I bought this adventure soon after it was published, read it over, and thought it looked like fun. I had planned on using it in my then-current D&D game, but it didn’t really fit into the scheme of things at the time, and then all the characters got killed by ogres (ambush that I should have toned down), and then it was decided to “do something else.” So the adventure never got used. Until recently, that is, where I found a way to shoehorn it into a new campaign. My world is different than the default one used for Fiery Dragon products (the character’s home country doesn’t have a king, but has a ruling council to maintain balance between the humans and dwarves, for example), but I rewrote a few things and found a way to make it work. As usual in my reviews, I will do my best to not give away spoilers, but I make no guarantees, so players should read ahead at the risk of their GM finding out what they’ve done and making them buy the pizza.
For starters, you will notice right away that NeMoren’s Vault comes with a sheet of cardstock counters (in color!) for you to cut out and use, as well as an extra page in the middle of the booklet that has a bunch of player handouts and a very simple battlemat for you to use in your games. I eat up this kind of stuff, so that scores points in my book. Artistically, the cover is OK, but not great, and the internal pencil art is good, but not great. I liked it, but I like pencil work. The booklet also contains a very legible map of the vault system, and six pre-generated characters. I note that, even though this is pitched as an “introductory” adventure for characters level 1 - 3, the pre-generated characters are all level 2. Thus, I assume that level 1 characters will get mashed. Looking at the encounters in the adventure, I’d say that’s true. Thus, I didn’t use this adventure in my new campaign as a starter, but I waited until the characters had all hit level 2 before springing it on them.
This brought up another thing I had to change. You see, the “hook” for this adventure is that the old Baron NeMoren died without an heir, and before his will could be read and his estate disposed of, the holders of some special silver keys needed to be brought together. The holders of the keys would be the heirs to the Baron’s estate. This is pulled off better than I’m describing, but I don’t feel like re-typing all the back story in the adventure. Anyway, that’s the “hook” to bring all the players together. But since my campaign was already underway, I just said that one of the characters had a key, and hauled her buddies along to the Baron’s estate to have the will read. I also added an NPC cleric as a key holder, giving me 2 keys. This worked well. Why a cleric? Because of what is waiting in the vault.
There‘s 2 sections of the dungeon. First, you have the actual NeMoren vault. This is where most of the treasure is. At this point, I should mention that there is an obscene amount of treasure here. There’s a few really neat magical items, but most of it is in gems, cash, old wine, suits of armor, etc. As a dungeon master this may bother you, but it really shouldn’t, as I’ll explain at the end. The NeMoren vault contains one of the two groups of bad guys. You see, the Baron’s wife had been kidnapped 30-odd years ago. He knew who did it (they tried to blackmail him), so he drugged them, threw them in the family vault, and sealed it up, so they’d die. Except they became ghouls instead. Now you know why I had a cleric for the NPC. I thought the encounter with the ghouls was staged pretty well. The final fight was pretty nasty for the characters, but they prevailed.
The other section of the dungeon consists of some hobgoblin warrens (probably 20-odd hobgoblins total), and tunnels made by an Undrathar. The Undrathar is a challenge rating 6 monster created for this adventure, and this bugger will likely chew up any low level characters thrown at it. This thing scared me. But since he always seems to be off making more tunnels, you don’t have to encounter it. Really. If you enter its lair, you have a 25% chance of encountering it. The only other way to run into it is to have a random encounter (only a 10% chance every 90 minutes), and then roll a 20. In fact, in my game, the characters never ran across it. Now, if you wanted to have the Undrathar appear to terrorize your players, you of course could, but I didn’t want to, and the dice didn’t even tell me to, so that was that. The hobgoblins themselves are pretty normal hobgoblins, and they can be a big threat if they bunch up on the player characters. The player characters made mince meat of them in my game (their chief being a notable exception), but your dice rolls may vary.
All told, I thought this was a fine adventure, and it provided many good challenges for the players to resolve. One problem I did have with it was that in the background info, the players get told that all the past generations of NeMorens put a bunch of traps into the vault. OK, and there’s, what, 5 traps in the whole thing, almost none of which actually cause any harm? I’d add some extra traps in, otherwise it can feel like the players are walking through a shopping mall. Until they find the ghouls, of course.
You can end the adventure when the characters exit the vault. But one of the things advertised in the back of the booklet is this “runes of passage” thing, where you can download extras from the fierydragon.com website. Well, you don’t need the password anymore, but they do have things like PDF versions of the handouts so you don’t have to cut up your adventure booklet. And, what’s this? Another adventure? A follow-on adventure called “The Quest for Amelia?” Looks good. And right away it solves that whole “too much treasure” thing. But you’ll have to read that review to find out how.
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