Dragon Mountain (1993) is another deluxe campaign box set from TSR’s later years, though not nearly so late in its life as Night Below. And compared to that campaign box, Dragon Mountain offers a lot less nuance. But there are still lots of surprises!
Dragon Mountain opens in a wilderness area dotted with small settlements, detailed in the first booklet. A number of adventures are to be had here and, naturally, all of them seem to indicate that something larger is afoot in the region. The second and third books detail the mountain itself, which is a massive dungeon in the classic style, complete with improbable death traps no sane person would build.
The secret of Dragon Mountain – and maybe stop reading if you think you want to play it – is that it is an attempt to rehabilitate one of D&D’s wimpiest monsters into a force to be feared. In my humble opinion, that experiment is a success.
Back in Dragon Magazine 127, there is an editorial about Tucker’s Kobolds. The DM used kobolds as an entrenched guerilla force in the first level of a deep dungeon and they prospect of facing them and their endless traps either coming or going was enough to make his players’ blood run cold. Dragon Mountain is, in my view, an attempt to formally publish D&D kobolds that match Tucker’s for their guile and gumption. I believe that if you run this campaign correctly, your players will never want to meet a kobold ever again.
That’s to say nothing of the dragon that resides in Dragon Mountain, or the unusual reason PCs have never heard of that worthy wyrm. Taken together with the kobolds, Dragon Mountain is a challenging, and likely very deadly, campaign.
Oh, did I mention the interior art is by Tony DiTerlizzi? It is! That makes it worth the price of admission alone.
