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Post by Scott on May 4, 2016 12:17:52 GMT -5
I DD as a 1 shot to the end. It's so damn fiddly. I love the concept and the encounters taken individually. But it's parts are greater than the whole. With some tweaking and more prep work than I prefer for a published adventure, it has the foundation to be great, but as written there's a lot to bog you down.
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foster1941
Warlock
Duke of California, Earl of Los Angeles, Knight Bachelor
Posts: 475
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Post by foster1941 on May 4, 2016 13:43:51 GMT -5
A couple weeks ago I was looking at the "Creations Unlimited" pdf version of this and it reinforced my opinion that I don't like this adventure very much - it doesn't seem like it would be very much fun either to run or to play in. I like the idea of "dark druids" a lot, but I don't like much of anything about the actual adventure and have no desire to run it. I could see taking the dark druid class and maybe a couple of the encounters from the module and using them in some other context, but there's no way I can see running it in anything even close to its published form (especially the the cheesy Dark Quest railroad ending).
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Post by Scott on May 4, 2016 14:15:23 GMT -5
I loved it when I first read it. I had a few big problems running it though. There is too much extra material, and it's all tucked into Appendix A, Appendix B, etc. making it hard to have any flow. Every DD has DD variant versions of the normal druid spells, and the variants are different by faction. There's the time keeping required to track the summoning of one faction's demon lord. There's time keeping for the multiple druids summoning creatures that will follow certain paths at certain intervals. Lots of extended, detailed activity required by the PCs based on short, vague clues. I think I'd like a stripped down, streamlined version of the adventure.
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foster1941
Warlock
Duke of California, Earl of Los Angeles, Knight Bachelor
Posts: 475
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Post by foster1941 on May 4, 2016 15:08:58 GMT -5
I don't like the maps (even apart from the ugly rendering I don't like their structure) and I don't like some of the feel (lots of force-fields and such that don't feel "druidy" to me) and I don't like the canned "plot" with its forced timeline of events that make it feel limited and railroady. I'd have liked something more open and modular that allowed the freedom and tools to use the DD in different ways rather than a single tightly-scripted situation (especially since it relies on a ton of backstory-detail that the players aren't going to have any idea about unless it's spoonfed to them).
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Post by geneweigel on May 4, 2016 22:18:38 GMT -5
The only thing I have is the Troll Lords version and when it came out it was definitely not what TSR/WOTC/Hasbro was making which was vapid "TALKY REALMS" to cartoony (what would later be known as "PERTHFERNDER".
As a continuing series it seemed to have some more potential but in retrospect without the promise it does seem weaker.
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Post by Scott on May 5, 2016 13:33:05 GMT -5
The maps are bad. As far as I can remember there is no scale for the wilderness. The DD lair maps look like brainstorming sessions that were never fleshed out. I still think it's a good read, and the concept is a good one. I don't think it's any more railroad than the GD series; I kind of accept that in a published adventure series. The layout is bad, and the record keeping takes the fun out of running it. With a ton of prep work I could probably run something very close to what I expected from the published adventure.
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Post by geneweigel on May 6, 2016 9:24:54 GMT -5
I have ten tons of Pied Piper crap. I was supposed to redo the Jepton map but I wanted to know what everything was first. There was a start of a key of where things were going and I, as well as GT, fleshed out what we were given as counterparts on the first page of thread. Here: piedpiperpublishing.yuku.com/topic/982/Some-Names-Ive-included-in-a-future-Project#.Vyyk-L6Qnp4Here is the snippet that I did: Of course, I was planning on Wieg to be an EHP in a spin off module called TEMPLE OF THE APE but thats pretty fucking obvious looking back now. FAIL
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