Steroids
Why I like Dragon Mountain:
Ok let me clarify; I like Dragon Mountain the way I eventually decided to run it. The original actually left much to be desired as I discovered when I tried to run it “unedited”. It was akin to a 50 mile railroad with a red herring placed on the track every 10 yards for the first 30 miles. It sucked. Every lead and every clue turned up shit. So the first order of business; make every lead a valid and important one that completes a bigger piece of the puzzle, and not some random guy placed there for no good reason.
Then there was the “always”, “never”, and “cannot” statements on every other page. NPCs that couldn’t die, if for no other reason then to unfairly screw over the PCs, were also quickly done away with. Now everyone had an equal chance of dying. And now since the clues abounded the PCs would have the freedom to do as they please and not be lead around by the nose.
The framework for the kobolds was there, and that was one of the best parts of it. It was like a little world with all the allegiances already all worked out. Each kobold clan had something unique about it that differentiated it from every other clan. There was structure, and originality to at least that part of the module. All I needed to do was drop in a couple of levels of warrior or adept here and there to the leaders and they could most definitely hold their own against the 10-14 level characters that they would be going up against. In fact, when it came down to it, when the players finally did come up against the kobolds I had to tone them down since the party was so small (3 players).
So after about a year working on it I had successfully converted it from the module equivalent of “The Hobbit” to something enjoyable. Unfortunately in the process in had run it as originally published and crushed the souls of the group I usually use as my “core” group (sorry guys) and was relegated to running the completed version for what I call my “test” group.