What Evil Lurks (WEL) is a module for players of 8th to 10th level by
Lance Hawvermale from Necromancer Games. It is a plot-heavy adventure
based on a chilling plan borne out of love. The title refers to what
you think it refers to and even has clues to the abilities of the main
adversary.
This is a module that focuses on interactions with NPCs. Traps and
obstacles make up the next most common features, followed at a distinct
third by straightforward combat with monsters. Necromancer Games (NG)
usually focuses on dungeon crawls and combat-heavy adventures, so this
represents a distinct shift for them. Apparently, this manuscript was
sent in by Lance Hawvermale unsolicited, and NG decided to publish it
based on the quality of the writing. This kind of module doesn't have
"first edition feel" in many ways, which depending on your point of view
could be either a blessing or a curse.
The author of WEL is Lance Hawvermale, who has written several modules
for Dungeon in the past. The first of these was "Blood on the Plow", an
AD&D Side Trek in issue 62 that involved a scarecrow taking revenge on a
farming family. His next appearance in issue 67 was also a Side
Trek. Named "Eye of the Storm", it featured an imaginative set of
creatures that reproduce during thunderstorms. Unfortunately, these
creatures, based on mathematical averages, would always die out instead
of reproducing. This mathematical carelessness also seems to show up in
WEL. His final effort was a full-length adventure in issue 80 that made
the cover page called "Fortune Favors the Dead". This adventure was set
in a mix of Castile and Mexico and had a spaghetti-western feel as the
characters tried to track down the four parts of a treasure map and
recover a missing treasure. This adventure was excellent and had a nice
mix of combat, puzzle-solving, and NPC interaction and captured the feel
and atmosphere of a western treasure hunt exceedingly well.
The assumed background for the module is straight third edition (3e),
with a party composed of 4-6 characters of 8th-10th level. The module
stays in a fairly restricted geographical area, and since the outdoor
environs mostly serve to enhance the mood, the important locations could
easily be moved around to satisfy an individual DM's campaign setting.
Layout
What Evil Lurks (WEL) has the standard Necromancer Games layout and
appearance. The cover of the module by Kieran Yanner features three
thin ghouls shambling toward the viewer as lightning flashes in the
distance, illuminating an old sawmill. The cover features an encounter
set in the first "act" of the module and doesn't give away very much, so
it is eminently useful during the game, though why 10th level characters
have to worry about a few ghouls is beyond me. It's a competent
painting, but doesn't seem spectacular.
In keeping with other NG products, WEL has a label in the upper
left-hand corner mimicking the old TSR style: G2. For those keeping
track, G1 is Siege of Durgham's Folly by Mike Mearls and G3 is the Hall
of the Rainbow Mage by Patrick Lawinger. Originally, the G meant guest,
for guest authors who are not members of Necromancer's staff, which by
now of course numbers in the hundreds. The G series seems to now also
be a home for one-shots that will not be expanded and have no formal
ties with other modules from NG.
The interior covers are not used, and the first page of the module is a
title page with credits. A long introduction takes up the first three
pages. Act I, in which the characters learn of the mystery, takes up 11
pages. Act II, when the characters go to the circus and learn the
location of the pit of evil, takes up 6 pages. The third and final act
(of course), wherein the characters journey to the adversary's fortress,
takes up 15 pages. A monster appendix listing a new monster and a new
template takes up 1 page. A series of maps by Christopher Boll takes up
the next six pages. Another page shows two crude illustrations of
supposedly important items in the book. The next page is the Open Game
License (OGL), mandatory for d20 and OGL products. The next three pages
are ads for Sword and Sorcery products and a new hardback from NG called
Necropolis, by Gary Gygax. (Hopefully for those wishing to purchase
this adventure, the editing by Necromancer Games of works by D&D
grognards has improved since the first Kuntz modules.)
This layout follows the standard Necromancer Games practice of beginning
each major section of a module with a new page. In many cases the page
breaks work out, but often they don't, and I would estimate a full page
of blank space accumulates over the course of the module from blank
space at the end of sections. Combining with the ads and the OGL
(which, though required, is hardly useful outside of its few lines of
Product Identity definitions), that means that instead of getting a 48
page module, what you are really getting here is a 44 page module. I
don't like getting ads in gaming products, and I suspect I'm not the
only one. It always makes me feel like I am paying for the privilege of
buying ads, especially since these ads are always for the parent
company. When I read a module, I don't like to see ads, and I hope NG
discontinues this practice, though Sword and Sorcery Studios may mandate
them.
The sidebars and margin decorations in the text are the same as all of
NG's other products. The font is also the same, which creates a nice
unified look for the company and doubtless saves them a lot of time. I
appreciate this decision both for its uniformity and for its
time-saving. Some companies (such as Fiery Dragon Productions) seem to
change their fonts and margin illustrations regularly, and the
replacements frequently are both ugly and hard-to-read. NG seems to
have settled on an easily readable (though small) font and a uniform
look that is aesthetically pleasing.
The interior illustrations are all by Brian LeBlanc, who despite his
name seems to prefer lots of dark colors. All the illustrations seem to
be pen or pencil drawings and seem to fit well with the dark theme of
this module. Even though all the illustrations are credited to LeBlanc
(who apparently is NG's house interior artist) a couple of different
styles are in evidence: moody, slightly blurry pencil drawings and much
more detailed pen drawings. The difference is somewhat striking and I
would have preferred he stick with one style for the module to make the
illustrations more cohesive and help join the story together, which
plot-wise already is a little disjointed.
Christopher Boll's maps are, as usual, excellent. Mr. Boll uses
extremely well the cut-away style used in many old TSR modules to show
rooms and their contents with a very clear three-dimensional style. The
firing of Conan Venus (the previous cartographer) and hiring of Mr. Boll
has to be the best business decision NG has yet made. The difference
between the current highly-detailed and yet readable maps and the smudgy
previous efforts by Venus is like that between good chai and old Lipton.
Unfortunately, one map, that of the Ogre ambush, was difficult to make
out and it would be quite easy for a harassed DM to miss several of the
ogres waiting to spring an ambush on passing PCs. While this is partly
the point (the ogres are well-concealed from all prying eyes),
this level of faithfulness in a map is not desirable.
Plot
At this point, many of the secrets of this module will be revealed, so
those with niggling heart conditions or the prospect of playing this
module in the future should not continue.
Gilean Vel, an accomplished wizard, is the descendant of a long line of
upright men. The line was plagued by a "magical malignancy" which
affected the first-born child. Through the efforts of Hanfred Vel,
Gilean Vel's ancestor, in the services of the goddess of paladins Muir,
the curse was lifted. This curse apparently manifested from interaction
with evil and shadow. (The text is a little unclear on this point.)
Anyway, Gilean Vel turned to greed and spite and joined with shadow,
becoming a shade. Later he met and fell in love, and by some miracle,
had a child, even though shades are sterile. Unfortunately, the curse
had returned, and the child was afflicted and a simpleton. To add
insult to injury, Gilean's wife died giving birth to Katya. Insanely
grieved, Gilean seeks out Muir's greatest foe Orcus and hatches a plan
to connect his world to the Plane of Shadow, plunging it into chaos and
giving Orcus an opportunity to take control. In return, he believes
that Orcus will lift the curse on his daughter.
This is all well and good, but does Gideon Vel really believe his
daughter, simpleton or not, will be happy in a land ruled by Orcus and
plunged into eternal shadow? It seems unlikely, and this level of
myopia and perhaps poor thinking for an evil mastermind makes the
character of Gilean Vel less interesting and constitutes a fault in the
design that shows up later in other ways. It's ok to ignore these kinds
of concerns in a dungeon crawl, but if we are supposed to think of
Gilean Vel as a great villain and role-play him accordingly, we need
better motivations and thinking for him.
Anyway, Gilean has created a soul-engine, powered by the soul stuff of
slain humans and demi-humans, that will bore a tunnel linking the Prime
Material and Shadow planes and allow the Shadow plane to leak into and
overwhelm the Prime Material. (The implicit assumption here is that the
Shadow plane is tougher than the Prime Material. Why doesn't the Prime
Material instead leak into the Shadow plane and make it have normal
gravity and decent reading light. Shadow plane fights Prime Material
Plane. Shadow Plane wins.)
Of course, there is a twist. Gilean has an assistant, a puissant mage
in his own right, who has made a side deal with Orcus. He has slightly
changed the path of the soul engine, so that instead of it boring into
the Shadow Plane, it will instead bore into the plane of Negative
Energy, flooding the plane with undead, sucking the life out of normal
folk, making Orcus king of the heap (as Prince of the Undead), and
making all those plus-minus labels on your batteries totally useless.
So there are really two big players in this module who are playing
slightly different games.
Now, Gilean is doing evil because he wants a normal kid. Don't laugh.
How many people in today's world send their dumb kid to tutoring
sessions or expensive private schools just so that they will supposedly
do a little better in life? It's a powerful motivation usually ignored
in role-playing games. The adventure says that Gilean is motivated
solely by love. I don't think that is even remotely correct.
Obviously, Gilean wants his daughter to survive and live a happy life,
but I also think he wants that as a reflection of his own glory and
worth and to provide for the future. These are very important
motivations, but I wouldn't classify them as love. Since he seems
prepared to ruin the entire world and everything in it (including
Katya's future, normal life) just to get the curse lifted, I wouldn't
call it "love".
On the other hand, Siebkron is evil, because ... well, just because. He
wants to destroy the world and everything in it. What his motivation is
... well, your guess is as good as mine. This is the other flaw of this
module. Here's another important NPC with a devious goal, but there's
no explanation of why he wants to destroy the world and everything in it
forever. It makes it a little hard to give a dramatic rant and engage
in deep role-playing. In fact, in the module there's even a page of his
journal that says at the end: "If Gilean were to uncover these words, he
would destroy me, yet I must risk penning them here, in order that our
motives might be understood, should anyone survive the coming holocaust
and find this humble tome." And what motives would those be, I wonder.
Lance can't even throw us the slimmest of bones.
The characters get involved by receiving a note from an NPC contact
asking them to investigate the disappearance of his youngest son. In
Act I, the characters arrive in the bucolic town of Leafton and meet
with their old friend. His son Mathfrid was apparently carried away by
wild beasts into the local forest and all attempts to recover him have
failed. The PCs then of course head into the forest. One nice feature
of this module is that general sensations are included for each area,
giving the DM tips on how to describe each location to the PCs.
After wandering in the forest for a while, the PCs encounter an ogre
hunting party. For some reason, these ogres are presented as being
inordinately stealthy (DC 30 Listen check to discover) and basically
surprise the PCs. After they are eliminated, which is almost certain
for this EL 9 encounter, the PCs gain basically no information. There
is also a possible lightning strike, an encounter with 10 bandits War1
that is almost laughably easy for a party of this level, and a pit
trap. The PCs eventually find the sanctuary of Gilean's brother,
Daitha. A powerful druid, he can attest that animals are not kidnapping
humans and can introduce the PCs to Gilean's daughter, Katya. By
exploring the area, they can learn from various animal friends of Daitha
that ghouls are responsible. Alternately, they can run into Mealkuph
the Strangler, a War3 and "bandit king", at the main bandit camp and
wring the location of the ghoul lair out of him. Finally, at the end of
this act, the characters are expected to assault the ghoul hideout and
defeat the 32 ghouls and their three necromancer masters. By defeating
them and freeing their prisoners, the PCs can learn that the
necromancers are also clowns and circus performers. They also receive a
cryptic poem from a hidden emissary of Muir and an artifact that can
lift the curse on Katya or destroy the soul engine, but only contains
one miracle, so one or the other must be chosen.
This act is somewhat strange. It's clear that combat is not the main
focus, since it is only at the end of the act that a truly challenging
combat for 8th through 10th level characters occurs. Puzzle-solving
seems to be the main theme, since the players must determine who is
kidnapping the children and where they hie from. Clues are given for
these and numerous notes on role-playing the NPCs, but no real framework
of discovery is given, which makes the DMs efforts a little more
difficult. Also, players who don't have a lot of patience and who
aren't heavily motivated to discover this mystery may spend a lot of
time wandering around and not accomplish very much. The numerous NPCs
mostly conceal information and could easily frustrate less teleological
parties. I sometimes felt in this section that the structure and traits
of the NPCs might actually prolong this section unnecessarily.
The second act, "The Show Must Go On", describes the circus act run by
Gilean Vel. The connection between this and the previous act is
tenuous. The characters must discover the necromancers' connection to a
circus and just find the one in town that applies. The circus is in the
local city, and the PCs are assumed to go and investigate it. In
contrast to the earlier section when the PCs wander to and fro, in this
act the action is constrained to the circus, and the PCs interact with a
wide variety of NPCs, all with different motivations, including the
ringleader, Gilean Vel himself. This section felt much tighter, and
also focuses mainly on problem-solving. All the NPCs contain notes on
what they can and can't tell the PCs, which makes role-playing them much
easier. One of them has even had a change of heart and wants to abjure
his evil ways. The knife thrower, Sneary, gives the PCs an encrypted
note which they must convert into plaintext. It is a simple
Caesar shift cypher. Hopefully the players know something about
cryptography, though the text does contain a hint for the DM to give the
players about frequency analysis.
Cryptography is another theme of this adventure. Siebkron was once a
talented cryptographer, and he encodes all his correspondence and
journals. At several instances in the adventure, the players must
decrypt various messages of Siebkron. In each case, the PCs can make
Intelligence tests to obtain hints, but the players must decrypt the
ciphertext themselves. I believe this is the right approach. Not only
does it introduce some variety into the role-playing session by giving
the players a different kind of challenge, it also puts the ultimate
responsibility into the hands of the players, where I think it belongs.
I like the inclusion of cryptography, though I suspect the author read
"The Code Book" by Simon Singh recently as I did and just had to put it
in the adventure, even though its inclusion here doesn't really mesh
with the plot or themes otherwise. Deception isn't a major theme in the
module by any means.
By talking to the NPCs and picking up on clues, the PCs can discover the
location of the kidnapped people and get some hint of the vileness of
the factory. This act of the module is free-form, but enough notes on
NPC reactions and the localized setting seem adequate to entertain the
players and drive the plot forward efficiently.
The third act of the module is "The Hearts of Men" and details the evil
factory that supplies power to the soul engine. Here the PCs meet again
with Daitha, who reveals what he knows and accompanies them to the
factory. There they must pierce its defenses and stop Gilean and
Siebkron from completing their tunnel to another plane. The tone of the
module changes radically in this section. It goes from a free-form
role-playing session in act II to a straight dungeon crawl with a key in
four parts and ingenious traps in this act.
This dungeon crawl is somewhat imaginative in that it is very light on
combat and very heavy on traps. The PCs must assemble the four parts of
the heartlock by defeating some clever traps to get closer to their goal
of the soul engine. The only provision for dealing with PCs'
capabilities is the fortress's defense against all teleportation or
passwall type magic. No provision is made for divination magic, which I
feel to be a flaw, especially since this is primarily an investigative
module at its heart and high-level parties have many powers to avail
themselves of.
Anyway, the PCs assemble the four pieces of the maguffin, reach the
second level and get attacked by trolls. In order to do this, they have
to drive off Siebkron and likely read his journals. One journals is
encrypted with a Polybius square code, which is explained in detail in
the text. Unfortunately, the inclusion of a handout of a Polybius
square seems excessive. Any DM can scratch this out on a scrap of paper
and hand it to the PCs in under a minute. I would have preferred a more
useful handout that I couldn't easily generate myself, like the diagram
of the heartlock mechanism that is included. Another journal is
supposed to be encoded with a Mirabeau Cipher, an expansion of a
Polybius Square cipher with null entries. Unfortunately, the first
lines of it seem to be exactly the same as the Polybious cipher
mentioned. I don't understand what Hawvermale wants us to do here, but
it seems like he wants us to write a message, encode it in the Mirabeau
cipher, and then hand it to the players for them to decrypt. This seems
like an awful waste of time.
As the PCs progress through the factory, they encounter a few more
foes, but most of them are low-level, and the real obstacles seem to be
the plentiful traps and even an illusion or two. That aspect of
"first-edition feel" seems to have come through very strongly in this
part of the module. Eventually the PCs reach the soul engine and must
fight Gilean Vel. His statistics are provided in full in this section,
and just in case you couldn't wait, his statistics were also printed in
act II, though not as completely as in this case. Regardless, it's
definitely a waste of space to reprint the same information twice in an
adventure and wastes another quarter of a page. The players can fight
Vel, but since he is a Ftr4/Shadow mage16, he is a serious threat,
especially since he will only fight a determined battle in the Plane of
Shadow, where his advantage (as a shade) is greatest.
This final confrontation is meant more as a role-playing adventure at
this point, as Daitha attempts to act as an intermediary with his
brother. Should the PCs convince Gilean they can cure his daughter, he
will assist them in destroying Siebkron, who with his talisman of the
sphere and sphere of annihilation is one tough customer. Unfortunately,
at this point, the soul engine has enough fuel to complete its boring
and it must be stopped. The module gives several ideas for stopping the
engine since the quill's miracle spell can be used to cure Katya or stop
the soul engine, but not both. I enjoyed the ending of this module for
allowing different levels of success. The PCs can save the world, but
can they also cure a young woman? The module discusses well various
possible endings and gives the DM essential help on the ramifications of
the PCs' choices.
Appendices and Extra Content
One new metamagic feat is presented, which allows a character to cast a
spell without material components by tattooing it on his body. A new
monster is provided, a soul nibbler. This rat has nibbled on human
souls and can now energy drain, even though it only has half a hit die.
I don't frankly see much use for a really pumped up quasi-undead rat in
my games. A new monster template, shade, is presented, which looks like
a straight conversion of the 2e shade template memorably used by Steven
Kurtz in "Beyond the Glittering Veil" in Dungeon #31, though it gains
its highest power in darkness, not shadow.
Conclusion
This module is something of a departure for Necromancer Games, but is
overall a success. The theme is maintained, and in general the DM's
life is made easier with clear descriptions of NPCs and a mostly clear
theme running through the module. I disliked the presentation or lack
thereof of the motivations of the main villains, but this can be
rectified. A more serious problem is the targeted audience of this
module. This module is mostly about investigation and puzzle-solving.
If your players don't like this kind of thing, they won't like this
module and won't like you if you run it. Also, the infrequent combats
are either very difficult or relatively easy, so players who live for
combat probably won't enjoy this module. These caveats aside, this is a
pretty good module that develops its themes relatively well.
Go to forum!
(Due to spamming, old forum discussions are no linked.)