Saturday, October 27, 2018

Next AD&D?

We enjoy playing AD&D, so we've been looking at what to play next. This will not happen soon as Felltower is waiting, and will be next, but perhaps early-ish next year we'll play more AD&D.


So far, the A-series looks like it's in the lead.

Some players have played some parts of them.

No one has played through all of them.

Plus, they come with reasonable pre-grens (sort of - see below) and nine of them. We'd be able to handle a full crowd with them, in case we run them while several of our players are back from school and have spares on top of that.

So what to run?

Let's look at them in turn:

A1 Slave Pits of the Undercity

I've run at least one current player through this. Others may have been involved. While I do really like a couple of the set-piece encounters, I'm not sure it's worth the time. Too much repetition, and I'd really be running it mostly for one big encounter and to prime the players for A2.

A2 Secret of the Slaver's Stockade

I've never really run this one to fruition. It's a tough, tough adventure even in tournament form. In full form, you're attacking a fortress and that ends very badly most of the time. That said, the latter parts of the adventure are cool and creepy and are great set-pieces.

I could see this taking two sessions easily, three in a worst-case situation.

This one is a maybe.

A3 Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords

I've run this at least once in elementary school. I've used bits of it for other adventures. This one will get run, with only the question of "Do I give out the changed pregens for the latter parts of the adventures, or just let the PCs sort out loot, advancement, etc. as they wish?

Definitely will be run.

A4 In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords

I haven't run A4 since elementary school. Maybe 5th or 6th grade? I planned to run it with GURPS when I was using a converted set of the series based on the A1-4 supermodule, but that never came to fruition. This one is absolutely getting run. I love this one.

Summary

So we'll go with the A-series, but it's probably A3 and A4, possible with A2 before that. A1 only if people really want the full experience.


Pre-gens

The pregens are pretty good, and equipped with magical and mundane gear. They all have a very high Constitution, though, but the couple I checked have nearly average HP. For example, the human fighter has CON 18 and 45 HP at 5th level. 5.5 + 4 = 9.5, 5 x 9 = 45. Beats the weirdness that is max-HP characters with no stats aside from prime requisites at a modifier-providing level.

4 comments:

  1. Might I suggest a few adjustments to the map? Subsidence occurs where The width of the cave is equal to or greater than the thickness of overlying rock. A sixty feet wide chamber needs to be beneath eighty feet of rock just to be safe. Subsidence begins at ten percent and ends at one hundred percent, the cracks sufficient at around eighty percent that water trickles down through the rock into caves beneath. It means the large chamber with slave pits needs to be considerably deeper than the smaller caves that surround it. So a remap means it's down hill to the slave pits and an uphill fight to escape them.

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  2. Peter---

    In the original tournament forms, A1 (both levels), A2 (both levels) and A3 (dungeon level) were each the five different round 1 event scenarios, with A3 (city) as round 2, and A4 as round 3.

    So, if you find some of the encounters from the round 1 events repetitive, boring, etc., just either drop them, or swap them out/mix and match with the ones you like: take the cool stuff from A1 and A2, mash it together into an uber-cool A^2, and let that be the lead-in to A3 and A4.

    Allan.

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    Replies
    1. I knew the breakdown, but thanks for outlining it here. I'm also thinking about the time. How many sessions will this take? If it's a lot, maybe the encounters I like in A1 just aren't worth the time to play them. Each session we spend on AD&D comes out of DF and Gamma Terra, so it's got to feel like it's worth the tradeoff. That's why A3 and A4 are shoo-ins and A2 and A1 need to earn some their time!

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