3.X Mega Adventuers?

[Lastgrasp]

Anyone run any of the Expedition to super adventures from 3.5. I think there was four in the series. Looking to grabbing one of them. Which one stands out? Which one should I say away from?

I think four where
Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk
Expedition to the Demonweb Pits
Expedition to Castle Ravenloft
Expedition to Undermountain

I heard the Undermountain is more a framework of an adventure.

Also what about:
Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil
City of the Spider-Queen

[Pigkappa]

Expedition to Castle Ravenloft


This one is really good and you should definitely play it. There are a few issues, but they are easy to fix (even if you already started playing it), except for the lack of a conclusion. It's the best adventure I've played up to now.



Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk

I've tried to read it but I didn't like the first 10 pages (an awful collection of names and events needed as a background). I guess it's not easy to run and play it if you know nothing about Greyhaw already.



Expedition to the Demonweb Pits

I've read a few pages and I liked it. I think I'll read it all and eventually play it, when the paper version arrives here, in a few weeks (stupid slow delivery).



Expedition to Undermountain

I've never seen it and I've only read a couple reviews on the net, and they weren't so indulgent about it. I'm afraid that's just a collection of encounters with little background.



City of the Spider-Queen

I'm currently playing it and it's decently challenging and interesting. I don't know if it's our fault, but we've been playing for about 10 sessions now and we've spent most of the time killing drows who won't speak to us in a huge cave. We've actually discovered almost nothing. Lolth has stopped giving powers to her clerics, a new (and more evil) goddess has replaced her, and nothing else. Also consider that this adventure is much longer than the other ones (level 10-18).

I don't know anything about the return to the temple of elemental evil.

So, my personal ranking:
1)Ravenloft.
2)Demonweb pits.
3)City of the spider queen.
4)Expedition to Greyhawk.
5)Expedition to undermountain.

Feel free to ask more about EtCR; I've DMed it once and I'm working on improving it since I'll run it again soon.

[Lastgrasp]

Thanks for the info. Ugh I grabbed a cheap copy of Expedition to Undermountain/Demonweb Pit on ebay. Even it's I don't use them I'll mine them for idea. I have to look at Ravenloft one. Seems good.


Anyone ever do Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil? I know it was early in the D&D 3e cycle. I think it was written by Monte Cook too.

[CTrees]

Out of curiousity, what were the generally advised level ranges for the various expeditions?

[Tyndmyr]

Anyone ever do Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil? I know it was early in the D&D 3e cycle. I think it was written by Monte Cook too.

I own, but have not run it. It appears to be rather gritty/2nd ed feeling, IMO. I'm hoping to DM it soonly, though.

[DiBastet]

If you can get your hands on it, there's a very high level githyianki invasion on Dungeon magazine, and don't forget Red Hand of Doom.

[Thalnawr]

Anyone ever do Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil? I know it was early in the D&D 3e cycle. I think it was written by Monte Cook too.
I've played in Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil a couple times. Our regular tabletop group is a bit flaky, however, so we've never gotten very far. What I did see of it was good, however.

[Zherog]

I've started Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil with two different groups.

For the first group (back when it first came out), we had a near-TPK. The only survivor was the halfling rogue who was smart enough to realize they got in a fight way over their head and ran away to hide. That group opted to make all new characters - including the player of the rogue - and delve back in. We allowed the rogue to "de-brief" the new group, mostly to prevent trying to separate out player knowledge from character knowledge. The second group managed to get about three-quarters of the way through before uncontrollable events prevented us from concluding it.

The second group is my current group. They're a bit under half way through at the moment, but - again - because of events outside of our control, we haven't played since late April. We're talking about getting together again, probably in mid-September, and the general chatter is to scrap the campaign and start new, since nobody really remembers all the little details you pick up during a week-to-week campaign.

Conclusion: Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil is cursed, or at least my copy is. ;)

*

I find it to be a fascinating adventure. It's got a gloriously grand setup (in my opinion), but there's something around the middle of the adventure that makes it a bit of a slog. My best guess is that the dungeon in the central part is a bit too large. It was a great idea, and implemented in a really neat way. It's just a really long dungeon crawl.

A few general problems. I'll put this section inside a spoiler block, since it might contain information people don't want to see, even with it having been out this long:


-- NPCs are horribly optimized. For a point of reference, my current group includes an evoker, a dwarven fighter, and a halfling rogue who relies on ranged attacks (and as built pretty much attacks in the surprise round and first round, then hides). They're not good optimizers. And even compared to this group, the NPCs are poor. In a way it's understandable, since all the NPCs only make use of core material - and the 3.0 versions of them. So expect to need to do some tweaking. Or, if your group optimizes their characters well, a lot of tweaking.

-- The maps are bad. That is, they're bad to use. They're beautiful to look at, but I find them very difficult to draw on the battlemat. The printed maps use a "one square equals 20 feet" scale, so there's that to contend with. And the large, sloggy central portion is within the outer edge of a dormant crater, so it's a lot of rough edges with odd shaped walls and such. Both of those factors (for me) make transferring the maps to the mat difficult.

-- That sloggy middle part. The "crater ridge mine" is a glorious concept, but your players will spend hours upon hours performing a dungeon crawl. And it's really difficult for them to effectively get out and come back if the need arises -- especially if your party "optimizes" the way mine does. They'll have to traverse about halfway around the mine complex, and then either trudge back the way they came once they find the magical McGuffin (a key for the bridge), or continue to finish the loop. As DM, you're expected to do two things:

Have NPCs react appropriately, so that once they know there's an intruder, they go to "red alert."
Keep track of time, and have new NPCs recruited to replace dead ones, and have masses of NPCs fill in the voids left in their wake of destruction.


All of that stuff you're expected to do makes perfect sense. It's just a crap ton of work.

-- There's some poor design choices that you either have to live with, or plan on replacing. One is the aforementioned McGuffin -- the magical key that allows them to cross a bridge over the lake in the center of the crater, so they can move on to the tougher stuff. Such a concept in and of itself isn't terrible. But the way it's designed intentionally lengthens the dungeon crawl aspect of this super-large middle section, rather than allowing the players to get on with the plot.

Another example is the defenses of said lake. It's fiat waved away that players can't fly over it - they get zapped by lightning, and high-level (but, again, poorly build) guards on flying mounts attack anything that survives the initial volley. And yet despite these supposed uber-defenses, the evil temple complex is supposed to be well hidden and unknown.


There's a few other small things, but those are the major points. There's a whole bunch of great ideas in the adventure, and the overall plot arch is terrific. But, in my opinion, it needs that big center part to be redesigned from the ground up - both to improve the flow and to improve the adversaries. If you don't mind doing that, there's a ton of potential for this adventure. If you want to open the book and run it, I recommend you move on to something else.


All in my opinion, of course; somebody else may have an entirely different opinion.

[Jair Barik]

From my experience

-Expedition to the ruins of greyhawk is not a complete adventure. It is a series of encounters and a plot that require some reading to fully understand and then a few big empty holes where the DM needs to fill in the gaps. I would not recommend this if you want something playable straight out the book.
-Expedition to the demonweb pits is 'almost' complete. A very good adventure, challenging encounters but a few little gaps that potentially require DM improv/writing (e.g. several worlds that can be accessed from the demonweb are briefly described but crunch/encounters for these aren't included).
-Red hand of Doom which someone mentioned already is a complete opposite of Greyhawk. Open terrain and outside encounters in place of lots of dungeon crawling and absolutely everything has stat blocks, maps, encounters and backgrounds including a chart for random encounters and a few flavourful fleshed out 'random' encounters plus various contingencies for what occurs if players do various things.

Moving on from these 'mega adventures' you also have the adventure paths which are effectively groups of mega adventures that take the players from lvl 1-21.
These are Shackled City, Age of Worms and Savage Tide. All have pretty decent reputations, having read/ran Age of Worms I can confirm it is very good albeit pretty deadly.

[Andorax]

Ran Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. LOVED it. So did the group.

It is 3.0, so you'l need to do some updating. Back in the day, there was a forum on Monte Cook's website dedicated just to RttToEE, and I don't know but what you might be able to find our old 3.5 conversion manual there (many of us enjoyed it so much we worked on a conversion soon after 3.5 hit).

[Jayh]

Im running "Castle Whiterock" right now, which is a lot of fun, and thinking of running "Rappan Athuk Reloaded" after. I know one of my players wants to run "Red Hand".

[Lastgrasp]

Is the horror stories about Rappan Athuk true? I heard it's really old-school dungeon crawl that is not very forgiving.

Castle Whiterock? That's the one from Goodman?

[Jayh]

Yes to both

[Piggy Knowles]

Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil was the first 3.0 campaign I ever took part in. I had a pretty good time with it, but our whole group was fairly new to the system, and we got slaughtered.

I've never played any of the "Expedition to...", but Red Hand of Doom is probably my single favorite store-bought adventure. It's honestly superior to most homebrewed games I've played in, and I've been lucky enough to have a lot of excellent DMs. A lot of depth to it, but also fairly easy to jump into.

[Lastgrasp]

I've never played any of the "Expedition to...", but Red Hand of Doom is probably my single favorite store-bought adventure. It's honestly superior to most homebrewed games I've played in, and I've been lucky enough to have a lot of excellent DMs. A lot of depth to it, but also fairly easy to jump into.

For the longest time I never ran published adventures but as I get older I'm finding myself running them. I think I actually prefer that now. Some of them are really good. Much better then I could do. I'm running the Carrion Crown Adventure Path series now and it's a blast. Its the first published adventures I've ever ran.

So now I"m looking for more. I heard really good things about Red Hand of Doom.

[Pigkappa]

Any ideas for level 12+? I'm likely running EtCR and then EttDP, so the PCs will be level 12 after that. Is there any other good long adventure apart the city of the spider queen from that level?