Shocker of shockers, I was pretty much on target with my guess in the last post that the third module would indeed follow the same format as the previous two. There are some minor differences of course. There are now three levels to explore instead of two, and the players come face to face with the Drow for the first time, putting a name and a face to the unseen menace behind the giant attacks that has only been hinted at in the first two modules. The stakes are higher, too, and just from reading you can tell the difficulty has definitely been upped. But what really struck me when reading this module was just how dense it was, both in monsters and treasure. King Snurre's hall is literally bursting with creatures - far more than you would think could live in such a space, considering that most all of them a giant-sized. I'm not sure the scale was well thought out here. In addition, the amount of treasure in this module approaches ludicrous levels. I swear it would take a team of porters a week to haul every last gem and gold piece out of this place. I'm wondering how this plays in to the gold pieces = XP gained rule of 1st edition as well. I don't remember exactly how it was worded in the Player's Handbook, but do players just have to discover treasure to get the XP for it, or do they actually have to take possession of it (i.e, haul it out of the dungeon)? I'm pretty sure it's the latter, in which case I can only imagine how many 1st edition sessions were derailed by meta-game considerations of needing to pause the action while the party carted out the loot they had found because they didn't want to lose out on the XP. I'm rather glad the game had done away with this concept by the time I started playing.
The module ends with the players discovering a tunnel leading away from King Snurre's hall into the unknown depths of the earth. We have a couple of months' worth of The Dragon to get through, then we can pick this plot back up with the D series of modules.
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