Anyone here ever got to play that part of the game? What was it like?

Assuming you mean the Gold Box*, I own it, but have rarely few others that did, and none that have actually played Immortal characters.

I never really saw the appeal, but I did use some of the rules in my Master-level campaigns.


(*There was the later release of the Wrath of the Immortals boxed set).

I didn't have any particular version in mind, but that part of the D&D game itself. Just curious about it. It seems like few people made it to the domain management part of the game, so it wouldn't surprise me if even fewer made it to this part.

We had it when it came out. We did play it. Mind you, we were 12 at the time. We played up through level 36 in BECMI and then on to playing as immortals (at least one of us must have started out again at 1st and played up to 36 again, since I think we tried each of the paths to immortality. Obviously some DM collusion to get us up to being able to use this new rule set we had bought was part of this). We did kind of play it just as another sandbox with dark gods and evil forces and artifacts instead of treasure (as you said, we never did do much with domain management, so much of levels 10-36 were also just sandboxes and dungeon crawls).

What I remember was that, even at that age (when 'you get to play as polytheistic gods' should have been enough to keep us spellbound for months), we all kind of got the idea at about the same time that that there was no real reason for this game to exist. Likewise, there was no reason to play it, and no reason why it should have bothered sticking close to its base in D&D rules.

It was hard enough to figure out what to do with PCs once they have 9th level spells (except domain management, which is wish had actually been spelled out decently in the BECMI rule set so that we might have been compelled to explore it), there is absolutely no reason to do so for immortals. I have no personal interest in Exalted, but I recognize that they set up a reason to want to play greater powers and their servants. This system didn't give the same reasons. There was some hokum about the factions of  Matter (Earth), Energy (Fire), Thought (Air), Time (Water), and Entropy(nothing), but no reason to feel invested in it.

This is where The Primal Order shines: by tying a god's power and very existence to worshipers and other sources of divine energy, and making Spheres of Influence a source of power, it sets up lots of potential conflicts.  Ultimately, though, if the players don't really care about going out and stirring up some god-level shit, Iliad-style, then divine-level play probably isn't going to work for your group.

I GM'd for literal god PCs in AD&D, but while I have the Wrath of the Immortals rules I've not used them yet. My Classic PC group (level 9-12 currently) are keen to play to level 36 & Immortal ascension, but that will be years off - at ca 5 sessions/level, 50 sessions/year looking at 2-3 years at least. The WotI rules seem to disgard some of the motivators for deity play we had in D&D, such as the quest for followers to increase Worship Points which allowed progression from demigod to lesser god (& in theory Greater God - no one made it that far), and I'm not confident in running a full Immortals campaign but I do own I2 'Wrath of Olympus'; and plan to use that at least.

Like Willie we played all the way through to Gold Box. At the time, it seemed very alien to us (we might have been 16 by this point) and so different from the rest of D&D that it didn't fit our expectations of a game with that name. Although we played 36th level characters we never actually used the Immortal rules for this reason.

I find it telling that they skipped the 'I' part of BECMI when they produced the Rules Compendium...

Quote from: Willie the Duck;898571We played up through level 36 in BECMI and then on to playing as immortals (at least one of us must have started out again at 1st and played up to 36 again, since I think we tried each of the paths to immortality.

Oooh. Your friend has to be the one person I know of which got the closest to ever winning D&D.

There was this weird rule in the Immortal's DM guide which stated that, after you managed to reach Primarch of one of the four PC accessible Spheres, Entropy being forbidden, you could either reincarnate as master of a world (i.e. you got promoted to being a DM) or you could have your memory wiped, restart again as a 1st level PC, and then if you managed to go all the way up to Primarch again a Sphere of Annihilation would suck you out, apparently destroying you forever, but in truth assimilating you as one of the Old Ones, the mysterious super-gods who ruled the D&D multiverse.

If memory serves, there was an actual sentence going something like "at this point, you've won the game", which I fondly remember as reading the authors telling people "Jesus Christ, dude, stop playing this fucking game and get out already!".

That's one way of looking at it.

I don't remember the Sphere of Entropy apparently destroying you part, but there certainly was a "get through immortal level twice and you become an Old One" thing. There was a poster on Dragonsfoot this past year who claimed that his group was finally, after >20 years, getting to that point. Yes, naturally most people called BS. Frank Mentzer actually dropped by, and with a "why brag about something no one else cares about?" attitude, took him at his word. He said that there wasn't any rules for what to do then, and that the point of that text was to say that there's always somewhere up to go.

Never saw the appeal of Immortals. But then I never had any interest in nonmaterial planes and that stuff. Frankly I lose interest not long after building a keep and what not. I find it more fun when we're tramping around in search of adventure.