Cleon
Legend
I was recently given a large treasure trove of 1st Edition books, magazines and modules which included Module WG5, which I had not owned or played before. I'm thinking of running it with my weekly 1st Edition gaming group. Who else has played this module? What are your thoughts?
I ran a group through it back in the day because my players fancied trying out high-level gaming, most of our D&D at the time being in the 3rd-7th level range.
Not being used to running 9th-12th level characters, there where a lot of casualties - some of the players suffered 5 or 6 character deaths before getting to the end of the module - though they always managed to have enough survivors to get the corpses back home for a raise dead, resurrection or flesh to stone.
The Terrible Iron Golem was particularly lethal and was responsible for multiple PC deaths. They eventually managed to get rid of it by polymorph other to turn a mouse into a rust monster...
A few of the other deaths were due to traps and cursed magical items, but many were down to PC carelessness. (As in casting fireball at an efreet while the party are all in a 20 foot cube room, which resulted in 75% PC casualties without harming the enemy).
They eventually got better-organized and started playing more effectively, but by then they'd got through most of the tough encounters.
Since the dungeon is fairly static and they kept on dying, the PCs were making a lot of forays into it. They'd explore about, deal with the occupants of a couple of rooms, then retreat to regroup & raise anyone who'd fallen.
Indeed, it's a bit too static, so I livened it up a bit by having Eli Tomorast occasionally move around monsters that the PCs had encountered and retreated from, and had some of the intelligent creatures go to support their neighbours when attacked. That didn't make the encounters that much trouble for the PCs, since a lot of the creatures in the lower levels are relatively weak compared to the party. Indeed, I suspect that was assumed that some of the monsters would act like that, considering many of them weren't much of a challenge as individual encounters.
By mutual consent we agreed to have a big showdown in the big hall at the lowest level between the party and Eli Tomorast, plus his assorted surviving minions - an epic fight which was the best fun we had in the whole module.
They then just had to deal with the demons in the final chambers of the dungeon and call it a day.