I've been playing since '79. B2 in the dining room with six-sided dice from a Yahtzee set. However, its not B2 that I remember the most. It was a borrowed module and soon returned to the owner. Then I bought S1, Tomb of Horrors. We played the hell out of that adventure. Still not the one the adventure I think of. The adventure that defined my way of thinking was X5: The Temple of Death. My friend Dwayne would runs campaigns and this would be the final adventure for my character. The reason being is most of my characters would die. I would get off the skeleton boat and get killed by the spell, Finger of Death. My characters never did saving throws well. It wasn't until my one character, Slice Handler, survived after at least of dozen of my characters died before him. There was an epic three-way battle. Slice against the monsters within and then against his own party member who had taken on the eye and hand of Venca. It came down to a handful of hit points and his last dagger that he had never used. When I think of old adventures that's the one I think of and I believe the one that shaped my gaming philosophy.
Is there an adventure that shaped your gaming style?
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D1-D2 Descent into the Depths of the Earth. It's really an amazing subterranean hexcrawl.
ReplyDeleteQ1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits. Only because it was the only module we had for a long....LONG time. I lived in a rural area and gaming material was difficult to obtain. I think about the web map often. Oh $%#$ I need to go look for a copy on eBay now.
ReplyDeleteA1 - Slavepits of the Undercity
ReplyDeleteFor my birthday I got the Moldvay Basic Set, and my friend's mom bought me a module. But, she didn't know there was a difference between Basic and AD&D, so she bought A1 for me. Well, my friend Jeff ran me through it anyways, and it was awesome. In the years afterwards, I would read and re-read that module, and eventually get all four of them. Never got to play them, but I had them, and the idea of fighting slavers just fit right with me.
Hmm ... I got the B1 in my first boxed set, B2 in it's replacement. I only played each of them once and died quickly in both. After that, I quit playing Magic Users for a while - my luck wasn't up to it.
ReplyDeleteMy oldest and fondest memories predate those. They are of playing X1: Isle of Dread. I didn't realize until years later how big it really was. I thought it was an entire campaign world. The guy running it had dice swiped from his older brother and a photocopied rulebook. He stranded us there and then scattered resources around that provided us the supplies in the standard equipment list. We fiddled around his little faux-medieval village then moved up the the normal villages and our "big" adventures began once we were past the gate.
I don't think we ever knew any real details about the mainland, we were kept contained. The one attempt to sail off met death by giant aquatic dinosaur.
Good times ...
B1 and B2 share that special place for me and still to this day define my play style.
ReplyDeleteERIC!
It wasn't an "official" adventure but a competition module cooked up by someone at the gaming club - The Dark Tower - I attended in the late 70s/early 80s.
ReplyDeleteIt was called The Crypt Of The Courageous and me and whoever I was teamed with (somehow) became the first people to complete it to the DM's satisfaction.
That adventure also saw the "birth" of my longest-serving character - a female half-elf MU/Fighter called Staghind.
Later she went on to face S1 & S2 and a host of home-brewed dungeons and wilderness crawls.
But it was the Crypt that I cut my teeth on - being the first dungeon I'd played in not run by one of my friends.
UK modules early saltmarsh, later uk ones like eye of serpent and gauntlet - interesting gritty worlds. Tomb of lizard king, The Lost city and dwellers of forbidden city - could expand into huge campagns
ReplyDeleteThe early Puffin Books run of Fighting Fantasy.
ReplyDelete"None of the above"--I had Holmes with the dungeon geomorphs. We didn't know there were such things as modules (or girls who would date us, for that matter).
ReplyDelete