So ... good ol' Slave Pits ... I had forgotten how linear a dungeon could be. The only time I ran this was in 3rd Edition and between the Basilisks, the troll-in-the-box and his assassin friend, and the immune-to-a-bunch-of-stuff insect men it was nearly a TPK At the time I blamed it on the conversion that I was using but there is some crazy stuff in this adventure in any edition.
Re-reading it with an eye towards Next I don't think it will be too difficult to manage, With the monsters already converted the bulk of the work is done.- Half-Orc Cleric Assassin? Yep, it's in there. I don't have multiclassing rules for characters but sure enough I have a set of multiclassed monsters - All that's left is adjudicating some of the stuff they are sure to try, and the simple methods in next of using ability checks is flexible enough to accommodate almost anything on the fly. I'm going to resist the temptation to over-plan this and rule these on the fly. Which is pretty much what we did back when this was new so it feels appropriate.
Setting-wise I'm still leaning towards Greyhawk - if I'm going to run an AD&D module in a somewhat retro system, why not use the AD&D setting? I did look over some ideas people have had for placing these adventures in the Realms but it just feels wrong.
Magic items may be a problem as not all of them exist in Next right now. There aren't a ton of them in the adventure, but this is one area I will have to detail ahead of time. Rings of protection and potions of healing are easy enough but rings of spell storing and rings of shooting stars are a little trickier. I'm going to look at Basic and at AD&D and try to come up with workable versions rather than changing them out for something else completely.
Gold is also a potential problem - there is a large amount of coin to be found in this module. Take out the leader and there is 5000 gp sitting right there in a box. This is mainly a byproduct of the original gp = xp system. That said I've never been all that afraid of letting the characters have extra cash in settings where they can't buy magic items. Either they blow it on something like gilded plate armor or they save it for their future castle, and both choices help tie them to the game world.
Finally, I'm a little concerned about running it as-is because there are some large groups of monsters in some places in here and I don't see us running 8-9 PC's - like we might have in the old days - unless we pick up some additional players. I'm going to start off assuming I can run it with the numbers as written and adjust if it proves to be too much.
I also have to give the slave lord in this one a name. Any ideas?
4 comments:
Dhoom.
The problem I have with the Slave Pit series was that they were really intended to be convention modules which would be run multiple times for different groups, then each group would be scored on how well they did. In order to ensure a level playing field, these modules did tend to be really linear. I forget which one, but there's one in the series that has a labyrinth that has only one way through and it goes through each of the traps.
They did flesh them out some beyond the strict tournament sections but the linearity is still there. I'll mention some of that when I get to A2.
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