Alex
Level 3 Conjurer
Posts: 92
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Post by Alex on Dec 19, 2012 10:39:49 GMT -6
Code Title Levels Author(s) Published Notes M1 Into the Maelstrom 25–30 Bruce Heard, Beatrice Heard 1985 M2 Vengeance of Alphaks 28–32 Skip Williams 1986 M3 Twilight Calling 30–35 Tom Moldvay 1986 M4 Five Coins for a Kingdom 28–32 Allen Varney 1987 M5 Talons of Night 20–25 Paul Jaquays 1987 I used to own M1 but don't recall much about it. I'll query Bruce on Google+. I own all these. M1 is a high fantasy retelling of the Odyssey. M1 + M2 + M5 together make a continuous story arc. M5's cover is misprinted. The levels are 30-35 not 20-25, as one can tell from the first page party requirements and the sample characters provided. M3 was a pocket-plane hopping hack fest and offered little of the high level play concepts associated with the other modules, but as a one-shot looks fairly exciting. M4 was just bad all around, in my opinion (though it seems a common opinion from other posters). In addition to the Masters level modules, some of the Companion level modules do an excellent job of modelling aspects of the high level game. For AD&D there is only the H-series, which is a much less grand scale (lead militias to protect a town from an army of bandits, assassins, and monsters vs lead trained armies of thousands in a continent-spanning struggle between two empires over the contested Norwold region while holding off the berserk rampage of 2,000 frost giants that happens every century or flying three flotillas through a sky-realm and dealing with 3 warring empires in order to reach a vortex to get back to the Prime plane). The H-series are not bad, they just didn't aim high enough, in my opinion.
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Post by tacojohn4547 on Dec 19, 2012 16:20:08 GMT -6
Here is a quick list of the Companion rules modules. Of these, I have copies of CM1, CM7, CM8 and CM9. I haven't read CM1 in years, and the others haven't been cracked open even once.
Code Title Levels Author(s) Year Published
CM1 Test of the Warlords 15+ Douglas Niles 1984 CM2 Death's Ride 15–20 Garry Spiegle 1984 CM3 Sabre River 18–22 Douglas Niles, Bruce Nesmith 1984 CM4 Earthshaker! 18–20 David Cook 1985 CM5 Mystery of the Snow Pearls 15–25 Anne Gray McCready 1985 CM6 Where Chaos Reigns 17–19 Graeme Morris 1985 CM7 The Tree of Life Elves 8+ Bruce A. Heard 1986 CM8 The Endless Stair 15–20 Ed Greenwood 1987 CM9 Legacy of Blood 15–19 Steve Perrin, Katharine Kerr 1987
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rjkuntz
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
Pioneer of OD&D
Posts: 345
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Post by rjkuntz on Dec 19, 2012 16:55:55 GMT -6
Thanks for the posts, Alex and Jon! Compared to other levels of play HLP seems a thin soup.
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Post by mgtremaine on Dec 19, 2012 18:27:18 GMT -6
I used Saber River once upon a time. Heavily modified of course, but it does have a cool series of caverns with elemental wormholes which is a lot of fun. One of my players [Wizard/Psychic] took over the place and made it his keep.
-Mike
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rjkuntz
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
Pioneer of OD&D
Posts: 345
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Post by rjkuntz on Dec 19, 2012 19:40:45 GMT -6
There's always something of primary consequence happening in your games, Mike. That's really cool. Nothing so simple--like, buying a mansion... Rob
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aramis
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 170
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Post by aramis on Dec 21, 2012 3:00:30 GMT -6
As a player: about 13th level. Worked up from 1st in a rather monty haul game. As a GM, AD&D: 15th level peak. Worked up from 1st. As a GM, advanced start, AD&D: worked a party form 9th to 17th. As a GM, Cyclopedia: 23rd level. Again, up from 1st. As a GM, T&T: 7th level. As a GM, Rolemaster: 6th level - TPK. As a GM, d20: 19th level - but party started at 8th, having been converted from Cyclopedia. In general, all of these did use the Mentzer progressions... 1-3: dungeons near home base. 4-6: dungeons needing overland travel 7-9: dungeons needing overland travel and some politics 10-15: getting into the politics 16+: travelling the planes, major politics. What a list! Are you still at it? Are there any current stories? Or have the ole gamers (like so many) drifted their own directions? Thanks for posting this. It's nice to know that the Basic to Master (or was it Immortals?) rules were at least responsible for some high level stuff. IIRC there is an old adventure written by Bruce Heard involving a vortex or something, goldish cover if memory serves correctly, for levels 18+ or thereabouts. I'm now starting to wonder how many higher level addies TSR published BitD. Rob I never ran PC Immortals in D&D... I've not run any D&D nor Retroclones thereof since about 2007, and that was AD&D 2E - and I've decided I really do not ever want to run AD&D again. I'm half tempted to sell off my couple cubic feet of AD&D2E stuff. I ran Cyclopedia last in about 2005, and before that in 1999. I ran T&T this past spring. Players hit 5th level in about 3 months of play. Ended shortly after half the party died, and two players were lost due to a move and resulting work schedule. I really have no love of d20 system - so 3.X is right out. 5E looks a lot like d20. I'm enjoying reading the playtest materials, but I'm not overly willing to run what they've presented, and my players are decidedly unwilling to play it, too. C&C was a beautiful set, but flopped in play with me and mine. Currently, I'm running two games... Prime Directive 1st Ed, and Star Wars: Edge of the Empire. I keep up on OSR stuff out of academic curiosity and nostalgia, not desire to play Old School games. It doesn't help that I learned D&D as a form of very relaxed Miniatures Wargaming more than cooperative storytelling. Actually, T&T and S&S could be seen as "Old School" games, but the tone of both as I learned them is so very different from D&D as I learned it that it's a whole different category of play. Lots of players making stuff up on the fly, GM's saying yes or referring it to the dice...
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Alex
Level 3 Conjurer
Posts: 92
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Post by Alex on Dec 21, 2012 14:37:14 GMT -6
aramis, you don't mention S&S anywhere above the last paragraph when you say it could be seen as "Old School". To me S&S is Swords & Sorcery, a game /style/ not a game /product/. So what did you mean it to be?
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Post by grodog on Jun 25, 2013 19:15:31 GMT -6
So at GaryCon and NTX I ran three high-level groups in a demi-planar, "demonic chase" adventure in my Castle Greyhawk (and will once more at KantCon over July 4th weekend). The players had PCs ranging from 9th to 15th level, and were put into two different "rounds" of the scenario (I wasn't running it as a tourney, but there was definitely too much material to play through in a single six-hour session). Here's the adventure blurb: Some random notes/thoughts about the caliber of play: - One of the three groups succeeded in their task during play (ferrying the artifact to the cathedral's cult; notably, the NTX gropu was the third I ran, so they had the advantage of me tweaking the scenario in response to how play went at GaryCon); one succeeded through hand-waving (they reached the entrance to the cathedral by the end of the session), and one never got out of the dungeon level. None of them had sufficient time to get to the Forgetting Door, but that's my fault for trying too fit too much scenario into the available time. Each team had fun, regardless of accomplishing their goals or not, at least - All of the groups leveraged some good divinatory magics to help wend their way through the dungeon level toward their goal (two used Find the Path, one used Locate Object to locate an entrance to the Leaden Cathedral; one of these entrances would take the PCs directly to the cathedral site, the other would take them to the entrance of the demiplane within which the cathedral rests; in both cases, PCs found the secondary path/entrance, once by ignoring the strongest and most-direct path indicated by Find the Path). - PC selection was a bit odd to me sometimes: the high-level bard and druid PCs were only taken once each, and the 14th level fighter was left on the table at least once (group size played a factor in this too: the NTX group was 10 players, but the two GaryCon groups were 12 each; I had 15 available PCs, so some were always going to be left behind); higher-level PCs are certainly more-versatile and hearty than lower- and mid-levels PCs, but I was surprised that the players didn't seem to worry a lot about balancing out the party's capabilities in terms of characters selected - Players did a good job of coordinating their spell selections and such, though, once PCs were chosen (they roll d% and high roll gets first selection); in particular, the cleric PC players seemed to coordinate strongly, moreso than the MUs did. - I didn't provide enough challenge in some of the combat encounters, despite one of the PCs in one of the groups being slain by a vorpal weapon (later regenerated and raised), and two of the three groups being fairly significantly challenged by the initial encounter in the dungeon level; I probably should have provided more obvious time-pressure in the game too, but that didn't come into play much - Relatedly, and to their collective credit, each team opted to head into the dungeons immediately rather than spending time researching/divining/getting more info/buying more equipment/determining more about their mission and possible foes, etc.; despite the scenario set-up, I did expect some of the teams to spend at least a day or perhaps two leveraging their high-level capabilities to help out their quest, but none of them did This next round I'm going to run the adventure twice, and will likely start both teams of players out at the start of the demi-plane, since I haven't had a chance to test that portion of the scenario as much yet. I'll report back more after the 4th
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