The Marmoreal Tomb was the right approach for us at GP. We were searching for a way to introduce gamers at large to the Hobby Shop Dungeon world and campaign. That's when TSR jumped in and proposed to publish a module. This was perfect because the audience of the magazine has old school leanings without being too focused, so we could present an introductory setting of adventure the way we wanted to (namely, using 1st edition rules and assumption) while at the same time demonstrating the versatility of our offerings and how it could appeal to a variety of gamers.

North Wind as far as I understand is in a different place, with an already established game, and an audience (we are slowly getting there now with GP as well). So it makes perfect sense for North Wind to consider different options and to not necessarily follow the same path. 

You know of my particular affection for AS&SH, Jeffrey. It is one of those games which would actually work great with the Hobby Shop Dungeon in my mind, in no small part because of the particular tastes and inclinations we share for classic Swords & Sorcery and Weird Tales sources. I will hang out on the forum more regularly from now on, I hope. I would love to get into what makes the dungeon and setting tick, and how that blends so well with AS&SH's assumptions.

With the long university holiday we managed to squeeze another day of gaming in and our group tackled the Mystery at Port Greely.  A bit challenging in that a couple players are big Lovecraft fans and obviously know the story but they did a good job of staying in character.
A few highlights (and spoilers for those who haven't played the module):

The party are a suspicious lot and mostly foiled the bartender by having the huntsman, who has a periapt of proof against poison, down most of the drinks.

They did pretty well in town, but got captured and freed by the drunk and set off for the islands.  And the scout got blinded by the glyph in the temple so he was largely out of commission, though he donned a ring of invisibility for the duration. 
Luckily they searched the lighthouse and found the wand of freezing, which the cryomancer put to devastating use later.  In the Temple of the Deep Dwellers, there were a couple interesting developments.  The blinded scout managed to backstab and kill the guard captain with some crazy rolling.  Then, after they got caught by the trap leading to the aboleth lair, they met Mother Hydra, who rose from the pool (they discovered the illusory bridge) and immediately took out the huntsman and the berserker with tentacle attacks.  As the shaman tended to them with cure disease scrolls, the cryomancer nailed the aboleth with her wand of freezing and killed her in one strike due to exploding dice (and the fact that the wand works better for cryomancers).
In the subsequent battle with the sub-chiefs, thanks to a critical, the berserker, recently cured of his potential transformation into a fish-man, was reduced to a single hit point.  But they forged on after rescuing the prisoners and determined that the high priest must be in the last chamber.  So, using a wand of phantasm, they created an illusion of the sub-chiefs bringing prisoners to Merlokk.  This bought them time for the shaman to cast darkness on him from her Staff of Stygian Purpose.  Then the berserker came in and opened fire with his flamethrower (from Ghost Ship, I think) and barbecued the high priest in one blast.

They ended up bringing all the documents they scavenged back to Khromarium and turned them over to the authorities, but chose not to pursue the full recovery of the town themselves.  They then gave the mace of command and some jewelry recovered to the Church of Apollo in exchange for a cure blindness spell for the scout.

This was an interesting adventure in that it was the cryomancer and shaman who really shined this time rather than the warrior types.  And the pyromancer and cryomancer are great for those who like offensively oriented magic users. 

P.S.--Loved the "Aqualung" reference, Ghul!

Next up: Kraggoth Manor
 

They did get to the attic, but left the demon there; even taunted him a bit!  They did not divine the purpose of Merlokk's scepter because they torched him before he got a chance to activate it and the automaton.  So they simply took the scepter as loot.

Interestingly enough our group of players also chose not to take the ship from Ghost Ship.  They saw it as a hassle and they were freaked out about the effects of the green diamonds.  The one thing they did take, which will have implications later, was the Staff of Stygian Purpose out of the Xambaala adventure.

I am about to run this adventure on Sunday. Shadows of Innsmouth happens to be my favorite Lovecraft yarn so I've been looking forward to this for a couple years. I'd appreciate tips from DMs who have run this before me. I have a feeling my normally conservative players might try to impress the Oligarchy by purging the fish-men or something crazy like that.

Spider of Leng wrote:

Are your players familiar with the original HPL story?  Mine were not and it made it better IMO since it was a fresh scenario for them.  And it's good if they explore those encounter areas on the islands because they can find some handy items that will really help them.

I doubt any of my players have read Shadows Over Innsmouth but Mrs. Savage at the very least is familiar with the "village corrupted by fish men" trope; it's repeated in games and other media. 

To be honest I was thinking of placing all the interesting island locations onto a single island because I don't want to  the players to waste a lot of precious game time exploring several mostly empty islands. I only have 5-6 hours to run the scenario.

Cool; sounds like your players have a better sense of follow-up than mine.  They tend to blow through an adventure and move right into the next one.  We're up to Forgotten Fane at this point, but with me being away from home for my temp job, there hasn't been any gaming for a few months.  Might squeeze it in over Christmas break....