White Plume Mountain - your experiences?

[crow81]

This was perhaps my favorite adventure both as a player in '83' and a DM in '91' as a DM I used it to segway the party in to the Dark Sun Setting by having the orge magi's magic at the end cross with a temporal spell cast by an evil templar in the future. The result was soul switch between the DS characters and my party. I then made my entire party rip up there existing characters replace them with DS characters I created and start still in White Plume but thousands of years later.

They then had to go backwards through the module

It was great. My Magic User's original character who was replaced by the templar went on to become the Sorcerer King in Try.

 

[viscounteric]

My player's loved/hated this module in my 2e college campaign. The ranger in the party had bought a painting in an auction written in a Dungeon magazine. At the next week's session, when he brought it up the the party's estate, they realized it was three adventurers on a cliff overlooking the moutain. Of course I made the three adventurers look oddly similar the ranger, the cleric of the sea, and the dwarf.

Since I went for the apocalypse-style end of the campaign, the party ultimately learned that they needed the weapons from the moutains to fight the impending evil.. Only problem was the cleric of the sea was dead from the wacky Ithillid dream encounter in Curse of Amber and the ranger had gone missing. Fortunately, the sea priest's player's new character was a Venerable 4th level half-orc cleric who was more worried about the party's morality than survivability. As the party bard was lured by the Kelpies, Ozark (the old man) kept yelling at him, "Talis, that's not your wife, you're being naughty, don't make me smite you!" As the bard was freed from the charm and managed to escape climbing up the ladder, Ozark 'smited' him with his cane, forcing him back in the water and back under the Kelpies' influence.

Ultimately Ozark died in the fight with the giant crab, bringing forth the return of the sea priest (any white guy trained by a no-legged guy named Mohammed to worship the Chinese god of the sea and raise pigeons on the side was a hearty dose of levity and great role-playing ). Like a cheesey comic book return, the sea priest returned to save the party from utter...

Then of course, the hard-luck bard slipped badly over the boiling pits of mud (bye bye! ) but the clumsy dwarf managed to get over using some kind of magic item and single handedly slew the vampire in the dark.... considering this was the first combat he performed even decently in TWO YEARS of weekly playing, he definitely earned the Axe (Whelm was changed to a kick-ass returning BATTLE AXE named Overwhelm. Still strikes fear 65 years later in my current Hackmaster campaign.

They never went for Blackrazor (casualities and the fact that the ranger was missing, even though they just watched their friend return to the living a few hours before.)

 

[Celebrim]

Our party got in a fight ICly over who would get the ring...

I'll leave it at that.

 

[JohnBiles]

Had a lot of fun with this adventure, though I like the Return to White Plume Mountain version better. The Return version, we had some of our most memorable sessions ever, especially when the PCs suckered themselves by taking a long a hivemind cannibal gnome they thought they'd mind-controlled. THOUGHT they'd mind-controlled...

Rarely have I seen my players panic so much.

 

[Uruush]

I recall this module. Everyone died in the platforms hanging from chains room. We made a new party and all died in the crab fight. It was pretty fun, but it had a reputation as a meat-grinder around my middle-school... Not as bad as Tomb or Horrors though.

 

[T. Foster]

We played through this fairly late in our 80s campaign (probably around 1989 -- right before we switched over to 2E). I remember we played through the entire thing in 1 long session, and the players did pretty well (retrieving all 3 items). The thing that actually stands out most in my memory, though, wasn't actually part of the module, but something that happened in the aftermath.

One of the PCs, Grimrick the thief -- the longest-standing character in the campaign, who had narrowly avoided death many many times when most of the other PCs didn't (meaning he got to keep all the treasure and XP for himself) -- had been killed in the final combat with the ogre mage -- shattered into bits and pieces by a cone of cold, IIRC. The survivors dutifully swept the fragments up into a large sack which the party's mage slung over his shoulder and teleported back home to get him raised. Unfortunately, the targeting roll came up 00 -- low arrival, materialized in solid matter, permanently and irrevocably killed. Grimrick's player was freaking out at the prospect of permanent character-death, all the other players (and, I'll admit, me too) were feeling significant schadenfreude at seeing this infamous rogue of a character finally fall prey to the sort of fate he'd so often benefitted from. Even the guy playing the mage didn't mind losing his character as long as he was taking Grimrick down too (after all, this mage was a replacement character, generated at about 6th level after this player's other characters had died). "But," insists Grimrick's player,"we don't know how far he came in low." Sure enough, the spell description in the PH doesn't say -- it talks about distance for coming in high, but not low. After several minutes of negotiation, we decide to roll (1d20, I think) to determine how low he came in. The mage's player rolls, and sure enough he comes up with a 3 -- he materialized 3 feet below his target -- meaning that he was still instantly and irrevocably killed (cut in half), but the bag holding Grimrick's remains, which was slung over his shoulder, was sitting unharmed on the floor of the mage's study. The mood in the room changed in an instant, from sorrow to joy and vice-versa, as everybody realized that, somehow, Grimrick had managed to pull through yet again, and the mage's player realized he'd be rolling up yet another replacement character without even having anything to show for it

 

[JohnBiles]

shattered into bits and pieces by a cone of cold, IIRC. The survivors dutifully swept the fragments up into a large sack which the party's mage slung over his shoulder and teleported back home to get him raised. Unfortunately, the targeting roll came up 00 -- low arrival, materialized in solid matter, permanently and irrevocably killed. Grimrick's player was freaking out at the prospect of permanent character-death, all the other players (and, I'll admit, me too) were feeling significant schadenfreude at seeing this infamous rogue of a character finally fall prey to the sort of fate he'd so often benefitted from.

That's how my last 2E character died; he was an Elven Mage/Thief, trying to break into a Mage Guild via Teleportation with two other party members in his bag of holding to get around weight limits. Until he embedded himself in a wall, trapping the bag of holding with solid stone around it and the two PCs were trapped in the bag with a limited air supply.

This happens literally 30 seconds into the gaming session. The three of us spent the next two hours trying to find a way for them to escape while everyone else gamed. THANKFULLY, one of them was a cleric who used Etherealness to escape. Though I got stuck still dead.

 

[hailstop]

It's funny. I know I've run this adventure, but I can't remember anything about it. I remember liking it, but that's because I like that type of adventure.

 

[justanobody]

It's funny. I know I've run this adventure, but I can't remember anything about it. I remember liking it, but that's because I like that type of adventure.

The revised version for 3rd edition is on WotC's website somewhere.

It was a great little adventure and one of my favorites.

I like the new one using the mimic, but miss the turnstile.

 

[Vayden]

Oh man. Don't get me started on this **** thing. I ran it for my group a year or two ago with the 3.x conversion - they blew up the freaking mountain!!!!

On the way down to the crab fight, they got paranoid about the reinforced doors, so they spent hours systematically dismantling and destroying all 3 doors. Then they get down there and decide to toss off a fire-ball like affect inside the bubble, rupturing it of course . . . they ended up using a dimension door to get the three of them (and the crab) out of the mountain seconds before thousands of gallons of superheated water flooded the entire dungeon, causing the top of the mountain to collapse inward.

2nd of 3 times that campaign where they completely and totally destroyed the plot - they're usually well behaved, but they were feeling cranky that campaign for some reason. Started off by fleeing the city I'd carefully built to last the whole campaign, then blew up white plume mountain, then got tricked into killing the last of an order of paladins, causing the goddess those paladins served to become very pissed at them . . . it was a train-wreck from beginning to end, but it was memorable.