Let's talk about Barrowmaze

[Blakely]

Yeah, it's a site to be cleared, and my gut says it was initially designed piecemeal as several tiny cairn dungeons and then bound together to make a larger product. Inevitably, you'll lose some cohesion when not designing with linkages at the forefront.

I think you're right. I read the complete bm in print, but I also have a pdf of bm 1, which I scrolled through. GG says in BM1 that he chose most of the monsters and treasure randomly. The only goal apart from robbing tombs is to throw the fount of law into the pit of chaos. It seems like the complete version took on a bigger scope, maybe to satisfy the more modern desire for a campaign to have goals and resolution.

You're talking as if there's a point to the adventure other than to gain gold, experience, and fame.

Yeah, I was looking at it as having a bigger point than that. But the book doesn't really make it clear why PCs would want to destroy the tablet, especially with the stakes being so high. They actually have to commit suicide if they want to destroy it. So thinking through that, the hook of the adventure should probably either be 1. plunder graves, or 2. help Law triumph over Chaos. In an XP = GP game, there's no reason to risk everything in order to defeat chaos. If significant XP is also given for greater accomplishments, then there is incentive to go through the whole adventure, at which point it does make sense to tie the dragon into the destruction of the tablet. According to the book, the Keeper and the Dragon have merged into a single consciousness. If that's the game we are playing, maybe it should be necessary to defeat both creatures in order to destroy the tablet?

Looking at it this way, there is a weakness in the design. GG seems on one hand to want a massive resource-attrition dungeon crawl with randomly determined monsters, but he also wants a save-the-world campaign. If this is true, the best thing about BM might be the map, which looks amazing but is probably hard to appreciate without running it.

 

[Two orcs]

I put Barrowmaze as a quite central location in my current campaign, after 5 sessions the players were invested but I was so bored of it I asked them to go somewhere else. I think the low variability of danger and treasure is what drains it of excitement for me, even though I really like the map itself.

 

[The1True]

I read this in a lot of reviews, and I thought I would encounter the same boredom. That's an awful lot of variations of skeletons and zombies, after all. But, between the constant onslought of undead wearing down the cleric's turn attempts, the tactical situations created by wandering monsters and dungeon loops, and an actual surprising amount and variety of NOT-undead once we got into it, it got really good. I'll allow, the first 1/6 of the dungeon is pretty vanilla, low-lvl undead slog, though. I don't want to be that guy screeching "you're doing it wrong!" since I'm usually the one doing it wrong. For this one, I just went limp and let the dice fall where they may and let the dungeon do its thang, and it all just fell into place: rival adventure party's waylaying characters as they limped home, characters losing their minds as they tipped over the optional "fear factor" meter, trickles of undead turning into unstoppable hordes as characters ran around making too much noise, the machinations of the dungeon factions, the fucking beholder over the pit of endless zombies!
As I've gone on and on about, I play 3.5e, but I ran off the 1e stat blocks in the book, which made a lot of the encounters a breeze. This just led to the characters delving deeper rather than faffing around with 15 minute adventure days, and getting themselves into real trouble as a result.
My only problem is the 3e tendency to pixel-bitch the dungeon for traps and secret doors, which has led to the players attempting to interact overlong with rooms that just needed a quick once-over and move along.

 

[Blakely]

I read this in a lot of reviews, and I thought I would encounter the same boredom. That's an awful lot of variations of skeletons and zombies, after all. But, between the constant onslought of undead wearing down the cleric's turn attempts, the tactical situations created by wandering monsters and dungeon loops, and an actual surprising amount and variety of NOT-undead once we got into it, it got really good.

That's why it seems like it has to be played to be appreciated, but I could see like 2 Orcs said, that it could be boring, depending on the level of lethality. If you're using death saves, and no turning adjustments or fear factor, or if you can level up in the dungeon without having to make it back to town with your treasure, I could see it being boring. I think it's meant to be a survival game. I envision it like a zombie movie. No one complains that Day of the Dead only has zombies. If you add in bottomless pits, save-or-die traps, and any amount of noise drawing more undead, it could actually FRIGHTEN the players.

fucking beholder over the pit of endless zombies!

This is weird because BM1 calls this monster Ibex-ibydl, an eye of terror. Advanced Labyrinth Lord describes that as basically a beholder. The 5e BM complete defines him as a Chuul, which is a crustacean crab creature. That makes no sense in context, and the player illustration shows a beholder over the pit. I guess it's one of the many mistakes in the conversion, which I don't really care about, but it does mean you have to do some research and prep if you don't have both versions to compare.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

I envision it like a zombie movie. No one complains that Day of the Dead only has zombies

The problem with this comparison is that Day of the Dead isn't a film you watch over a period of several months, in sessions lasting 5+ hours at a time. It's over in 100 minutes, and you move on to different things and other kinds of films.

 

[Beoric]

As I've gone on and on about, I play 3.5e, but I ran off the 1e stat blocks in the book, which made a lot of the encounters a breeze.

I've heard of people doing this with 5e rules using 1e monsters, and the gg no re podcast does this most of the time when they run 1e or OSR games. It seems to work fairly well in a pinch.

 

[The1True]

This is weird because BM1 calls this monster Ibex-ibydl, an eye of terror. Advanced Labyrinth Lord describes that as basically a beholder. The 5e BM complete defines him as a Chuul

Yeah, this is for sure an IP issue. It's a beholder though. We all know it, he's just not allowed to say it.

It's over in 100 minutes

That's fair, and it can be a bit unexciting to read for consumers who are more into collecting and reading, than trying to play everything they buy; a category I very much find myself in. In this case though, this is offset on the one hand by the lavish illustrations and ton of content that keep the reader moving along. And, on the other hand, the large areas of dungeon that are occupied with seemingly tedious loads of one particular monster or another, end up interesting when you start to mobilize that tribe of npc's as a whole rather than room-by-room. Piss off the gargoyles, the harpies, or one of the cults, and you're going to end up hounded through the dungeon by a snowballing army of enemies. Fleeing blindly from these encounters ends up turning boring room encounters with undead into deadly roadblocks as the party looks for a way out, place to rest, or just a corner to fortify.
Enforcing weight/encumbrance limits on treasure, and like Blakely said, making the party return to town to level up gets the PC's to explore the Barrow Mounds a bit and forces some adventure in the Moores. Eventually, the players will need better services than Helix can provide though, and I kind of wish GG had detailed Ironguard Motte a little more. This brings up an opportunity to bring out the machinations of the Cults and introduce treasure hooks and alternate entrances to the dungeon, which just happens naturalistically, once again, without a lot of planning necessary. This may be more of a benefit of the later Complete editions of the adventure though. And of course, the dungeon has restock tables, so the players will be motivated to find new entrances so they don't have to forge their way back through freshly inhabited rooms to get to where they last left off exploring.

 

[Blakely]

Piss off the gargoyles, the harpies, or one of the cults, and you're going to end up hounded through the dungeon by a snowballing army of enemies. Fleeing blindly from these encounters ends up turning boring room encounters with undead into deadly roadblocks as the party looks for a way out, place to rest, or just a corner to fortify.

I don't mind the similarity of monsters in an area of a dungeon. You are entering the home of a tribe or group of creatures who will work together to fight the party by responding to assaults in neighboring areas and possibly sounding an alarm (depending on the type of creatures). This forces strategy instead of just room by room tactics. Early modules like B2 introduced this as a way of playing D&D that makes logical sense, although lots of people say that was uninteresting too.

1True, did you use the extremely lethal stuff, like bottomless pits and save-or-die poisons? I don't like death saves (don't know how 3e handled that), but I'm pretty uncomfortable with telling someone their character is dead because they missed a saving throw. How did you describe all the pit traps? Did the floors open up like a trapdoor, or was there canvas over them with flagstones on it?

 

[The1True]

I asked the players at the start if they wanted to play Save-or-Die, and they voted yes. Probably why they ran away from the not-beholder and never went back. As I mentioned, they pixel-bitch a lot, so they've managed to skirt or disable most of the death-traps. They've gotten sloppy and fallen into a few pits anyway, usually while fleeing or pursuing something. So far, they've all been ten-footers with maybe a spike or two at the bottom. I've tried to be pretty ruthless with the dice. The only cases of fudging I can think of were more to hurry combats along than to show pity on anybody. I've also ruthlessly prosecuted that optional Fear Factor rule at the start of the book, which has forced the players out of the dungeon to take a mental health day more than once. One of the characters finally lost his mind, and we've been tinkering with various diy and homebrew insanity charts ever since. He's having a blast (no offence to those of us out there with very real issues...)

I usually telegraph that the players are in a SoD situation if I can. In the case of bottomless pits, I'll occassionally allow a nearby PC a Dex or Str check to try to grab their falling companion if they call it out fast enough and have been clear about their proximity to each other in the marching order.
PC's have definitely died and had to be dragged back to town. I've installed a bishop at Ironguard Motte to tend to the more expensive healing. The PC's have taken to hiring henchmen and/or taking on cohorts, so players with dead characters just switch over to one of those until they can get raised.

I haven't encountered any No-Save-Just-Die yet. It's hard to pull off without people squawking in a 3e game, unless it's part of the social contract, which it is in this case. If such an effect were to rear its ugly head, I would once again, strongly telegraph the situation so the players understand what they're getting into and don't feel ripped off by DM fiat if they're suddenly dead.

All in all, the knowledge that sudden death awaits has shaped play significantly.

 

[Beoric]

I asked the players at the start if they wanted to play Save-or-Die, and they voted yes. Probably why they ran away from the not-beholder and never went back. As I mentioned, they pixel-bitch a lot, so they've managed to skirt or disable most of the death-traps. They've gotten sloppy and fallen into a few pits anyway, usually while fleeing or pursuing something. So far, they've all been ten-footers with maybe a spike or two at the bottom. I've tried to be pretty ruthless with the dice. The only cases of fudging I can think of were more to hurry combats along than to show pity on anybody. I've also ruthlessly prosecuted that optional Fear Factor rule at the start of the book, which has forced the players out of the dungeon to take a mental health day more than once. One of the characters finally lost his mind, and we've been tinkering with various diy and homebrew insanity charts ever since. He's having a blast (no offence to those of us out there with very real issues...)

I usually telegraph that the players are in a SoD situation if I can. In the case of bottomless pits, I'll occassionally allow a nearby PC a Dex or Str check to try to grab their falling companion if they call it out fast enough and have been clear about their proximity to each other in the marching order.
PC's have definitely died and had to be dragged back to town. I've installed a bishop at Ironguard Motte to tend to the more expensive healing. The PC's have taken to hiring henchmen and/or taking on cohorts, so players with dead characters just switch over to one of those until they can get raised.

I haven't encountered any No-Save-Just-Die yet. It's hard to pull off without people squawking in a 3e game, unless it's part of the social contract, which it is in this case. If such an effect were to rear its ugly head, I would once again, strongly telegraph the situation so the players understand what they're getting into and don't feel ripped off by DM fiat if they're suddenly dead.

All in all, the knowledge that sudden death awaits has shaped play significantly.

How do you think they would feel about it if raise dead/resurrection isn't a reliable option? This is an Eberron-related question, it is hard to find people capable of doing resurrections outside of major centers, and even when you do, it only works properly about a third of the time:



The marut shows up because raising dead is breaking the rules, and they do their best to kill the newly-raised character and those responsible. Needless to say, most clerics do a bit of divination beforehand, and if the result is "woe", they pass.

 

[The1True]

Jeez man. Just kill them. That chart puts the PC's through a lot of unnecessary suffering. If I was playing in that campaign, I'd have found innumerable ways to stack the dice on that roll so as to cut out any randomness.
I guess if character death is super rare in this campaign, I'd keep the chart for a fun one-off side quest. But it would be tedious otherwise.

 

[Beoric]

Jeez man. Just kill them. That chart puts the PC's through a lot of unnecessary suffering. If I was playing in that campaign, I'd have found innumerable ways to stack the dice on that roll so as to cut out any randomness.
I guess if character death is super rare in this campaign, I'd keep the chart for a fun one-off side quest. But it would be tedious otherwise.

The chart doesn't really come into play until the PCs are high enough level to do the job themselves, because the very rare caster who is able to do it is gonna augury the shit out of that before raising anyone.

The other issue is that you have a very limited time to get that spell done. The Eberron afterlife is very different from most settings. Spirits in Dolurrh, the Land of the Dead, lose their memories rather quickly, until they are just empty, unrecognizable husks, which are used as raw materials for the natives of that realm. You need to raise them before they lose all their memory, because they don't get it back when they are raised, and once they have reached a certain point, resurrection isn't possible.

EDIT: Adding to this because of this post, this also means you don't know there is an eternal afterlife, and you don't know where you are going. The existence of something beyond Dolurrh is still a matter of faith.

As a practical matter, raising dead just isn't part of the game until the PCs are quite advanced. That or resurrecting your dead buddy ends up being a side quest to Dolurrh, or doing a deal with whatever Dark Power interdicted your buddy's soul. It puts a whole different spin on save-or-die if resurrections aren't handed out like candy, and death isn't just an inconvenience. It's why I've reflavoured an existing rule to maim rather than kill when you flunk that third death save, so you just lose a limb or are blinded or get brain damage, all of which are easier to deal with than death.

 

[The1True]

I used to have an Impressive Scar table that I broke out for character deaths and critical hits. You need to talk it over with the affected player, but I've found people surprisingly receptive to playing without an eye or an arm or a leg if the penalties are moderate or surmountable with training. The handicap becomes a badass addition to the character portrait. (Once again, no offence to those out there living with physical disabilities who maybe don't have such a romantic view of their condition...)

 

[Beoric]

... but I've found people surprisingly receptive to playing without an eye or an arm ...

This just makes you eligible for cool undead themed prosthetics!