Sanctuary

Sanctuary, a place of refuge providing safety from those who would bring you harm. Sometimes those who seek sanctuary are not those who you would expect to do so. Even the blackest heart needs someplace that they can call home.

The rural backwater of Cherrimoor is a place far from the political intrigue of the towns and cities but it has its own secrets its own stories. A gothic adventure unfolds involving a search for a fallen paladin a family curse and the new tenant of Tharlen Keep.

Sanctuary is an adventure from Auran d20. As you might expect, it’s an adventure that uses the d20 system and this review will contain spoilers for it. If you think someone might run this game for you in the future then you’ve already been naughty by clicking on the link to this review. Go on; back out now before you make it worse.

The rest of us can safely discover that Sanctuary is about a vampire in a castle above a quaint little village. There’s a catch. Some of the villagers are up to no good, are waylaying people and sending them up to the castle. Er. Okay. That isn’t a catch at all. It’s cliche. I suspect at least half of a gaming group will react with "I bet there’s a vampire!" followed by a "and the villagers are in on it!" the very minute the thankless GM describes the rain, the village and the nearby castle. Ah, but perhaps there is a catch after all, I don’t really think it matters if the players start thinking . o O (Vampire!) from the word go, in fact, it might actually improve the game. Sanctuary is designed for a party of third to fourth level characters. How do you think they’ll fair against a vampire equipped with some useful magical trinkets? Not very well. Sanctuary can cope with between four and six players and it’s going to be very tough on them. It’s going to be very tough indeed. It’s designed so that the player characters release that there’s a powerful vampire in the castle, that it’s nearly dawn and the best idea is to get the hell out of there.

Besides, your first reaction to Sanctuary is unlikely to be a disappointed "oh, a vampire cliche game". Your first reaction is much more likely to be a "Oh! A CD!" And so there is. The 110-paged, black and white, US$19.95 book comes with a CD. There are eight musical tracks; each one composed especially for particular scenes in the book, a PDF copy of the book and some 3D illustrated scenes from the game. That’s fairly impressive. Getting the right music to roleplay to and getting it without fussing must rate among my top tips. It’s good music to roleplay to, atmospheric and largely musical (rather than vocal). The PDF copy is handy for finding things quickly and great if your bookshelf is upstairs but you’re writing notes for the game downstairs on your computer. The 3D scenes aren’t so much my cup of tea even though all the GMs I know now GM from either a laptop or a palmtop. Why not? The music suggests images to the players but the images go as far as showing the players what they see, stealing a little from the imagination. I’m being hypocritical because I don’t have a problem showing players illustrations of NPCs or items they find. Oh well. I think it’s safe to say that something on the bonus CD will suit your tastes and that’s a... well, that’s a bonus.

Sanctuary isn’t really black and white either; there are fourteen colour plates inside that show various maps and floor plans. In this centre section of the book there are pages of black and white handouts to photocopy and give to the players. If I’m buying an adventure then one of the first things I look for are handouts. I can write adventures myself but I suck at the art side – and I’m sure I’m not the only one. In any case, pre-written adventures are supposed to save you time and with the handouts you’re certainly saving time.

It took just a quick flick through Sanctuary to confirm that I was going to like it. The adventure isn’t too linear. Sure, events happen but they’re a result of valid player character actions and NPC reactions. The NPCs have their own goals, knowledge and reactions. NPCs aren’t restricted to rooms in the castle or buildings in the village either. They’ll move around, they’ll move around in reaction to what players do and they’ll be seen by other NPCs as a result. There are shades of grey too, the game isn’t only "Should we go left or should we go right?" or "Should we attack with steel or magic?" decisions. The villagers taking part in the kidnapping think they’re supplying slavers with stock in order to protect their own dying village – how harsh would you be on them? The vampire who’s moved in and dealt with the slavers isn’t making any more demands on the villagers, she’s just taking the offerings they bring – that’s better than most vampires – and she just wants to be left alone. It was one of the Paladin’s bowmen who fired the first shot that led to the massacre of the vampire’s previous "home village", the villagers there were happy to have her – so doesn’t she have just cause for hating the man? In fact, if the players find the Paladin then he’s dying from a spider bite, not a vampire one. The players can save him if they’ve got the resources, or he might die. There’s no railroading of the plot.

Actually, there’s just a hint of railroading. The game works so much better if the players get captured and locked up in the castle. This will happen when some nasty gas canisters drop down and smash in front of them. You’ll have to search through to the back of the book and rummage around for the saving throw for this gas and that’s one of the book’s few layout flaws. When the players wake without their equipment and manacled in a cell they’ll have to be on top form to get free. There’s no plot device left for them to find and escape. There’s no loose link or crumbly brick. If you, as GM, think one is necessary then you’ll need to put it in yourself. That’s if the players get that far, I think they’ll be lucky to survive the locals dropping boulders on their heads at an inopportune moment earlier on.

The lead into the adventure has the players looking for a dying man’s brother. The brother, a famous Paladin, is off questing to exterminate his evil nemesis. That’s right, the vampire. After a bit of searching the players will track him to the village. Sanctuary isn’t a plug in and play adventure. It needs an introduction; it needs a run up, heck you could take your players from second level to the suggested third or fourth level just tracking the Paladin to the village. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just important to be aware of in this day and age when so many pre-written adventures can run straight out of the gate.

The first section of Sanctuary is divided up into parts, acts and locations. The first two are causal and chronologically ordered and the last, location, is self-explanatory. The notes for DMs are in boxes and bits to read allowed are in italic. The text density is good and therefore the pages can be a bit of a jumble at times but careful use of headers keeps the confusion down. It’s only when the facts and figures you need for the encounter aren’t in the DM’s notes and have been saved for the extensive second section of the book that you’ll find yourself flicking pages around and risking getting lost. Sanctuary is a game that needs careful preparation. The italic read-to-your player bits are all right. They seem to be directed at one non-specific player, the phrase "You and your companions..." is common. I don’t like the use of "You" in the read-to-player bits but Sanctuary doesn’t make the critical error of telling the players what they do - only what they see.

The second half of the book follows after the coloured plates and some wonderful full-paged character sheets for important NPCs. It begins with giving more concise stats for the remaining non-playing characters. Sanctuary claims that it can be played in any game setting and it’s probably true given a fair amount of tinkering. And tinkering is fair; most pre-written games need tinkering before they’re good to go. Sanctuary really needs a suitable coastline for the castle to be up against, it needs to have the kingdom or country that the slavers come from close by. The second half of Sanctuary gives you write ups on such countries, on the deities that the locals will be serving, detailed backgrounds on key characters that are best kept away from the stats when you’re in a hurry. Okay, so the second half of Sanctuary isn’t really a "half", it’s more of a quarter or a fifth but it does play a critical part in the game’s success.

The book speaks of quality: sturdy bindings, pages of colour, good text density and quality illustrations. I’m no fan of pre-written adventures, as Wyrdlings will know and be fed up of me saying. Although there are maps and tunnels with traps in Sanctuary it isn’t really a linear nightmare. The book presents the key locations, NPCs, motivations and likely events. It does that work for the GM and then leaves the guy running the game with the unpredictable players with the freedom and the ability to put all these ingredients together. It’s a success.

* This review of Sanctuary was first posted at GameWyrd.

Beware! This review contains major spoilers.
This is not a playtest review.

Sanctuary is an adventure deisgned for 4-6 characters of levels 4-5 from Auran d20.

Sanctuary is a 110-page mixed mono/colour softcover product costing $19.95. It also contains a CD with the adventure in .pdf format, 3D images of the adventure locations, and ambient music linked to the scenes. Space usage, font and margins are all pretty good (barring the slightly annoying intrusion of a couple of 1/2 page adverts into the main text). The interior mono sketches are good, with a couple of truly superb pieces (notably the alluring main protagonist). A central colour section shows some of the CD images in 2D, as well as some more very presentable colour art. This section however concentrates mainly on maps, which are good enough that it's hard to tell if they are photographs of scale models, or computer-rendered graphics. Unfortunately, the scale is presented on a bar to the side of these images rather than as a grid, but this is a minor issue. The writing stle is generally good, if a bit long-winded. Editing is average with regular errors, some of which could have been caught with a spellchecker.

The CD has a much-needed improvement compared to those released with Auran's Guardian and Shadowland adventures. Sanctuary uses Apple's Quicktime to show off its well-rendered 3D images (though often a bit dark for my liking), doing away with the rather strict requirement for certain graphics cards that the previous CDs had. The medium allows you to use your mouse to sweep around the 3D environment and zoom in on interesting facets (though it can get a bit pixelly when this is done). There are a few additional images for those of you who bought Guardian, to be used with Quicktime - its a shame not all the images from this and Shadowland were included for those whose PCs did not have the capacity to use the previous medium. The music is linked to passages within the book and makes for pleasant background music to increase atmosphere without being too intrusive - there are also some ambient sounds such as the rattle of harness and children playing to fit in with the scene. There is a link on the CD to a free adventure on the Auran website, Shades Of Gray, set in the city of Quorull, the starting point for Auran's first adventure, Guardian. The searchable (but not bookmarked) .pdf seems to be a direct copy of the print version, unlike Guardian, which contained additional information in the .pdf.

Though set in the same campaign world, Sanctuary is not linked to the Guardian/Shadowland plotline, and is a stand-alone adventure.

The adventure begins with some introductory remarks and a rather long players introduction, which should be read to the players (though it is not marked as boxed text). This aspect is remedied in the rest of the adventure, where text to be read to the players is clearly marked and notes to the DM are also clearly delineated.

Part 1: Cherrimoor
Information on events and locations in the village of Cherrimoor is given separately, with some guidelines for taking into account player actions. There is also information on the government, religion and history of the area.

Part 2: Tharlen Keep
If the players follow the main storyline in Part 1, they should end up at this keep, which is the central location of the adventure. Again, this section contains event and location information, but these are interspersed to provide a more cohesive journey through the keep. Again, there are snippets of advice for amending the adventure to suit unusual player plans and actions. Both in the previous section and this one, the weather is used as a major influence on both the atmosphere and the plot. There is plenty of advice throughout the section on the tactics of the keep's populace. The adventure works much better if the GM uses a spot of railroading at the beginning of this section, but the information given allows for other routes through the adventure.

The PCs must explore the keep, and may need to attempt to escape its confines if following the main plotline (which involves being captured and imprisoned by the inhabitants). Worse, they may discover that there is a timeframe during which they must do this, which can provide an extra frissante of danger - the main protagonist is actually a vampire who will awaken at sunset and, if fought, probably destroy them (CR 10 vampire variant - see below), especially if she combines with her minions, since the PCs should only be 3rd-4th level.

Well over half the book is appendix material, the adventure itself being only 40 pages.

Appendix 1 are random encounter tables.

Appendix 2 is a useful NPC summary sheet, giving a one sentence picture of the NPC, along with their reason why they may be encountered away from their home and important conversation points.

Appendix 3 gives a typical daily timetable for the inhabitants of Tharlen Keep.

Appendix 4 are a series of handouts - a notice used as the main plot hook, a players map of the region, a couple of letters which give clues, and a potted history of the House of Tharlen.

Appendix 5 gives 10 pages of colour maps plus a legend for those maps, and a couple of pages of stills from the 3D images on the CD.

Appendix 6 provides more detailed information on the main NPCs in the adventure.

This section also includes a new variant vampire template, which gives more detailed rules surrounding the effects of the blood drain ability on victims (taking temporary Con damage if only a limited amount of blood is taken, followed by permanent Con damage if more is taken). The Create Spawn ability works slightly differently too, sometimes creating ghouls or ghasts (from energy drain attacks) and sometimes vampire spawn or even vampires (from blood drain attacks), and also includes rules for creating free-willed spawn. Damage Reduction is bypassed by wooden stakes. There is also a new set of rules surrounding a vampire's Sanctuary (hence the title) - a coffin or burial shroud, which is based on similar effects seen in movies - the vampire is linked to its Sanctuary and benefits from its inherent powers. Most of this is nicely done, although the rules on creating spawn are a bit loose with definitions of which creatures can be affected (using the term 'living creature' rather than 'humanoid or monstrous humanoid', theoretically allowing a drained rat to spawn a ghoul - this could link interestingly into Mongoose's Slayers Guide To Undead templates (e.g. a 'ghoul-rat' but the idea is not explored fully here). There are also some notes on how to change the 'vampire spawn' creature with regards to this variant template.

The NPCs are given a fair amount of detail in their sections, with information on roleplaying the character as well as background, description, and motivations. These are enhanced with several double-page full character sheets for the major NPCs. There are also stat block details for all the minor NPCs. Stats seem good.

Appendix 7 contains information on the magic items to be found within the adventure including an ingenious mage lock, which resists the effects of spells such as knock and the most clever attentions of rogues.

Appendix 8 contains information on the religions mentioned in the adventure, either for integration in a campaign or for easy swapping for relevant existing campaign deities.

Appendix 9 gives DMs background information, and discusses early vampires, the history of the main vampire protagonist, the background to the plot hook involving an ex-paladin and his search for the vampire of the story.

Appendix 10 gives a glossary of terms related to the setting and its history.

Conclusion:
This is an interesting adventure with a good mix of roleplaying, skill use, combat, and mystery-solving. Unlike Guardian and Shadowland, it does not suffer from quite such an over-abundance of background material (Auran have cleverly put this information at the end as well), making this theoretically an easier product to integrate into an existing campaign.

Another area that I feel has somewhat improved since the previous two adventures from Auran is the organisation of material. I recently ran both Guardian and Shadowland - trying to bring all the disparate information together from sections on event, location, NPC, and magic item, not to mention stats from Core Rulebook III, proved to be a nightmare in-game. Sanctuary does a little better in this regard, with event and location interspersed for Tharlen Keep, but this aspect will still require some decent pre-game prep by the GM, and will probably need access to a photocopier.

The adventure's main plotline has some aspects of railroading in it (a single plot hook and a requirement for the PCs to be captured once they enter the keep), but there is advice on running the adventure avoiding the capture element. The adventure could theoretically be deadly to the entire party if they make the wrong decisions, and may need toning down if the party fights without thinking.

However, overall, an atmospheric aventure with plenty of props to enhance the GM's presentation.

Sanctuary

Sanctuary is an adventure for a party of 3rd-4th level adventurers. The book includes a compact disc with music/background sounds, 3d images, and a pdf version of the book. This is the third such product produced by Auran, after Dark Awakenings: Guardian and Dark Awakenings: Shadowland, but does not follow the storyline of those two.

The adventure is written by Keith Done.

A First Look

Sactuary is a 110 page perfect-bound softcover book packaged with a PC and Mac compatible CD rom. Consider that price would have been competitive for the book alone, based on amount of content, the package comes at a decent price.

The cover of the book depicts a medallion on a wood surface, designed by Jason Robson.

The interior is mostly black and white, but there are many glossy full color maps. Bob Jones is once again responsible for the black-and-white artwork, and brings the pages to life with his slick, detailed character and location portraits.

The interior body text is fairly small, though double paragraph spacing is used. The use of space is generally good, though the layout is in some ways confusing, such as scattering references to parts of the adventure through the appendices. Also, many NPCs have PC style character sheets, which strikes me as a waste of space; if the NPCs had been put into stat blocks, they would have only taken up half a page each instead of two pages each.

A Deeper Look

The CD

The CD that comes with the game contains music tracks, a PDF of the adventure, and 3D virtual reality images of certain scenes in the adventure setting. However, if you are familiar with Auran's adventures, the 3D images are quite a bit different. Instead of using a custom 3d rendering program as Guardian and Shadowland did, Sactuary uses Quicktime movies as it's 3d viewer.

Quicktime is quite a bit less capable than the custom 3e viewer of the previous adventures; for example, in the previous adventure the GM could select options to add weather to a scene or add certain details to the scene as the situation warranted, and the images are memory resident vice rendered on the spot, making the images rather pixilated if you zoom in too much.

However, Quicktime does have one advantage over the custom viewer made by Auran for the previous adventures: it does not require a high-end video card. I was unable to run either of the previous adventures on my laptop, but using quicktime should be a snap.

The Adventure
(Warning: This section contains spoilers to the content of the adventure.)

When I picked up the module and felt the heft, I thought I was in for quite a lengthy adventure. However, I was surprised to find that little over a third of the book was actually the section describing the adventure. The rest of the book is supporting material: handouts, maps, a region history, notes on various NPCs, and rules.

The adventure is actually fairly straightforward. The characters are hired to track down a noble out to grapple with an old nemesis. Their search takes them to a town full of suspicious acting villagers. If the PCs press the villagers, they can find out that the supposed slavers are hiding out in a nearby abandoned keep. If they arrive at the keep, the inhabitants of the keep will take them captive with the aid of sleeping gas.

When the players come to, it becomes their responsibility to escape from their captors and learn that this is not a slavery operation at all, but the keep is under the sway of a vampire. The players must get past the vampire's minions and find her before she awakens, for she is rather likely to be able to slay the party if she does.

The plot smacks more than a little of railroading to me. The book does say it's okay if they don't fall into the trap and you can do whatever you want if they don't. That said, aside from the considerable wad of background material, there is little troubleshooting advice or alternate paths provided for in the adventure.

One of the more interesting rules bits is the vampire itself. The vampire is created using a modified template. Modifications include alterations that allow the vampire to create ghoul or ghasts as spawn if the creature is slain with energy drain vice constitution drain, and the vampire spawn create ghoul spawn and can actually be active during the day. Most significantly, this vampire variant is dependant upon an object that now houses their soul, and creates a sanctuary to house the object (thus the name of the adventure.)

The NPCs are lavishly detailed, but many are mechanically flawed. For example, there is a character with the weapon specialization feat that not only is not a fighter, but does not have the weapon focus prerequisite.

Conclusion

The adventure itself is fairly straightforward, if perhaps a little cliché. If the players follow the presumed plot flow, it could stand to be an interesting and engaging adventure, and the sounds and images could well enhance the mood. However, the adventure itself does seem a bit railroaded, and if the characters do not follow the predictable path, the whole adventure could easily go off the tracks and much of the point of the adventure and supporting material would be lost. The author really should have made some alternative means of completing the adventure.

The book and CD are actually very stylish, and it is good to know that Auran is listening to feedback and making their products more accessible. However, it seems that the supporting material:adventure ratio is a bit higher than you could make meaningful use of.

Overall Grade: C+

-Alan D. Kohler

By Brad Mix, Staff Reviewer d20 Magazine Rack

*Warning this review contains spoilers!

Sizing Up the Target
This review is for Sanctuary a 110-page long adventure for 4-6 third to fourth level characters. Written by Keith Done and published by Auran d20 Adventures. This retails for a respectable $19.95 and comes with a CD-ROM.

First Blood
Back when D&D first started it was decided that adventure modules would be short and to the point. Very little information was given beyond what was necessary. Only the cover of the modules had color, maps were very basic with little detail, and the descriptions were left up to the DM. Then came the text box that allowed a more detailed description of the room, or area to be given. Take for example one of my all time favorite adventures, Castle Amber. For those of you that have played it, think back to the time travel, and unique monsters that you fought. Sure there were gaps in the story and the final encounter involved burning the tapestry to break the curse. You did this because it was engraved on the inside of the coffin telling you how to break the curse. Do you remember anything but the picture on the front cover? Did you realize that this module is only 26 pages long? It was great at the time because it was all we had. This mind set has been around for over 20 years. Thankfully that old mindset is starting to change. Adventures books are now filled with color portraits of the NPC’s, 3D rendered maps, and detailed background information. Think of how memorable you can make these new adventures for your party.

One of these new trailblazers is Sanctuary. See Critical Hits as to why this is so trend setting.

It is campaign neutral and can easily dropped into any setting. The adventure itself takes place in the little town of Cherrimoor. Bandits are invading the town and the party has answered a call for help. We all know that the bandits are only a plot device to get them to the village. The adventure is about finding a lost Paladin who has not been seen in a while. Villagers have some fears and concerns but otherwise don’t know much. There are a few timed encounters and some that happen when the party meets an NPC. This keeps the pace of the game moving so the PC’s don’t get to bored wandering the city. Of course the spooky castle on the mountain is a great place to start, but getting information in the city should be done first. With the rain and creepy background music most experienced players are going to say “Its time to kill the Vampire.” Of course that person will then cringe as you look at him and chuckle with glee. He then realizes that he only has a 4th level character and has no chance to kill a vampire. It is a little cliché but the fear that it inspires is great. The actual vampire is only a vampire spawn (CR 10) which has its powers toned down a lot from a true vampire. It uses the vampire variant template.

Critical Hits
Included is everything you need to get the party started in a little town of Cherrimoor. Including a CD that has 8 tracks of mood music and background sounds. These eight tracks total about 50 minutes. Also included on the CD are colored maps of some of the more important areas. A PDF recreation of the book for easy searching. You can keep your place in the module and browse the PDF for the next few encounters. A little movie like trailer for the book is also included. The adventure itself is only 40 pages long. The rest of the information includes: a poster that requests hired swords, several letters that can be found, 12 pages of colored 3D maps, 5 pages detailing the main villain and cohorts, 6 NPC’s are on character sheets for ease of use, and new magic items discovered throughout the adventure. Using all of the players’ senses will add to the realism and hopefully a well-remembered adventure.

Critical Misses
I had trouble getting any music to run on my PC. There was sound on the movie clips but nothing for the music tracks. When I put in my CD player it worked fine. It would have been nice to play the music on a laptop and still be able to show a map on the computer as well. Having to use both a CD player and computer can make it hard for the GM.

A couple of spelling errors occurred in the book but nothing major. The biggest error I found was on the vampire herself. The description on page 66 has her listed as a 3rd level Cleric/ 2nd level Fighter Vampire. Then on page 67 it has her listed as a 6th level Cleric/ 2nd level Rogue Vampire. The second description is correct as her feats and prepared spells indicate higher level Cleric and Rogue abilities.

Coup de Grace
Great stories and adventures is what roleplaying is all about. All the supplements in the world don’t mean anything unless you have an adventure or campaign to put it in. While self made adventures are perfect because it has everything you want in it, pre-made modules are great for GM’s who don’t always have the time to make an adventure, or for the part time players who get together once in a while and just want to adventure without all of the stuff involved with keeping a campaign alive. I hope more companies put their creative juices into adventures. Honestly if I see one more book about Elves and their boring, overanalyzed culture I am going to scream.

To see the graded evaluation of this product and to leave comments that the reviewer will respond to, go to The Critic's Corner at www.d20zines.com.

The review below contains spoilers. If you're GM is planning on running Sanctuary by Auran publishing, read no further.

Designed for a party of 3rd-4th level characters, or is that 4th-5th (both are mentioned), Sanctuary is site and time based adventure. Characters will start off looking for a relative of their patron, but quickly discover that what plagues the small town of Cherrimoor isn't slavers selling people to a foreign country, but something far more sinister.

The adventure is set up into an introduction that describes the current events and the town of Cherrimoor, as well as how the players get involved. It's a bit heavy handed and some GMs may find themselves rewriting the introduction to better suit their campaign. The adventure does take place in the Auran setting so further modification on location may be necessary prior to running the adventure.

After they're hired and find themselves looking for Guilfarn, a fallen paladin, their research leads them to the town of Cherrimoor where they find that not everything is as it seems. The town is detailed with NPCs and locations for the DM to use as he sees fit but certain events are supposed to happen to get the players to Tharlen Keep where they learn the true nature of the slavers.

Turns out that the slavers have been killed by a vampire who uses the old keep as her sanctuary, hence the title of the book, sanctuary. Worse, some of the villagers are in on this little scam and wind up putting the players in a bad situation. The keep is fully mapped out with all encounters listed by room and relies on the GM to keep straight the different events that occur as the players take action. The module itself takes up less than half of the adventure.

A good chunk of the book deals with the resources for the GM and players. For example, NPCs have their own character sheets. I'm not talking about stat blocks, I'm talking about character sheets. This gives the GM a lot of information on roleplaying and properly using the characters, but might be a bit overkill. Other tools include random encounter tables for both the town of Cherrimoor and the wildlife outside of it. Handouts for players include letters and maps, as well as background history to flesh out the area.

The maps are in full color and top quality but lack the one square = 5' indication that makes combat easier. Minor issue with the overland maps but more serious when it comes to the smaller locations as this also makes drawing out the maps for the players more difficult.

Stats sometimes have wrong numbers. For example, Maedranna, the vampiress, is introduced as a 3rd level cleric, 2nd level fighter, and then latter as a 6th level cleric, 2nd level rogue. There's a huge difference between those two class numbers. Other minor errors like listing a commoner of 1st level as a CR of 1/4th and then another one as ½ creep in. Minor but annoying issues.

Those interested in the background of this setting will enjoy the DM's background on vampires, that ties directly into this adventure, as well as the material on the Faar and Ormocea churches. This makes it useful for GMs of other settings to swap out gods, but takes up some odd three pages.

The CD provides great bonus material. Several images are taken from the maps and expanded upon. This allows the GM to move on the map and move in or out for different areas of viewing. The introduction to the module itself is like the advertisements for various EN World products. While easier to use in terms of 3d power, it's less powerful overall as you can't add the same effects to it. A PDF version of the module is also included, as are 8 tracks of music to add atmosphere to the game.

The module itself is top notch in terms of physical quality. The binding is sturdy. The layout crisp and clean. The art, by Jason Robson is top notch. The only problem is that some of the art is reused in the module as you've got the art in its original place and then reprinted again at the back for certain characters and events.

Sanctuary is perfect for those playing in the Auran campaign setting who use their computers at the game. For others, it'll take some work to translate over, but you'll have a solid adventure with a lot of 'fluff' that you might be able to make your own.