Star Frontiers - Example Characters and House Rules

For my upcoming Star Frontiers Campaign, I was going to produce my own custom, 2-sided character sheets with a tent. This would help some of my first-time players quickly produce a character. And to save time, I changed my mind and decided to use the one on Polyhedral Nonsense. 

I find this massively amusing. I was ready to invest a ridiculous amount of time making my own sheet and found an amazing sheet on website labeled "nonsense". Each area is neatly designed with large areas suitable for either computer text or handwriting. It corrects the one-side flaw of the original and ups the game with a useful tent. 

This is the opposite of nonsense, it's fabulous! I use a 1-5 star system for ratings, so this sheet gets 5 stars. 

Sorry, I didn't mean to do a review. But since Polyhedral Nonsense saved me so much time and effort, I had to do it. 

Back to your article, already in progress. 

The characters... 

I assume the characters have lived through the Crash on Volturnus modules. The group lives on the planet Typhon, a water world whose colony supports the post-war effort of decommissioning and preserving warships on the planet Dust. This endeavor requires nearly every skill in known space, of which the characters have a bit. The players will find it easy to fit in and have opportunities to improve their career skills, whatever they might be. They are learning to operate and maintain spaceships. 

I have a couple house rules that will be in effect. Spaceship skills are available from the get-go, but this is slightly modified as we are creating higher-level characters. The players will be granted 30 experience points to select any skill from the Alpha Dawn rules and 10 experience points to select spaceship skills from Knight Hawks. 

That isn't too unusual. That places the characters with a non-combat PSA plus a couple of Military skills, and one spaceship skill. 

What is unusual is the characters all have professions, meaning they draw a salary. At generation, the players can buy a monthly salary of 1000 credits for one experience point, 2000 for 3 experience points, and so on. In addition to this, they get their normal roll for credits plus one month's salary cash. Star Frontiers has a lot of cool gear but hobbles the players and the characters with a lack of credits. I hate that. Each character also has a place to stay, which means they have far more than the typical adventurer. 

The players also start with a standard equipment pack plus a laser pistol, coveralls, and a backpack, mementos of their time on Vulturnus. Each one has a professional tool kit. Anyone who has a Military skill will have one appropriate personal weapon assigned to them. If they want more, they need to spend their savings.  

The players will discover that Typhon and Dust aren't really places for weapons, but the moment they get moving on their adventure, they will need them. I need to build a bestiary and make maps for both planets. Life is not especially dangerous, more of a point of interest for the curious player. 

New Ko-Fi Store

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Star Frontiers Campaign - Supporting Cast

For my campaign next year, I will need a supporting cast for the players. The characters will have access to a Kon-Tiki shuttle smaller than an Assult Scout. Since the players will be using this new type of ship, it needs to have a bit of history, as if it were a character. 

In the closing of the Sathar War, the Federation ran down a couple of paths of ship design. One of them was a type of electronic warfare destroyer called the Puff Adder. This destroyer was fitted with 3 atomic and three ion engines, packed with electronic warfare gear while giving up many of its weapons. It was also given two Kon-Tiki shuttles that could dock with it. Like its namesake, the Puff Adder could ambush enemy ships with its electronic warfare gear and light weapons while the Kon-Kiki shuttles provided support. The inherent abilities of the two types of engines allow these ships to dance in and out of danger. 

It would have been a vastly more expensive ship than your typical Destroyer. 16 hulls of this type were laid down before the war ended. At the end of the war, Puff Adders were fitted with engines recovered from damaged ships as a cheap solution. However, only 8 were fully outfitted with their electronic warfare gear and weapons creating a second variant on the destroyer. 

The Puff Adders had assault rocket launchers, a laser battery, and ICMs with electronic warfare gear. Those not fitted with all of the projected weapons were labeled as the "Heracles" variant. The Heracles class was suitable for research, search and rescue plus surface support operations. The pairing of the destroyers with the Kon-Tiki shuttles creates a means for the characters to explore single systems easily while also providing very limited system-to-system travel with a bit of danger. 

The characters in their Kon-Tiki class shuttle will be supported by both types of destroyers, depending on what system they arrive in. This will give the players the exciting experience of being able to travel from system to system in a small ship. 

As time permits, I will be sketching out the deck plans of all three types of ships, the shuttle, and the two destroyers. 

Star Frontiers Campaign - Ships for the Characters

I want the players to have access spaceships. They will be jetting around between the planet Dust and Typhon plus various systems across the Federation. 

Most of the time, the player characters will be landing on the surface of planets so they have a giant shuttle, smaller than an assault scout. It is size two. These shuttles are barely able to move from system to system, hence the name Kon-Tiki. However, for in-system ships, the Kon-Tiki class shuttle is super roomy. 

Although I have shared a picture of a spaceship above, I really want this ship to be more like a real space shuttle and not a tail-lander. 

I will be sharing deck plans and such as time permits. 

Star Frontiers Campaign 2024

This year, I would like to run a Star Frontiers Campaign. I have a couple of ideas of what I'd like to do. I'd like to have a mystery to investigate. 

Let's start with the characters. They are not newbies. They have survived the events of Volturnus modules. To that end, they are in advanced officer training and learning to crew a spaceship. 

In my campaigns, spaceship skills are selectable from the get-go. These characters have 20 experience points for anything they like from the Alpha Dawn set and 10 experience points to spend on one spaceship skills. The players have one special option at character generation - they can trade 1 exp point for 1,000 credits. This pairs nicely with the 20 exp for any AD skill. The characters will be nicely equipped with the expectation everyone has one or more guns. 

I don't believe in yanking the character's equipment at the start of the adventure. 

Next, the characters have a home base, a planet named Typhon. It's a water world with underwater living quarters. The population is small, but growing after the war. The planet features a chain of islands around the equator. There are many aquatic animals in the planetary ocean and more than a few amphibians inhabiting the island. Even the bird and rat-like creatures are amphibians. It is an interesting world without too much excitement. Typhon is one of those "best-kept secrets" planets, beautiful and safe, not well known yet and not completely explored.  

Also in the Typhon system is the planet Dust. This planet is barely habitable, but the low-oxygen atmosphere is great for storing and repairing spaceships. It is a base for training future astronauts. It isn't as dangerous as training in a vacuum. All species hate the environment, it requires suits for comfort but you can survive on the surface. Just barely. Typical stints on Dust last between a month and 3 months. The planet has one main base and dozens of smaller bases scattered here and there. 

If you weren't learning how to be an astronaut, you'd have no reason to visit and even less to stay. Everyone, including the general staff, tries to speed run any necessary tasks to get back to the comfort of Typhon. Failing that, a tiny ship and a hard vacuum would do. 

Now we are to the meat of the setting. There has been a rash of incidents where the visitors to Dust go missing. They vanish after leaving Dust for other destinations. This is bizarre because they spend some time at the destination getting settled, checking in with friends and family, and getting spotted on plenty of security cameras. Then they are gone. The one commonality is they disappear at night. No bodies have been found, no ransom, no demands, there is no pattern to the destinations, and no foul play is evidenced but is obviously suspected. 

Since the Sathar and their agents have been sent packing, it is an interplanetary locked room mystery for the players to solve.  

Star Frontiers: Alpha Dawn
At DriveThruRPG

I picked up the print copy of AD from DriveThruRPG. The printing is excellent, and the binding looks sharp and clean.  

Simple Improvements - Power to the Archer

I like archer characters. Over the weekend, I had a chance to binge-watch a couple of episodes of Hawkeye and a few of The Arrow. Both shows are obviously based on bow combat. 

In virtually all RPGs, archers are limited to how many arrows they have. Once the quiver is empty, they aren't an archer anymore. They lose the deadly ability to strike at a distance. 

I wrote about making fighting men and spell casters more powerful without adding die rolls or wildly different mechanics. Archers can be similarly empowered. 

Looking at the first Avengers movie, Hawkeye doesn't miss so much as not hit his target. 

Loki is a trickster and should have seen this coming. Now let's look at Hawkeye missing a target. 

This time Hawkeye misses because something got in his way. He didn't see it coming and lost an arrow because of it. His second shot is also a miss because Quicksilver threw him down and the arrow was knocked out of reach. Then there is a third attempt, the one I want to simulate. Quicksilver simply disappears, leaving Hawkeye with no target. Technically, that is his third miss. 

This last miss is easy to simulate. When a shooter ATTEMPTS a shot, sometimes the target moves in such a way that the archer can't follow. In this case, the miss means the archer never loosed an arrow. This is actually a very powerful thing for someone with a bow. In not loosing the arrow, they keep it for later. Since running out of arrows will put the archer out of action, not losing an arrow in every round of combat is powerful. 

(Good lord, my spell checker hates the difference between loosing and losing.) 

A DM could declare that on certain missed rolls the archer has released the arrow and on others, they retained the arrow and didn't shoot. Since 1 is odd, I would rule that every odd-number missed attack means the archer really did let the arrow fly and it's gone. On every even-numbered missed attack, they didn't let it go. They kept it. 

I have a simple rule for collecting arrows after combat. If the characters have fled the battle, they lost all of the arrows they shot. If they keep the battlefield, then they can look for them. Even better, if the enemy was shooting, they could possibly recover those, too. 

If a player shoots x number of arrows, I select a die with fewer sides than the arrows fired, hopefully within one. If an opponent was also using arrows, I have PC archer roll a second of the same die. They may end up with more arrows than they started. This is in addition to whatever is taken as treasure. 

You can also amuse yourself with the possibility that two archers keep missing each other until each has to resort to picking up the arrow just fired at them. This is more likely to happen with spears and javelins, which is why the Romans used pilums. Pilums have a soft tip that bends to prevent it from being thrown back. It seems to be a 400 BC solution to a much older problem.  

Let me know what you think in the comments. 

Disappointment = Improvements, Star Frontiers Edition

 

Star Frontiers was one of my favorite non-D&D games. While my friends loved Traveller. I was all in on Star Frontiers. Traveller and SF are two completely different games in the sci-fi genre. In my opinion, Traveller is a pure RPG while Star Frontiers incorporates role-play into a board game. It is my personal belief, being a pure RPG, Traveller is unified and therefore more balanced. The setting also doesn't hurt. However, I rarely play it. 

Star Frontiers Alpha Dawn and Knight Hawks are both excellent games, but they are completely different games. Trying to integrate player characters into a fleet battle-type game is glitchy, to say the least. One of the biggest disappointments is summed up in this chart from Knight Hawks:

Holy hell, you need to max out an Alpha Dawn character to be able to fly a spaceship at minimum competency. A level 6 technician should be able to build a whole spaceship with little trouble, why would you need this level of skill to operate a spaceship? 

Han Solo's ability to fix stuff is putting a blaster shot into it. I can't picture Maverick fueling his plane, he can't even put on fireproof gloves. Ok, Data could assemble pretty much anything, but he is a robot made of McGuffin but I can't imagine Sulu doing the same.  

The second chart is even more annoying. 

It perpetuates military skills are the best way to advance quickly. If you look at the chart from Alpha Dawn, this at least continues the trope started in the first book. 

I had a strong desire to fix this back in the 80s in a simplistic fashion. Everyone got 3 skills to start, anyone could take spaceship skills from the get-go and I just accepted that spaceship skills were harder to level up in. 

I did preserve the first chart of requirements as a social aspect of being a spacer. These were the minimum skills necessary to get a professional job on a ship. Rather amusingly, my players figured out exactly what I getting at and would role-play padding their resume to land jobs. 

Recently, I decided to engage in a bit of confirmation bias and checked to see if anyone else saw this as a problem. A lot of people did see this as a problem at the time and today, and many of them even used this very technique to fix it. 

Since I was engaging in confirmation bias and not fact-finding, I totally discounted people who had other modifications to these tables as being a less common option. I reserve the right to be wrong.  

Let me know in the comments. 

Interestingly, I did see many people playing the game straight. While I absolutely hate this solution it is firmly based in reality. Historically, astronauts were (and still are) brilliant people and a vanishingly small portion of the general population. It does make sense in that respect. I just don't like it for space opera. There is a case for leaving it alone but I wanted to have spaceships as an option from the get-go. 

I blame this attitude of mine on some players' odd reactions to skills in a given era. Some players will opt to claim that their character can't swim, can't ride a horse, or drive a car in eras where most people can. They see that skill on a chart and not wanting to waste skill points don't select it. Then they assume that not ticking a box means zero ability. Most people who can't swim merely can't swim well. Most people who "can't" drive a car can totally explain the operation of a vehicle and merely lack the will to do so. This is just being wise to one's own limitations, not a lack of understanding or slight ability. 

I have a whole post on silly things I won't let players do. That is D&D-themed, but you can read it anyway. 

Speaking of posts, you can expect to see more posts about Star Frontiers soon. I want to have a campaign going shortly. 

Simple Improvements - Magic Spells

A lot of times magic use feels like a machine gun in a knife fight. And then there are days where it doesn't work out like that. 

I have one simple improvement for magic users of all stripes that doesn't involve dice throws. It is a clarification of my house rules. 

First - To loose and/or lose a spell it has to be prepared. This is usually part of the rules of the game. One word to improve this rule is "completely", as in "completely prepared". 

Adding this one word completely changes the dynamic of spellcasting. 

Let's say a wizard or cleric selected a complex spell. They start to prep it then they are hit in the face. "Completely prepared" switches the result from "I lost a spell" to "I have to start over". They weren't done prepping. That seems kind of fair as the player and the character pays a cost in terms of frustration but doesn't actually lose anything else. 

They need a better plan, but they can use that spell later. 

The next modification to spell casting for simplification is: to allow the character to pull back unused spells. I can't tell you how many times I have had a player prep a fireball in the last round of combat and simply lose it. It seems reasonable to me that a player should be able to undo that action if nothing else is happening. Perhaps it takes the same amount of time to put the spell away as it does to prep it. Seems reasonable to me.  

A third simplification is what I call "spell coast". On Monday, a cleric prays for three spells  - Light, Purify Food and Water, and Bless. He has only one opportunity to cast the Purify Food and Water spell on Monday. On Tuesday, decides to replace that one spell with Cure Light Wounds. Being a small-town adventure, nothing happens until Sunday night. If the cleric is happy with his spell choices, he doesn't have to study every day. He coasts along with the 2 spells he prayed for on Monday and third, he prayed for on Tuesday. 

The less time the players spend memorizing spells, the better. I had a diabolical DM that would take people's memorized spells away the moment they lost consciousness. 

All of these things together make spell casters more powerful while also providing more role-play opportunities.  

Random Encounters/Making Memories

Tonight, Jen and Catherine are at a Stevie Nicks concert leaving me and Nathan to fend for ourselves for dinner.  Nate and I picked a local favorite and got to talking... about D&D. 

This only sometimes happens. He plays e5 while I am into AD&D e1 or OSE. They seem wildly different, to me anyway. But tonight proved that wrong. 

Halfway through dinner, Nathan realized he planned a D&D session with his friends. He looked rather glum about it. I said I was envious because I have very little time to game. 

The problem was he didn't know what to do for tonight's session. I asked him about the past sessions and he filled me on the problems first. They are 4 sessions into this campaign and they skipped a planned Session 0. Nathan was forced to cob together a very basic idea into a full-fledged campaign due to a lack of planning. 

Here is the gist of that idea: The players have found a cursed town. There are a couple of levels to the curse. A dragon is rampaging around the edge of town, but cannot enter due to a spell cast by a witch. The witch stole the dragon's eggs and placed them around the perimeter of the town to protect the town from a threat, a non-dragon threat. The hag was killed by the dragon mid-cast, so the spell is partially broken.  

Currently, the spell is supposed to protect the town from a threat. Thus far, this averted threat is limited to the rampaging dragon. The spell should be fixed on and powered by the maturing dragon eggs, but unfortunately, it is wavering. When a person touches the edge of the spell, say by entering or leaving the town, their memory becomes corrupted. The corruption is like amnesia, people forget personal facts but don't lose skills or abilities usually. 

Two characters have already been corrupted and lost the knowledge of a spell and resources. The mage forget the spell is in their spell books and are surprised every time they see it. The other character has forgotten he is rich. This is being played for laughs. 

Nathan, dressed to impress.

That's it. Nathan didn't define the threat to the town and threw the characters right in the middle of the mess without a plan to get them out. Worse, the players are fighting a bone construct for one of the eggs. Nathan has no idea why he introduced this combat. The players are hell-bent on destroying the egg for unknown reasons. The last session ended in the middle of that battle. 

Memory... funny thing that is. 

I parsed out the whole situation, problems and all. 

Here is what we came up with as a solution. The hag, a witch, was the town shaman. Unfortunately, she was fated to die young but didn't know when. As the appointed day came close, she bargained with the dragon for its eggs. She would cast a spell on the eggs, to protect the town from bad weather and disease in her absence while also protecting the eggs as they matured. People who found the eggs would be afflicted with memory loss about the eggs and would not harm or steal them.  

Problem one is solved, we know why stuff is happening. That's important. 

Next, time to tackle some other issues. Nathan starts every session with a synopsis of what happened in the last session. He simply reads from a notebook. Tonight, he decided that will change. Instead, he will hand out notes to all of the players. Once they have the notes, he will absentmindedly flip through his notebook as if looking for the notes he just handed out. 

Queue the laughs. He'll ask someone to read the synopsis for him.

Oddly, there will be no mention of the combat with the bone construct. Instead, the players will find themselves in an ancient and desecrated graveyard at the edge of town. It says that right there in the game notes. The graves have been pillaged for something. In the dark, a shambling bone creature will disrupt their investigations. The bone construct was made by a previous shaman with the intent to protect the town in their absence. As long as the party doesn't attack, it will not attack them. It needs them alive to protect the town. 

It seems all of the players are suffering from memory loss. They didn't fight a bone construct, they are about to fight a bone construct. Maybe. When they return to the town proper, fight or not, they will find some of the NPCs have changed. These will be subtle changes, maybe someone needed to step out for a while and a friend took over. 

Now for the real fun. One of the PCs wears a wedding band. The same player inquired about having it turned into a ring of wishes in the prior sessions. This was an off-handed comment, a part of their character background. They would wish their spouse back to life if they could. Obviously, they recently saw the Dungeons and Dragons movie. 

A week from now, Nathan will be armed with a letter from a sage explaining how exceedingly rare rings of wishes are and that it would be virtually impossible for this particular ring to be one of wishes. Of course, no player character asked a sage about this. But here is a letter like they did. 

How did that happen? Who paid for it? It appears to be the guy who can't remember he is rich. 

The path is now clear, the party needs to become the protector of the town and eggs while the spell casters try to correct the malfunctioning spell or end the spell by finding another shaman. It would be helpful not to be eaten by the dragon while doing this, but it's starting to look like one of the PCs or NPCs will become a dragon snack. 

That's fine by Nathan. Not only is he counting on it, he has a friend scheduled to show up with a brand-new character, and prepped and practiced to act as if he has been there since the beginning. 

It's amazing how a chance dinner-time meal can turn into a campaign session. 

Setting, Theme, and Narrative

Last week, I was so hopeful. I would get myself back on track by returning to reviews until I was back on a regular posting schedule. Thursday morning, that goal was evaporating as my son got sick and by Friday evening, I had it too. 

It's been 147 days of Sudafed haze and sinus hell since Friday night. It's one of those sucky things you can't shake off. That's a shame because I wanted to post about something I received in the mail: 

Dragonlance is one of my favorite settings, my most hated modules, and THE THING that made me think about game design. It is a great setting. I can't wait to review these books and get into the Setting, Theme, and Narrative. 

My Friends, I Have Wasted a Year - Civilization II Gold Review

Title: Sid Meier's Civilization II Gold 
Publisher: MacSoft
Author: MicroProse
Year: 1999
OS: Mac OS 7.1 up to OS 9.2
Overall Rating: 5 of 5 stars

The misquote in the title is from Emperor Titus in 79 A.D. and is apt for a review of any of the Civilization Games. 

There were so many changes from Civ I to Civ II and the Gold version expanded on those, this version is like a brand new game. This particular version is my favorite despite being "made of glitch". I have delayed reviewing this game due to the incredible breadth of content and play options. 

This is an exploration strategy game, if not THE strategy game of the late 90s and early 2000s. You pick a civilization headed by an avatar representing that culture/civilization. From there you select a map type, either pre-made like the one below or a randomly generated world. Next comes scenario modifiers, where you can race for Alpha Centauri or have a slugfest to dominate our Earth (or approximation of Earth). 

From there, you explore and build cities to support both combat units and non-combat units like explorers and settlers while also competing to complete Wonders. The incredible number of wonders, improvements, and units keeps the fun going for hours if not weeks or months.  

Now, here is where the fun begins. In Civ Gold, you get a wonderful introductory video (if you have the CD-Rom, that is) and a scene cut of your wonder being built. These videos are beautiful and well-timed so as not to disrupt gameplay while also being fine enough for educational purposes. They actually enhance gameplay rather than being annoying. 

The Throne Room option is annoying because it adds nothing. 

In addition to the basic game, the Gold came in the form of a scenario editor, a cheat mode, hot-seat multiplayer options, and three collections of scenarios. Conflicts in Civilization, 8 "Best of the Net" designed by fans, and a final collection called Civ II: Fantastic Worlds based on MicroProse games. 

Additionally, the AI was much improved over the last iteration... Ha-ha, Just kidding!

Seriously, there must have been some improvement made to the AI, considering it would have to deal with random scenarios, new city improvements, new wonders, new units, and a mess of different scenario concepts all of which could be modified by hot-seat multiplayer or scenario parameters. This is asking a lot of any AI, even today. 

So it was taught to cheat, like instantly constructing units or improvements at will while having barbarian hordes wash over the map. Add in some actual gitches and you have comedy in the making. My personal favorite is you can use a wrapping map that the AI doesn't get. It will try not to go off the non-existent edge and send troops the long way around the world.  

The most famous glitch was allowing the AI to have Gandhi. Each AI-controlled civilization has a preassigned level of aggression, 1 to 10.  One is non-aggressive and 10 is omnicidial manic. This would be fine if it weren't for the modifies applied by technology gains. Democracy applies a -2 to aggression right about the same time cultures start getting cruise missiles and atom bombs. Gandhi starts at 1 then goes two less with Democracy. In computer math, he ends up with nukes and an aggression level of 255 on a scale of one to ten. Amusingly, if you disable nukes (through the scenario editor), Gandhi's opts for a Macrosss style cruise missile massacre. 

Either works exactly like this: 

Despite all of this, it is very easy to kill a week or more playing this game non-stop. I give it 5 stars due to the endless replayability provided by the scenario editor and the excellent modding tools provided out of the box. 

Review: Adventures in Dungeonland

It has been a while since I've posted. I have a lot going on but I would like to return to a regular posting schedule. As a head-clearing exercise, I would like to return to reviews, a process I enjoy. From the title, you know the module in question. 

Title: Dungeonland
Rule Set: AD&D 
Levels: 9-12
Year: 1983
Author: Gary Gygax
Publisher: TSR
Pages: 32 pages plus a map
Rating: 5 of 5 Stars

This is a classic module from 1983 by Gary Gygax. I recall two DMs running us through this module. One followed the note in the beginning to avoid Alice in Wonderland references while the other DM simply did exactly what he was told not to and introduced The White Rabbit as an NPC. 

It works both ways. I feel that back in the 80s, most people would have been familiar with either the Disney movie or the books but not both so it didn't instantly set off alarm bells. Back in 1983, you would have seen Alice in Wonderland in the theater or one of the smooshed-up, edited-down Disney TV shows. VHS wasn't even an option, as it didn't come out until '86. 

Gary Gygax mashes up Caroll's books with the Disney film Alice in Wonderland to great effect. The module is short and by necessity, almost feels like a single-session series of events. Everyone I've played with has been drawn in and wants to see what comes next as quick as possible. I guess I could have called it "engrossing" and saved some words. 

Now, this module isn't for every player but I think it is well worth a run-through. You can play this one a lot of different ways, with a bunch of different party types. One thing of note is that you cannot play this in a single session. Were I run this again, I might do it as a "special event" having several sessions a week.  

The intro is quick and to the point, so a DM has very little to set up. The high-level play, 9-12 levels of experience is sort of a drag for a DM who really wants to play this module. But with a lot of prep, you can dumb it down to any level. 

The module has six sections, one of which is "a blink and you miss it" intro, with all of the others lasting for several pages. The artwork is excellent and holds up over time. But there is strangely a lot of it for a book of this time period. I am going to circle back and blame the creative art team for enjoying this book too much. 

This module has so many creative scenarios, odd monster matches, and atypical magic that it really instills a sense of wonder, a dream-like experience for the players. 

I have personally used this module 3 times, once with the exact same party that experienced it as low-level characters before reaching the 9-12 levels as suggested on the cover. This is the third time with some folks who experienced Dragonlance burnout.

Here is a spoiler, the module starts with falling into a dream-like world. I mention this because the experience of falling and dreaming happens to people quite often and it can become a vehicle for launching the module with zero preparation as in getting the party to you know, actually fall down a hole.  

The first time I ran this module with low-level characters, I merged it with a Fritz Leiber story called The Howling Tower to make it survivable. 

 

The characters found a shrine with a crystal moon on an altar. I dropped some not-so-subtle hints as to what was happening. The walls of the shrine had a club and spades motif while the crystal moon prominently featured the rabbit in the moon and various areas noted with diamonds and hearts. When the characters removed the crystal moon from the altar, they were sprayed with a contact poison which they all misinterpreted as a gas as I hoped. 

This was done to force the players to all fail their saving throws as planned. Some characters made the first save only to be forced into a second or third save by touching downed characters. It didn't take long for them all to fall into Dungeonland.

The events of the module were their final moments of death stretched out in a bizarre hallucination. Escape from Dungeonland meant survival in the real world. 

Once in Dungeonland, if a character was dropped to 3 hp or less they got another save vs. poison. If they succeeded, they vanished from Dungeonland and reawoke in the real world. They had 3 rounds to consume wine, water, and food which magically healed their delusional wounds. Feeding others in the real world also heal them, too. Perhaps they could cast a spell before sinking back into Dungeonland. 

I had planned what I thought were obvious outs in the real world, such as leaving the room, placing someone on the altar and out of the poison would prevent another save, not touching other players or the crystal moon, and so on. Cleaning things or wearing gloves would have worked too, but no one caught on to this aspect as they really wanted back into Dungeonland. 

This party's second go-around in Dungeonland was brought on by one player mentioning the adventure while holding the Crystal Moon they found. 

For my hard-luck Dragonlance players, I yanked them down the rabbit hole via a nasty cabal attack. Each section of the module was the result of an alter reality spell being cast on them. Rather than being a total screw-fest, the Dragonlance characters had abilities and magic not accounted for in Dungeonland and they prevailed handily. 

Additionally, at the end of each sequence, they physically fought the illusionist who cast the spell for that part of the module before being thrust back into Dungeonland by the next illusionist's reality warping. As a consequence, they gained treasures from the dead illusionist cabal which they could use in the world of Krynn to equally deadly effect. As a nod to my first party's run, they also obtained the Crystal Moon device, which is a crystal ball. That is amazingly useful in Krynn. 

This was a confidence builder for getting back into the Dragonlance story after a minor setback which the party took as total failure. Funny how players think. 

This is one of the most fun adventures I have ever played as a player and as a DM. I may take a stab at it using Old School Essentials.