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It seems like a killer dungeon with a poison cookie for a prize, but looking at it from my perspective now, I feel a bit differently. Overall, I was quite impressed with this one. an umber hulk illustrated by Jeff Dee and one illustrated by Erol Otus. pictures of the "keys" so you don't have to explain them without a visual aid. lots of blown-up maps of special rooms you can show to players (and smaller ones for the GM).
#Ghost tower of inverness 5e plus
Scoring is for loot, damage given, minus damage received, plus all sorts of bonuses for handling specific encounters and even for making observations about the environment. The scoring is individual and team, with a winning team and winning individuals being given prizes. Some of them are probably appropriate for a regular campaign, others seem like they'd just make the encounter more complex (and bloody) for little real gain. The non-tournament additions are just more encounters embedded in previously empty rooms, or additional monsters or traps stuck into the more puzzle-like encounter areas in the Ghost Tower. There is an interesting range of monsters in there, but they're clearly chosen for a mix of thematic appropriateness and level of challenge. Some of the puzzles require combat - for the tournament, monsters all do specific (sub-average) damage. Some of them are player-facing (player skill resolved), most are at least equally character-facing (resolved by character abilities, if correctly applied.) Add on top of that a time limit in the tournament and it must have been pretty tense, choosing between boldness and caution in turns. And that's without even touching the scoring bonuses the tournament players would get for choosing the right course of action for each puzzle.
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You can't easily get through them all with cautious 10' pole pokes and refusing to do anything dangerous, just as you can't easily get through them all with bold action and straight combat.
![ghost tower of inverness 5e ghost tower of inverness 5e](https://www.elventower.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/47-Raven-Town-L-1200x901.jpg)
The puzzles are pretty cool - they reward general caution, player skill, character abilities, and knowing when to take bold action. Then complete the one-path-only way to the McGuffin.
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Enter the dungeon, find the key, find the door, back off, try again until you get all the keys. It's a find-the-keys puzzle with nested puzzles. It is basically a big puzzle made up of puzzles. Still, "here is 25,000 gp worth of gear you can take from my treasury" seems a really contrived way of putting the item choice into the player's hands. I remember doing it myself with these lists, and it's a lot of competing trade-offs between powerful but costly items that limit your overall choices and cheaper items that might just not get the job done. Selecting magical gear is pretty fun, though. I wouldn't want to try that with an inexperienced or rusty game group, because buying equipment (especially mundane gear) is always time-consuming. Oddly, they come unequipped, but get 25,000 gp to buy normal equipment and select magic items from the Duke's treasury. The tournament setup is that the PCs are coerced into the adventure - four prisoners from the Duke's prisons, and a monk indentured to the Duke as payment of taxes. The adventure is basically a dungeon crawl, penetrating a ruined fortress seeking a McGuffin desired by an NPC. The copy I have is the release version from 1980. This module was originally a tournament module, for (according to the intro) Wintercon VIII in Detroit in 1979. In the weeks ahead I'll try to get through the other adventures people requested I take a look at, and others from my collection I especially want to talk about. Probably we got sent outside to play because it was a nice day or something. My only memory of it was hearing the intro text, and using the 25,000 gp to buy magic items from the Duke's collection. I'd never read the whole thing - this was part of what I inherited from my cousin's collection. I remember not buying it because my cousin had it and I was going to play it, but that didn't happen. This module has sat, unread, in my collection.