Goodman Games Original Adventures Reincarnated #3: Expedition to The Barrier Peaks

I bought this to mod the module a bit for my own uses, incorporating aspects of the built in story setup and the dungeons mysteries into the larger narrative of my homebrew's long term campaign. Serving that cause it was a success and my adventurers seemed to love it. We dove this dungeon for at least 4 3-4hr sessions as they learned the truth about the structure and encountered its mysteries. It is thorough and mostly well laid out with the original version included before the 5e conversion in the second half of the tome. Even throwing away the running of it, there are a lot of cool ideas, monsters, items and more to juice up your campaigns in general. This was my first time running an older module and it was a lot of fun and definitely recommend it.

Goodman Games has been doing a great job highlighting some of the most famous older adventures from the early days of role playing. These omnibus editions are a fun way to collect the original text and art in a more durable form, and it's fun to learn a little bit about the history of each adventure.The fully updated version of the adventure for 5th edition D&D makes this product much more useful for players in the modern era. Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is a stand-out of the series for the amount of additional material provided to expand the adventure and suggest hooks to link it into a broader campaign.

I'm not a big D&D fan. But I enjoy the hell out of weird, genre bending Fantasy. The kind of thing that was a lot more popular before the 1980s, when Fantasy Literature started to mean Tolkien-esque/Medieval European-based. This module was sort of famous or infamous when I was growing up in the 80s, before I ever even tried D&D.The Goodman Games version has lots of cool stuff in it, including reproductions of the original. But for me, the star is the 5e conversion & expansion. Not because I am going to run it in 5e, but because it's much easier to read thanks to modern layout. And I've gotten pretty good at converting 5e stuff over to Dungeon Crawl Classics.I seeded this on a regional map for a campaign I was putting together, but sadly, things went sideways. Life (and death) got in the way. So, that's on the backburner. Still, a very entertaining read.

The campaign is great took my players about 8 sessions to finish at 3-4 hours a session. They really enjoyed the retro sci-fi aspect and played into the weirdness of the setting. They really enjoyed the added wilderness exploration which I’m looking to recreate for other campaigns as well now.

My players are really enjoying this as a change of pace, and I have no criticism of the 5e conversion quality. The layout reflects the style of the original, which can be counterintuitive compared to modern adventure products. For example, the rules for players discovering the nature of the alien items are not mentioned in the main body of the adventure, which means that I was unaware of them for our first session.Additionally, the book includes reprints of both versions of the original adventure, which are practically identical. Maybe this would be nostalgic if I had particular connection to this adventure, but I don't. As is, it just makes the book unwieldy. I think these products would be better if they didn't have those reprints.It would also be nice if the product included PDF versions of the handouts. I ended up taking pictures of the page with my phone to send to my players, which led to me inadvertently showing them the name of the adventure printed on the bottom of the page. (PDF maps would be nice too, but that's a bigger ask)

NAILED IT!!!I have been collecting all of the Goodman Games "5e Conversion and Homage" books, and Expedition to Barrier Peaks is where Goodman Games found the perfect balance of new material, the classic stuff, and a gorgeous end product complete with a beautiful new piece of Erol Otis artwork as an inside cover artwork.For those who complain about getting too much "old stuff" they clearly do not understand what Wizards of the Coast is allowing Goodman Games to produce for them. A classic D&D experience!!!Again of the (so far) 3 classic modules Goodman Games has produced, Expedition is the Gold Standard version to which all the others should be judged. They really did a good job on it.Not sure why Isle of Dread lost them but, I am so happy to see the bookmark ribbon has returned to the books spine! Feel free to double up in the next printings. A great help.

This is a great book so far, just started to read the 5e section. The reprints of the original are perfects, and I was glad to read all the interviews in the front. The inner cover art by Errol was great. I’d have loved to see more color Errol Otus Art. He is one of my art heroes from way back. The only think I’d like to have is more color maps and color art. I’d pay more for color versions of all the hand out art. The maps are so complex with the lighting information a color map would have helped that a lot. But that would just be icing on the cake, and this is some great cake.

Great history with this book. Takes me back to the good old days. Love all the added info.