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Sorcery! vol. 1 - The Shamutanti Hills is the fourth (and so far the last to be published) module produced by the British company Myriador. Myriador has the rights to publish d20 conversion of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, a gamebook series with a large following in the UK and many fans elsewhere. For more info, please refer to my DeathTrap Dungeon review.
Sorcery! was a spin off series of gamebooks, set in the Fighting Fantasy world ma forming an entire saga where the reader had to confront many dangers and traps to recover the legenday Crown of the Kings, stolen by the Bird Men of the evil Archmage of Mampang. There are four books in this series and you should play them in the order of publication to have the best chances of recovering the crown. I have very good memories of the series, albeit I never managed to exit that evil city, Kharé...
The module is designed for 3rd level characters and it's, of course, the very first to be played. Being a gamebook conversion, players are strongly (very strongly!) encouraged to follow the roads and kindly avoid having a tour of the wilderness. The module is simply not designed to accomodate a 'free' style of play: when I played the module with my players, they were regularly informed that very bad things waited for them outside the 'safe' roads (rolling dice as a warning and flipping the Wandering Monster Table pages of my rulebook, with dark hisses...), so they behaved themselves, never giving me any problems. I sincerely doubt that every group may be so condiscendent about this, so please be warned.
This said, I enjoyed DMing this adventure and my players appreciated it too. Albeit not particularly original, the plot is good and there are various hints, items and characters in various locations linked to each other, giving the setting a nice 'living feel'. For example, if you find item X and then you encounter NPC Y, something can happen (I'm vague to avoid giving away any spoilers). The only things I did not like were some items with no description of their use: for example, at a certain point the PCs receive (if everything goes well) a gate key useful for entering in Kharé. Unfortunately, the text says nothing about such gate so when my players started to ask questions ("What gate? Where is placed? How many gates are there? Can we use the key on any gate?") my answers were "Uh, well, ehm... I don't know, I have never been in Kharé". A shame, considering the fact I had built quite a good feeling of Titan (the FF world) so far.
Doubtless, such problems will be a thing of the past as soon as the entire series of four modules will be available. I'd like to to commend the fact that the module may be played with higher level characters: many encounters and locations require non violent solutions and the ones being violent can esaily adjusted to match the PCs' power. This is a nice feature, making possible use and reuse the adventure various times. More, it well written and requires little preparation in advance.
Graphics and artwork are of course of the usual good Myriador standard, albeit the maps are still computer generated - a high tech touch out of character for a fantasy adventure in my eyes. But this is a minor remark. I still have my own dounts about the $ 15.95 price tag for a 40 pages b/w module of course...
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