I did the Falcon trilogy a long while ago, and found the series as a whole a mixed bag. In general, the Cult of Iuz seemed way too under powered to give the City of Greyhawk any serious threat. With all the high level NPCs in the city, this cult would likely get trounced as soon as it began its reign of terror. So I did a little editing to make their plans of sabotage more covert and subtle then what the modules depicted, and boosted a couple of levels to the main leaders.
An example: When I ran the cult assault on the temple of St Cuthbert in the second module, I ran it as the module dictated and the cultists got creamed. I recommend that instead of a direct assault, spread out a series of assasinations of minor priests and regular temple goers. The cultists theme should be to concentrate on the low level people and commoners, for without their work the city's economy would collapse. A direct assault would draw too much attention to itself. I guess that is really the point (it has been written that if the Old City disappeared Greyhawk would collapse), so the open attacks on the temple seems out of character with the general strategy of the cult.
When it comes to the critiques of the series, there are quite a few people who did not like the overly strong dragon in human form watching over the party. I would keep his involvement in the plot to an absolute minimum, so that the players get the most out of the adventure. The well placed spy within the city counstables was unmasked a little too easily, I suggest making his work more subtle as well. Finally there's the concept of a derro base just outside the city, again this is too blatant and not really in keeping with the covert secretive nature of the cult. I would suggest making the derro into more human cultists from the countryside to act as reinforcements for the city based cult.
I actually liked the modules. I felt there was enough little details added to the city of Greyhawk alone to make the series worth while. I made the changes above and felt that they made the series a bit more realistic, but that's just my take.
Have fun with the rest of the series and let me know how it went.
The adventures themselves never really inspired me enough to run them as is, but the maps and added details about the city and NPCs, as well as the cardstock buildings, made them well worth the price I paid (which, IIRC, was like $3 each in the game shop bargain bin about the time 3e came along and some shops decided to dump their 2e stock) _________________ What would Raxivort do?<br />
I did the Falcon trilogy a long while ago, and found the series as a whole a mixed bag. In general, the Cult of Iuz seemed way too under powered to give the City of Greyhawk any serious threat. O-D
I agree with this entirely. It seems like they wanted a "City of Greyhawk Adventure Series." This is what they got. To me, it didn't really seem GH except as that is where it was set.
I have played through the falcon modules and have never played worse, it could be said that this was the worst example of the Greyhawk setting being used to push sub par products with below par writing _________________ What the hell is an aluminum falcon? (robot chicken star wars special
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