RPG Retro Review: Temple of Death
Вставка
- Опубліковано 20 сер 2024
- Going back to 1983 to review the classic Expert Module: X5 Temple of Death
Vaults of Pandius: pandius.com/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
X5 Temple of Death on PDF and POD: www.drivethrur...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My Patreon Page: / captcorajus
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PayPal Tipjar: www.paypal.com...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Facebook: Dungeons and Dragons RPG Reviews: / rpgretroreviews
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
captcorajus on Twitter: / captcorajus
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
captcorajus on tumblr: www.tumblr.com...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact me: captcorajus@gmail.com
A 37 year old module. Man, I remember buying it brand new back in 83. Think I will need a potion of youth soon.....
Get me some too brother!
Fun, isn't it? Worst part is realizing you've outlived an ever-increasing number of creators from your youth. Sigh. Think I'm going to pursue lichdom myself. My health care doesn't cover potions of longevity.
Don't forget, potions of Longevity have a cumulative1% chance of REVERSING the effects of ALL Longevity potions consumed! ;)
Hmm, Longevity Potions? = short term solution only, Lichdom? = Ugh icky, Reaching Immortal level? = to hard (and too much 'immortal politics' even IF you succeed)
That sucks. lol
@@sharkdentures3247 See, that sort of thing is why undeath is the way to go. Just don't go with one of the routes that have hidden upkeep requirements, especially if they're also saddled with a slew of goofy weaknesses. Take vampirism, for instance. The blood-drinking and sunlight-induced immolation issues aside, who wants to spend eternity with severe garlic allergies? :)
Potion of resurrection for me lol
Please continue with reviewing 1st ed D&D Basic/expert modules. myself discovered my old D&D stash from 30 years ago and want to get back in to it and include involving my family. I find your series invaluable as I absorb the info needed to start RPG again. Don’t Stop!!!
I'm loving your reviews. I hope you plan to do B10: Night's Dark Terror at some point. That was one of my favorite modules of the old B/X era.
Defiitely!
I love the old modules text and art work it's so nostalgic!! I LOVE IT💚🇮🇪
erol otus is my favourite old school artist, brilliant artwork ! :-]
@@nozzer2002 Yea! And I love your intro its gone too short now I remember that tune in the 90s I taped a fantasy program off the TV. Keep up the great work yours is one of my favourite channels💚🇮🇪
The reason I love your channel so much is because. Every time you do a review I become a kid again!! Thank you Cap 😊 👍🤘
I wish they would re-release the Mystara setting. It was my first Campaign setting back in the early 90's. This adventure sounds vaguely familiar. Not sure I ever ran it, but I collected every D&D book I could get my hands on and I'm pretty sure I owned this at one point or another.
Please write to Wizards of the Coast and let them know you want Mystara back. The way we customers get what we want is by ensuring the company knows there's a demand for it. (An online petition would probably achieve even more than a single message.)
This was the very first D&D product I ever bought in the summer of 1983 shortly after playing the game for the first time (the DM ran X2 Castle Amber) before I got the BECMI basic set at the end of the year.
I just read this one in the past 2 weeks, and man are those tunnels through the mountain fun. This one did a great job of mixing those kind of weird fantasy elements (a well can make a ladder to the friggin moon for no reason) and the "behind enemy lines" feeling Cook captures so well. Agreed, the ending is a very sudden roll credits sensation.
And of course X5 and another great review - thank you! Playing these modules provided some very vivid memories even though we never ever finished one! TPKs all round in those days.
About the abrupt ending of the adventure, Cook provided two ways in the temple for PCs to teleport back home, the teleportation closet and the House of Zebulon magic item. But in addition to that, anyone who would like a follow up adventure to this one written in Cook's style can find on the pandius website an adventure called Escape from Hule that was published in the last year in Threshold Magazine issues 22 and 23. It provides three routes for players to make their way back to their homeland and uses the B/X Moldvay/Cook rules.
Outstanding overview of an interesting sounding module. Always look forward to your videos and my wife says your voice is soothing when I’m watching your videos while she’s going to sleep. 😄
For all that I’m updating my Patreon to top tier for you. May you keep making awesome content for years!
Wow, that's great, I was going for soothing. AND THANK YOU!!
@@captcorajus
Yeah, telling us in a soothing voice that the Master of the Desert Nomads and his army are preparing to conquer the known world. 🤣
Another great review, another module I will try to get on pdf.
Thanks.
This is a rockin' old module. I might re-run it again and expand heavily on it.
Yeah, this one leaves a LOT of room for expansion.
@@captcorajus In fact, it could even be interesting to have my players take on the roles of dissidents who try to change and save Hule from within. Hmm. I need to ponder this.
Would you consider reviewing CM9 Legacy of Blood? Besides being a neat module, it focuses on a style of play (domain building) that Basic did so well and has been lost to suceeding generations of D&D. That could be an educational episode for the uninitiated.
Great review. I recently got X5 as a POD and can confirm it's a good product. Recommended (despite the strange lack of a POD option for X4).
Your advice on how to run the module was really useful. I agree it should do a bit more to help the DM. There's a possibility of escaping the Temple using the Master's skyship (crewed by skeletons), and another using a pocket dimension to transport back to the Abbey in X4, but neither are very obvious. Killing the Master without fighting him is also possible, but it's not clear how anyone can be expected to work this out. Perhaps adding some additional (subtle) clues in the Magden village encounter would do it?
It would be interesting to hear your views on X10 at some point. Although it's meant to be a sequel, it could almost be an alternative way to tell the Master's story. You could even adapt it as a prequel, fleshing out the war mentioned in X4 (not my idea BTW - I think I saw this suggested on the Dragonsfoot Forums).
Damn, I meant to talk about the skyship. lol.. oh well, I guess I'll save that for X10. :)
@@captcorajus look forward to it! Keep up the good work 👍
A skyship crewed by skeletons? I bet that was inspired by the ship crewed by zombies in the Tunnels & Trolls solo adventure: "Amulet of the Salkti".
Great video, the temple map looks great, very inspiring to make me wanna make my own temple of death. I shall add a giant cauldron that if the pc’s are captured end up tossed into it to boil, thats a fitting end to those pesky adventurers messing with the masters plans... 🙂👍🏻
They finally made both X4 and X5 available on POD. I just grabbed both of them and Drums on Fire Mountain
Is this the one with the cool spectral hounds? I have the original somewhere. One of my favorite modules as a kid in The 80s.
Good review
Sounds like an interesting module.
Great review as usual.
If you have Indy, that would be a great review, (TSR)
Thanks for your videos, Always fun
He home brewed this . Great but I loved nomad more
I wound up buying the package deal (shown in your last vid) for $40 on ebay with the desert nomad adventure plus this one. I will probably steal a bunch of ideas from both and modify the theme somewhat to fit in my Irish Celtic based campaign (no desert, for example). In 1983, I would never have bought these because AD&D was the shyte back then, so why would you bother with B and X? Duh. I got the Basic box for Christmas 1981, read it and went out and got the Expert set a week later. My friend goes, 'Oh we play Advanced D&D.' So I wound up playing AD&D and buying stuff for that with my limited money as an 8th grader and through high school. But I still have to say that I learned just about everything I needed to know for adventure design from Keep on the Borderlands & Isle of Dread. Anything I learned after that was gravy. These dungeons seem to be right in line with those. esp. the hex crawls of the Expert set. :D
My introduction was the opposite. My DM hated AD&D and he introduced me and my friends in the 80's to BECMI as he always said A&D&D and unnecessarily more complex and it wasn't as much fun. So its all we played and I still have all the rules book sets and 40+ modules and gazetteers. Never played AD&D to this day (though different race and class sound good) and when I game back to the hobby years later, 5th edition is what my new DM played. Now I run my own 5e game for my daughter and her friends and dads on one weekend and play in another game on alternate Saturdays for the last 5 years. Not sure if I'll play BECMI again but may converts some modules. Always loved X4 and X5.
@@boyfromoz7 I agree...AD&D is not necessary, although there is a lot of good info in the DM Guide and Player's Handbook...I have pulled a lot of quotes out of them and cited them in a home brew world/rule system that I am designing. I have learned a lot from those materials people used in the early 1980s. :D Though I think BECMI refers to a different Basic/Expert set than I am talking about?
Hi. I really enjoy your reviews, especially of the old D&D and AD&D module.
Any chance you can review I11 'Needle' sometime?
Will you do the 3rd in this Trilogy? Red Arrow, Black Shield?
Seems likely.
I'd love that. Still have that module on my bookshelf
I bet the reason the Master of the Desert Nomads seems difficult to kill in Temple of Death is that he's meant to survive for the final module.
Me and my friends played through this module in 5e, and we discovered one critical flaw in the architecture of the temple that made the battle against Master and his forces a cakewalk.
We stealthed our way through the temple with disguises and poisons and deception, until we got to the final area. There we basically fooled/killed a few people, explored the area, and once we got to the second floor, started killing people outright. After killing everyone else upstairs, we came across Master and he fled downstairs.
By this point I realized that out of the several different staircases throughout the main temple, only ONE of them led to the main room of the upstairs.
As the downstairs began to fill up with goblins, bugbears, ogres, crab demons, ogres, clerics, holymen, and giants, I poured several flasks of oil on the stair case. We then positioned ourselves in front of the stairs, tanks in front, mages and ranged attackers in the back. With the stairs being difficult terrain and forcing them to make Dex saves each turn, it was very hard for the large armies to come up and swarm us. Most who tried died from fall damage. The two tanks held back the few monsters who got upstairs while the magic casters firebolted them to death. Only the Holymen managed to get through and hid behind the secret door next to the stairs, but we managed to flank them.
After 8 rounds, our DM had to say, "The blood of your enemies washes away the oil."
Eventually the only ones left were the Crab elephants, the Master, and his Wizard friend. It was a reasonably tough fight but we managed to defeat them, mostly because our Druid, two Wizards, Sorcerer, and Artificer all had their spell levels unused. And then defeated the master again.
Funny that they made the temple pseudo Cambodian but then in X10 the Master is clearly the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Yep. Iran and Cambodia (Khmer Rouge genocide) were big news back then as symbols of "evil". Meanwhile, the US govt backed Saddam's Iraqi invasion of Iran, the US govt gave covert aid to the genocidal Khmer Rouge and socialist Vietnam invaded Cambodia to end the Khmer Rouge's genocide, and the USA was making wars constantly, including the more famous US invasions of Grenada and Panama. In psychology, we call this "projection".
i love the intro these vids
BECMI Mystara is simply the best.
You should review Gaz 2 it goes with this module.
I've always liked this module but have also always felt that its cover art didn't do it any favors.
I like the cover art. The cover art and the title are what made me want to play it.
Thanks, been waiting for this one :)
6:42 What is the true nature of the Master?
Have you reviewed "Quagmire! "?
Talking about campaigns on mystara. Do you know calidar? It's writen by Bruce Heard, I think he wrote Voyage of the Princess Ark. I have the first calidar's book on PDF, and I liked it very much. But I would love to watch you do a review on the setting.
yeah, i'm very familiar with it, I just haven't invested in it as I am invested in Mystara, and my time and funds are limited. Its seems highly unlikely that i would ever get to play in it, though I understand its quite good.
@@captcorajus I understand, just would love to know your thoughts on it. Cheers and thanks again.
@@itsasecrettoeverybody I greatly appreciate your confidence. If Bruce sent me a copy of the world, I'd totally review it! lol
@@captcorajus You going to look at Welsh's 5e Mystara book at some point?
If for some reason the group accidentally or intentionally go to the Moon, how would you resolve it? I understand from a previous video that the moon gate is a one-way. If the party doesn't have planar travel spells and you don't want to TPK the group outright, perhaps one idea would be to leave a Spelljammer type ship crashed on the moon, that they need to retro engineer Gamma World style that crashes on atmospheric re-entry(Revenge of the Sith style)? Or leave bodies of other unfortunate adventures there that happen to have a spell book with some rudimentary spell that a wizard was working on that gets them to the Astral Plane above Mystara (at which point they will see that the planet has holes if they inspect it well enough) but not back on track to where they were.. or an item with a Wish? I mean its all very Dues ex machina to do something like that, but maybe it might create new campaign ideas outside the module.. idk. I guess if someone in the party has a type of mass teleport spell it might solve it though, but that is a pretty high level spell for the module..
Well, here's the cool part. I'm the DM, its not really my problem to resolve. Its the player's problem to resolve. That's my DM style in a nutshell. I have absolutely no care on how it gets 'resolved'. There's a near unlimited number of ways they could solve the problem, and you mentioned a few of the possibilities.
For me at least, I'm as much there 'to see what happens next' at the players are. A lot of DM's obsess about how this is going to get resolved or how that is going to end, but I don't. If they end up going to the moon, I'm sure there's SOMEONE there to interact with, probably some dangerous 'moon creatures' or the like, I sort of get giddy with the possibilities. Oh how much fun it would be if the players go that route... lol.
If the players seem to express interest in 'spell jamming' perhaps that's how it will end up, though in all likelihood it won't be as simple as finding a ship and flying home. :)
@@captcorajus Good points.. I would tend toward having a few loose scenarios in my head available if it happens though, It definitely doesn't have to be on rails, but I think having a few encounters they COULD stumble upon if they are so inclined or so lucky, there must have been a purpose for the portal in the first place..
@@Leftylives Absolutely!! When it comes to things like that, I really do listen to the ideas the players put out at the table. I totally steal those ideas, though frequently it ends up with some twist that defies their expectations. In my head I'm like, "oh, that's actually a pretty good idea, but what's the twist?"
@@captcorajus I cant remember if the moon had air or not, if not it would be a TPK unless some Dues ex machina happens. Of course its the DMs world and you could do with it as you like and add air and moisture and plant matter or whatever.. it doesn't need to be a barren Earthlike moon, but if I remember right it was described as such.. It could be a forest moon of Endor or whatever complete with little furies running around, haha!
If they go to the Moon, they all die from lack of oxygen. Simple. 🤣 Ok, giving a warning first would make it less upsetting and increase player survival.
WotC should put out a giant hardbound Mystara setting Cyclopedia.
I think they'd screw it up.
@@BTsMusicChannel what? you don't love monster stat blocks so long and convoluted they can't be summarized and have to be put into adventure modules as "See MM page 123".
@@dungeoneering1974 :D I am with you on the reprinting old stuff 100%...Wouldn't it be great if all the original B and X modules were in one book, for example? But I wouldn't trust WOTC with anything at this point. I am glad that they are doing so much to popularize D&D, but at the same time they are sort of changing the expectations of players in a way that I think changes the quality of the game in a way that makes it a little too cartoonish for me.
Very cool lol
Hey Cap'n, any idea why some monsters (both old and new to this module) have an asterisk next to their name. There's no explanation that I can find.
Next to the name or the HD? usually there are a number of asterisks in BASIC monsters to help determine what to give in regards to XP due to monster special abilities.
@@captcorajus Next to the name. This occurs both in the new monsters section (but not for all new monsters) and in the text of the adventure (sometimes next to classic monsters too, like vampire or mummy). It occurs in both X4 & X5.
@@lindy9196 I believe an asterisk next to the monster name means it can only be hit by special/magical weapons. As noted above, the asterisks next to HD are special abilities.
I don't know how to play dnd can you help me captin
I have a 'how to play' series on my channel my friend. Did you find it yet?
@@captcorajus I just did thank you
@@captcorajus I like the idea of being a dungeon master
I’m looking for a 1st or 2nd Edition module to introduce D&D to my 11 year old nephew and my 9 year old son. Neither has ever played so it would need to be a low level campaign. Any suggestions?
Stacey Mello i suggest using “Keep on the Borderlands” its a great simple starter module for new young players. And i have had many say the module with its simplistic way gets new players hooked. I know i was hooked after i played this module for newb’s. Heck i had a group of players claim the caves of chaos as there base and sealed the evil temple with a good old fashioned gnome alchemist having barrels of his creation go boom and cave in the temples areas so it could not be used again... or is it.... tune in next year when the party discovers somethings amiss in there caves of chaos base... 👍🏻🙂😉
You might also consider 'Tower of Zenopus' from the holmes basic set. I did a review on it while back.
captcorajus yes thats a good start. It also is a good tie in if they rescue lamunda the lovely. She than takes the players to adventure in the area where the DM has placed the keep on the borderlands area if they discover that the smugglers trade route is a stop over at the keep. Hence a tie in to the temple of chaos. As the smugglers could have the jovial clerc listed in the keep who works for the temple in the caves. Just one of the ways i tie the keep on the borderlands module with the tower of zenopus and also the secret of saltmarsh. I have had the pc’s with the local “port town” miltia tracker follow an escaped smuggler from the tower of zenopus to the keep via the main road or through open land to reach the area of the keeps “sandbox area” the best part of new players for a DM is new players are new so guiding them along to places like the town “saltmarsh” or to the “keep” from Porttown is also for them to have encounters as part of the fun for newb’s.
Into the unknown is a great one, but I would use the Keep on the Borderlands as the starting point and use the Cave of the Unknown on the map for that module, you might want to railroad it, to begin with, and expand it from there.. the modules usually take place in the Barony of Karamiekos in Mystara, but can be fit into just about any campaign setting.
Personally, I think starting out, 5th edition is an easy system to learn and play and is more forgiving and gives players more to do generally. But if you really want to go old school BECMI rules, then the best 3 modules (in my opinion) are B2 Keep on the Borderlands, B3 Palace of the Silver Princess or B4 The Lost City. I found B1 Search of Unknown a bit of a snooze fest and the DM has to populate most of the dungeon themselves. B6 The Veiled Society is fun but maybe not as a first module for younger players as it more of a mystery, less fighting and not your standard D&D basic adventure. B7 Rashasia and B9 Castle Caldwell are not as good as the 3 modules listed above (but have superior front cover art)
Seriously, who is the one loser who disliked this video?
Somone who is very against death, and very much dislikes temples dedicated to it?
Way too many ads...
There's only one at the beginnig and two in the middle. Gotta pay the bills!
@@captcorajus do you still get revenue if the ads get skipped?
@@Johnny_Nitro There's a whole bunch of 'maybe' in that.
i miss the old hex maps. i have a coulple of apps that let me make hex maps for my games.