A1 has the honor of being my very first taste of D&D. I was a freshman at college & the only thing I had heard about the game up to that point was that people had disappeared playing it in steam tunnels. So of course I was intrigued.
When a guy in my dorm bought the module & wanted to DM it, he invited me to fill out the group since he knew I was interested. He ran the standard tournament version of the 1st part of the module using the pregenerated characters. Since I was a complete newbie (I didn't even know how to read the results on the d20
) I was assigned the stupid fighter "Ogre" & the female ranger on the theory that fighters were the easiest to play.
The most experienced player was given the mage-types to play & was instituted as the party leader. He turned out to be a classic paranoid player. For example, when we discovered the barrels of vinegar, he ordered us to destroy them, afraid that if we left them behind unmolested they would be used against us.
This proved problematic after we defeated the giant sundew.
The sundew battle was the part I remember best. Since the monster was rooted to the spot, we thought it wise to engage it from a distance & pepper it with ranged weapons. While my ranger was effective at this, "Ogre" felt left out. When it became clear that the sundew was highly resistant to ranged attacks, I decided that the most effective thing to do was to have "Ogre" charge & engage it in melee, where his damage bonus from exceptional strength would come into play. This worked fine until the creature grabbed the character with multiple tentacles, forcing the party to have to come to "Ogre"'s rescue by hacking the tentacles away.
The party leader castigated me for reckless play, but the DM noted that "Ogre"'s melee attacks had done more damage to the creature than the rest of the party combined - & was completely within character to boot!
We were totally fooled by the fake slave room. When we saw the ogrish shadow figure on the wall & heard the sounds of torture, we didn't even think to check the bonds of the slaves along the wall, instead going right for what we thought would be a big battle against an ogre & his minions around the corner. So we were completely surprised & surrounded by the disguised half-orcs in the room & had to fight for our lives.
Basically we fell for every trick & trap in the place, so that when we reached the final encounter, we were running on empty. I must admit that what happened in that final battle is a complete blank, although I guess we won somehow. But I do recall the DM doing the trournament scoring for us after the conclusion & explaining what we did wrong, which was pretty much everything.
Still & all, I was hooked. This remains one of my favorite modules (& series) of all time. In fact I am running it again as we speak. The party just finished the courtyard battle with the flamethrower & is about to head down the hallway with the gargoyle statues to the temple proper. They have a bad feeling about things...
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
