Dead Gods

Well, the campaign is still going, though the players are all far away from each other now, so we continue it via forum.

The campaign started with some of my own designs. Mostly, I led into the adventure through the death of Maanzecorian, rather than through the trip to Crux. Right now they're in the time-warp section of the campaign, and they're nearly coming to blows with Evreth.

As for conversions, Psychotic Jim over at enworld has posted his own thorough conversion of every creature in the module, if you're looking for someone else's.

It went really well, I think. We ended the campaign with that and have since started a new Planescape campaign. My local group has pretty much had to move to forum gaming, though, which is fun but so much slower.

Anyway, I think the module is great. A big, evil mystery. Taking on beings of immense power in a really creative way. Plane-spanning travels.

I used mostly Psychotic Jim's conversions, though by the time I ran it, plenty more of the monsters in it had eventually found their way into 3e/3.5 books. The conversion project by Weenie, Seraph of Babel, and others over at the Wizards forum, provided a more satisfactory version, I thought, than either Jim's or the one from Libris Mortis, so that's what I eventually ended up with. I think I probably used all three over the course of the campaign, but they were such favorite villains that I kept trying to make them better. They ended up with their weakest incarnation at the end, which was more fun because the players by that point really wanted revenge on those masked pikers.

I think the environments are some of the best parts of the adventure. The fortress of Tcian Sumere (which I modified a lot to make it more diabolical and less dungeony. It ended up being more mechanical and machine-like, the magic tunnel-hallways being replaced by clanking chain transports.), the desert of Pelion, the tunnels of Pandemonium. I would really emphasize the environment, both in your descriptions and in how the characters can interact with it during a fight.

The interlude where the characters play as adventurers in the past, going to the Last Spire, is such a powerfully dramatic segment that I would make sure to include it. It may be extra work to create a set of temporary PCs, but I think your group will find it a fun opportunity to play new types of characters.

We also skipped over the Vault of the Drow. It would have been time-consuming and I felt like my players would really have gotten sidetracked in all that drow warfare, and it would have messed with the adventure's sense of urgency. Plus--like I said--this was at this point a play-by-post campaign in our own forum, and I didn't know that I wanted to take months of real-life time to resolve something that I wasn't that excited about. I had bigger and better ideas, and really wanted to get them to Pelion.

I still needed them to get certain information about where Kiaransalee's servants had taken the Wand. So, I made the story be that a whole squad of drow had taken the artifact to Pandemonium before being drowned in the Styx to hide the secret forever. I had a new player joining the group at a really tough-to-add-new-characters-without-breaking-the-storyline time, so what we ended up with was that his character was an undead drow who had once been part of that expedition, though he didn't really know it, due to the memory-draining. He slowly regained that knowledge at certain plot-convenient moments. I know, I know. What character needs an excuse to play an undead drow? He didn't get too angsty, though. Thank Orcus.

I thought that the adventure's ending was a bit kooky. Having them destroy the Wand in Pandemonium, then take it all back and make them fight the real final battle on the Astral was a little bit too much. I think the climax of the adventure is when Tenebrous dies, not when his priest might possibly almost revive him. Of course, you probably want Orcus alive again, as it's sort of assumed in the rest of the game that he's come back from the dead for real-real.

I just took the best of both those two chapters and put them both in Pandemonium. In my version, the Wand had take Kiaransalee's hiding place in Pandemonium and carved it into a cavern/temple complex using its slow magic over the centuries. The result was the perfect battlefield for the endgame, in which they had to trek through the tunnels, past deadly creatures, and then come through the temple. Deadly dancers (from the Tome of Magic) were a really fun encounter as predatory creatures which had taken up residence outside. Once they got past those (on a crumbling stone bridge, no less), they had to get past Kiaransalee's various barriers, then fight off Quah-Namog (who had come into the adventure earlier, as they were trying to get to Pandemonium in the first place). He had a small undead army (skeletal glabrezu are still scary, even without their magic), which made for a nice fight.

Just as they were hacking through the last of this, however, more trouble started. They neared the Wand just as clouds of visages were swarming the temple. Collectively, their lucidity control power triggered the "Sigil Unmade" encounter (I used the Fiendish Codex WE for the Aspect of Orcus for the illusionary Demon Prince). Those that were under the illusion's effects battled on an imaginary street in burnt-out Sigil, while those who eventually broke out of that had to deal with the visages who were attacking.

In my campaign, the PCs managed to destroy it using the amulet from Tcian Sumere, and they did so without making the mistake of having someone die in the process. Honestly, they probably would have, except that I knew this was going to be the last session of the campaign and the mood was better for a triumphant end to the campaign, not a bittersweet sacrifice by one of their number or, worse yet, an afterword-style trip to the resurrector's shop (if there were such a thing).

The inter-chapter narratives were a great touch. I used them as little cutscenes, and even made up some of my own. For example, I wrote one about that undead drow's past life, in which he witnessed Kiaransalee's conquest of Naratyr.