Heck, I'm not even sure where to post this:
Now there's a real puzzle for old school A/D&D players:
I've dug up a very old AD&D character to be reused in DnD 3.5.
Most important event in the charactes live was an adventure played on a paper&pen con (I think it was a FRON or a SOX-Con, in Germany), where he had to face an old green dragon that forced the PCs to recover its eggs from some kind of volcano, and I think the DM was using some DRAGON magazine adventure.
Now I'd like to find out, what DRAGON magazine that adventure was from.
If there is any old school AD&D player out there who has an idea, please let me know!
Long live the Dragons, whether they be advanced or not!
That was Green Lady's Sorrow, from a Dungeon Magazine.
I loved this adventure too.
Edit : Found the issue : Dungeon #35.
Hoooooo boy!
Let me tell you something about me and Green Lady's Sorrow. Running it was such an incredible experience, I just HAD to tell about it. I was lurking on these messageboards for years, too shy to post, when I saw the perfect excuse to tell about Green Lady's Sorrow on a certain thread. So I wrote my very first post to paizo.com about it. And I rambled about it for THOUSANDS of words! You can read it here.
What a pity this Joseph P. O'Neil guy didn't get any other adventures published. (An article in Polyhedron just doesn't cut it for me.)
And in case I didn't make it clear in my last post (in fact, I didn't) I'd very much like other people to share THEIR memories of Green Lady's Sorrow.
Hey, great many thanks. To bad that Dungeon issue doesn't seem to be available anymore. If anyone could provide this adventure I'd welcome that very much.
For now, the link provided to experiences with that adventure is already very useful, since it contains at least the name of the dragon Pzyruxal, which I would like to see reintroduced as an old nemesis of the PC involved.
Many years ago I played a good aligned old-school ranger. I too said, I don't trust an evil chromatic dragon the least bit, let's attack her now and get over with it. But the greedy party overvoted me, so I went along.
When the party finally wanted to storm out with the last eggs to claim the promised treasure, I insisted on a different approach - a hostage situation with the eggs being hostages. The dragon grudgingly met our demands at first, letting the party get away with much advance. But one character had to remain in front of the dragon, holding an egg and a powerful dagger. Finally, after some hours of dragon-elf staredown (and continued threats like "you try to enchant me once more that egg is history") finally I threw the egg away in a high arch, used the moment the dragon needed to catch the egg to shapeshift into a falcon (which I could do, actually being a Mielikkian Shadoweir, that is a neutral good half-elven ranger/druid) and started to fly. With the dragon closing in, I shapeshifted into a panther upon reaching a forested area. That moment the gas hit. The DM was rolling dice openly. The inflicted damage minus the shapeshifting healing effect let me survive with exactly 1 hit point (sic!), and after some difficult hide&seek reach the nearest stream and escape as a water snake.
Having been almost killed by being hit with painful acid, the dragon should still be a nemesis for that character, and a nemesis should have a name and personality.
That's amazing. In my campaign, Alein swore to get Pzyruxal one day, when she was experienced enough. We never got around to that in our campaign, though.
Who could provide this adventure? I assume you're asking where you can get this issue. Well, TrollandToad.com is offering the issue in near mint for $6.95, and used for $3.48. You can find both copies here.
The Dragon's Trove is offering it for $4 here. (However, I've never ordered from The Dragon's Trove before, so I can't personally vouch for it.)
The Noble Knight is offering a copy for $5 here.
Someone's offering it through amazon.com for $9.99 here. (That's much too steep in my opinion, though.)
Thanks for the info, by now I had the opportunity to read through the original adventure. Amazing thing is, back then we didn't find out much about the Ifrit and didn't give it much thought. In the course of the current campaign an Ifrit became an important NPC, whose name was never determined so far. Could be this Jafar, who knows ...
And yes, "get Pyruxal one day" is exactly what my PC intends to do. Our current DM currently plays a campaign in Zhentil Keep during Bane's return 1369 DR, and one of Cyric's Champions already made an appearance, riding a close relative of Pyruxal ...
Amazing thing is, back then we didn't find out much about the Ifrit and didn't give it much thought.
Yeah, that was an amazing thing about a LOT of adventures from Dungeon magazine - they were full of NPCs and situations with a lot of interesting backstory. Some people criticized this approach, calling it a mistake. After all, 95% of the time, the players don't find out about any of this backstory. Ah, but the other 5% of the time, it made for some fascinating play sessions!
After having updated that character a bit, I remember that there were 2 other adventure modules played with that character, placed on the Moonshaes (at least by the DM), probably they too were from a Dungeon magazine.
One was about some Moander priests, who tried to subjugate the Moonshaes by corrupting moonwells and abducting archdruids.
The other was about some ancient artifact that was uncovered during mining operations. That artifact also tried to subjugate the islands. I think it was some metallic globe and it had some duergar servants.
Does anyone recognize anything of the above?