Re: (TFT) Tollenkar's Lair Opinions?

["" <pvk@oz.net>]

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 different 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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