Essentially a repackaging of the adventure module that had been serialized in Polyhedron magazine starting with issue #24, back in 1984, Needle is originally, as all the modules published in Polyhedron, designed for competitive play. What does this mean? It means that a less than experienced party will very likely get their asses handed to them.

Your party is hired by a king to retrieve an obelisk that is in the middle of a jungle and, as you can imagine, that jungle is full of dangers, eventually if you are lucky enough to recover that obelisk you get to open a portal to another world and the dangers keep coming.

Competitive modules are usually merciless, they are designed to separate expert players and parties from more amateurish ones in the context of convention play events and this is reflected in the game. It easy to get a TPK, so tread carefully, but it is also a fun adventure, with Mentzer being generally a seal of quality for any module with his name stamped on it.