The Brain Gorger's Appetite

 The Brain Gorger's Appetite is one of my favorites. It has a lot of different beats to it, a fun, intriguing story, and some real humor. All my players are real role players, so that made this one even more awesome, as there is plenty of opportunity for that. 

I will echo other reviewers in that the given hook is a little contrived, but if you are a DM, just tweak it to fit your campaign. The Rebels were already known to the Duke Orsino of Daggerford (Daggerford is called Riverport colloquially in my campaigns) and his steward, Regus. In fact, they live in apartments in his manor and do special assignments for the Dukedom (sort of a Rat Queens premise). So it was simple enough for Regus to approach them with the news that the "Duke is acting weirder than usual and I'm worried." (my nephew was actually pretty surprised to learn that all I really did was change some names in the module to make it fit our setting. It fit absolutely seamlessly into our campaign. )

When the Class of '81 ran it, it was a little trickier, but it is in their best interest to make sure the town is safe, for several reasons, so with the help of Captain Mercutio of the town's militia, they were able to infiltrate various posts within the Duke's household. We made it work. It helped that three of the party members are in a band (Tifinin, Sorrow, and Ivar).

There are several black and white maps, wonderful black and white drawings, and a color map of a copper mine. 

SPOILERS AHEAD

The players have to negotiate an attempted hit on the Duke's sister via a jewelry box mimic, political intrigue, and a series of clues suggesting that a criminal faction is involved. The string of clues take the players to a criminal headquarters in a foundry, a copper mine, and a manor house containing a doppelganger and gang members, and a later attempted hit on the party by a gang of thugs.  

The Rebels killed the thugs at the foundry and set them up to look like they'd gotten into a fight over a card game and killed each other. They also wrote "Devos is coming" on the wall in blood. There is no Devos. But now the criminal factions in Daggerford are more than a little on edge because they don't know who Devos is. These kids are savages. 

This module gets extra points for scaring the bejeebus out of any player that realizes 1. what a mind flayer is and 2. The fact that low level characters don't stand a snowball's chance in hell against one. But what they don't know is that the thing is so out of its mind high when they encounter it that it's not nearly as dangerous. Still, that is a hard boss fight. The thing has allies. And the Class almost lost their rogue, Boz, in that fight. 

The punchline of all this is that it was all an elaborate and dangerous drug cartel running deals out of Daggerford. The "brain gorger" (it's a mind flayer, lets be real) had gone nuts with addiction. 

Grinda today

At the copper mine, there is a kobold guard that is being bullied by the other kobolds for not being tough enough. Macterah, a member of the Class, could not abide this and was very, very kind to the kobold. In fact, she couldn't stop thinking about him, and the next morning, announced that she would return to the mine to retrieve him from his situation. What she didn't know was that the kobold had followed the party back to their ship and stowed away on board. So he was in the hold when they returned after not being able to find him. And that's how Grinda the Crying Kobold became a permanent part of the Class of '81 campaign. 

Return to The Class of '81

Adventures To Date

In Search of the Unknown

The Riverport Rebels Foil A Coup

The Tomb of Crossed Words

The Brain Gorger's Appetite

Death in the Cornfields

The Pillars of Pelagia

The Fey Sister's Fate

The Ghosts of Saltmarsh: The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh

Underworld Speculation

Heist

Scourge of the Sword Coast: Introduction

Against the Cult of the Reptile God

White Plume Mountain

Islands of Plunder #1: Spices and Flesh

The Tomb of Crossed Words

I picked up The Tomb of Crossed Words by Richard Jansen-Parkesup many years ago, and I've run it for several groups. It's a great one for kids and low-level players. It's not terribly combat-heavy, and it's a great puzzle dungeon!

I've got two regular D&D groups: the Riverport Rebels, which consists of my daughter, my nephew, and my husband, and the Class of '81. When I ran it for the Riverport Rebels, we played in person, and I made up actual hands-on puzzles for the kids to solve. They loved the puzzles so much that it has become my regular DMing style. The Class of '81 plays entirely remotely, so I still do hands-on puzzles, but I translate them for Roll20 use. 

SPOILERS! If you are likely to end up as a player in this module, you should probably skip this next part. 

The premise is pretty straightforward: a monk, Brother Connor, is looking for a party of adventurers to investigate a legendary shrine that was dedicated to learning and writing, but lost to time. Local legend says that fifty years ago, a group of adventurers found the tomb, but met a grim fate. Only one of them stumbled back to the village to tell of it before dying of his wounds. 

 The players must answer a riddle given by a skeletal warrior and choose the correct door to access the tomb. Inside, the players find that all the books and scrolls inside are under a curse, their inks turned to smeared and running black oil. 

Encounters include: 

A room that must be passed through by passing by stone soldiers that block the way by advancing on anyone retreating from them. 

A pool of water containing a water weird and spectral beings that can be dispelled using a hint contained in a riddle. 

A room containing a beholder with amnesia. Not kidding. Having been mindwiped, he's more confused than aggressive. I have run this module at least three times, and been a player (I was along to help a new DM run the module) in it once, and never have the players of any group failed to bring the beholder with them out of the dungeon because they felt sorry for it. The Rebels named it Avalon, and the after they followed suite, the Class found out the Rebels had named the thing already and decided to just keep the name. 

A hidden room containing the Big Bad Boss, who turns out to be the undead leader of the doomed party of adventurers that brought the story to the village fifty years prior. He gives the players a choice...answer my question and fight me alone, or fail and fight me and a swarm of animated skulls. The players may ask 20 questions for yes or no answers to figure out the solution.  Every time I run this, the players scoff that the riddle will be impossible to guess. And no group has ever failed to get it right, and often they do it without even hitting their 20 question limit. Which I love, because I kind of feel like that doing a task you thought you weren't up to is a real confidence booster. 

 

In Search of the Unknown

So years ago, the phone rang. It was my sister. Her young son had seen an episode of Freaks and Geeks and decided that he wanted to learn to play Dungeons and Dragons. So she immediately, and correctly, called me. 

I told her "I knew this day would come." 

My sister's family was coming to visit that very weekend, and I had no time to plan. I was not running any games at the time. I had nothing, really, except some old modules (and when I say "old" I'm not kidding. We're talking 30-40 year old stuff in a trunk in the attic, from when I was running Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. System isn't even compatible to 5E) I was actually in the process of learning 5e, because I was playing in Trey's Azurth campaign. 

So I go up the attic and drag out the first module I played in when I learned Advanced D&D, a TSR module called In Search of the Unknown. 

I didn't even own a current Monster Manual. I went online and found the 5e versions of most of the monsters in the module and just went with it. Old modules had to be manually keyed by the dungeon master, so I was using penciled-in keys my high school age self had written decades ago and converting the stuff on the fly with notebook full of notes in my lap. 

Didn't matter. I winged most of it and we had a blast! 

We played the classic way, with paper tokens on a good old fashioned battle mat. The group consisted of my nephew, my daughter (the kids are less than a year in age apart), and my husband. 

In Search of the Unknown was a classic dungeon-crawl type module that was written by Mike Carr in 1979 and published by TSR, Inc. It wasn't a bad module to start some kids on to get them used to combat, ability checks, and map keeping. I definitely wanted to teach them 5e instead of earlier editions, as I thought it important for them to be as updated as possible if they chose to play with their friends later on down the line. But the content was simple and fun, and had some fun stuff in it. It's got one layer of ruins, and a lower level of cavern, and some opportunity for a little role play. 

So maybe not the most compelling module by today's standards, but it definitely was many hours of fun and learning for us!