The Red Hand of Doom (wikipedia entry) by Richard Baker is a 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons mega-adventure.  When it was released, I remember reading about it and thinking “This sounds very close to the H-Series Bloodstone Pass Saga, so I’m going to get it and run it.”  And I’m thankful that I did.

What made this unique was the excellent character interaction.  There was Averron, the ranger who was seeking vengeance on the warlord of the Red Hand armies.  Slade, a male bounty hunter on the cold trail of a woman who had escaped.  Aversanno, an elven wizard archer who, along with his diabolic familiar, was hungry for power.  Gabe, the austere halfing druid who was tasked with protecting Glib, his younger brother.  Glib was a carefree halfing freak-show (bard / cleric aspiring to be a geomancer).

Setup

The campaign started in the hearth of Glib and Gabe’s parents inn.  They needed to investigate some marauders.  It was here that the heroes stumbled into a greater story.  The hobgoblins of the mountains were hiring mercenary ogres to join their ranks and crush the Elsir Vale. Glib and Gabe’s mother insisted that they all needed to warn the Elsir Vale.  The parting conversation between Gabe and his mother was “Watch out for your brother.  If anything happens to him, I won’t forgive you.  Now take this healing potion.  It is for Glib’s use only.  But you should keep it safe.”

Events

The party traveled south to the Elsir Vale, and had several memorable encounters: a sneaky hydra, an assault on a fortress, defending a village from a raider attack, and a handful of truly memorable battles with dragons.

The first dragon encounter was well planned, but poorly executed.  They had protection spells and buffs going, but didn’t know that the dragon could move so fast.  It almost ended in a complete loss, but thankfully they were able to retreat.

The second dragon encounter, much later, was memorable as it was a multi-tiered battle with different fronts to defend and hold.   The combat remains an all-time favorite:

During the combat, as Slade and Aversanno gave chase to a severely wounded dragon, leaving Averron, Gabe and Glib alone.  While cleaning up the minions, Averron was charmed by a hidden foe. Averron, with a look of sorrow, chopped into his dear friend Gabe, slaying him and rather remorsefully dumping his body in a watery grave.  The hidden foe, using a disguise spell, then appeared as Gabe and told Averron to go after Glib.  Glib was able to shake Averron from his charm, and they turned to defeat the imposter.

Details

During each of these combats, Slade, would always enter his barbarian rage with a high pitched scream;  You see, Slade was in fact the woman which “he” was trying to find.  Slade figured the best way to find her daughter was to track the people looking for her.  But the attention to detail was great.  At every point, Matt made sure to leave clues about Slade’s nature.

Gabe and Glib interacted as an responsible / irresponsible brotherly pair.  Gabe was always keeping a watchful eye on Glib, who’s antics and direction were chaotic.  Glib was carefree, while Gabe was world weary, and struggled with his family relationships.

Aversanno, with promises of power from his wicked familiar, eventually sold his soul for even greater power.  The familiar’s influence didn’t stop there; Knowing that Averron was seeking vengeance, the familiar offered power to Averron for his soul.  Averron accepted.

Conclusion

Sadly, due to two players moving away, the campaign collapsed.  For awhile, when one of the players moved, we used RPTool’s Maptool and Skype to facilitate gaming.  It worked reasonably well to have one remote player and all the rest gathered round a table; But the constraints of the tools and the lack of face to face interaction greatly reduced the feel of the game.  With a second player moving away, the game was scuttled.

Had I been born two years earlier, I’m certain I would’ve played in TSR‘s Queen of Spiders adventure for Dungeons and Dragons 1st Edition.  But I’ve never played it; Nor will I likely ever play it.  I did, however, manage to snag a used copy at the Griffon, my Friendly Local Game Store, for $3.  It was missing the maps, but, I figure I won’t likely run it, so instead I can mine it for ideas.  During that visit I also purchased Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, which was heavily influenced by the underlying adventures of Queen of Spiders.

So there I sat with two adventures in hand, both about the machinations of the wicked Drow, evil subterranean elves, and their demonic goddess Lolth.  The differences are noteworthy.  The production quality of the newer adventures (including the Expedition to the Demonweb Pits) is better; Color printing, glossy paper and hardback improve the visceral experience.  The layout has evolved as well.  Whereas Queen of Spiders uses a three column newspaper-esque layout, Expedition uses a two column, textbook-esque layout with a slightly larger font face.

The biggest difference, however, is the presentation and framing of an encounter.  In Queen of Spiders, each of the encounters is “inline” with the rest of the content.  A “Guards at the Gate” encounter includes 3 paragraphs of text to describe the room, it’s inhabitants and features.  There are an additional three short NPC stat-blocks, each 4 lines long.  On a given two adjoining pages, there are often 4 to 6 combat encounters, and another 4 to 6 “empty” room encounters. Some of stat-blocks instead reference a page in the monster manual.

Contrast this with Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, where a single encounter takes up two adjoining pages.  One encounter that I am referencing Giant at the Black Gate (p78-79) has sections for Tactical Map, Setup, Tactics, Conclusion, Supplemental information (i.e. hazards or things in the room) and a massive single stat-block at 50 lines long!  Most things needed to run the encounter is contained within these two pages.

The page size of each adventure’s encounter highlights an evolved understanding of what an encounter is.  Breaking the presentation into Tactical Map, Setup, Tactics, Conclusion, Supplemental, and Stat Blocks helps the game master digest what is going on.  By including this information, however, instead of the greatly simplified encounter of Queen of Spiders, the expectations of the encounter are more clearly defined.  That is to say, the more words used to describe something, the less interpretation required, and the more constraining the encounter; You can certainly “wing it” but why? there is so much information already there for you to use.

An interesting by-product of the Tactical Map is that encounters in Expedition to the Demonweb Pits start within the constraints of the 2 pages.  Characters start an encounter, in my opinion, far too close to the action.  The Expedition encounter format, as well as a lack of separate overview map, lends itself to stark transitions from narration to set-pieces (i.e. battlemat).  I have found that there is very little “lets keep quiet” as we travel through the dungeon, because, “we are going to start the encounter on the tactical map.”  I understand that this is meta-gamey, but the reality has been observed.

Contrast with Queen of Spiders where the entire map is separate.  This means the dungeon master can more easily get a sense of where things are in relation to each other, the transition from narration to set-piece happens more organically.  In particular if I’m using the battle-map to draw out all of the character’s progress.

The other interesting effect of having the very large encounter format in Expedition, is that the adventure itself has a whole lot less encounters.  A single encounter in Expedition is likely to last notably longer than a single encounter Queen of Spiders.  So each encounter in Expedition must carry it’s own weight better; It requires more thought to the design.  After all if I’m going to invest an hour for a single combat (or more), there should be interesting options during the encounter.  Whereas, if most Queen of Spiders encounters are 15 minutes, those options need not be there.

All told, I’m extremely thankful for my $3 purchase, as I got to see how the older adventures were written as well as witness an evolution (e.g. change over time) of adventures.