By Bruce Boughner, Guest Reviewer, d20 Magazine Rack and Co-host of Mortality Radio
Depths of Despair is the first of a series by Pinnacle Entertainment designed to take a generic adventure that can be inserted into ANY campaign but one filled with almost insurmountable peril. It can be tweaked into nearly any level of play. A fantastic cover by Oathbound cover artist A’lis of a storm swept sea, the sailors striving to survive the watery inferno graces the book. The internal artwork, by Chad Sergesketter is well done.
Pinnacle, known best for their Deadlands series, steps to the plate with a very credible concept, an adventure, in a harsh clime, with specific rules designed for the extreme nature of the location. Future releases promise adventures on polar ice caps and blazing deserts. They also take a moment (and a column or two) to review the nature of D20 and OGL before going on to state that they are using rules from Fantasy Flights’ Seafarers Handbook and Green Ronin’s City of Freeport Sourcebooks. Their text speaks of the co-operative effort to make many items in the D20 realm cross-company accessible and is one of the first such products I’ve seen make such a declaration. Bravo!!! Much, much better than footnotes.
Chapter One starts of with an eight page short story, setting the mood of the piece and going into the editorial meat of the project. Chapters Two and Three go into detail about the whirlpool at the heart of the area and the city at the bottom of this phenomena. Chapter Four describes the dramatis persona (read NPC’s), while Chapter Five goes into the adventure itself. The book wraps up with a sixth chapter devoted to new magic items, spells, adventure hooks, equipment and whatnot especially suited to this climate. An index for ease of reference is also provided. The authors place the action in a sub-tropic or tropic clime about 20 miles offshore in an ocean or sea, but allowance is made to place it in any environment. Full page illustrations separate the chapters, based on the subject matter, they deal with the undersea aspects of the local flora and fauna.
The heart of the adventure lies with a sahaugin-triton war. The triton king, weary of the war charges a quest to locate the Horn of the Sea God, the Nautilacrum. Hidden from the tritons at the top of a high mountain to prevent it being used, the artifact, of course, does not work quite as legend states it does, destroying the triton city and replacing it with a mile wide, 100 ft tall whirlpool. The sahaugin, in due course, take advantage of the chaos and put an end to the war. This destruction did not go unnoticed by the surface dwellers. The magic of the Sea God, tends to destroy ONLY ships, stranding the survivors at the bottom, in the ruins of the triton’s city. A half-orc pirate named Galt, found a way to get back and forth from the bottom of the vortex. Making a pact with the sahaugin, Galt set up his hideaway and embarked to become the scourge of the seas. Welcome to the game. A good many surprises await from here.
New feats and equipment such as fresh water tolerance (for salt water creatures) and undersea armor (made from giant crustaceans) and a HUGE list of magic pirate earrings add to the spice, as well as magic items specifically geared for the pirate or maritime character. New monsters, such as the Giant Seahorse (used as underwater steeds, Great Neptune, Aquaman!!) and Manta Rays and others add to the briny flavor of this crawl.
Again, City of Freeport is given as a resource and the Freeport Pirate is given again here as a class for players. A goodly amount of rules from Fantasy Flight’s Seafarer’s Handbook is used to provide an easy guide for life on and below the seas. Pinnacle Entertainment has long been one of my favorite publishers. They bring a lot of experience to this outing from their Deadlands and the Weird West settings. The 128 page book seems to stand out as one worth sending some vic I mean, players through as possible. Arrrrr Matey, it be a good-un for ye what don’t got yer sea legs yet!!!
To see the graded evaluation of this product, go to The Critic's Corner at www.d20zines.com.
