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For you new players, back in the day TSR would release printed versions of modules written just for competition in conventions. The main point of these modules was to present a short scene for players to compete with other teams to get through without dying. Points were awarded for secrets found, how far the party got before dying, and so on. The writers' goals for these tournament modules was to present a very challenging environment, and they were more than happy to throw all the precious realism that came upon the hobby in the 80s and 90s out the window if it meant a cooler dungeon.
The classic example of this would have to be S2: White Plume Mountain, the original "Return the stolen magic weapons? As if!" module. Among the other bizarre things thrown into the dungeon just to mess up the PCs' days was a kayak ride along an antigravity river, a really sadistic corridor which was entirely friction-free, the world's largest crab with the world's largest anti-psionic ring in a giant soap bubble, a puzzle involving a turnstile, Laura Croft-style platforming above a pool of molten mud, and the infamous sunken swimming pool full of carefully partitioned stages filled with random monsters (at the bottom of which rested Blackrazor, everyone's favorite weapon to steal). White Plume Mountain was fifty pounds of crazy in twenty-pound jeans.
It was also enormously beloved, and showed that D&D can survive a large amount of surrealism (antigravity kayaking?) so long as the play was fun.
That's really what we have here with H3. Oh, sure, it's now the 21st Century, and Mearls and Wyatt (the very talented authors of the adventure) do pay attention to giving reasons behind their wackiness. But there's no second way around it. H3 is 4.0's tribute to S2, Tamoachan, the Ghost Tower of Inverness, and all the other modules who put a 50' dragon in a 10' room and didn't give a rip how he got in there or how he'd get fed. He was in there for the PCs to kill, and that's all that mattered.
It's tough to review this module in that it's so fragmented in its unified presentation. Maybe describing the Pyramid of Shadows would help. The players follow any number of Quest threads to try to find the very mysterious Pyramid in the middle of the wilderness. They discover the Pyramid finds them more than they find the Pyramid -- with no say in the matter, they're sucked into it, and there they're stuck, until they somehow manage to escape, or die trying. Really, given the way the adventure works, it makes just as much sense for the Pyramid to suck them in while they're sitting around the inn table eating dinner and never have heard of it. The Pyramid exists just so adventurers can get sucked into it.
The Pyramid was created by the Nine Lords of Hell as a prison for a powerful tiefling wizard who didn't read the fine print well enough when exercising certain details of his agreement with the Nine. It's an extradimensional nonesuch, and the tiefling in question (Karavakos) serves as both the warden and the chief prisoner.
The bizarre properties of the Pyramid are many. It tends to act as a prism for the souls of its greatest prisoners, splitting them into different aspects, all of whom are then their own being and personality (the party will have a chance to kill over a dozen Karavakoses during their stay in the Pyramid, and many Karavakoses will be happy to team up against other Karavakoses). The Pyramid travels randomly through the multiverse, sucking other people in pretty much at random. Those interred in the Pyramid (including the PCs) become immortal, dying only to violence, disease, or poison; the Pyramid sustains all within indefinitely without food or water (sleep is still needed).
Even stranger, beings of great will or ability will have their soul reflected back upon the nature of the Pyramid itself which, over the endless eternities inside the prison, reforms the Pyramid into rooms and chambers that reflect that being's personality and desires. This is the real focus point of the Pyramid as an adventuring location -- why is the awesomely nasty advanced otyugh known as the Charnel Lord located at the bottom of a pit of garbage beneath a stupidly-involved trap involving rotating floors, sliding walls, and hordes of undead rats? Because that's the sort of place the Charnel Lord liked, and the Pyramid reformed itself to suit the Charnel Lord's likings.
Thus: in the Pyramid of Shadows, the reason there's a 50' dragon in a 10' room is because it wants to be in there. And the whole Pyramid is like this, a kaliedescope of utterly different and bizarrely fragmened mini-locations, each of which has nothing to do with the other locations in the dungeon beyond sharing a 10' corridor that links them. Lofty, loam-coated gardens inhabited by an Aztec-like bloodthirsty race of plantmen are right up next to a sunken room filled with lizardmen equipped with, literally, Super-Mario-Brothers style pipes that suck people down into them and spit them up in random other locations in the dungeon. A white dragon has created an ice cave paradise of frozen grandeur to snooze in, and that's right down the hall from basically a high temple to Cthulhu, which is next to a room of elves who are just there because none of the power players in the Pyramid have bothered to wipe them out yet.
There's a band of utterly nonmagical mortal bandits who have managed to trap a werewolf in a room, but they're all scared of the succubus who spends her time praying in the Temple to Bahamut, which is next to the room with the teleporting fireball trap, which is just across the hallway from the room so stuffed full of random bones that PCs could suffocate when they open the door, which is just up the hallway from the ettin with his collection of phasing severed heads (!) and his pet carrion crawlers. This is, literally, how the whole adventure goes.
And it's a big place. The Pyramid is the largest adventuring site that Wizards has released yet for 4.0. Intriguingly, the random spots of craziness does serve to fit the theme of the place, a prison that reflects the nature of its prisoners back on themselves. It also makes for some very interesting (and possibly very difficult) set pieces. Nearly every room has some sort of effect, trap, trick, or other disabling bit of crazy that the PCs will have to deal with while still trying to defeat (or negotiate with) the monsters also in the room.
The GM is given rather extensive (almost three pages) notes on how, if they're so inclined, the PCs could play power brokers for the various half-insane factions stuck in their mini-realms in the Pyramid. This is a nice bit of info, even if the actual room encounters always presume the PCs move immediately to initiative rolls.
One of my favorite bits of revision in 4.0 was how they tried to show how artifacts, if handled properly, can fit into any tier of play, and need not be left only to epic-level heroes. H3 gives Wizards a chance to show off this philosophy, as the players will most likely quickly end up with what is probably the first artifact of their careers, a snarkily self-serving one which wants to escape this damn Pyramid just as much as the PCs, but sees nothing wrong with sacrificing the party to move itself along. Roleplaying with the artifact will probably provide the main narrative thrust of what is otherwise an extremely fragmented dungeon, but it's worth it, as the "final battle" involving the artifact is one of the most hilariously disturbing things printed in mainstream D&D for years.
So is H3 for you? It's definitely an old-school dungeon with the weird quotient cranked until the button fell off. Parties who enjoy tactical challenges should find a feast in the Pyramid, as nearly each new room is literally a new environment and usually has some nasty ongoing effect to restrict (but never defeat) the party. There's lots of roleplaying opportunities with the artifact at least, and plenty of notes for GMs whose group enjoy talking before swordplay. But it is one strange mama-jama, and while there's a surprising depth (and, yes, even psychology) behind some of the NPCs in the place...
Well, this IS the dungeon where one of the scenes is the party carefully crawling through the corpse of an mind flayer ex-prisoner of the Pyramid, whose lethal attempt to flee the Pyramid turned him into titantic size and then inverted his flesh and skin so that his insides were on his outsides. And *that* area is just two doors away from a medusa with her ogre bodyguard who enjoy an S&M relationship. If your response to any of my snippets of the encounters in the Pyramid is "Now that's just freakin' cool!", you'll probably enjoy your stay, even if your players might not know what the hell is going on.
