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D20 fantasy adventure (3.5 rule set)
This is a playtest review.
THE BASICS:
The adventure is 40 pages long. Cover price of $12.99 American
Inside cover used for the map.
Outside cover and 1 page used for close-up room diagrams (complex traps)
2 pages of credits/legal/advertising
3.5 page of introduction and background
2 pages of new monsters
3 pages of new magic spells, including a new school of blood-magic
28.5 pages of dungeon adventure
Encounter Breakdown:
23 Trap encounters
9 Combat encounters
0 negotiation encounters
The entire dungeon takes place in a claustrophobic trap-filled crypt. This adventure bears some similarities to the Tomb of Horrors, the Crypt of the Devil Lich (a previous Dungeon Crawl Classic), and similar deathtrap-filled dungeons. I personally enjoy reading this style of dangerous trap-filled crypt with some dangerous undead master running the place.
SYNOPSIS:
An ancient vampire tyrant, Srihoz, retired into a custom-built trap-filled crypt where he intends to remain for an eternity. As normal with these types of maniacs, he killed all of the servants that built the crypt. He does have a few followers that travel the land and whisper tales of great treasure, in order to lure brave adventurers to the place so that he can feed on them.
THE SPECIFICS:
1. Interesting and varied encounters: (4/5) The encounters were all fairly unique. In my experience, the hallmark of the super-deadly-trap-filled-dungeon is that every encounter is very unique (generally some new way die via deathtrap), and any creatures encountered tend to be unusual, with odd templates, or special abilities, or simply new monsters entirely. There is one trap, "amber stasis field" appears 4 times. There is another trap "Pit trap with scythes" that appears5 times. That means that close to 1/3 of the trap encounters, or about 20% of all encounters are "reruns". This level of repetition would normally cause me to downgrade this category heavily, however, these particular trap encounters are very quickly resolved and took almost no time away from game play... they bogged down the game a little, but no significantly. On the upside, some of the encounters were really outstanding. In particular, there is a vampiric Aboleth in a room with illusionary bridges that makes for an outstanding encounter. There is another room full of dangerous vines and plants, A ghost inside an animated statue, some very creative traps including a greased and sloping corridor leading to a nearly bottomless pit, a teleporter that may send someone out of the adventure if they are not careful, and a golem in a no-magic zone. The encounters were very entertaining to read and were enjoyed by our group.
2. Motivations for monsters and NPCs: (2/5) Frankly, with no NPCs, no negotiation encounters, and virtually no intelligent living creatures, there was not much to say about motivation. The primary villain, Srihoz, has motives that have been done many times before. I didn't think that this adventure brought anything new to the "old undead buried in a tomb" archetype.
3. Logical: (3/5) The map has no scale. The description of the place on page 5 seems to imply that each square is 5'. Most of the room and corridor descriptions seem to confirm the 5' squares. The problem is that there are a number of rooms which are too small to hold the creatures inside them. Room 2, for example, is 15x35 feet (21 squares). It has 4 large creatures and 1 medium creature... that uses up all but 4 squares in the room. Granted some of those creatures are swarms, and some are stationary, but it is still a very crowded room if you are using miniatures. Another area, room 6, has the vampiric aboleth. The room is only 5x5 squares wide (though it is very deep), but it has a huge aboleth (3x3) and it summons 1d6 large squid... in my playtest it was 4 squid. This many creatures could only fit in the room stacked above and below each other and even then it was fairly crowded. There is another room (area 19) that is roughly 15'x40' (24 squares). It is supposed to appear to have 125 medium creatures in it, even though it really only has 25 medium creatures. 25 medium creatures still take up more space than is available in the room. One really nice touch is that there are a number of traps that place characters in stasis rather than kill them, which my players correctly surmised was so that the vampire could come around later and feed on the people... basically keeping them "fresh". There are some 1-way secret doors, which seemed to work fine in the old 1st edition D&D, but with the 3rd and later versions of the game there is no secret door that will stop any characters, as they can simply bash or carve their way through with impunity. There was one area that had some dangerous traps (Area 18), but there were some mechanical things going on that required the party to deactivate certain other traps before this area could be opened. The weird thing was that by the time this area was opened, the party would already have found a secret corridor that eliminated any need to pass this area. I am not sure what its purpose was in the design of the adventure... perhaps I missed something: (For example, this might have been used to "cover" Srihoz' escape route?) My party (and I'd suspect many other groups) discovered Srihoz' hidden coffin long before they encountered the vampire. It was a little perplexing to them that Srihoz was harder to find than his coffin.
4. Writing Quality: (4/5) There was a lot of descriptive text, which helped set an appropriately spooky and creepy tone in the dungeon, but the text was not so much that it every became long-winded. I was very happy with the descriptive text. There was one room in particular, (17B), that was warded to keep the vampire out, so the vampire pushed some inanimate objects in the room. The players correctly surmised what happened and got a laugh out of it. I thought that this was particularly well done and brought a sense that this was a real environment to the adventure.
The appendix pages regarding blood-magic or "sanguiomancy" don't seem to add much to the adventure at all. That' nearly 3 pages that could have been better spent with a few more interesting encounters. The one magic spell that was used (delightfully in my game) was "create vampire spawn" that temporarily turns a living person into a vampire spawn, possibly under control of the spell caster. The spell only lasts a short time, but basically applies most of a vampire template to the PC for that duration. It was rough to break up combat in order for the player to jot down all the notes regarding his new stats (+4, strength, +2 dex, Undead type, etcetera). From a role-playing perspective it was a fun spell and added some entertaining dynamics, but from an actual playing perspective it interrupted the flow of combat.
5. Ease of DMing: (3/5) Most Dungeon Crawl Classics have at least a few player handouts or illustrations, but this adventure has none. I think that the adventure "Tomb of Horrors" set the tone for this style of dungeon, and it was the player handouts in Tomb of Horrors that really make the adventure memorable. There were plenty of opportunities in this adventure to provide visuals for the players, but alas the adventure didn't take advantage of the opportunity. The encounters are clearly written, with a bit of descriptive text followed by the usual encounter and trap text blocks. The monster stat blocks are in line with the encounters so there is very little needless page-flipping. Some of the traps were fairly complex, and the blow-up room diagrams helped with these complex areas. There is a mirror image room (Area 19B) that simply does not work, especially if you are trying to use miniatures. The mechanics are especially cumbersome here.
FINAL WORD:
If you don't like traps, then avoid this adventure. If you liked Tomb of Horrors, Return to the Tomb of Horrors, Crypt of the Devil Lich, and similar adventures, then this is one that you'll enjoy.
Running the adventure: (Playtest experience)
Even though the adventure seemed to call for 5' squares, I changed them to 10' squares for the rooms and left them as 5' squares in the corridors. My intention was to keep the claustrophobic effect, but leave enough open space in the rooms to conduct tactical combat with miniatures.
The players had a good deal of fun and were able to do some creative things: For example: one room has a trap that involves a large bronze plate that gets colder and colder... the players managed to take this plate off the wall and roll it down a hallway and they tried to chuck it into the pool with the aboleth in order to freeze the water.
It was anticlimactic when the party found the coffin before they found Srihoz--most vampire encounters usually involve the party defeating the vampire then racing to keep up with its gaseous form as it retreats to its coffin.
There is nothing in the adventure to prevent the party from using slow siege tactics... taking on one room, and then resting to full health. (some would call this the 15-minuted adventuring day) The party made very slow and plodding progress through the adventure... which was very smart from a character perspective (this was toward the end of a particularly long and deadly campaign), but it made the adventure slightly less fun for me to run as a DM.
Its also a nature of the d20 rules, that a lot of traps and secret doors are obsolete when you have a skilled rogue that uses "take 20" to search everything. I think this is the kind of adventure that works better with different rule sets that bring a little more chance or granularity into searching for and disarming traps.
I enjoyed running the adventure once, but I will probably not run it again. I'd say that overall it was pretty average, although from the first read-through I had expected it to be a lot more fun. It isn't always obvious when reading an adventure that a party is going to move so ponderously.
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