RPG Memories -- Expedition to the Barrier Peaks

Expedition to the Barrier Peaks

I first encountered Expedition to the Barrier Peaks in 1984, picking up a copy of the module in a game store in Minneapolis on my way to Coast Guard Basic Training. I read the thing cover-to-cover during the trip to Cape May, and somehow managed to get it packed away into storage with my other civilian belongings while I was in training. After I graduated, the module went with me to my new unit, and I read it cover-to-cover again and again while I stood various engineering watches.

In 1985, we were in shipyards in Charleston, South Carolina and I had a chance to attend a small local game convention being hosted by an area RPG store. Much to my delight, one of the adventures being run was none other than Expedition to the Barrier Peaks! I signed up for it right away, along with several other players. This was going to be a big game, with fifteen PCs, a Primary DM, and two Assistant DMs. We had the option of either rolling up a new character for the game, or bringing in an existing character of suitable level (subject to DM approval, of course). I opted to roll up a character, and created Patrick "Paddy" Goodfellow, a halfling fighter/thief.

I knew that I wasn't the only one familiar with the module, but nobody actually asked me if I was, so I kept mum and played dumb...unlike three or four of my fellow players, who were confident that their collective knowledge would give them an edge in surviving the adventure.

They were wrong.

The attrition was horrible! We lost nearly half of our party before we even found a way off of the first level. By the time we reached the Garden Level, we were down to a druid, a magic-user with only a couple of spells remaining, a dwarf fighter, a halfling fighter/​thief (me), and an elf fighter/magic-user. In the end, the only survivors were me, the druid, and the elf. Oddly enough, I was able to attribute my survival not to my knowledge of the module but instead to the fact that I was playing with what I figured would have been a halfling's mindset in such a situation -- everything was just way too big and strange for me to be comfortable doing much other than trying to stay out of the way.

Incidentally, I continued to play Paddy off and on for a few more years, but eventually retired him when AD&D Second Edition came out and I created and began playing Savinian the Multi-Faceted, a half-elf fighter/magic-user/thief. But that's another story...

Back to Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.

When I began running role-playing games myself, I would frequently turn to published adventures that I already knew and convert them to fit whatever game I was running. The first time I did this was for a Justice, Incorporated campaign that I was running, in which the PCs were sent to investigate an alien artifact of immense size recently discovered buried beneath the ice in Antarctia. A doorway led to an alien city...which was none other than the spaceship from Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, repurposed for the adventure.

The expedition proved to be something of a disaster for the PCs, with four of the six PCs (one of them a Nazi spy planted in the party as a "ringer") dying on the first level before the survivors were able to fight their way back outside...only to watch as the entrance to the ship was buried beneath an avalance, removing all trace of it.

After running that adventure, I started "fleshing out" the vessel beyond what the module contained. What did the crew wear? What books did they have in their library? I named the ship, gave names to some of the (deceased) crew members, and even worked up an "alien language" cobbled together from various Earth languages and utilizing a modified form of the Deseret alphabet. I drew inspiration from other science fiction games, from Traveller and Star Frontiers to Star Wars and Battletech. Monsters from the module were changed out as I found ones I liked better in other games, and the list of equipment that could be found filled an entire spiral-bound notebook.

A couple of years later, while I was running a Danger International campaign, I stumbled across a crude map and some notes that the players of one of the surviving PCs had made. This gave me an idea, and I contacted the player and told him what I had in mind. He agreed, so I sent him a copy of the notes and map. About a month later, he returned to me a hand-penned journal that represented a portion of the long-retired character's memoires. Within them were the notes and map, incorporated into the narrative. I then arranged for the journal to fall into the hands of my current game's PCs...and they took the bait – hook, line, and sinker.

Ironically, the group of five PCs didn't fare much better than the previous one, even though they had the advantage of modern equipment and knowledge and the rough map and notes. They lost their medic on the first level (ironically, to a malfunctioning android surgeon), their polar survival expert to a malfunctioning waiter robot in a restaurant/lounge, and their two combat specialists on the Garden Level. The sole survivor – a computer hacker/wire rat – managed to escape and make his way back to a research station, but nobody believed his story.

Since then, I've adapted the adventure to and run it in everything from Call of Cthulhu to AD&D 2e's Spelljammer and Masque of the Red Death to GURPS. The ruined spaceship has appeared in the jungles of the Amazon and the Congo, in the mountains of North Africa and the American West, on the moon and Mars, and even in the Bermuda Triangle. Notes once scrawled into spiral-bound notebooks eventually became typed pages punched and organized into a three-ring binder before eventually becoming various word-processing documents created on a series of computers of ever-increasing complexity.

More than 30 years after I first encountered it, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks remains one of my all-time favorite adventures.