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I did my best not to let player knowledge ruin the fun for everyone else, although it was a challenge watching the players make the same old mistakes I remembered making the first time around. The DM of the campaign I was playing in at the time saw it in my AD&D library & was intrigued enough to run it as a side adventure when many of the regulars in the campaign couldn't make it. In that respect, this module made me a better DM.Īfter not having thought about the module for a decade, I ended up playing it again right before 3E came out. In the various tricks & traps, I gave the players enough feedback to allow them to make good decisions instead of effectively random ones. I ran the module a few times as a DM, always remembering the lessons I had learned as a player in it. Lesson #1 of the Ghost Tower: "When in doubt, hack!" I was furious after the game when I found out that I likely would have succeeded if I had simply bashed the thing a few more times. Annoyingly, I had attacked the force field around the Soul Gem, but the DM made it sound like my attack had no effect, so I didn't try again. Thus it was just a matter of time before we got sucked into the Soul Gem. Sadly, it did not occur to us that the flashing floor sequence was totally random, so we ran around the room trying to deactivate the sequence through a sequence of our own. Of course, since we were playing the Tournament version, there were no "strange" monkeys, but the DM was weirded out nonetheless.Īs might be expected, we suffered heavy attrition through the course of the module & only the Cleric & I (the characters with the most HP) made it through to the final encounter.
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He thought I had somehow read the module beforehand, but I was just being psychic about bad module design. The DM was anoyed in the prehistoric jungle when I warned the party about the danger of su-monkeys. This would end up killing him later in the time travel room when he refused to buckle himself into one of the comfy chairs, as the damage from the acceleration coupled with the earlier damage from the chessboard proved to much for his monkish d4s. If only he had realized that he need to leap 2 forward & 1 to the side each time in order to avoid taking damage. The Monk (who had unfortunately started on the Knight's square) took a ton of damaged before he gave up & basically tried to leap across the room & thus touch the fewest number of squares possible. We never really figured out the chessboard trap. I recall lobbying for the Frost Brand for myself, but believe that I was outvoted. Like many others, we figured a "Ghost Tower" would be filled with undead, so we wasted a lot of our wealth on magic items useful against undead. I was given the Fighter & we were thrilled to be given the chance to equip our characters off of the list provided. I enjoyed the back stories about how the various characters were captured. The GM had just bought it & wanted to run it right away. I played this one right after it came out.
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Overall, as a matter of heaping abuse on lots of random creatures? Sure, it fills the bill.īut anybody who puts skills into Bluff/Diplomacy/Sense Motive/etc or feats into Improved/Extra Turning will be sorely disappointed. Be prepared to draw a diagram to save time and frustration. Replacing pteradactyls with eagles and a pleisosaur or whatever with a giant shark just doesn't convey the sort of prehistoric mood the module is going for.ģ.5) "Spellcraft: Chronomancy" is also a good thing to have people check for.Ĥ) Describing visible gravity reversals is not the easiest task in the world. If you don't want to miss, don't want to offer saves, use Magic Missile (which is a force effect).ģ) When you're going for a major environmental shift - to like, dinosaurs or something? - be sure to actually use, like, dinosaurs or something.
#RETURN TO THE GHOST TOWER OF INVERNESS MOD#
(Paladin retreiving a gem that sucks souls out at random? Not likely.)ġ) Traps have saving throws, even if they didn't when the mod came out no matter how cool the failed-save effect is.Ģ) There is no untyped, no-save, no-miss energy damage. We had 4 characters, 3 survivors (with the one dying to the annoyingly arbitrary soul gem - really, what kind of idiot would leave their death trap sequence set to "Random"?)Ġ) Not all characters are the same. But I did put the smack-down on the fire giant, which almost made up for it (before landing in the ocean, in a freakin' fish, next to a balmy tropical island - wtf?). I played as a Dwarven Cleric + Fighter heavy into undead turning and was sorely disappointed by the lack of anything that was genuinely ghost-like.