if the whim takes me...

 

[Jack99]

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

Not sure. I bought it yesterday after reading this thread, and wondering/considering the same.

 

[Schmoe]

I started running this, but unfortunately had to stop when the party was close to entering Book 2. Book 1 was an absolute blast. It provided a nice overview of the area with enough adventuring options and NPC descriptions to keep things interesting and moving. I added a few things specific to the party, but that's SOP for me and certainly wasn't necessary to make it interesting. Since this was the whole of my experience with Night Below, I have nothing but great memories of it.

I didn't have a chance to run Book 2, but I'm a little surprised that so many found it to be such a slog-fest. I was envisioning a lot of adventure possibilities with the svirfneblin encampment, at least enough to keep the plot moving forward and to keep things varied. Admittedly, there wasn't much of that described in Book 2, so it would have been some additional effort on my part, but I think it could be made to work very well. I imagine that it was either a space or time consideration that prevented fully developing Book 2, but the framework is in place for some good adventures.

Edit:
I forgot to mention that I ran this back in the days of 2e, so unfortunately I can't offer any advice on conversion. It would definitely be worth it, though, for any willing to take on the task.

 

[radferth]

I big chunk of book 2 can be bypassed, as written. One of my groups cherry picked the encounters they wanted, and avoided many of them (You mean the temple of $DEMON marked on our map is not actually in the way? No, we're just moving past the entrance at a fast jog). The other actually wanted to fight everything on the map, as did so. One of my players in this group was the worlds most efficient DM (He would regularly run combats with a dozen or so players each controlling 2 or 3 characters, and 100-200 monsters, quickly, and with a noticeble slip). Me and the most of the other players were from his campaign. We would go thorugh 2-3 big fights per week. In both cases, I had changed quite a bit, and eliminated some encounters.

Damn, I definitely need to run this. [changes looking for players ad].

 

[legiondevil]

When we finally got to the Derro city, we decided to "help out" in our own special way. Using high-level scrolls of mount, we summoned a pair of elephants, cast barkskin on them, and then berserked them while I'aiming them down the tunnel leading to the city.

After a moment when they "went to town," we followed behind them to provide artillery support.

Ah, the memories.