Re: (TFT) Tollenkar's Lair Opinions?

[Sgt Hulka <hulkasgt@yahoo.com>]

Interesting. All the comments seem to be positive so maybe I should give it a try someday. How long should I expect it to take?

--- On Sun, 4/12/09,  <pvk@oz.net> wrote:

> From:  <pvk@oz.net>
> Subject: Re: (TFT) Tollenkar's Lair Opinions?
> To: tft@brainiac.com
> Date: Sunday, April 12, 2009, 10:11 AM
> I don't think Tollenkar's Lair is tedious. I enjoyed
> GM'ing it for a few adventures, and incorporating it
> into my Elyntia-based campaign. It is, or can be, difficult,
> especially if your measure of success is a total victory
> over Tollenkar, but I actually think it scales quite well
> against a wide range of party ability levels and strategies,
> as the party can back out and the game gives reaction
> procedures for the inhabitants which logically don't
> lead to a huge confrontation to the death. I think it does a
> great job of teaching GM's about level of detail, what
> players may or may not do with a prepared area's detail
> (as Rick pointed out), offering a balanced but ramping up
> difficulty level with appropriate risks and rewards and
> mystery, lots of really nice detail and characters and logic
> and cause and effect. I think it's a great example of
> how a TFT campaign can be detailed, make sense, etc. It has
> the potential to teach players lessons about the effects of
> their own differen!
>  t strategies in a logical environment.
> 
> My main criticisms were the map it uses (the shapes of
> which are interesting but mostly pretty random as opposed to
> logical and making archaeological sense, as well as an issue
> I won't mention because it would be a spoiler to people
> who haven't played it), and that the cause & effect
> of strategies could be even better done. That is, GM'ing
> the upper levels the first time, I tried to run it like
> programmed instructions for locations plus the random
> encounter table, which breaks down and doesn't make a
> lot of sense after a while, like a typical old RPG module.
> By contrast, the lower levels are very good in terms of
> describing how the inhabitants react to strangers and so
> it's clear the GM will be thinking of what is going on
> on the lower levels if and when the players get there, and
> that all of the descriptions are flexible and respond to the
> situation. Part of that may mainly be a demonstration of
> what Tollenkar's Lair taught me as a GM from my first
> tries at GM'ing it, to my!
>   later tries.
> 
> Anyway, I didn't find it to be tedious, even when some
> players tried cleaning the entire thing by laying seige from
> above and sending repeated sorties over days and only making
> it to about level 5. Another group tried being more
> adventurous against my mature GM style, and ended up being
> captured pretty quickly in the upper levels.
> 
> PvK
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