Retrospective: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks

I talk about a fan-favorite classic module that mixes fantasy and science fiction. S3, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.
0:00 What's today's video about?
0:31 The physical components
3:05 What destroyed the town?
4:10 Where did the specimens come from?
7:29 Moral implications of the ship's mission
8:36 What creatures were brought to Oerth by the ship?
9:43 "Hidden" new monsters in the module
10:20 The technology charts
11:45 Thanks, and sale on web store!
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[@Fharlang067]

I have run this adventure many times over the years, I currently have a party near the end. Everyone enjoys the abrupt change from fantasy to sci-fi for a short time before going back.

[@kennetth1389]

I truly adore this module. Every time the campaign progresses far enough, they encounter some aspect of the adventure.

[@inkspitter13]

Just winding up this adventure right now... my take is that like virtually all old modules, its not really intended to be run 100% as written. It needs work and filling out into something that has a point. Its a big weird place that on its own makes very little sense, with a strangely random monsters and very little actual story. But for a DM willing to dive in and do the work, its a remarkably fun module to run, especially if you give it some kind of a plot to hook it into the greater campaign, and gloss over some of the inconsistencies of the original. I fleshed out the background of the ship itself a bit, gave the party an addition reason to enter (find the previous party that went in and is now MIA), used the Shedu as "psychic guides" of sorts, and added a bunch of creepy weird stuff about the Mind Flayer and its ultimate motives, and finally a denouement involving switching the control that will send the ship back to its own universe before the Flayer (the first so far encountered in this campaign) can figure out how to use it as a bridgehead to allow more of its kind into the World of Greyhawk... And no, they wont get to keep their lasers guns lol. Most of the tech will stop functioning once/if the ship departs.

[@EHLarson]

Love that little EGG embedded in at least one of the deck plans.

[@joeyj6808]

I remember this one fondly. Not so fond of the re-issue, which allowed a surviving party to be OP with laser rifles etc. LOL. I learned from that to be a stricter DM!

[@thatpatrickguy3446]

The planned Metamorphosis Alpha crossover adventure, though that was not specifically said in the final printing. Anyone familiar with the MA game can see all the things imported from that game. I loved that the DM was left to decide what had been thrown out to ravage the countryside. The DM who I played through it with when we were thirteen decided that it was a great time to insert some of the ridiculously overpowered monsters he'd made. 😀 In a DM panel that I was involved with agreed that the "Star Trek" premise (seek out new life and new civilizations) was behind the collecting of the varied creatures from Oerth. The robots followed their programming and went out to collect creatures of all kinds on this new planet for the scientists and linguists to communicate with and study. They were held painlessly in stasis until said scientists and linguists could examine them and attempt to communicate with them which, when the ship had its original crew complement, would happen very quickly. But now the programming remained for the robots which they followed to the letter, but that programming had no "If there are no surviving scientists and linguists" provision, so they continued to collect until the holds were full. Once the holds were full the robots no longer went out exploring. As the ship had been here for centuries if not millennia there had been no excursions to collect life forms in a very long time. Anyone familiar with the Metamorphosis Alpha game (which I was not until just before the panel when a couple of my fellow DMs gave me a crash [pun not intended] course in the game so I knew more about the background) knew that, once the explorer ships encountered difficulties the programming and central computers would occasionally become altered or flawed over time without updates and without regular maintenance, which is why some odd things occur: some robots will attack anyone on sight and some will not. It's also why there are occasionally orders to dump some of the animals from stasis to the outside world. And, occasionally, some of the stasis chambers would fail and creatures would escape and find their own environments to exist in. Some might be otherworldly, such as everything from the web bats to the beloved froghemoth (I'm not even going to count how many mid-high level adventures there have been froghemoths in in my campaigns. But apparently they went forth and multiplied 😀) or they may just be, for example, normal bats who ate radiated spiders in a rad zone on the ship and were altered. One guy I knew laughingly insisted that the vegepygmies were just radiation altered halflings. 😀 The great thing about S3 is the vistas it opened, even for those who read it and said, with good reasons, that they would never allow it in their campaigns. I never ran it, but obviously I pulled ideas from it. One of the ones that amuses me is that I still refer to everything from a hand truck to a mining cart to a grocery buggy to a golf cart as a "wheely sled" because of this module. 😀

[@davepeller6173]

You just gave me 3 or 4 or 5 ideas for follow-up and/or prequel Barrier Peaks adventures. You rock!

[@trevormcwilliams7578]

I loved the horror aspect. Dark areas, intellect devourer hunting the party, an android that will operate you to death. It reminded me, just a bit, of the Starlost.

[@jackleg2007]

Read but never ran this module. I remember the excitement of seeing it advertised in Dragon magazine. The flow chart used to figure out high tech equipment came from Gamma World.

[@richmcgee434]

The artwork's got some Jeff Dee (the mind flayer and intellect devourer, for ex, and I think the drugged bulette getting chucked out the cargo hatch with the party was him) but they pulled in almost everyone for it. Roslof, Sutherland, and LaForce all contributed, and Errol Otus did the front cover and all the color plates. Having the new "alien" monsters show up later far away from the Peaks is easily explained by anything from "the ship's malfunctioning tech produces random temporary portals that they wandered through" to "this species grows from spores and a whole bunch of them have gotten loose from the ship and spread by wind, water, and getting stuck in bird's feathers" to "there was more than one crash site" possibility. Wolves-In-Sheep's-Clothing were everywhere in our games after the module came out, and the DM had them adapt almost as well as a mimic so they started looking like a treasure chest on a small table, or a keg of ale with a platter of food on top of it, or (in a formerly ghoul-haunted mausoleum where most of the ghouls had been eaten) a plump pungent corpse on top of a pile of dessicated bodies. We managed to avoid falling for that last one, at least. Also ran into homebrew froghemoth tadpoles, which we thankfully killed before they grew to adulthood without every knowing what they were. Spent years convinced they were some kind of larval aboleth.

[@pentegarn1]

Before there was a Star Wars RPG we actually used the weapons in this module to play Star Wars. I mean they had laser pistols and lightsabers in this story...so it helped us RP Star Wars before they finally came out with an official Star Wars RPG. I think we made Jedi characters be paladins, and Han Solo-like smugglers were just thieves with blaster pistols as per this module. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot more fun than Star Frontiers....except Star Frontiers did have stats for ships and speeders which we really didn't have.

[@godking4621]

I used it to introduce the Tyranids to Greyhawk.....magic/psionic leaders directing a swarm of aberrations to harvest biomass The ship was a Imperium Mechanicus research ship

[@pickard72]

This is my all-time favorite module as a player; I had a great DM. Temple of the Frog also had some futuristic gear in it. If I DM these 2 adventures, I will likely limit the remaining charges left in the gear at the end of this adventure, so as not to be OP in the next adventure.

[@robertshulman1659]

The ship was in orbit of Oerth, took specimens from it, until it took something too much. This caused the crash, then the powerful critter escaped, destroyed the town, and departed. Subsequent releases were as described. - from Zordar's Legends, myworld.

[@garryame4008]

What a funky and fun module!

[@Se7enBeatleofDoom]

Think of it as a prequel to and a Greyhawk crossover with Spelljammer before Spelljammer was a thing.

[@MrCSeiberlin]

One of the best ideas I saw for this was that a mind flayer larvae infected the captain and converted him. And that its gone a bit crazy(ier) and still thinks it is the 'captain' (due to some super science medical treatment no doubt) as it's waited patiently for the robots to dig it slowly out of the mountain (keeping itself in suspended animation in the intervening years). But a mad flayer as the overall BBEG for the region with a few tweaks I thought was a clever premise to tweak this for long term campaign usage. I ran it a few times in my youth as well. The russet mold never failed to kill a PC. The Intellect devourer another PC killer as well. I also ran it once as a Gamma World crossover, in a campaign where they used a transporter to get to the Warden (Metamorphosis Alpha) and the transport from the Warden side was broken. They eventually jury rigged a 'fix' of the malfunctioning transporter which sent them to a cast off pod section (from the warden) in the network (with another nonfunctional transporter). I figured they could always find a wish or something if they wanted to return home to gamma earth. Honestly they were a pretty rambunctious bunch so those 3 destroyed villages in the Grand Duchy were probably taken out by Mutant PCs;-)

[@chupa5946]

never really likes sci-fi in my fantasy but i loved the module for what it was

[@davidleonard8547]

I bought this module when it was released, but I've never ran it. My younger self was intimidated by it. These days, I love its possibility, assuming that you're open to sci-fi in your sword and sorcery. I'm okay with it, although I'm probably in the minority. I like to think that the ship crashed on Oerth millennia ago, and that most of the monsters on board are Greyhawk's invasive species. Mind flayers and Intellect Devourers, etc., are from the great black yonder; and maybe that's why they are so lethal here! Vegepygmies, on the other hand, might have evolved on the ship, to my mind. Great stuff! But like I said, I expect I'm in the minority.

[@danilanglois6785]

My understanding is that most of the monsters made their first appearance in S3. That would mean the crashed ship is where they all came from. Given how strange many of the flora and fauna are, does it really surprise you that most of them are aliens? As for how they could be spread beyond the crash site... magic. Magic-Users, Lich's, Demons/Devils, and any number of other creatures that might be able to transport them.

[@GreyhawkGrognard]

If you're talking about the robots, yes. But IIRC the only new monsters that made it into the larger game (in the FF and MM2) were the vegepygmies and the wolf-in-sheep's clothing.

[@danilanglois6785]

@@GreyhawkGrognard I was referring to the 1976 Origins II Tournament Module. Though, I guess some of the fauna/flora was printed in The Strategic Review #3 first. Most of the creatures appeared in those two sources first. Later they were added to the Monster Manuel II. At least, that is my understanding of their history. Edit: Of course, they were reprinted int S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks before the Monster Manual II.

[@GreyhawkGrognard]

@@danilanglois6785 It's an interesting question. Which "canon" comes first? How official/unofficial is SR, or a con module, compared to a published module or the FF/MM2?

[@danilanglois6785]

@@GreyhawkGrognard With WotC mucking everything up, I am going to stick with chronological order for now. 🙂 lol

[@erincollins9761]

Doesn't the module say the spaceship went through dimensional rifts as part of it breaking up and crashing or am I confusing this spaceship with the Blackmoor spacecraft?

[@GreyhawkGrognard]

"The section concerned here was drawn through a black hole and spewed into the universe where the World of Greyhawk fantasy setting exists."

[@heathla1]

White Plume was more fun for my players but its a well do adventure

[@allenmcnight8576]

Any thoughts on Goodman Games OAR treatment of the module?

[@GreyhawkGrognard]

Don't have it, alas.

[@jermwar]

copypasted from the blog: RE: What destroyed the town... Whatever those creatures were that destroyed the walled town and villages, they are still out there somewhere... Alt Theory: it is a spaceship, but not from outer space, but rather inner space! It comes from Hollow Oerth! All the creatures exist somewhere on the outer Oerth, and this is a scout recon ship in advance of the literal uprising of the Atlantean/Grays Aliens/whatever- equivalent that lives at the center of Oerth (the invasion is currently on hold as obviously, the creatures on the surface are very powerful to have destroyed their recon ship).

[@mmelmon]

It is best not to ask too many questions about a Gygax adventure....

[@swirvinbirds1971]

And the players ask a lot of questions.

[@michaelr00ney]

The Goodman Games Revisited version fills in the wall-destroying menace released from the ship (I will not spoil it), and provides that as an alternative prelude to the expedition. As for the ethics of a spacefaring civilization that puts sentient organisms into stasis as zoo specimens-well, that’s not hard to imagine, as that’s how Europeans rolled for centuries.

[@fleetcenturion]

I truly never cared for mixing fantasy and sci-fi. Good review, though.

[@pickard72]

I was with you about not mixing the two, until I played this with a great DM. I was the first one to figure out what was really going on here, and loved it. The robots should be described as knights in armor (ignore the included pictures), and the charges of the futuristic gear can be limited in their remaining energy. The walls and floors can be described as a smooth metallic-like material, the light seems to be a glow in the ceiling. A lot depends on the DM's choice of words when describing the environment and stuff.

[@adampender2482]

I'm not a fan of science fiction in fact I hate it so when I got thus module in the super module I hated it for a waste.