Customer Reviews

The Ghost Tower of Inverness (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons module C2)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

After a long sabbatical from gaming, I'd decided to run an AD&D module. My brother was a veteran of gaming, but my wife and daughter were newbies.

Making a terrible mistake, I started with "The Ruins of Andril," an old Dragon magazine centerfold module. It was too high-level, and pretty dull, actually. We never finished it.

Vowing to not repeat that mistake, I went through my classic AD&D module collection. As soon as I set my eyes on C2 - "The Ghost Tower of Inverness," I knew it to be a perfect introductory module. I eventually want to start them on a campaign, but this tournament module was a great warm-up.

First of all, the pre-rolled characters are nicely done: All humans, one of each of the major character classes. The adventure starts out as a standard dungeon crawl, but with just as many tricks as monsters. Players, even novices, will always surprise you. Their solution to the giant rolling ball was novel. The chess room really had them stumped; because of the multi-colored tiles, they never figured out the proper moves. My brother was thinking it was some mathematical formula...nobody could understand why the rules were different for each character.

As they entered the upper (transdimensional) levels, the dangers increased. The Fire Giant was perhaps their greatest foe. Being an intelligent monster, he targeted the magic-user, with devastating effect.

In fact, though, their only death happened at the very end, in recovering the Soul Gem.

Outstanding module! Fun to play and ref. It took the players three sessions to finish, and now they want more.

...

The designer of this old module was Allen Hammack, who tends to do the best thinking modules. He also helped with the old A3 slavers module. The other guy who is good is Lawrence Schick who did A4 Slavers (the best module I ever ran that was fun) and the original White Plume Mountain.

Although short in comparison to later editions, it's packed with 3 to 6 original thinking challenges for players. Monsters are set up to fight intelligently rather than sit around like fools in most of the modules.

Highly recommend.

Orginally deigned for tournament play, this adventure has directions for rating and points for indiviudal players. I find this interesting as it is often touted that RPGs are a game in which no one wins.

The module is a PC invasion of a wizards tower, filled with bizarre monsters and fiendish traps. It's a lot of fun, and can be inserted into practically any campign. Definitely worth having around, if you run out of ideas and need something to stick in.

The second best and most ingenious puzzle-solving adventure of all time (IMHO, I'd place White Plume Mountain first, and Tomb of Horrors third). In the realm of Greyhawk, Lord Justinian, Duke of Urnst, has finally located the legendary Soul Gem, the devourer... it once was held in the indomitable Tower of Inverness, a lost ruin on the Woolly Bay. Centuries ago, the terrified masses pulled it into rubble, but its accursed apparition can still be seen haunting the skies! And now, in the name of honor and filthy lucre, your VERY challenged PCs will find: upside down dungeons, horrors of air, earth, fire, and water, a cruelly fatal "chess trap" chamber, a petrifyingly beautiful maiden, reverse gravity, and an intelligent gem that literally sucks the life out of anyone who cannot solve its conundrum. (Don't worry - you'll get your soul back if it doesn't kill all your friends :) Hardcore adventure!

The Ghost Tower Of Inverness (1979) is, in my opinion, one of the best AD&D modules of all time. It's for character levels 5-7. I went through it back in 1982. It's a cerebral adventure that places an emphasis on tactfulness and problem solving. The setting is an old magical tower in the Abbor-Alz Hills. In order to enter the tower, players must find a key that consists of four parts. The goal of the adventure is to find the powerful Soul Gem. This is an adventure that gets increasingly difficult as players progress. The tower is dangerous and has many deadly monsters.

If you want to go through one of the classic AD&D modules, then go through this one. Highly recommended.

First introduced in 1979 as a tournament module, The Ghost Tower of Inverness can still be a lot of fun. Does it stand up to the test of time? Welllll...not all of it. There is a tendency to simple hack-and-slash ("A monster suddenly appears in the air in front of you!") and there are a few places where logic fails.
For the most part, though, this was a lot of fun. I converted it to 3.0 with ease, since that's what my group uses. I led them rather more gently into the adventure than the railroad the module suggests; the PCs were there in search of a time gem to help a sorcerer repair time itself.
At first, my players were a little too modern for this dungeon. Nobody wanted to touch anything, and everything was a trap, whether it was or not. Finally, one of them said, "We've been making this too hard. All you have to do is interact with this dungeon. If there's a bed, lie on it. If there's a cup, drink from it." From there on, it was a lot more fun.
As noted elsewhere, the group must assemble four pieces of a key to "unlock" the upper levels of the dungeon. This is fairly straightforward stuff, but some of the elements are fun. The chess room stymied my players for a while, and only one of them actually seemed to figure it out. If he did, though, he never said squat to the others, so maybe he just lucked into moving like a rook.
Once they have the entire key, the adventurers can move up into the elemental levels of the dungeon. There's an air level (I changed the hierosphinx to a small green dragon), an earth level (the module uses a medusa; I toned it down a little), a fire level which was perhaps the most fun for the DM, and a water level where they fight something like ixitxichitls (no idea if I'm spelling that right), which can be found in updated form in Monster Manual 2. Finally, the gem itself threatened to age them to dust if they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The module, as written, whisks the group straight back to the NPCs who sent them, one of whom can resurrect any characters killed by the gem.
All in all, it takes a little work, but it's worth it.

Ghost tower was desgined for a tournament, so the puzzles are really fun. And there are a lot of puzzles. The monsters have been chosen well (of course). What can I say? Mr Gygax is a god.

gary didnt write this one either,whats with you people