Queen of Lies

An attack on a church sends the heroes on an expedition to rescue kidnapped victims and stolen treasure. The trail leads to the Netherdeep; the sunless realm of the fearsome dark elves. Can the heroes complete their mission without being discovered, or have their very actions been orchestrated by the evil Queen of Lies?

Queen of Lies

Queen of Lies is an adventure written by DMG author Monte Cook. The adventure is a foray into the underground realms occupied by the wicked drow elves.

As simple as that description sounds, it is one that I find quite exciting, for multiple reasons. First off, it is a campaign against the drow elves. Necromancer Games boasts adventure with a "first edition feel," but authors Clark Peterson and Bill Webb have proclaimed that their favorite modules of those days were the likes of White Plume Mountain and Tomb of Horrors. As for me, I preferred the series of modules with the moniker D1-3: Descent into the Depths of the Earth, Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, and Vault of the Drow, an epic quest in which players take the fight to the dark elves in the mysterious underdark. The idea of another such campaign under third edition rules is quite intriguing.

Further, I can't think of a better person to do it than Monte Cook. Aside from knowing the d20 system inside out, he has shown that he can spin an adventure. In fact, he is the author of what I consider to be two of the best RPG adventures ever written: the epic plane-spanning Dead Gods (which incidentally included a visit to the Vault of the Drow), and the flexible and beautifully orchestrated Tales of the Infinite Staircase.

So perhaps my expectations are a little high. Let's see if the adventure can live up to these expectations.

Queen of Lies is an adventure for a party of 11th level characters.

A First Look

Queen of Lies is a 48 page staple-bound softcover book priced at $10.95. This is fairly typical for d20 products of this size, though not as good as Fiery Dragon's own Beyond All Reason.

The cover of the adventure is color. The front cover is by Brian LeBlanc, who does many recent FDP covers. Though I have expressed my disdain for his other covers, this one isn't to bad. It depicts some drow characters in the foreground; behind them is a backdrop of a Drow city. This is a very nice depiction of a place in the book.

The back cover has a smaller (but very good) picture by Claudio Pozas, depicting a drow priestess in front of a stature and a rather scary looking giant spider.

The interior is black and white. Claudio does most of the interior artwork. I must say that I am not as fond of his work here as in prior Fiery Dragon adventures. Though the artwork is nice, the drow elves seem entirely too human to me. Perhaps I am a bit particular on the subject, but I prefer dark elves to have more of an alien fey look.

The cartography is generally decent. There is one map that is rather abstract depicting the PC's path through the underdark (or as this adventure calls it, the Netherdeep). Perhaps my recollections of D1-3 are setting some expectations here, and considering the fairly linear nature of the module compared to D1-3 perhaps the adventure would be ill served by a more detailed map, but I had hoped for a more detailed underground map.

The typeface on the interior is decently compact with little wasted space. Given the price per page for the adventure, Queen of Lies delivers a decent value based on quantity of content.

A Deeper Look
(Warning: The following contains spoilers to secrets in the adventure.)

Queen of Lies is based around the machinions of Alevolenz, a drow elf noble priestess with some unusual characteristics. Due to her unusual nature, she was cast out of her house. She ran into the mind flayers, and they started conditioning her as a pawn. However, owing to her unusual nature, the mind flayers never truly dominated her.

And just what is this unusual nature you ask? Alevolenz is, in truth, not one drow but two. Alevolenz is a bizarre conjoined set of twin sisters. Though her "normal" half is a cleric like many dark elf nobles, the "hidden" twin has a talent for magic and is a high level sorcerer. She has returned to her house and took power, with aspirations to one day restore her house to power and rule as queen.

Alevolenz thinks that she can solidify the drow under her rule if she can convince them that the surface dwellers mean to make war with the drow. To this end, she seeks to start such a war by attacking a well loved temple on the surface and leaving a trail of crumbs back to their lair in the underdark.

The players get involved when they are asked to investigate an assault on a prominent temple, in which several clerics where assassinated and several others where taken captive. The GM is advised to make the incident as personal as possible by using a church and NPCs that are important to the PCs. The adventure also provides a patron to spurn the party along and an all too convenient lead in the form of an escaped prisoner with a good deal of information on the city of the drow that launched the attack.

After some investigation, the party should be ready to lead an attack to the Netherdeep. As the party are not the only ones outraged by this act, they may find that they are able to recruit a force to go with them.

Once underway on their mission of vengeance, the adventure is broken into four basic parts. The first part describes the journey to the drow elf city responsible for the assault. This consists of three potential encounters. The first encounter is with Kuo-Toa; if the party decides to parley instead of attack, they could get some valuable information about Alevonlenz. The second encounter is an ambush set up by the dark elves and their bugbear lackeys that could take a toll on any troops they decided to bring along. Finally, the dark elves have poisoned some water in the PCs' path.

The second part details a watchtower suspended in webs in the ceiling of a cavern along the PCs' path. For the most part this is a fairly straightforward struggle with some drow characters and some monstrous spiders, but there is a surprise or two.

The third part describes the Cavern of Ul-Drakkan, the cavern where Alevolenz's house, house Vrana, resided. The cavern contains three huge towers that form the fortress of house Vrana. This section only describes the entry gate, stables, and slave pens.

The fourth part is the meat of the adventure, the three towers. Most of the encounters are with Drow elves and their lackeys, including bugbears, deinonychuses, and monstrous spiders. There are a few encounters of a political nature, such as a mind flayer spy and a traitorous drow loremaster who passes the players information. The later parts of the tower contain demons and other creatures.

As is typical for FDP adventures, there are stat blocks for creatures and characters encountered throughout the book. The appendices contain new magic items: the pot of curses (a small black cauldron which curses anyone who approaches the pot), the staff of dread power (a powerful staff with divine magic), and web armor.

There is also one new monster, the arachnemass. The arachnemass is an ooze that is formed from the conglomeration of thousands of small spiders.

Conclusion

As with most Monte Cook adventures, the statistics of the creatures where well done, and the rules where well leveraged. The adventure does a good job of presenting a challenge against drow elves, filled with opportunities for treachery and betrayal.

That said, I really wasn't drawn into the module the way that I expected to be. First off, I was not really captured by the supposed treachery of the premise. So Alevolenz lures the PCs into kicking the drow in the teeth. What does it really change once they find out? Not much. Now if she had lured the PCs into decimating another drow household before luring them into their own home where they set a treacherous trap, then I could see the players fuming over the treachery.

Second, despite the little political tidbits and the oddness of encounters like the arachnemss and Alevolenz herself, the adventure seems like a fairly plain (if challenging) dustup with the drow to me. Perhaps I have expectations carried on winds of nostalgia, but somehow I expected something more.

However, the module does provide a well developed Dark Elf city with some well developed personages. If the GM is willing to play up the political aspects of the game, it could be a fairly nice adventure.

-Alan D. Kohler

I just finished reading Queen of Lies by Monte Cook. This module is published under the Sword and Sorcery banner. It's black and white, 48 pages and staple-bound.

First of all I like to say that this module is perfect on all technical areas. Monte Cook sure knows his trade. It features a couple of new magical items and a new monster. There are no spelling mistakes or type-os whatsoever (that I could spot).

The Queen of Lies is pretty straight forward and simplistic in it's design. The author adds a few interesting tidbits about dark elven society and the players will learn first hand how cruel and devious the dark elves are. The adventure starts off with a murder mystery but the culprits are easy identified with the help of a few divinations or gather information legwork. The victims are old friends of the characters. Once the players realise that dark elves are behind the murders the players are assumed to want to track down the dark elves to get revenge and reclaim some holy artefacts. The characters trek to the underworld and soon mayhem ensues.

There is not much room for role-playing but if you enjoy tactical combat then you will find that this module provides ample opportunity to hack and slash. One interesting aspect of the module is that the author encourages the player's to get henchmen. A party of four characters can be accompanied of as many as 42 henchmen not counting cohorts and followers. The henchmen makes for some pretty interesting battles where the characters and their minions clash with the numerous forces of the dark elves. The henchmen also serves as bring-your-own-role-playing since the dark elves show very little interest in the adventurers.

The author writes in a way that everyone can understand. All descriptions are short and to the point. The author uses the iceberg-techinque of Ernest Hemingway. If a dark elf, for example, hide objects in a body cavity, the author writes just that and nothing more. This is nice because it allows for more actual material to be crammed into the book. However, I find that the whole module lacks poetry. There are no emotions involved and it makes me wonder why I (or the players) should care at all. A tortured victim is used only to communicate a few secrets he is all forgotten about.

The art in this module is very good. All dark elves are handsome and especially the female ones look extremely pretty. Pretty as in cute, that is. This might detract from the image of dark elves being cruel and evil. The maps are simple and easy to comprehend.

All in all it's a good module for those who likes to get in and fight it out but if you want to add role-playing to your campaign I wouldn't recommend it. The author wants the DM to kill off a number of developed NPCs in order to ignite the right kind of righteous fury in the characters. The trade off is not worth it though. Developed NPCs are far more valuable than that.

Queen of Lies: 5 Superb

Please read Psion's review for a synopsis of the plot of this adventure.

Cost/page count is fine

I liked the art by Claudio Poza but agree that the Drow looked a bit too human. The cover art by Brian LeBlank is good as well and I thought better on this product than his other projects. I'd still like to see a Pozas cover.

That said, on to my review of the interior of the adventure. I really enjoyed reading this adventure and will use it in my game. It has a good first edition feel. Having said that, like many first edition modules the in route travel path is very linear and while I don't mind, a DM could easily in-put underdark encounters from other sources. Once the party and all their possible henchmen reach the main cavern and it's three towers the direction of the adventure is left more to the PC. This is a dungeon crawl, but where the PCs go first is up to the PCs.

There are plenty of interesting NPC, but the interaction with them will most likely combat oriented. There is a Albino Drow, a Mindflayer posing as a drow, and a mutant Siamese twin Drow much like the mutant leader in the movie "Total Recall".

I thought that the Drow Commenors had very low Hp, several with only 1Hp. This compared with Hobgoblins with 40+hp made the Drow almost less than fodder. This is a very minor gripe since any DM can change easily Hp as they see fit.

I liked the new monster, the aracnemass and its engulf ability.

In review: This module has a great First edition D1-3 feel and is the best underdark module I have seen produced for 3ed. I highly recommend this adventure and urge Monte Cook to write more underdark adventures of this type for lower lever characters. Please, please, please...

ASEO out

The Queen of Lies is a module by Monte Cook, published by Fiery Dragon Productions. This 48 page scenario is intended for characters averaging 11th level, and takes them on a raid against a drow fortress where the new queen of an up-and-coming house is making her bid for power over all the houses.

Queen of Lies (QoL) pushes into somewhat new territory by encouraging the players to use their Leadership feats (assuming they have them) and bringing a small army with them on what really amounts to a small-scale wargame. It also provides a slice of life of drow politics, though the players are unlikely to make heads or tails of what is really going behind the scenes of the game.

The artwork and graphic design of the module is quite good. As one would expect from Monte Cook, the adversaries are statted up properly. I know this is not usually something to brag about, but when I prepare a module the last thing I want to have to do is go through and edit a ton of poorly-statted encounters. Everything about the module is solid and well-constructed. There are some very cool encounters - the Queen herself bears a dark secret that makes her truly unique as an opponent. The political undercurrent is fun for the DM, and provides some interesting hooks upon which to continue adventures against the dark elves.

Unfortunately, all is not perfect. In playtesting, the "small army" intent of the module was ignored - probably to the PCs benefit. In all likelihood, babysitting an army of low-level fighters would only ruin any chance of stealth and result in a lot of dead troops early in the adventure. I may be wrong with this, but it just didn't seem to work out very well.

The module itself feels like a very large "Order of Battle" sheet - wave upon wave and room upon room of drow and bugbears. It reads like a phone book. While there are definitely some interesting parts and some very cool encounters, the bulk of the module consists of some pretty bland encounters that feel like "filler". These encounters serve little purpose but to make the module more "believable" and to wear down the party on their way to the more interesting challenges. Even many of the unique drow, fully statted with character levels, don't really have a chance to do anything other than sling a few spells or poisoned bolts before becoming just another source of treasure and XP at the end of a PC's sword. There's just not enough material here to give these characters any kind of life.

Fortunately the module was more fun to play than it was to read - the "filler" encounters tended to go quickly. The players managed to avoid setting off any alarms on their initial foray, and were able to do quite a bit of damage before the fortress went on alert and the bad guys started looking for them. In the end, it was still not an extremely satisfying module. The shakey motivations and plotline shaping this adventure are really not exposed to the players. They were left scratching their heads wondering what was going on. When all was said and done, the adventure was certainly not bad, but the players (and this DM) found it to be forgettable. Other than a couple of key encounters (such as the climax, which killed two PCs, and the wizard getting lucky and killing a fire giant fighter with a well-timed phantasmal killer.

The Queen of Lies is a solid, entertaining module, but not something I'd jump up and down and recommend to other DMs. It just doesn't have enough of the "spark" that really brings the adventure to life and makes it exciting.

Queen of Lies is an adventure for designed for a total party level of 40-45. This is more of a DM's perspective review and some spoilers are contained below. Please see other Psion's review for a story Synopsis.

Adaptability: Easy to stick into almost any campaign; Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, homebrew, you name it almost any setting has reference to the vile dark elves. The Adventure is suited for the aforementioned levels, and increasing the difficulty for higher level players is quite easy. I can see making this adventure for lower levels to be quite challenging and may take away some of the special and lethal aspects of the opponents. I ran 5 characters ranging from 9th to 12 through this adventure leaving nearly every monster stat as written without problems. However, I did make some changes to the plot which I think helped the module. First I had this adventure connected with the recent Dungeon Magazine #94 module "Spiral of Manzessine". I had the captive slaves sold to the Mind Flayer slave camp. Furthermore, I made the Drow who attacked the surface actually plant evidence against the other Drow house, thus fooling my players into initialy attacking the wrong house. With few details on the motivations of the drow, this module's story can easily be enhanced for greater and more entertaining adventures. 5/5

Player Fun Factor: Overall my players liked this adventure, however I think it may have more to do with the additional parts I included rather than the original adventure. The players liked that they were tricked into fighting the wrong house. The attack of the three towers was a bit dull and basically boiled down to enter room, kill everthing, and then repeat... My players became a little weary at this point, but everything prior to teleporting in the tower was a lot of fun for them. Luckily they only went through the one tower, the other two towers skipped entirely. Some of the encounters in the beginning were memoriable such as the Watchtower in the webs. Good news is that this adventure has something for all types of players. 4/5

Style: This adventure is really about getting from point A to B and then killing everything at your destination for hours upon hours. The DM really needs to add some additional plot elements to bring this adventure alive. As written, the adventure is one quarter traveling, and three quarters dungeon crawl. The problem is the marjority of the combat is at the end. Another major criticism is there is no real NPC interaction. As written you just have Drox X, Y, and Z who your players need to kill not talk to. However, there is great potential here, and the module may not come alive with character interaction but with twisting plotlines. The locations were nicely done, and provide a lot of the mood and tone of the Underdark. I also commend the use of trapped drow equipment, nicely designed traps, and interesting creatures. Add Damning Darkness and Darkbolt from BoVD to the Drow arsenal for some truly dark encounters. Watching Drow decend for the Watchtower on Spider mounts was terrific. Great locations and monsters but mediocre plot. 4/5

Ease of Use: The layout with this module is about average. The common Sintrin poison used througout the adventure is written in a weird spot near the front of the module. Flipping back and forth, especially during the three tower sequence is quite common. I wish they could have put the maps of the towers on a seperate page at the back. NPC stats seem to be about right, except for one, Alevolenz. Her CR seems a little low to me. A 11/11 multiclass character should be more than a CR 12. Though she is two seperate characters in essence, they act as one. For some reason I could never find the monster stat block I was looking for. I am not sure why, but I had to keep flipping back pages. The names are in alphabetical order but the appendix was a mess in my opinion. Another bad point is the tower encounters. Some rooms have enemies, some do not. Once the tower goes on alert people start moving all over the place. Sometimes the players are fighting in one room, and only after the fact do you realize that the foes in the other room probably should have heard and came in to help. I am not sure if multiple readings helps, since there are so many encounters at the end to keep track. By contrast, the first half of the module flows smoothly. 3/5

Overall: As written the module seems a little dull, and really needs a good DM to spice up the adventure. Having one house setup another house really brings the treachery alive and I recommend any DM who has the time to perhaps do the same. There are some great encounters in the adventure and the villians are truly formable. One player death out of the five, but this was due to a failed saving throw. This adventure can be deadly, many of the villians/encounters have one saving or die type rolls. I am not a big fan of instant death encounters, and there are plenty of them in this adventure. The last part of the adventure will really test the players resources since there really isn't a opportune time to rest. This adventure has potential and I recommend it for anyone looking for an excursion into the underdark. 4/5