Well, that was my first dungeon ever, and I never got to play in or run that adventure...
The intervening years were unkind to the magazine, and I have replaced the original with a pdf file
Its actually very high on my list of adventures to convert. That said I'm probably going to do a major over haul of a lot of it. Ex Libris, like A Hot Day in L'Trel and Chandanthers (Dammit I'm spelling this wrong) Bane, is conceptually almost unmatched in terms of adventure local but in deep need of more work in actual execution.
That said - exactly how to fix it has me a tad stumped. Obviously the key component is the moving rooms. They might even work a bit better in 3.5 as they will seem a little large due to the 5' versus 10' square convention. Still I'd think demons popping in kind of randomly will get old friggen fast.
Maybe do the whole thing as more of a lair for demons with teleportation? Demons make good adversaries as the dungeon itself with its random movements might be the epitome of chaos. Its just keeping things more interesting then DM pops in and players kill it repeat ad naseum that concerns me.
I'm in the process of updating this very adventure for my group. Of course, I use a "most default Greyhawk" campaign world, so Oghma has become a lesser deity of knowledge, and the PCs have been commissioned to check out the ruins of this "rumored keep of knowledge" and bring back any books/scrolls/whatnot they can find to the Temple of Boccob in Greyhawk City.
Topside, I pretty much kept the monsters as-is, using the current version of the heucuvas, and choosing some specific wandering monsters in the ruins (ones I happen to have suitable figures for: giant centipede, giant spider, and carrion crawlers).
In the sublevel, the first thing I did was cut the rooms down to 8x8 instead of 16x16. This was a matter of practicality, as I realized I'd only be able to get a single 16x16 room out of a sheet of standard-sized posterboard, and didn't have anything large enough to carry such large room tiles safely to the game in any case. 8x8 seems like it'll work fine: there's plenty of room for the PCs to move around in, and I just tried to keep the same basics of each room. The doors are all still in the middle of the walls, so they straddle two adjacent squares, but that shouldn't be a problem.
I scrapped the classed NPCs in the lower level, as I don't want that many people down there at once to have to keep track of, so I replaced them with a single doppelganger who will be taking the form of the PCs' hireling, whom they left upstairs with their horses. He'll concoct a story about having been overrun by a pack of displacer beasts and having barely escaped down the stairs and getting lost in the rooms, so the players will have something to worry about after the adventure is over.
Having cut down the room sizes, I cut back a lot of the plant monsters in the hydroponics room. I think I'm just going to use a shambling mound and some violet fungi and call it good - the original room looked to be a bit labor-intensive as far as keeping track of all those monsters at once. (Oh, and I had a scrap of green posterboard just the right size, so I made up two versions of that room tile: a green one for the "foliated" original version and a white one for the "defoliated" one; the latter one has the red scroll markings visible.)
As for the duplication of the guardian beasts, I'm a bit concerned that that may get boring, but I haven't decided just what to do about it yet. (We ended the last session with the PCs going down to the second level.) I did generate 3.5 stats using the abishai entry from "Monsters of Faerûn" and the guardian daemon from "Tome of Horrors," which I'll definitely be using, but I may just decide that not as many books are protected that way, especially not the ones that don't hold the pages needed to reassemble the control book. I may throw on some extra sepia snake sigils or exploding rune spell traps to take their place; that way the original Oghma cleric will still have protected his books, but not in such a repetitive fashion, and it'll make for a faster game session that way. (I'm fighting a timeline here, as my youngest son goes off to college in a couple of weeks, and we want to finish up this adventure before he leaves.)
As the PCs discover the "rune pages," I'm giving them a token that has the appropriate English letter on it - again, for the sake of time, I'm not going to have them decipher what each rune really stands for.
I think that's about it. We'll see how it goes, hopefully the weekend after next.
Johnathan
Looks like a lot of good ideas. I'll have to keep this thread in mind when I do my update. Just goes to show you that the really good adventures never die...they just get pared down to their essentials.