Shades of Gray by Michael Proteau An campaign for character levels 1 up to 12

D20 fantasy adventure (3.5 ruleset)

This is a playtest review. My sessions run for about 2.5 hours and meet about 3 times a month. Each chapter has taken about 4 sessions to run. We are roughly halfway through the book after playing for about 5 months.

THE BASICS: The adventure is 176 pages long. Cover price of $22.99 American
3 pages of credits/legal/advertising
6 page of introduction
6 pages of player handouts
8 pages of NPC stat blocks
23 pages of new monsters
6 appendix pages of new gods/domains/spells/magic
and 11 chapters of Adventures:
Chapter 1: 10 pages (abandoned city/enemy camp)
Chapter 2: 18 pages (city adventure)
Chapter 3: 11 pages (forest/haunted fort/brief visit to celestial plane)
Chapter 4: 9 pages (desert/ruins)
Chapter 5: 13 pages (dwarven mines)
Chapter 6: 12 pages (Jungle island/temple)
Chapter 7: 15 pages (ruined monastery/city sewers)
Chapter 8: 14 pages (swamp adventure/ruined citadel)
Chapter 9: 7 pages (frozen waste/ice palace)
Chapter 10: 6 pages (lich's tower)
Chapter 11: 9 pages (underdark/subterranean city)

As you can see from the 11 chapters, there is a broad variety of adventures in different environments and locations. Each chapter has its own feel, and as a whole the book covers many fantasy standards. The first four chapters are fairly linear, as are the last two, but there is a broad area for player choice in the middle 5 chapters. It is a good mix between keeping the overall plot together (with a beginning, middle and end), and giving the players freedom to choose their own course of action.

Normally I'd break down the adventure by the types of encounters: puzzle, negotiation, trap, puzzle. There are simply too many encounters here for me to deal with all of them, but suffice it to say that there is a wide variety of encounters, plenty of negotiation and puzzle, and plenty of combat and traps. There is a healthy mix of all of the above. As with most D20 products, combat is the primary focus and I’d say that about 80-85% are combat encounters.

SYNOPSIS: (Spoilers follow) A lich from a neighboring country has let loose a extra-planar plague that kills people and raises them as ghouls. The party must discover what the plague is where it is coming from, and how to stop it. The source of the plague is a rift to Hades that can only be closed by assembling an artifact "The Rainbow Harp". Unfortunately, the Rainbow Harp is currently disassembled and the various strings are scattered across the countryside. Each string is a magic item of its own. The party has some leeway in deciding which pieces of the harp to recover, and an early adventure provides them with a means of locating each of the strings. Eventually, the party has to face the lich and close the rift to Hades.

THE SPECIFICS:

1. Interesting and varied encounters: (5/5) The encounters certainly run the full spectrum from negotiation and intrigue encounters in big cities, to solving problems, exploring old ruins, crawling through dungeons, and beating the crap out of lots of creatures. You name it, its in here. There are places where the party has opportunities to plot raids on orc encampments or a metropolitan rogue’s guild. There are encounters in just about every environment from jungle to desert to forest to tundra. When I am running a game, I don’t like to see the same encounter more than once… each encounter takes a lot of time and I don’t want to slog through room after room of the same monsters. I’ll point out “World’s Largest Dungeon” as an example of the kind of design that I dislike. This adventure throws something different at the party with every encounter. There were a few places in which two areas had the same type of monsters: For example, in the haunted keep (chapter 3), there are several rooms with skeletons and zombies. This is not an example of hitting room after room of the same thing, but rather the undead hordes dribble out of the rooms on their own in order to encounter the party in a massive brawling undead horde.

2. Motivations for monsters and NPCs: (5/5) The primary villains each have good motivations for their actions. In a few cases, some bad guys might plot against the PCs if the PCs have interfered with their plans, but in many cases the PCs are gathering pieces of the artifact from people that no longer know the significance of what they have. The party is able to uncover lots of little plots and intrigues through the adventure: servants that have risen up and enslaved their master; a priest that betrayed his congregation for his lover; a dragon that discovered she was a pawn in a larger game who is now plotting revenge against those who used her. The detail in many of the NPCs really brings the game world to life. There were a few cases in which I would like to have seen some monsters have slightly more personality. There is a blue dragon in Chapter 4 that appears as a straight combat encounter: my players tried to negotiate with the dragon; I would like to have seen this option explored by the writer. This goes for all adventures: if you are going to have a very tough and intelligent foe, please provide suggestions on dialogue or personality in case the PCs attempt to bargain or negotiate.

3. Logical: (4/5) Everything appeared reasonable to me, especially in the latter chapters. People had motivations, and they acted on it. There were no large creatures in small rooms. There were no improbable neighboring monsters. Intelligent monsters generally had good tactics and organization. In the first chapter (a town that had been abandoned because of a plague), the party can explore a shrine and find several potions and scrolls of remove disease that should have helped prevent the plague. There doesn’t seem to be any indication of what happened to the priestess or why she didn’t use her resources to save the town. I had the party discover the priestess corpse, stabbed in the back with a dagger and stuffed into a closet. The time of death was just before the plague hit the town. This made it clear to the adventurers/investigators that the plague was not natural and that someone who had been in town had plotted to kill the priestess in order to make sure the plague would run its course.

4. Writing Quality: (4/5) The entire book was clear and concise. It seemed as if some of the early chapters, particularly chapters 1-3 were a little more fleshed out than the latter chapters. Chapter 1 even includes a side-quest that doesn’t tie with the main plot. In latter chapters, everything is devoted to the task at hand. There were two places in which the writing seemed noticeably sparse: in the dwarven mines, there are large residential complexes that received only a few paragraphs of text. There are no major cities written up, which saves considerable space but may require the DM to come up with his own. I also found that the opposing country from which the lich launched his attack is barely described at all. I think fleshing out these areas would have required an additional 48 or so pages of text, and I suppose it would not have added much to the campaign. Perhaps with a project this vast there will always be some things that are cut. One thing that especially bothered me was in Chapter 2. The town that the party investigates is named “Darnagal”. Two allied NPCs are “Dorrestal” and “Donegal”. Donegal turns up dead and Dorrestal is framed for the crime, so the party has to find evidence in the town of Darnagal to exonerate Dorrestal. (confused? I was) All three of these names are so similar that I could barely keep them straight while reading it, there is no way I could expect the players to remember who is who or what was what. I had to change the names of the two allies to “Surovy” and “Markham” in order to make it easier to distinguish them. This is something I would have expected an editor to pick up on and correct before it went to print. This is just one minor blemish in a huge book, but it kept me from giving a ranking of 5/5 in this category. I think that a few of the new monsters were not really necessary: many were imported and updated to 3.5 from the Tome of Horrors. If you own that book, it might be nice to see some monsters in play, and if you don’t own the book you get the full stat block, flavor text, and illustrations. I think that the new domains and the prestige class were 2 wasted pages, as the domains have no bearing on the campaign and the prestige class is basically a paladin that can disguise self rather than call a warhorse. The central artifact, the rainbow harp, is very well done, with each string having its own magic powers.

5. Ease of DMing: (4/5) The adventure has no read-aloud text and the monster stat blocks are all located in an appendix. I prefer to see some text that can be easily paraphrased at the beginning of each encounter. I also prefer the stat blocks to be in line with the text. As it is, I end up photocopying the stat blocks and flagging the ones that are needed for the current session. It involves some additional prep time, but probably saves some space in the grand scheme of layout. The handouts were very nice, but they are all from the first 4 chapters of the adventure. There are no handouts for the latter chapters. I would like to have seen more handouts. The adventure has a pretty well defined world and many specific names of gods and locations are built in to the handouts and adventure. In order to run this adventure, you’ll probably need to take some considerable time to map the various locations in your campaign world, or else you’ll have to start fresh and just run the campaign from the setting as written. Putting aside the handouts and specific gods and place names, the campaign is very easy to run. Each chapter has a short introduction explaining what is going on and how the chapter fits in with the overall plot. Each chapter ends with a little “resolutions” section that explains what the party should have accomplished and how to tie up any loose ends that the party left behind and what hooks are appropriate to lead the characters toward the future chapters. In my experiences over the past 5 months running this campaign, I’ve never had to use any heavy-handed tactics to keep the party on track. There were a few times when the party debated alternate courses of action, the text of the adventure had already anticipated them and provided suggestions on encounters and aftermath. This is certainly a single unified campaign, but the railroading is so minimal as to be imperceptible.

FINAL WORD: This is an outstanding ready-to-run campaign. I am very happy with this purchase. I don’t have a lot of free time to tinker and plot and prepare, and I’ve found this to be an outstanding purchase. It looks to me like this will hold up to time quite well. Keeping the stat blocks separate in the back might actually be useful as it will make this product easy for DMs to convert to another system if they are not using The 3.5 rules.

Running the adventure:

In my experience, I think it was worthwhile to have read the entire adventure a few times before playing it, so that I could leak out clues about future plot points whenever the party made an extra effort to gather information. For example: the party kidnapped and interrogated an orc leader in chapter 1, so that leader provided information that one of the villains the party would face in chapter 2 was a shapeshifter. In another case the party sought information from “the temple of secrets”, so I had the priests at the temple use a divination to provide information to the party that would further the aims of both the party and the temple.

I also created several player handouts based on the text of the adventure… whenever the text of the adventure described some clues, (a journal entry, a guest register at an inn, a map) I went and drafted them in order to hand out to the players. I also had to prepare a map of the continent so that the party would have some idea of where the important locations were. I am downgrading the “style” rating in this review because I would liked to have seen more of these types of handouts already prepared.