Lord of the Iron Fortress is an adventure for 15th level characters and is the seventh of eight stand-alone adventures in the Core Adventure series from Wizards of the Coast. In it the adventurers investigate the disappearance of some forgemasters and find themselves travelling to the Concordant Domain of the Outlands and then Acheron to get to the bottom of things. By the end of the adventure, surviving player characters should be 17th level.
The first thing one notices is that Lord of the Iron Fortress is sixteen pages longer than previous adventures in the series. The space is put to good use and provides the DM with information on running a party on the outer planes, thirty scenes of possible combat, and only a very small number of all but empty rooms. A new template for axiomatic creatures, two completely new creatures, one new spell, two new magic items, a major artifact and a new material are also provided. As if that wasn't enough, write-ups for four 15th level iconic characters are provided (Jozan, Lidda, Mialee, and Tordek which all together take only one page) for those who don't have characters of this level, but still want to run through the adventure. Note that the iconic characters are also useful for DMs who want to compare their players' characters and their possessions with those provided. I was stunned at how well outfitted the iconic characters were compared to my regular group. The artwork is of the quality we've come to expect from Wizards of the Coast and earns especially high marks for its utility. Not including maps or the front and back covers, there are seventeen pieces of art, only two of which are repeated from other products, and all of them depict memorable encounters or important characters that can be shown to the players.
The introduction provides a summary of the adventure, some character hooks, notes on planar travel and some much appreciated guidance for when the characters use divination magic to find out what is going on. Unfortunately, divination magic and knowledge skills are the only things that will provide information that might motivate the characters. The character hooks are the weakest the series has seen, with most of them revolving around forgemasters dying and their spirits being unable to be found. In our campaign, the characters found a clue in the Deep Horizon adventure that indicated something major was afoot. DMs should be ready with something to motivate their parties unless they have been blessed with a particularly curious, do-gooder type of group. Quibbles about character hooks aside, DMs of 15th level parties shouldn't have too much trouble getting the heroes involved.
Gradually, the party will gather clues that point them in the direction of Acheron. To get to Acheron, the party first travels to the gate city of Rigus on the Concordant Domain of the Outlands. Here the adventure becomes specific to The World of Greyhawk, but the section is short and DMs can substitute an analogous location that fits their own campaigns' cosmology with little difficulty. In addition, it wouldn't be hard to keep the entire adventure in some inhospitable and forboding location somewhere on the material plane if the DM wishes to avoid planar travel entirely. Though only three pages are devoted to Rigus, parties who enjoy plenty of roleplaying may spend a fair amount of time here gathering information from the locals and trying to locate the gate to Acheron.
After travelling through the gate from Rigus, the party lands on a cube floating through Avalas, the first plane of Acheron. If they don't know already, they have the oppurtunity to learn more about the lost forgemasters, a being named Imperagon living in a fortress made of metal plates, and his plans for raising an army to invade the material plane. Eventually the party makes it to the cube that Imperagon's fortress is located on, but being 200 miles on a side, the party has some travelling to do before they get to the citadel. In addition to random encounter tables, there are seven location encounters, one of which could lead to an unlikely alliance between the player characters and a hive of formians. This entire section can be skipped if the party is wise with their use of spells, but it's nice to have just in case.
Once the characters arrive at the iron fortress, they'll find that it's not nearly as impressive as depicted on the cover, being only 110' on a side and only two stories tall. As a DM, this didn't bother me in the least since it keeps the maps to a managable size, but it's odd none the less. Another strange note is that the heroes have apparently caught on to Imperagon's plans very early on, because they will find the fortress and its environs virtually empty of regular, invasion-grade, soldiers. There's no army to be found encamped around the fortress, no long supply trains running back and forth to Rigus, and no sign that the inhabitants are doing anything out of the ordinary. Not a big deal really, but another oddity that some players may comment on.
It's at the iron fortress that DMs have to be on their toes. The layout is such that the characters will be forced to go down stairs to the basement in order to access a stairwell to go back up to a section of the first floor that they couldn't get to before. From there they can access the lion's share of the second floor, also inaccessible from other parts of the fortress. The end result of all this is that DMs have to know which staircases go up, which go down, and where they end up. None of which is very clear on the maps. The stairwells are marked, but no indicator is given of whether they go up or down or where they come out.
Another problem that becomes clear, not as a result of the adventure but due to the D&D system as such, is that villians at this level of play are complicated, and I don't mean in personality. The battle plan for the grand finale covers, without art work, two full pages of text. That's two pages just explaining what defensive spells the bad guys cast and how they execute their battleplan. Another three pages of text (some of which comes from the Monster Manual) is spent on the write-ups for the bad guys. DMs unfamiliar with high level campaigns should plan their preparation time, and available play time, for this adventure accordingly.
All in all the fortress is well done and populated with some interesting combinations of evil. The heroes must invade, destroy an artifact and defeat Imperagon and his cohorts. It's functional rather than imaginative, though. For example, while it makes sense to have fire elementals at the fortress, characters who've been through previous adventures in the series have had more than their fill of fire creatures and elementals in Heart of Nightfang Spire and Deep Horizon. Frankly, I was disappointed with having to run a major battle in essentially the same environment as that found in the last half of the previous module. Nonetheless, Lord of the Iron Fortress is a solid tool that a skilled DM can use to entertain a group of players for 20 hours.
Go to forum!
(Due to spamming, old forum discussions are no linked.)