Atlas   Rules   Resources   Adventures   Stories       FAQ   Search   Links

Tower of the Stargazer in Basic rules on Mystara

by Not a Decepticon

As an off-shot of my Pirates of Mystara campaign, I've run this one-shot (in place of the regular game, one player had to cancel, we added a replacement). Tower of the Stargazer is an introductory module to Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which is a B/X retroclone so I decided to run it with Basic rules for d&d, trying to get an old-school feel.

Here is how it fits into the campaign: The party set off to the sea and hired a rival party of adventurers to search for a wizard who was kidnapped with his entire tower and moved deep inland, nearby Castellan Keep. I decided the Wizard, now called good wizard, was squatting at Tower of the Stargazer, with the evil wizard inside the tower still imprisoned. The party of rival characters was based on the example pcs from the Red Book who were known to the main campaign's party as a bunch of jerks.

The players were warned this is going to be deadly and to not get attached to these characters. They selected a team of Elf, Halfling, Thief and Magic-User, deciding to go for the squishiest party possible. I recall the idea was to take this in a "Dark Souls" mode, one of the players being a big fan of the series.

So they spent good several minutes arguing how to approach the tower and not get hit by lightning, almost going so far to try to build a rock tunnel or dig under the tower. Then they masterfully dodged a lot of traps and noped the hell out of the basement. They saw through evil wizard's ruse, as he was pretending to be a good wizard, trying to trick them. They did fall for another trick I added - he had hidden a helmet in his nightstand. It let users see in the dark...and was also the helm of opposite alignment. As PCs would put it on one after another they become evil and desire to free the wizard and put the helmet on others. Which, with some detour to tinker with a telescope that almost ended with Magic-User being sucked away to be feed to aliens, ended with the entire party being brainwashed and evil.

This will have consequences.

My players' observations about the basic rules were they are a bit weird and they now appreciate more the utility of later editions, especially darkvision. Which, if they had, they wouldn't fall for the helmet. Also the concept of race as a class was hilarious to them and a source of many jokes.

me, I do not think I did a proper job dming this, the first time using basic rules and all. But I think it made the system far less intimidating for me and I may try playing in B/X or BECMI if I find more time in my schedule.