The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Delgath's Lament is a Living City adventure set in the Forgotten Realms. Living City is, for those of you unfamiliar with it, an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign where you make characters that can be played at game conventions across America (and even out of the country) that are offering Living City adventures. The levels required for a Living City module are flexible and depend on the strength of the players' characters. A pool of higher level characters result in harder adventures; low level result in easier adventurers.

I will discuss the module's content in detail, giving away its "secrets," so if you ever plan to go through it, don't read this review. Not that this knowledge would really benefit you, but I thought I'd better mention that.

Just when I thought I'd seen the worst Living City module ever, this one was handed to me to be run. This one, co-written by a variety of authors, should be listed as one of the definitions of the word "lame" in the dictionary. There are no words that can possibly express just how hopelessly terrible it is.

Its premise: in the city of Procampur, a mining house guru named Donatus Piniago hires PCs to go to a haunted house and recover any documents found, returning them to city's Office of the District Executor. The haunted house belongs to the fallen mining family of Delgath, a bunch of dwarves (hence the game's title, I presume).

After they leave with their meeting with Donatus they can pointlessly learn a little about House Delgath's history and its downfall or they can go straight to the haunted house. (Learning about its history will give them no advantage but it does take up a little time and offers one of the few chances to roleplay.) After being briefly stopped by the city guard (which is pointless but offers more roleplaying), a young girl tells PCs that her brother went into the house of the Delgath family a little while earlier but never came out. Apparently PCs need this extra incentive to enter it. Now they have a dual quest of getting documents and saving the boy as well (whoopee!).

The house is a deathtrap and its only point in existence is to kill PCs. There are traps everywhere and, since they're in the boxed text, there is no way for PCs to avoid them. There is no map provided for the DM so the house's layout, which is poorly described in the text, was as much a mystery to me as it was to the PCs. I just made up a map as I went along--which got me in trouble when its logic came into question. After all, if you have a ten-foot deep pit upstairs, then the house must by necessity be mighty tall. There's no description in the module, so maybe it is tall despite the fact it's in the city's poor district where one would think large houses would not abound.

The house has ghosts, gremlins, and a gnome. Well, it says it has a gremlin, but I couldn't find stats for it or where it was supposed to be or what it was doing there (other than pointlessly causing mischievous). Ultimately the PCs can find the important documents, which are maps of the various mines around the city. PCs can acquire them by telling the house's ghost that they won't turn them over to Donatus Piniago, the man who offered them the recover job in the first place. Why PCs would bother returning them to Donatus is a mystery since they're offered no incentive to do so. (When I ran the module I did offer them incentive. I also had a sage who they visited for the pointless background information ask for copies of the maps for a nice fee.) In any case, the ghost thinks it's OK for the maps to be returned to the Office of the District Executor. This is interesting considering that Donatus tells PCs when he hires them that the maps are available to all the mining houses once they are returned to that office.

The adventure ends with a nice thug attack. They want the maps themselves (or rather for Donatus, their employer). They notably provide a combat encounter just in case the house didn't kill enough PCs.

I could continue this review by spending time attacking the poor writing style or nitpicking other points of logic. However, I've decided I've wasted enough time with this it and so I shall waste no more.