#RPGaDay: Day 6

6. You can game everyday for a week. Describe what you'd do!

Answer: This is probably going to sound lame to a lot of people, but if I could game for a entire week I would run a group through the Queen of the Spiders series. I never owned them back in the day and it took me a while to collect them. By the time I had them all I had been out of gaming for about 15 years. I've always felt like I missed out on a gaming rite of passage that so many people had experienced. Using my week of gaming to finally experience it for myself would be a great way to check that milestone off my list. I don't own the proper Queen of the Spiders super-module, but I have the Against the Giants 3-in-1, reissues of the three individual, monochrome Giant books that came in TSR's 25th anniversary box, the full-color reissues of D1-2 and D3, and the final Queen of the Demonweb Pits.

As it happens, the series works out perfectly by taking one module a day for the whole week.

Day 1: G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief
Day 2: G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl
Day 3: G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King
Day 4: D1 Descent into the Depths of the Earth
Day 5: D2 Shrine of the Kuo-Toa
Day 6: D3 Vault of the Drow
Day 7: Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits

I'm sure I'd be exhausted by the end of the week, and there's no telling if the group would make it all the way through. This series is the quintessential railroad adventure with one module leading into the next along the prescribed story line. You could almost lay blame for all bad story gaming at the feet of this colossal expedition. At the same time, there are so many classic touchstones to these adventures including the introduction of the Underdark, the Drow, and real interplanar gaming.

YouTuber, Captcorajus, has a great breakdown of the series with several videos giving a good critique of the things that work and those that don't. As he points out, this railroad kind of ends in a bit of a trainwreck, but he offers some great ideas to make the series as a whole live up to its potential. I'd love to take a crack it.