The Temple of Elemental Evil - your experiences?

[zoroaster100]

I ran this adventure from beginning to end for my brothers, cousins and friends back when I was in high school (many years ago). We had a blast. There were something like 8 players, which made things rather crazy and difficult to run at times. Two of the players flirted with the idea of their characters (a druid and a magic user) joining the forces of evil by trying to make a deal with Zuggtmoy and Iuz, but one of these two characters was killed by the necklace of strangulation found in one of the elemental nodes before she could carry out her betrayal. The other player reconsidered and decided to stick with the original goal and help defeat the bad guys in the temple. The final battle was a challenge to run, since the players had completed the Skull of Golden Death and summoned four demons and four elementals to help them in a frontal assault on the Temple leadership. It took two full sessions to play out that fight. It was a bit of an anticlimax that in the end the most critical battle was between Iuz and St. Cuthbert and the players were not the ultimate heroes, in a sense. But we had fun.

 

[Style]

I played in this under 2e rules back in 1989 or thereabouts. I was using my Paladin Ramiel (one and only instance of an 18/00 in all my years of gaming) and the game was set in the Forgotten Realms so I chose Torm (god of duty) as that struck me as a particularly obnoxious religion and, hey, what's the point of playing a paladin if you can't annoy the other characters?

The DM was using the Temple as a replacement for Dragonspear Castle in the Realms, but kept the ToEE backstory pretty much intact. The party was hired by a group called the Council of Lords or something and sent to investigate rumours of a return of evil in the ruins. Like another poster, the party was composed almost entirely of thieves who spent much of the time concealing their various illicit activities from me. To make it worse, the Council of Lords appointed Ramiel the leader of the group and told the others that it was their duty to follow my orders. Frickin recipe for disaster. Being dirty, thieving scoundrels, the others took this as an inidication that they should actively oppose whatever course of action Ramiel suggested, regardless of the consequences ("Frogs shmogs! I am not apologising for blasphemy!")

We argued and bickered our way through the village and the Moathouse. We wanted to push on towards the Temple but our DM kept insisting that we go through the Moathouse first. We were in the middle of an argument about something when Lareth appeared. We slagged him and carried on arguing without missing a beat. We finally made it to the main temple (although not before I had tried to have the rest of the party imprisoned by the Lords - they let them off with slaps on the wrist, damn liberals!)

We hammered our way through the upper level, wreaking bloody havoc on the inhabitants. I recall slaying an ogre with a single blow from my 2-handed sword. There was also this room with crossbowmen hiding behind a shield wall whom I decided to charge. The Great God Gygax smiled upon my dice that night. Crossbows twanged and three bolts whizzed past my ears. I vauted the shield wall in my platemail (rolling a 1 for the ability check) and killed all three while they fumbled to change weapons and missed me with all their attacks. Our party thieves gave me much less crap after that.

The campaign tailed off a few sessions later, though, as we were starting to get a bit sick of the hack-and-slash nature of things. After we closed the adventure, the DM mentioned how there were all these factions but that he had not been able to get them into play. I own the adventure now and can see what he means. Got plans to run it for a new group (moving soon) so I will be making sure to highlight these non-combat angles when I do. Still gonna keep the frogs, though.

 

[Dark Dragon]

Last year (was it really last year?) I DMed the group through the ToEE, monster stats were updated to 3.0. The module was used to test our homebrewed D&D rules. The group consists of a bard, a druid, a paladin and a rogue/fighter (All at level 4 or so at the beginning).
While most of the campaign was about killing monsters, clerics and bandits, there were some funny parts.

Somewhere in the dungeon is a pathetic banshee (it is not the MM2 version with 26d12 HDs! But I used that one, the group got some hints on how to defeat it without great problems). However, the group got some clues that something that can kill with its mere voice is in the area. The bard said:"Maybe it helps to cast silence before we open that door. " Player thinks a moment..."No, I'll wait." Party went in, banshee appears, initiative is rolled. Banshee was first, wails and leaves the paladin and the druid to deal with the monster. The rest of the party was dead. But the two guys kept on fighting, should they die, they'll die at least in a big fight. And luck was on their side: Allmost every attack was a hit, the two made their saves against the wails and killed the banshee in a few rounds.

Later (everybody was ressurected) the rogue was exploring a room in the water temple. In the centre of the room was a pool. He decided to use his ring of invisibility before checking for traps. The rest of the group waited at the door. Somewhere was a trap casting suggestion at the first entering PC. The rogue failed his save and was urged to take a bath in the pool. The pool was filled with acid. The rogue was invisible. The party needed some time to get him out of the pool, but a lot of his equipment was ruined (a magic mithril chain shirt for example...).

The same rogue sneaked later into a lair of white dragons in the air node (without knowing that there are THREE dragons waiting), but he was lucky and kept them busy until the rest of the group arrived.

The elemental nodes were quite funny, I put more and different monsters in it (a saphire and a brown dragon in the earth node, the group decided to help the saphire dragon against the brown one) and evolved the story a bit more.


The dungeons were too large, IMHO, but the node idea and the moat house were quite good.

 

[ZuulMoG]

I ran this for my group about ten years ago in 1st Ed, and the frogs were a TPK.

Moathaus FTW!!!

(Try to picture a halfling thief's legs wriggling madly poking out of a giant frog's mouth.)

I'm running it again with three from that group and some new friends on Friday night. Been a long time since the froggies had fresh warm Adventurer au Swamp Jus. Heh.

 

[Bront]

Post #23: 08-05-04, 03:25 AM
Post #24: Today, 03:20 AM

Threadcromancy at it's finest

 

[ZuulMoG]

And your point is...?

Was I supposed to create a duplicate thread?

 

[Bront]

Either solution works.

Don't take offense, just pointing it out (Many people don't realize it when they do it.)

 

[Doc_Klueless]

This "super" module is one of those that always started out with a bang with my groups and then petered out the further they got into the dungeons below the ToEE. Homlett, Moat House, etc. would hook us, but we always ran out of steam through the looooong dungeon crawl. Add in the repopulating of levels if you leave and it just made it longer for us.

On the other hand, I looooove how it reads and I could see how it would rock on toast with the right DM (which I obviously wasn't for this module) and the right group (which they obviously weren't).

 

[BOZ]

Zuggtmoy's stats are out now in Dragon #337. CR25.

 

[Drkfathr1]

I love this module. It was the first I ever bought, and remains one of my favorites. It does take quite a bit of work to keep the PC's interested as time goes on, but that's part of the fun. I re-worked the Elemental Nodes to make them more exciting, and added a few extra ruins in the forest nearby.

I'm currently running a new group though it in a pretty large campaign that will include the RTOEE, so I'm sprinkling a bit of Tharizdun's cult in there too.

I had sculpted a mini of Zuggtmoy out of sculpey, but with her "new" look I'll have to redo her...and use the old one as a new monster: Handmaiden of Zuggtmoy, or Fungal Shambler.