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Post by geneweigel on Mar 9, 2021 20:44:42 GMT -5
Damn that is real crust... I recall Gary being sluggish on Pied Piper boards. I feel like I got half the story of what happened at PPP anyway. (What the hell was PPP forum? Refugees from Eric Noah's and Clark Peterson's messageboards? Weird how forums changed that was right after the cascading waterfall type forum era. I had a prototype forum in that mode for my 90's "AOL website" but I never implemented it.)
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Post by GRWelsh on Mar 10, 2021 10:16:21 GMT -5
Thanks for the info GT. I'll have to read DWELLERS IN THE MIRAGE now as that is one by A. Merritt I never got around to. I should read everything by A. Merritt and take notes since he was one of EGG's favorite writers. Also, I much prefer EGG's ideas on T2 and Q1 versus what we actually got. I also prefer the darker, brooding atmosphere over the mechanical devices and steam power when it comes to demons, and I love the idea of players having the option for a solution that is worse than the original problem -- that is Gygax all the way. Few things are more at the heart of D&D than watching players who know something is a bad idea do it anyway... It usually ends in disaster but makes for a great story.
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Post by geneweigel on Mar 10, 2021 21:36:02 GMT -5
That Q1 was definitely anti-climactic. There is so much wrong with edition era and ongoing stuff its hard to be brutal over anything made at that time. (Even the toys were cool at a time when 50% of the toy store... WAS NOT!) In contrast, Q1 is solid gold.
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Post by GRWelsh on Mar 11, 2021 7:03:08 GMT -5
Q1 was an excellent module, just not a fitting ending to the G and D series. But it was bursting with creativity in the way it showed us what alternate Prime Material planes and planar adventuring could look like. I loved reading about Maldev, Caer Sidi and the Nightworld of Vlad Tolenkov. And it has art from the classic era of TSR artists like Jeff Dee, Erol Otus and Jim Roslof. All of that was great, but Lolth's lair being a giant, mechanical spider ship in the Abyss just wasn't a good fit for the traditional swords & sorcery atmosphere built up in this campaign.
Did anybody ever have a party make it to the end and take down Lolth?
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Post by geneweigel on Mar 11, 2021 8:14:37 GMT -5
Yeah, Q1 was a standard of character burn out in 1983. You killed a god now get retired. Out of the D series it was the easiest to acquire. I remember people having at least one copy at that time. It was required it seemed. I recall being a nonspoiler player being surprised that it was a spaceship but that had a "2001:ASO" feeling to it. The guy who ran it for me in 83, the other Tim, was a hostile DM so it was not a minute of respite. It was all GD veteran walking talking tanks or nothing at the beginning. I just remember stores of old last resort/ rain day wishes being used up a lot.
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Post by GRWelsh on Mar 11, 2021 9:10:47 GMT -5
So were you in a party that successfully got onto the spider ship and killed Lolth?
I remember in middle school a lot of people had this module as well as all of the others from that era (1978-1981). I bought the AD&D books and some modules from a kid who was "getting out of the game" in fall 1981. I had the core three rule books, G1-3 "Against the Giants" D1-2 "Descent to the Depths of the Earth" D1 "Vault of the Drow" and Q1 "Queen of the Demonweb Pits" (the combined/color versions printed in 1981). I read them all constantly and got a lot of use out of G1-3 but very little out of the others except as inspiration. I'm pretty sure the first AD&D I ever played (as opposed to D&D Basic) was in the fall of 1981 with a kid who DMed G3 for us and gave us pregenerated characters who were from his and his brother's home campaign. I had a 12th level ranger with a ring of flying ("Arthur Hothtar" the son of his main PC "Glothiar Hothtar"). It was awesome! Unfortunately, we never played the whole module series.
The alternate Prime Material Planes ideas inspired our campaigns quite a bit and in 1984 one of our DMs, Eric, came up with a magic item that allowed us to go between worlds -- the "Doorway to Infinity." It allowed you to enter a hallway with infinite doors, similar to what was in Q1. We mainly used it to go back and forth between each other's campaign worlds, which we were just beginning to consider as being on alternate Prime Material Planes rather than different locations on the same planet. Prior to that, that aspect of play was ambiguous or undefined.
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Post by geneweigel on Mar 11, 2021 14:22:39 GMT -5
I had those characters for years until I gave them back to their respective owners. They all abandoned them and they were in a folder which I ignored as it was the DM'S notes for that session. A module like that is way too freeform and I believe the DM was not appropriate. Too aggressive that it was limiting. It made a bad taste that I didn't want to run it myself later on for others. Too high level and resource munching.
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Post by geneweigel on Mar 11, 2021 14:23:45 GMT -5
It was played over a few days when everyone was camping out playing games at my house.
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