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The Night Below is, in brief, a complete campaign setting designed to move characters from introductory standing and first level up to the teens, complete with some backstory, interaction with politics and a whole lot of hackin' and slashin'. While the "stat blocks" all fit into the core 2nd edition AD&D rules, the campaign setting itself can be translated into the current D&D rules set or even ported to other game systems with a little work. (My own group started out under 2nd edition rules and converted to 3e half way through without a hitch.) The setting itself is a drop-in, designed so that it can fit into any campaign world with little fuss as an otherwise little-known out-of-the-way area where great things are coming to fruition.
CONTENTS: The Night Below is a hefty box, and while $30 wasn't cheap back in '95, today many core hardcover rule books cost more. To be frank, after three and a half years of gaming with this set, my group has gained perhaps the highest cost-to-fun ratio EVER for any entertainment medium, simply because there's SO MUCH STUFF. The core of the adventure comes in the form of three books. Book 1, "The Evils of Haranshire," describes the small shire into which the player group wanders, and some of the ill happenings there. Book 2, "Perils of the Underdark," covers the massive sprawl of caverns and tombs underneath the sleepy shire. Book 3, "The Sunless Sea," centers around the final battle at a tremendous underground sea and its surrounding environs. Each book comes in at 64 pages, and they all have separate cover art so they're not easily mixed up. They also include DM's maps, encounter tables and similar useful info on the inside covers, so no space is wasted.
Next up is an eight-page Monstrous Manual insert, including the statistics for some of the special critters in _The Night Below_. Most are permutations on already-existing creatures, but it's useful to have the extra descriptions. A DM hoping to use the game with different editions can also go through and pre-convert all of these stat blocks, thereby saving time later in the game -- when the module references powers or stats in the insert, the DM can easily go to the conversion instead of having to convert "on the fly" for everything in the books.
Three maps cover the various areas; they fold out and are all printed in color. Typically, each map covers the areas from one of the corresponding three adventure books. Each also includes a grid map deigned for use as a mat in specific combat areas of the module, ready for scale with most common miniatures. About the only real complaint of the maps is that most of them don't list a "north" compass, so it's sometimes hard to figure out which way the group's facing except by reading the module and figuring out that a given passage enters from the west or whatnot.
As if those books and booklets weren't enough, the set also includes a double handful of handouts, cutouts and color plates. Many of the handouts are black-and-white illustrations of specific objects, such as orcish tribal glyphs or strange treasures, while the color plates feature reference cards for various things the group will run into in the dungeons -- there's a card for certain specific monsters, one for special hazards of the Underdark and so on. Also included are color cardstocks with chits to cut out and use for miniature combat. The chits aren't ruled on the cardstock, though, so it takes a little guesswork to cut them out to the right scale for the maps (above). Conveniently, the chits cover oddball monsters or monsters that come in large groups -- the sorts of things for which DMs might not have figurines.
SYNOPSIS: If you plan to play the game, you may want to skip this section. This is where I spoil the plot for you.
The game assumes that the PCs arrive from outside of Haranshire. They may be en route to point B, or just wandering, looking for work, whatever -- they find themselves stopping over in an underdeveloped farming community with poor farmland and little to do. An attack by bandits starts the action, and soon the PCs discover that Haranshire seems to be under siege, but nobody knows why or by whom -- brigands don't just rob travelers, but kidnap some people; humanoids, fought off a generation ago, stalk the forests again; lizardfolk snatch up people who travel too close to the marshes and whispers circulate about unquiet dead in haunted parts of the moors and badlands. In short, it's just the sort of action that happens when PCs show up somewhere -- mysteries and foes.
The bad guys don't wait for the PCs to come to them, though. Kidnappings and assaults force the PCs on the move. The town's elders and rulers are mostly old and/ or crippled -- from the lame constable to the doddering squire, they simply lack the manpower and energy to handle the crisis. After a few exploits, the PCs may find themselves formally enlisted and duly authorized to take care of business. So the stalwart group finds itself cast as heroes by the general populace . . .
Exploration of Haranshire gives the PCs a chance to grab a few treasures and "clean up" matters so that the people aren't in any immediate danger, but things point more and more toward an abandoned keep in the deep forest. The PCs not only have to bust their way past the orcs who roam the woods, but after finding the keep need to pry it from the bandits who lair there. The organized bandits have a lot of supplies, they're working with the orcs to take prisoners, and they have one kidnap victim holed up -- some of the first clues the PCs receive that a larger plot's afoot. Once the PCs clean out the place, they learn that the kidnapping victims are taken underground, through a basement and into a series of tunnels under Haranshire. That's the end of book 1.
In book 2 the PCs descend into the very lengthy tunnels under Haranshire. Never mind that these cave complexes push believability; they're supposed to be fun and dramatic. A whole lot of wandering in the dark goes on, and the PCs probably gain some skill just fighting the bizarre critters that roam the depths, but persistent searching eventually reveals that the Underdark has several settlements of fairly smart creatures, some friendly and some hostile. Diplomacy with a settlement of deep gnomes is a must, and with those allies, the PCs have to find a way to fight through the passages and to a great kuo-toan city -- the place that the orcs sent the kidnap victims. By this time the PCs are probably well aware that something smart and malignant is behind the whole mess; orcs are too unintelligent and kuo-toans too chaotic to orchestrate such a scheme. Encounters range from some rather cunning and distinctive trolls to a nest of grell, a shadow dragon and even -- if the PCs are extremely persistent -- a few shadowy meetings with a rare elven sub-race that eschewed the entire war between surface elves and drow and instead became exiles in the deep by dint of cowardice. Once the PCs have enough allies and experience, they take on the City of the Glass Pool -- the kuo-toan city itself.
The City of the Glass Pool is a hefty section of Book 2 and it has some reference cards as well. PCs have to hit and fade and use some nasty tactics to break apart the kuo-toan society. Even then, they'll only succeed in liberating a few prisoners and halting one menace; the City itself is a gateway to the final passage leading down to the Sunless Sea -- the home of the final enemies.
Book 3 covers the Sunless Sea and its surroundings. As with the earlier books, there's a lot of wandering room, and PCs can become sidetracked if they're not careful or even accidentally step into something a little too big for them. Smart PCs will learn to run, and to use tactics that allow them to retreat! The enemies here are no-holds-barred: groups of mind flayers, communities of derro, fire giants with priests, islands of undead. Fortunately for the PCs, many of the caves and islands are so far separated that news of the PC invasion takes a while to get around; the PCs can take the area on in bite-size chunks, right up until the city of Great Shaboath, the final stage -- the place where aboleths, using special dominating potions, have centered their influence. Using kidnapped spellcasters and a supra-genius derro engineer, the aboleths have built a massive (one might say artifact-level) dominating tower structure that will soon (i.e. a few weeks after the PCs arrive) allow them to extend their mental powers to the surface and dominate everything within a hundred miles. PCs to the rescue!
The final stages of the game are very tricky. PCs used to the "meatgrinder" approach can find themselves bogged down fighting in deep water against an entire city of amphibious enemies (who, in D&D 3e, have reach on their side). The PCs must rely on a combination of stealth, trickery, magical domination and well-timed force, all designed to make a quick entry and a fast resolution. Too much lollygagging and the group will find itself swamped under the aboleth reinforcements. And that's not good, since the nut that the PCs have to crack -- the central tower complex -- has some of the nastiest magical traps and guardians yet. In the final stages, the PCs will have to push their group's stamina to the limit and blow out most of their magical items in order to force their way past the guardians while on the clock. The final confrontation's a real killer and underprepared PCs could lose completely -- which makes victory all the more satisfying.
THE HIGHS: Not only is The Night Below huge, it's good. It takes a lot of D&D tropes and turns them on their ear, while giving the DM helpful tools to make the game run like an epic story.
In contrast to some of the older boxed sets and modules, which focused on solving traps and puzzles (Ghost Tower of Inverness, Tomb of Horrors) or beating through hordes of enemies (Temple of Elemental Evil or Ruins of Myth Drannor), The Night Below tends to focus on -- get this -- diplomacy and trickery. The players have to carefully play out their reactions and alignments, dealing with everything from the balancing act of satisfying local authorities to handling racial prejudices or making alliances with associates of dubious character (potentially including fiends!). This isn't to say that it's all a boring talk-fest; the module features plenty of combat and more than enough traps to keep several rogues busy. It simply also requires the party to have some personal interaction skills, and some parts of the module are much easier (or harder!) if the PCs go through the right conversations. Having a high Charisma is actually vitally important to this module; the party must have a good speaker who can handle diplomacy, or they'll never make the allies they need to survives!
As a drop-in module, the game provides a small setting to place in any campaign world. It even includes notes on how to integrate it with Forgotten Realms, Mystara or Greyhawk campaigns, using those games' deities when describing holy relics, mentioning important NPCs from each setting who can provide help or information and so on. This flexibility is a big plus. My group played through as a Greyhawk game, but other groups have used the game in the Forgotten Realms setting (as shown by some sites on the internet) and it's doubtless possible to drop it even into something far afield, perhaps even a non-D&D game.
The color presentation for all of the handouts, and even the black-and-white papers and books, is good. There's no shortage of materials. About the only worry is that a DM who has this collector's item may be hesitant to actually cut things out!
While many of the monsters are standard D&D fare, quite a few have special touches, and some of the magical treasures are particularly unique. Consider a tribe of trolls who all wear their hair in topknot braids, or a group with a genetic defect that causes an underbite so they drool constantly. These little touches add versimilitude and give the players the feeling that they're doing more than just hacking up another group of generic monsters. Similarly, nifty treasures like a tiny model house that can be expanded to full size and then compressed with everything in it, or a medallion holding a microscopic prayer book that grants bonuses when it's enlarged and read, are very unique and lend the campaign its own personality. The one intelligent weapon that shows up even has its own persona (and, at one point in our game, wound up taking part in the party's negotiations with another group).
Many sections of the game include specific notes not just on the encounter at hand, but how to manage that encounter. This isn't just tactical stuff, either (although that's not lacking): the book also notes negotiation tactics, things that might put NPCs off or make them betray the PCs, places that'll be reinforced, ways for NPCs to respond over time to continued invasions and so on. PCs who dally or assume that the monsters won't react to repeated assaults may find themselves on the receiving end of an assassination party or ambush!
Some of the specific plot-points also include very special rules to cover the steps that PCs need to take. For instance, determined PCs could just slash their way through the kuo-toan City of the Glass Pool, killing everyone until they render the place empty. The reference cards and books, however, introduce a social control system to help the DM model the effects of kuo-toan racial mental instability, and to show how their society deteriorates as the PCs destroy vital control points. An intelligent group that makes a study of the enemy and exploits this can find ways to destabilize the entire city and drive most of its inhabitants to insanity (and, thus, spread chaos to cover the PCs' attack) just by striking certain critical areas. Similarly, the final battle requires the PCs to puzzle out the rules of magic in the D&D system and then creatively apply their spells and items to cover several magical schools of theory; wizards who focus solely on blowing things up will be forced to retreat and learn more breadth before the PCs can finish matters.
THE LOWS: While The Night Below is chock full of good stuff, it's not without a few foibles. Fortunately they are for the most part excusable, but it requires a little DM work to compensate.
The book suffers from the occasional inconsistency. For instance, a table on p. 28 is described at the top as ". . . the surface of which is wooden but appears greast and almost metallic" but later is a ". . . monolithic stone table." A small chapel in the basement of the keep in book one, described on p. 48, is underground, but for the Greyhawk game, it's a chapel to Pelor -- the sun god? Underground?
More problematic are the lapses in information. Some bits of information are simply scattered around so much that they're hard to find. For instance, starting in book 2, the PCs gain access to a rapid transit network of teleportation circles that function at specific monoliths. While it would've been very helpful to have a short list of all such places and where to find them in the adventures, the DM can only find them by reading their descriptions in individual encounters. Thus, it may not be immediately clear that there's one (for instance) in the middle of a fire giant rift in book 3; the DM has to pluck it out of the encounter text. Who build the Parlfray Keep? Who was the grandfather of the current Count? No, this isn't under the section about the Count and his family -- it's in an overview section about the area around the keep, which then sends the DM to later in Book 1 for more information on the Keep itself. Tracking who's who can sometimes be difficult because names are dropped in some places but not ever repeated elsewhere, so there's a lot of page-flipping while the DM portrays NPCs who're supposed to know about extended families or area history.
Several other reviewers have mentioned that their campaigns have ended in book 2, as the group fell apart from boredom in the dragging-out section of the Underdark. In the set's defense, the books do instruct the DM to tailor encounters as appropriate to the PC level and place in the story -- slow them up if they need more experience, or give them a swift journey if they're ready to hit something big. A DM who slavishly follows the random encounter rules, though, may wind up throwing a random group of critters at the PCs every twenty miles or so, meaning five, ten or more random encounters just while walking from entry point A to known enemy checkpoint B -- and that can deplete PC resources so much that they can't fight the real foes (or slow down the game so much that the players lose interest).
Lastly, the final battle has a low blow: An area where the PCs can't get through without losing most of their magical items, guaranteed. If it's so important for the PCs to not have so much magical treasure, then the module probably shouldn't have given out so much in the first place. By the end of the game my group was arming up their henchmen with 2 and 3 weapons and armor simply because they had so much magical gear that they didn't know what to do with it all.
OVERALL: Despite a few quibbles with the design, The Night Below is a strong product. It certainly delivers what it promises: An epic adventure that will carry a group from the very beginning up to the mid-to-high levels, with a solid story and a lot of adventure along the way. It's not for the faint of heart, though. While a single book could probably be inserted into an existing game, it really works best if following the threads that tie the story together, and that requires a game group committed to finishing the whole tremendous project.
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