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This is the fifth part in the Scales of War adventure path. This path has not been brilliant recently, so I was hoping for an improvement with Rodney Thompson's adventure. Mr Thompson is best known for his work on Star Wars, wonder if there will be wookiees? After reading through the whole thing a couple of times, I'm still not sure what to make of it.
This is from Dungeon 160, the November release from 2008. It's pitched at 7th level parties and the intro flavour goes like this:
"Some months ago, a mysterious figure calling himself only the Emissary contacted the hobgoblin chieftain Sinruth and spurred him into reviving the marauding horde known as the Red Hand of Doom. Unbeknownst to both Sinruth and the PCs, this Emissary was the shadar-kai arms dealer Sarshan. Simultaneously, Sarshan began sending messages to the leader of a band of gnoll mercenaries, a disciple of Yeenoghu named Fangren, in the hope of inciting the gnolls in a similar fashion. The gnolls were not so easily commanded, however, forcing Sarshan to take more drastic steps. While the goblins were content to raid Brindol thanks to little more than motivational letters, the gnoll mercenaries required something more. In order to secure their services, Sarshan arranged for the gnolls to receive several shipments of shadar-kai weapons from his storehouses in the Shadowfell. In exchange, Fangren agreed to lead his mercenaries across Elsir Vale, pillaging, plundering, and seizing as many captives as possible."
So essentially it's the same plot as we got earlier in the path, but this time it's with gnolls. Given that the bad guys were so spectacularly inept in previous installments, I'm not hopeful about their chances this time, seeing as they have exactly the same plan. Before we get stuck into the story proper there's the usual rigmarole about explaining how the adventure format works. It's a complete cut and paste job. It continues to helpfully recommend that "reading through the Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition rules is your first best step to understanding and preparing to run the adventure". Your second step might be to grab a notebook, you're going to want to write down questions as they occur to you, and believe me they will. Straight away you'll need to pay full attention to the treasure parcel information. It's not quite right. The text says there's 15 parcels, the table provides 16, but 3 are set in stone, and that leaves.... oh forget it.
The nefarious plot
In this adventure some of the plot threads from earlier installments start to come together. Not before time. I'm sure WotC's intention was to ramp up the tension and anticipation by not providing an overview, but I get a sense of frustration instead. So now some actual revelations, well, one anyway. Here be spoilers. There's a platinum sword in this, except really it's an alternate form of a divine being. How cool is that? Pretty cool except "(it's) full identity and purpose are yet to be revealed". Sigh.
To begin, the party are in Overlook following the events of Lost Mines of Karak. There's a messenger coming their way, but the villains of the piece have abducted said messenger before she gets to the party. Luckily a handy NPC lets the characteers know she's looking for them and this is deemed a sufficient plot hook to hang the whole adventure from. This is the first (and not the last) sign of the enormous amount of rail roading going on here. I don't object to railroading per se, it can be a memorable trip if handled with a light touch, but here there's not even a pretence at choice. The heroes either get with the plot, or they don't. Not so much a rail road as a monorail really.
Finding the messenger is handled via skill challenge. I like the formatting here, its been tweaked since the early publications. There's 8 available skills, and you could take as much time as you like while the PCs explore the city looking for clues. Given that Overlook is such a well written location I'd be happy to let my group take their time with this.
The challenge is broken up by an appearance from an NPC who will reappear later on. This is Gilgathorn, Thorn for short, an elf mercenary. He gives the DM a chance to come over all Batman-like for a few minutes as he addresses the party with dire warnings about a bounty on their heads and how they'd better watch out. I suggest you prepare this one carefully. It's too early to make this a fight and you know what players are like. Flip forward to page 36 to find a picture of this guy. He'll be back, so lay it on thick with the characterisation.
The encounters
The messenger is being held in a ruined temple of Pelor and the party have to bust her free. If they failed the earlier challenge the opposition increases (and there's more experience accordingly, so hardly a disaster). The encounter is standard fare, nothing ambitious or particularly creative. There's not much in the way of hazards or interesting terrain, and there's no surprises, or waves of combatants, it's just a scrap with some thugs. There's nothing really wrong with that but it's a shame it takes four pages to tell the story of the encounter. The tactics section is wrong too. It talks about an at will power recharging, which is unfortunate.
The rescue successful, the message is delivered. There's trouble afoot back at Brindol and could the PCs please come and sort it out? It's been 6 levels since they were last there so lets hope your PCs fancy the trip back. Assuming they do there's a quick journey there, with a couple of interludes to hand out some more exposition along the way. This could all be handled by talking it out with the messenger on the road if you prefer, it would certainly get to the point a little quicker.
The destination is the Hall of Great Valour, a museum dedicated to the tale of the Red Hand of Doom, an invasion from a whole edition ago. The curator, Sertanian has discovered something interesting about a platinum sword the adventurers recovered from their last time here. It's started talking and asking for them by name. Help me heroes, you're my only hope. There's a Q&A section provided that is absolutely farcical. I simply cannot believe that the author has really considered the sort of questions a real gaming group might come up with. It assumes total compliance, if not utter gullibility. The sword is enigmatic in a way that only NPCs can be and doesn't even have powers as a bargaining chip. Over in the deadtree world you can play Pyramid of Shadows that uses a similar conceit, but in the form of an artifact that actually helps the party, unlike this piece of dead weight. The good news is that just as the conversation starts to dry up, ninjas attack. This is the saving grace of this early part of the adventure, a decent combat and the place catches fire at the same time. This nested skill challenge has a really cool idea in it, if you don't get a success, you get an automatic failure each round. Get enough failures and the place burns to the ground. There's no real mechanical consequences (you could lose a healing surge, and there's no more encounters that day) but it does provide an action movie scene, even if that action movie is the fantasy version of The Da Vinci Code.
The aftermath sees the reappearance of the elf mercenary. That's a coincidence. Again, he's not here to fight (yet), but your party ranger will be muttering someething about a quarry under his breath by now. Actually, he doesn't get a cover story for this encounter, so let's hope your players don't actually ask him anything.
The next stop is a secret githzerai monastery in the mountains. A skill challenge gets you there, and you'll have to ignore the sword all the way as she goes all shy during the trip. Don't worry, things liven up soon enough.
Fortress Graystone
This is the dungeon part of the scenario. The dungeon being an ancient githzerai monastery overrun with a pack of gnolls. The chief gnoll is trying to open a rift to a place of power (aren't they all), and only the heroes stand between him and regional domination. Sarshan didn't know what the gnolls would find when they moved in, which surely makes him the least well informed idiot of the master villain world.
The monastery is designed in such a way as to show off the dualisic nature of the githzerai. Some rooms are regular, some are all twisty. That's the whole law/chaos thing for you in an architectural nutshell. Feel free to dole out some lore to those PCs trained in dungeoneering. To be fair, the map layout is nice enough and the author tells us how the doors work. That is not something you can rely on in many published adventures, yet it's something I often find myself having to narrate as a DM. There's 6 location based encounters within the monastery proper, 1 on the approach and one event encounter that can happen when the DM sees fit. I guess that's two longish sessions of play, maybe three leisurely ones.
To gain entrance to the monastery the party have to ascend huge stairs set into the side of the mountain. There are gnoll guards to defeat as well as a stonewalker spirit that animates within statues before attacking. This is a cute encounter. The stairs make movement a challenge, and the gnolls are a variant on the standard MM dogmen (most of the new monsters are detailed in the appendix so there's some replay value at least). Best is the spirit. When it inhabits a statue it turns from a lurker into a brute. It's got a petrifying touch which is one of the nastiest abilities in the whole game. When it hits 0 hp it flees into the next statue along, which could very well be a petrified PC. That is full of dramatic possibility.
Going underground
Into the dungeon itself and here's where we have to talk about Thorn. He returns at some point to attack the party. You get to decide when. There's a picture of him on page 36, hope it matches the description you used when you introduced him. He's brought some animated pets with him, and together they form a level 11 encounter, so that's considered tough for this adventure. The recommendation is to sic him on the PCs after a difficult encounter, or halfway through a rest. That seems like harsh advice but in my experience solos don't do as well as WotC think they will, there's still only one of them to a party of five. Hopefully you'll get to use some of his neat attack options like pepperbombs and a gripping net. Now, at some point, the combat needs to turn into a discussion if you want to be able to fill in Thorn's story. He's prepared to bargain for his life, but I imagine not many groups will allow him that option. I'd say it's worth trying for it, just so you can say the following when the PCs ask how Thorn knows his way around the monastery so well: Thorn explored the monastery in his youth. Oh, right. Really? If that's not enough, he has the somewhat vital (though hardly surprising) knowledge that it's Sarshan behind the price on their heads. Should Thorn die, it's handily written on a note to be found on his person. This is contrived rubbish at best, and an insult to players intelligence at worst. By all means have him stalk the party, that's a neat idea and one that is alluded to in earlier skill challenges. Having him be responsible for reactivating the traps in the monastery and eluding a whole pack of demonic gnolls is stretching it a bit far. Bah.
Traps, arenas and rituals
Once into the dungeon proper you’ve got a special encounter to overcome. It’s called the Githzerai mind trap and it’s nicely old school in its function. That is, it’s there to be frustrating and random with extreme violence mixed in at the same time. It’s a teleport trap, and it’s got a bunch of gnolls stuck in it. Thorn reset the trap when he came through earlier, showing that there’s no end to his talents when the plot requires it. The nature of the mind trap means you’ll need to be quite organized at the table with multiple rooms laid out and split combats a plenty. It’s not rocket science but it does pay to read the workings of the trap two or three times to make sure you don’t stumble during play.
I like the gnoll variants presented here. Gnolls with whips is never going to get old. The mauler variant is armed with shadar kai weaponry which is a nod to the backstory that I appreciate. This tribe gets a full write up at the back of the adventure so it’s worth skipping ahead to do your DM research first.
There’s more gnolls spread throughout the rest of the fortress. That’s fairly straightforward. Where it gets a bit more interesting is when the legacy of the githzerai becomes apparent. The first signs are in the architecture. Unfortunately that makes some of the rooms an absolute nightmare to map out on your table. If there’s any dungeon tiles in print in the shape of crescents I don’t know about them. One of the less wacky-shaped rooms is the training chamber of the githzerai. Picture the scene; there’s a waterfall and a set of constantly shifting aqueducts. Amongst this you’ve got ruin-touched gnolls mounted on giant hyenas (introducing in Dragon #369). Fun for all the family. It looks interesting enough, not sure how it would work out in play though. Has any reader run through this encounter yet? Did the shifting terrain make a difference?
The meditation chamber is where the dualistic nature of the architects comes into play again with a split encounter area, one side all straight lines, the other all curvy and full of pits and weird edges. Even the monsters are split. We get two new creatures here. There’s the githzerai psionic echoes, kinda like ghosts really, except with psionic powers. Then there’s the mindscramblers, who are all chaotic and random in their attacks. Flip to the back of the adventure where we find out that these bad boys are ‘coalesced psionic residue of githzerai untamed emotions’. There you go then. It’s all cute enough, but perhaps a little too out there in concept.
Are we nearly there yet?
The main event of the fortress is the showdown with the gnoll leader. To get to that we first have the classic set up of a sub boss to deal with on the way. In this case it’s the shadar kai weapons master who’s been training up the gnolls with their new.armaments. He’s taken the great hall as his lair and is surrounded by gnoll recruits when the party arrives. It reminds me of the classic kung fu movies. I can imagine the PCs and the weaponmaster locking eyes for a moment of silence, then, with some choppy hand signals, the gnolls leap to the attack. Maybe it’s just me. The shadar kai has a couple of cool powers under his level 8 skirmisher chassis. He can hit with a disarming strike and follow it up with ‘my weapon now’ which allows him to attack with his captured weapon. Awesome. He’s prepared to parley given the chance, and there’s even a skill challenge provided to assist with the interrogation. I’d handle it with a single roll to be fair, assuming I even asked for that. If he dies then fear not, he’s got some incriminating notes kept nearby which give another clue to the backstory. Well he would wouldn’t he.
I should mention that the gnolls here are not the usual run of the mill hyena guys either. This batch includes the warmaster complete with the magic sword, ‘wicked fang’. This level 11 magic weapon can do 3d8 26 damage on a crit. Nasty, especially when it’s daily property gives 10 ongoing to boot. Again, flip to the appendix of the adventure for more.
The final showdown is in the ritual chamber. You’ll either see this as a hackneyed old dungeon trope or proof of the power of classic ideas. There’s an evil shaman in the final throes of an evil ritual that only the party can stop. There’s plenty of opposition in the chamber, including twisted former captives as controller fodder. The shaman is level 11 and all about the vicious ranged powers. Try ‘vortex of chaos’ for size, area burst 1 within 10, 13 v reflex, 3d10 6 fire, ongoing 10 psychic and target dazed (save ends). Ouch. Then there’s ‘shun the unbeliever’, an immediate reaction that slides the target 3 squares when they move next to the shaman. It’s a good mix of creatures in this encounter with lots of forced movement for added interest. Again, the Dragon archives are looted, this time for the crocotta from #364. I looked it up as this adventure gives you no more than a statblock, I liked what I saw
This predator blends the features of a wild boar and a hyena. Black-spotted brown fur covers its head. Large brown, pitted tusks emerge from its canine jaw. The rest of its body is hairless and covered with hideous, crusty sores. It has a long ratlike tail
For once, the ritual element actually shows up in play too. There’s Yeenoghu’s own claw that reaches through the portal and can make brutal grabs. The shaman gets to direct it too. Plus there’s a skill challenge to overcome the ritual, though I imagine the party will concentrate on the creatures first then take this at their leisure. That’s a result of the games rules and it’s a shame in some ways. I’d love to be able to guarantee the two elements of the encounter, the combat and the challenge, were undertaken at the same time, but it’s simply too ineffective a tactic.
Having mopped up the fortress denizens, here’s where the players have to sit still and listen as you deliver a scene where they can only be spectators. Remember the sword with the spirit in it? It’s been silent this whole time and now it’s time for it to get involved. I won’t spoil the moment, suffice to say that I’ve never been a fan of the enigmatic NPC, I just find them frustrating to narrate or play with. This is no exception, but I sense that everyone is supposed to just go with it and suspend disbelief while they’re packing up their dice and counting their treasure.
Overall: I’m still doubtful, but I’ll give this adventure the benefit. There are parts which I really enjoyed, and then there are the jaw droppingly dumb parts that have been spot welded into the adventure seemingly just to make it part of the Scales of War path. I wouldn’t be surprised if this started life as a Star Wars scenario, and I don’t mean that as a criticism. If you and your group can get past the clunky exposition, then there are some memorable encounters to be had within. Certainly it’s brought the average up after recent installments. Worth a punt.
