# Expedition to the Barrier Peaks - your experiences?



## Quasqueton (Jul 27, 2004)

Twentieth thread of a series on the old classic Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules. It is interesting to see how everyone's experiences compared and differed.

_Expedition to the Barrier Peaks_






Did you Play or DM this adventure (or both, as some did)? What were your experiences? Did you complete it? What were the highlights for your group? 

Quasqueton


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## Wereserpent (Jul 27, 2004)

Finally(I have never played it) but I want to hear others experiences.


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## diaglo (Jul 27, 2004)

need i say it... i preferred the wizard logo one better.  


yes, i refereed this one. it was a Blast


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## JDJarvis (Jul 27, 2004)

It is a great adventure I've enjoyed it every time i've played it either ad PC or DM.  While it is in essence a straight up dungeon crawl it is all about discovery and exploration in a fashion that often had veterans experience the gee-whiz factor they did when first playing, which is pretty darned amazing for an adventure written for high level characters.


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## Quasqueton (Jul 27, 2004)

diaglo, your statements on liking the "older of the old" covers has now hit rock bottom. When you comment that you like the 1980 logo in the bottom corner of the book better than the 1981 logo, you have proven that you are simply being obnoxious. You are not being old-school, or even very observant. 

Every time you have mentioned an older cover for these modules, I've posted the pic of the older cover. I will not do that anymore -- especially not to show a simple logo difference that was only at most a year older. I've tried to post the pics of the most common covers, the ones that most people have seen and remember. 

And I will also note that you have never really given any information on your experiences with these adventures. You've simply chimed in to point out that you played or DMed the subject. And to add a comment about something older. "Hey, look at me! I'm old-school!"

Get over yourself. You are not the only "old-school" gamer on this forum. You know this. How about adding something constructive to the forum, rather than just always waving your old-school credentials in everyone's face in every thread. Even hong occasionally adds something useful to threads he posts in.

I have lost respect for you now.

Quasqueton


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## robberbaron (Jul 27, 2004)

Played it with single high (I forget how high) MU.

It was a laugh in places - I remember magic missiling the Wolf-in-Sheep's-Clothing to death (I thought the bunny looked suspicious so blew it away) and nearly died to an Intellect Devourer - but it was quite a good module.

Mind you, this was all while at college in '82 so I may have forgotten the bits I didn't like.


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## diaglo (Jul 27, 2004)

Quasqueton said:
			
		

> Even hong occasionally adds something useful to threads he posts in.




if you read the rest of my posts in your threads instead of focusing on my preference for certain covers. you will see i have added useful info.



> I have lost respect for you now.




the feeling is mutual.


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## EricNoah (Jul 27, 2004)

Owned it, read it, dreamed of playing in it or running it, but I don't think I ever got to actually do it.  One of my greatest (D&D-related) regrets!


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## janta (Jul 27, 2004)

I both DMed this and played it.  Of course, since my gaming friends and I were oh, 11 at the time, we didn't really play it right.  My main memory of this module is that the fencing android and the wrestling android became our friends and were named John and Eric.  (Why they were named this I do not know.  And thinking on it further I'm pretty sure the droids developed a crush on one or more of the female PCs.)  I don't think we ever actually finished the module though -- we had kind of short attention spans.  

In later years, I tried to get people to play through it again, but they all cursed me for bringing it up.  

--Janta


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## Piratecat (Jul 27, 2004)

I tried to run this as my very first DMing attempt back in high school. My players walked out on me after half an hour. It was another year or two before I tried DMing again, but I never went back to this module.


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## Plane Sailing (Jul 27, 2004)

I played in with my MU of the day. Like RobberBaron I spied the wolf in sheeps clothing and thought "You've got to be kidding" and hacked it with my Mordenkainens Sword, rolled two twenty's in a row and under the crit rules we had at the time did the poor beasty about 120 points damage in one blow. 

Kablooie.

The only other recollection I had was that we found some power armour but I ditched it because it was less effective than the suite of defensive stuff I normally used anyway.

I've got no idea what level it was aimed at, I think my PC was 13th level and the others in the party were a little lower. We were very much hack and slash before they hack and slash you first (having just graduated from the Giant series)

Cheers


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## Quasqueton (Jul 27, 2004)

I never personally played this module, but several people in my game groups through the years did. Like others here, I would love to have played in it.

Online, I've read many complaints that this adventure ruined D&D campaigns by introducing sci-fi tech to the campaign world. I re-read this book recently with attention to how that could happen, and I found that there is no way for the tech on that ship to survive very long in a D&D campaign. Everything ran off charges, and there's no way to get more than maybe a couple dozen charges in treasure. Even if the PCs didn't use up the charges in the adventure itself, the items in this adventure are no worse than finding a wand of fireballs with 5 charges remaining.

Even the power armor that I've heard complaints about had no more than 10 minutes worth of energy, and there's no way to recharge on the ship (states this in the text).

Quasqueton


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## the Jester (Jul 27, 2004)

Played it as one of my very first dnd experiences and loved it.  I didn't finish it- I was running a party of pcs all to myself, with just me and the dm.

I later played it again and finished it, ran it once or twice, and really really loved it every time!  Weird flavor, a plethora of cool, weird new monsters (froghemoth, aurumvorax, etc), great treasure (that, as Quasqueton said, runs outta charges), etc.


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## Plane Sailing (Jul 27, 2004)

I'd love to read the module - it seemed to be a sort of "metamorphosis alpha crossover" idea, and we were all used to playing metamorphosis alpha from the mid 70's (it was the first RPG I ever bought!) so it fit in well with our expectations


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## Joshua Randall (Jul 27, 2004)

Played this back in the day with my other 12-year-old friends. We blundered around in the ship, discovering various things and most of the time ending up the worse for wear. For example, my personal PC shot himself in the face with the needler gun (damn that misleading picture). Several other PCs died to the froghemoth (coolest... monster... evar...!) while the rest of us ran away. In the end we didn't accomplish much, but it was tons of fun, and we laughed the whole time.

I don't really object to the sci-fi elements in Barrier Peaks. They were pretty self-contained, and certainly weren't any weirder than any of the fantasy elements in D&D.


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## Aeolius (Jul 27, 2004)

One word - vegepygmy 

   Also, didn't the map of one of the interior walls spelled "E G G"? What significance does that have, I wonder.


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## BiggusGeekus (Jul 27, 2004)

We kept starting and stopping this one in junior high.  By the time we really sat down to run it, half of us had cheated and read through the thing.  So the DM was really ticked off when our brave adventurers were TOTALLY AVOIDING A HARMLESS BUNNY!

The bunny picture was stupid anyway.  Everybody knows that if the module has a picture of something then it's going to try to eat you.


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## Henry (Jul 27, 2004)

OOH! OOH! My Favorite!

I have DM'ed this module 3 times in my life. Once I DM'ed it for a single high-level player Character (I was 13 at the time) and we enjoyed it - He even got 2 android NPC henchmen out of the deal. 

The Second time I played it (about age 16), I turned it into a space-marines derelict ship, a la the second Aliens film. Remove Vegepygmies and other beasties, introduced Xenomorphs and machine guns, and the player loved it.

The Third time I ran it, they players never got below the top deck. They hit the controls to activate the ship, (I improvised a little and added a working power core and a bridge) the PC piloting it flubbed his rolls badly, and they teleported off just in time before it fell, and devastated half of a swamp that it was originally parked in. 

In all cases, those laser pistols and rifles were LETHAL! 1 in 6 chance that a shot not saved against will kill the target!


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## ephemeron (Jul 27, 2004)

Quasqueton said:
			
		

> Did you Play or DM this adventure (or both, as some did)? What were your experiences? Did you complete it? What were the highlights for your group?




A few years ago, I got some friends together with the promise of a one-shot nostalgic dungeon crawl and sprang S3 on them.   

There were five or six players, I think.  I had them use pre-gen characters from the back of the module; there was a lot of speculation as to how the pre-gens could have reached their levels with such mediocre stats and so few magic items.  

Unfortunately, they didn't get very far at all.  After several hours of hacking at vegepygmies (oh, and discovering that 33,000 cu. ft. is a whole lot of fireball), getting annoyed at the color-coded doors, mapping, mapping, and mapping -- it felt like I spent more time describing and redescribing twisty corridors than anything else -- people started getting tired and bored and asked to end with a big fight.  So we "skipped ahead" to the froghemoth and had a fairly satisfying battle.

They never saw the crazy high-tech gadgets, which is a shame.  I thought the artists did a great job of illustrating them in such a way that players would be just as clueless as their characters about what they were, how to use them, or even where the business end was!


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## kilamanjaro (Jul 27, 2004)

We spent what felt like forever trying to get into the power armor and never did figure it out.  The wizard killed himself trying to figure out a laser gun.  We all got mauled by some security robots with great armor classes.  The frogemoth we killed, but we ran in terror from the mind flayer.  (We all thought mind flayers were too awesome to fight for some reason.  The first time I fought a mind flayer was in a first edition conversion of Undermountain.  After my lone monk took it down I couldn't believe that we'd lived in fear of them for so many years.)
Anyway, great adventure.


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## Etan Moonstar (Jul 28, 2004)

Lots of fun.  Ran it as a 3E module with a good group of players.  They almost had the security robots convinced that they were supposed to have the high-level access card they'd found, then someone got paranoid and attacked the robots.  Oops.  The mage (wielding her flaming crowbar--don't ask, please, she was one of the worst players I've ever had, one of the risks of running an open game at a university gaming club) died, but the rest escaped.  The vegepygmies also gave them a great deal of grief, what with the grenades and laser gun (less lethal than the original save or die, but still nasty).  The paranoid tactician of the group (who was also the guy who ordered the rocket launcher, for those of you who read the Ravenloft thread) ordered the rest of the group to run into a small room and use the doorway as a chokepoint against the vegepygmies.  I grinned, and he realized the implications of that strategy about 10 seconds too late, just before a sleep grenade bounced through the doorway and filled the room with sleeping gas as the vegepygmies surrounded the door to use it as a chokepoint against the party.     The druid complicated the situation by casting chill metal on the metal floor outside the door, hoping to drive the vegepygmies back.  They learned then that vegepygmies were immune to cold, and they were stuck either staying in the sleep gas or coming out, standing on the cold floor to fight the vegepygmies, and taking damage from the chill metal spell each round.  They managed to kill enough vegepygmies that the rest ran off to regroup, then the party fled for the main doors they came in, set up a secure camp, and waited there, wounded and scared, until the doors opened and they left, never having gone down below the first level.

I hope to run the whole thing someday with another group.


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## Dr Simon (Aug 2, 2004)

It's good fun (and I always have a tendency to mix in a little SF stuff with my fantasy - blame it on Sheri S. Tepper).

The "flow" is a bit unbalanced though - once you descend below the garden decks it loses momentum, with the more exciting parts being the initial experience of the high tech in the upper decks (with the vegepygmies) and the garden deck. By the time you reach the level with the mind flayer it's got a bit old-hat, and there's no BBEG, really.


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## jasper (Aug 2, 2004)

Played in twice die twice (this was in my early game group munckins etc)
Dm 3 times. The first time munckins megagame and got mad at me when the id started hunting them.
2nd time had mind flayer use the grenades on the party. Slurp!
3rd time most of players wanted to bail so I allow it.


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## rogueattorney (Aug 2, 2004)

Oddly, I've never played or DM'ed it.

Why is that odd?  Because it was the great Otus cover art that I couldn't stop looking at on the comic book rack of the local grocery store that got me to ask my dad, "What's Dungeons & Dragons?"  (I was 8 or 9, and he was a long time wargamer.)  He brought the Basic and Expert boxes home from work with him later that week.

R.A.


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## hong (Aug 3, 2004)

Quasqueton said:
			
		

> Even hong occasionally adds something useful to threads he posts in.




Do not.


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## vulcan_idic (Aug 3, 2004)

Etan Moonstar said:
			
		

> Lots of fun.  Ran it as a 3E module with a good group of players.




Any idea where I could find such a 3E version?  I have a campaign world I'm designing where one of the key plot lines involves the crash of an advanced spacecraft and an evil king (whose island realm has been cut off from magic and the rest of the world due to an ancient attempt to conquer the world) who captures the tech and the crew and can recharge the items and uses this new "magic" to try to recapture his country's former glory...  This sounds like it would be very helpful in designing such a circumstance...


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## Etan Moonstar (Aug 3, 2004)

Well, my 3E version consisted of the original module, the MM, Tome of Horrors (used the website at the time, now I've got the book--essential if you like classic mods), the section in the DMG with futuristic weapon stats, and a bit of on-the-fly DM finesse to handle those few bits not covered by the rest.  As Barrier Peaks has a lot fewer classed NPCs than other mods (classed NPCs are usually the only things I bother prepping in advance when converting a module), it's much easier to convert on the fly.


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## Altalazar (Oct 7, 2005)

I got this module when I was in Junior High (or maybe earlier) and enjoyed reading it and then ran it 1E (of course) when I was in undergrad, around '90, I think, and I think everyone really enjoyed it.  It may have been partial inspiration for me to do a homebrew adventure where the group went to early 21st Century Chicago, which was also a memorable adventure.  

What most sticks out in my mind is the bullette dumped outside for pressing a button, the complicated diagram for figuring out how items worked, and the 'tween level with an intellect devourer, which to this day I always associate with this module.


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## MummyKitty (Oct 7, 2005)

I don't recall all the details of playing this (it was in high school) but I do remember it was fun.  I know our characters were walking around with some of the weapons we recovered in this module through several other more traditional modules (the laser gun wrist band things made great accessories for the female characters-- hey, we were in high school!).  I always liked the old Gamma World with its artifact flow chart, so the one in this module was cool for me, and as was mentioned, the illustrations of the weapons and artifacts were tres cool.  I think some of the other players thought it was weird but I totally thought mixing sci-fi and D&D was a radical idea.


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## Evilhalfling (Oct 7, 2005)

Wow - back from the dead! 

I played this while very young - I played a 30th level magic user who rolled 6d30 for fireball damage - and I cast a lot of these.  I rember puzzling a lot with the doors and cards, and some robot with a powerful force field.  I remember clearly how it ended we found an elevator and pushed the up button while on the top level.  We were all shot out into space - and we died of lack of air.  

I tried to run it once, a few years later, but it the game fell apart before we finished PC generation.  

A third time, we played at a late night pick up game, at a wisconsin Con - The DM speifically said we could use whatever we could remember.  We played for laughs and didn't get very far.


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## JohnBiles (Nov 16, 2008)

We had a ton of fun with this one; the PCs wrecked all kinds of havoc later with the gear they got here.  But they were sad they couldn't get it to fly.

The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing critter suckered them pretty hard and due to some good rolling, they had a very ugly fight with it.


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## FATDRAGONGAMES (Nov 16, 2008)

The WISC nearly did us in when we played it. The module was one I dreaded when I heard about the premise, but I ended up having a blast with it when I ran through it 20 years ago. I bought an Ebay copy about a year ago and am preparing to run it for my C&C group in a couple months. The hardest part for our DM when he ran it was keeping us in check as far as recognizing items that our characters wouldn't have a clue about, he really had to sit on us pretty hard.


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## Scurvy_Platypus (Nov 17, 2008)

Did we _really_ need this thread necro'd from 3 years ago for you to post a picture and give two sentences?

Just so I'm not completely threadcrapping...

I ran this module earlier this year as the finisher to my year long E8 experiment. It was... interesting. The group had a lot of fun and I came close to killing everyone at least once, but managed to (barely) avoid actually killing anyone. Four level 8 characters, but they were pretty heavy hitters in the magic department. The system was a d20 variant.

Highlights:
One character rode the Lurker Above like a Dune Sandworm.

An Assassin Vine flung one character over the edge of the drop, and the whole rest of the party leapt over because it was safer than staying where they were.

Everyone but the warforge-type character gets snagged by ropers. Warforge type manages to rescue the others. Party beats a hasty retreat when they realize there's more lurking at the edges.

Party goes on a plant killing spree and one character is entirely engulfed. He blows the plant apart from the inside.

The Mindflayer (rebuilt using the Green Ronin Psychic Handbook) used the group's tactics against them, and seriously jacked them up with teleports and hit-n-run tactics. He had one character face wrapped and going for the brain suck when another character went with the probably suicide option and blew the thing up.


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## Humanaut (Nov 17, 2008)

Oh yes, I was about 10y.o. then, we had recently moved so it was just my little brother and I playing.  My father wanted to play, see what we were so into.  My brother had a level appropriate PC, I had my father roll up a new PC... he wanted to be a wizard... for some reason I had him start at 1st level !  Needless to say he died quickly, somewhat confused about why he died so quick.  He never did play again with us.  Oops.

Later in college I ran it for my group in campaign play, but i had heavily modified it to be more like the Alien series with homebrew "Alien" and removing much of the original monsters.  That scared the bejebus outta them.  

Summer of '09 my highschool friends and I will gather again for a week of gaming:  "Geekfest 4"  Our DM has promiced a 3.5 conversion, heavily modified to foil us who've owned it for, um, long time.


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## Wik (Nov 25, 2008)

Hm.  I revived this thread to ask a question:  How do you think it would work in a 4e conversion?

I had an interesting snippet of conversation with Blargney about running this as a one-shot, and I may just put together a run using the module.  I have played it before, but I don't really recall it all that well.  I remember something about exercise androids, and improvising the scene into a comedic one that was actually pretty cool.


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## The Green Adam (Nov 25, 2008)

*One of my favorite modules ever, if not THE favorite*

The Expedition to the Barrier Peaks was, essentially, the catalyst for my entire D&D campaign universe.

I intended to run a campaign of AD&D with a bunch of players who had all been playing for a few years but never together. We met at camp and had campaigns running with our non-summer/school time chums. Each wanted to use the character they had already been playing but I insisted that if they did, the PCs in my campaign belonged to my campaign. They were basically alternate, parallel world versions of the guys they'd been playing. They all said yes and we were off!

I altered the background and story slightly...a Mind Flyer, fleeing from knights and brave peasants from a near by village fled into the mountains only to discover a secret passage into the Barrier Peaks vessel which had been buried after crashing hundreds of years before. Most of the crew was dead and gone but the ship's commander survived in a suspended animation chamber. Curious to learn more of this bizarre, hidden 'castle' the Mind Flyer released the commander and sucked his brain dry. The result was utter maddness and the Mind Flyer's personalty and goals merged with those of the ship's captain. Soon, he commanded armies of Metal Men (Robots) to capture nearby villagers for sustenance and psionic research.

Enter, the Neutral Man, an almost elemental entity from the plane of true neutrality, the Concordant Opposition. Foreseeing the activities of the Mind Flyer, now calling himself Lord D'Ark, as a threat to all beings of all alignments on this world, the Neutral Man summoned a force to defeat the mad creature before he destroyed the world (exactly how or why he was going to destroy the world eludes me at present - this was written by my 12 year old mind and I'm 39 now). The heroes chosen came from all walks of life and all alignments, banded together by this Watcher-like fellow to save the day. It was an awesome adventure! Good guys and bad guys worked together, refused to work together, turned on each other and even changed alignment. In the end, the world was saved, D'Ark believed dead, the villains were given pardon and the heroes remained together to form a sort of medieval Justice League. The team used the Barrier Peaks as its base/HQ, later merging magic with some of the SF tech because they simply assumed the place ran on some strange sort of wizardry. Each of the members of the party had communicator type devices that they found in the ship/'castle' and they also kept many other gadgets and gear.

Many, many years later, when I started gaming with a very special friend of mine, I set my new campaign in the same world some 25-30 years of game time later.

I ran the original version, less modified, at least two other times for two other groups. I'll never forget how one group got inside the back flap thing on the Bullette and road around in it for a bit. I met Tony DiTerlizzi at Gen Con once and told him that story because he was looking through a copy of the module. When I met him again a year or so later he said, "I remember you. You're the guy with the Hatchback Bulltette."

Good times, good times.

AD
*Brandon Wheeger*: "But I want you to know that I'm not a complete brain case, okay? I understand completely that it's just a TV show. I know there's no beryllium sphere...no digital conveyor, no ship... "
*Jason Nesmith*: "Stop for a second, stop. It's all real."
*Brandon Wheeger*: "Oh my God, I knew it. I knew it! I knew it!"


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## Derulbaskul (Nov 25, 2008)

This is one of the few adventures I ever played as I normally DMed. The DM i had taught me a lot about DMing, specifically the important of winging it when a player had a good idea.

Frex, my druid was able to draw on the ambient eletrical energy of the spaceship to cast _call lightning_ (which otherwise required the presence of an electrical storm).

My druid also asked to explore the garden level rather thoroughly, specifically looking for poison spines or similar that could be used as weapons against the froghemoth. Said plants were soon found and the froghemoth slain rather quickly.

Anyway, two small events but they made my 12-year old mind realise that I had a lot more freedom as a DM to run a fun game if I so chose.


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## Estlor (Nov 25, 2008)

I'm actually working on adapting this to 4E and merging it with phase one of the BECMI "Wrath of the Immortals" path and the basic adventure Castle Caldwell and Beyond.  (I'm running a very old school campaign right now that's merging a lot of classic BECMI and 1E adventures together.)

Basically, Clifton Caldwell buys an abandoned keep in the mountains only to find it inhabited and needs the PCs to clean it out.  On the way, they encounter strange creatures (sprackles, ploppeds, vegepigmies) that are mutations caused by the ship's energy.  At the keep they have to fight their way through lightning zombies, discover the keep was built on top of the remnants of an alien spacecraft (in this case, part of the Beagle from the Blackmoor "Cit of the Gods" adventure that landed in Karameikos after it went kablooie).  The menagerie part actually becomes the early part of the adventure and once the portion of the ship is found it's a run through the metal men as they try to investigate the "Talking Shield" one of the lightning zombies told them about.

I'll need to tone it down a little bit because the party will be about 4th level when they go in the ship.


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## Wik (Nov 27, 2008)

Estlor said:


> I'm actually working on adapting this to 4E and merging it with phase one of the BECMI "Wrath of the Immortals" path and the basic adventure Castle Caldwell and Beyond.  (I'm running a very old school campaign right now that's merging a lot of classic BECMI and 1E adventures together.)
> 
> Basically, Clifton Caldwell buys an abandoned keep in the mountains only to find it inhabited and needs the PCs to clean it out.  On the way, they encounter strange creatures (sprackles, ploppeds, vegepigmies) that are mutations caused by the ship's energy.  At the keep they have to fight their way through lightning zombies, discover the keep was built on top of the remnants of an alien spacecraft (in this case, part of the Beagle from the Blackmoor "Cit of the Gods" adventure that landed in Karameikos after it went kablooie).  The menagerie part actually becomes the early part of the adventure and once the portion of the ship is found it's a run through the metal men as they try to investigate the "Talking Shield" one of the lightning zombies told them about.
> 
> I'll need to tone it down a little bit because the party will be about 4th level when they go in the ship.





Hunh, cool.  I think you'll have to tone it down more than just a "little bit", though.  Are you planning on keeping one of the main hooks (that the PCs can't really get out once they get in?)

I'm personally thinking a 4e one-shot, with five pregenned characters and a lot of fun.  Androids would make good soldiers, and Vegepygmies are the original skirmishers.


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## frankthedm (Nov 27, 2008)

Here is the fungus sprite sheet. Russet mold and Vegepygmy counters are on the sheet.


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## Spatula (Nov 27, 2008)

All I really remember from this adventure is that the intellect devourer killed my high-level illusionist/thief that I had played for pretty much my entire D&D career, to that point (1e).  The party turned my body to stone to preserve it until the whole thing was over so I don't think I got to play the rest of the module.  Afterwards the druid reincarnated me as a bear.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 28, 2008)

I've read it and think its a great module, but I've only been through it once.  
We barely got out alive.

We had an ultra-high level party going through it- what would be termed "Epic" in 3.X- and nearly had a TPK.  The problem wasn't the NPCs & critters, it was the party.

Generally, we tried to play smart.  Resources were distributed throughout the party and nobody just went "TAB-TAB-TAB" unless it was clearly needed.

It was our first encounter with the Police Robots- at least 4 as I recall- and they looked tough, so we figured we needed a big spell to take them all down at once.  Rather than having the Wizard do something, one of the other PCs- OK, White Lotus, my Ftr/Ill/Ass- used a Ring of Spell Storing to cast a high-level Delayed Blast Fireball set for max delay...

You know, so we'd have _enough time to get away._

Of course, the robots were so insanely fast that they had closed to melee with us by the end of the next round, and were whaling away on us when the DBF went off.

It sure did kill all of the 'bots.  It also sent several PCs into the negative and got everyone down to less than 30 HP.  Since none of the ambulatory PCs was a divine caster, it was time to get out of there, heal up and regroup.

As you can imagine, each subsequent encounter on our way out was a LOT tougher than it would normally be, and by the time we exited, one half of the party was dragging unconscious bodies of the other half.

We never went back.

To this day, some 20 years later, the guy who ran the mage blames me for that mess.  What he conveniently forgets is that it was he who suggested the use of DBF in the first place, and had _his_ PC cast it, it would have had an *additional 9d6* punch to it.


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## Wik (Nov 28, 2008)

That story is priceless.  I forgot about the police robots.  Why is it that everytime someone talks about fireball in 1e, disaster follows?


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 28, 2008)

Thanks!

Actually, we were pretty good about Fireball- it was _Lightning Bolt_ that kept getting us in trouble, what with its ability to bounce and all...

You should see what happens when that spell gets cast in a wild-magic zone with all kinds of metallic targets around...in and around a lake.

(No, mountains did NOT come out of the sky
and stand there...)


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## Mircoles (Jul 3, 2010)

kilamanjaro said:


> We spent what felt like forever trying to get into the power armor and never did figure it out. The wizard killed himself trying to figure out a laser gun. We all got mauled by some security robots with great armor classes. The frogemoth we killed, but we ran in terror from the mind flayer. (We all thought mind flayers were too awesome to fight for some reason. The first time I fought a mind flayer was in a first edition conversion of Undermountain. After my lone monk took it down I couldn't believe that we'd lived in fear of them for so many years.)
> Anyway, great adventure.




Well, they are kind of scary looking.


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## Wereserpent (Jul 3, 2010)

Galeros said:


> Finally(I have never played it) but I want to hear others experiences.




Wow, it is weird seeing a post by myself from six years ago.


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## Olgar Shiverstone (Jul 3, 2010)

Fun adventure, especially for a diversion.  It's best if the players have never heard of it or seen it, though.

When I DM'd it in a campaign, most folks knew about it (1E days), so they'd figure the tech stuff out pretty quickly.  I think this was before the term "metagaming" was invented, and there wasn't much separation of "player knowledge" from "character knowledge".

I do recall the odd laser pistol and a few grenades sticking with the party for a long time to come, to be used sparingly.  I occasionally use bits from EttBP as easter eggs in later campaigns.  All those odd monsters escaping into Geoff had to end up somewhere, right?

I've always thought a good sequel might be to introduce another section of the ship -- perhaps one where the crew had survived in some horrible, mutated form.


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## Ariosto (Jul 4, 2010)

Not my experience, but Something Awful's:
Dungeons & Dragons: Dungeon Module S3 "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks"



> *Steve:* Well the cover rules hard. Who doesn't want to pop on a bat-wing helmet and blast an evil starfish with a death ray? Everybody wants that. Little babies and congressmen would be down for that sort of action.



I'm sure I visited the ship a time or two, but the occasions just blur together with other far-out gaming.

I also played a lot of *Metamorphosis Alpha*, for which (IIRC) the original convention scenario was sort of a 'teaser', and its successor *Gamma World*.

Also *Mutant Future* is rad!


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## Holy Bovine (Jul 5, 2010)

Ariosto said:


> Not my experience, but Something Awful's:
> Dungeons & Dragons: Dungeon Module S3 "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks"




That was really funny!   I love SA's take on this old D&D stuff.


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