D2 Seven Swords of Sin (Paizo 2007)
By James Sutter
D&D 3.5 edition for level 7 characters
A powerful seductress has stolen seven mighty blades, each tied to a deadly sin, and secreted them away to her monster-infested dungeon. Located in Kaer Maga, one of the most dangerous cities in all of Varisia, the trap-laden halls must be overcome before the sorceress can bind the swords to her will and gain unimaginable power.
THE BASICS:
The adventure is 32 pages long, cover price of $12.99 American.
Depending on how thoroughly your party explores or how mission oriented they are, some encounters will be bypassed. In my estimation, there are:
Overview:
A powerful sword, one of seven prepared by the ancient runelords, has been stolen from a temple treasury by a wizard. The priests ask the party to recover the sword. The party must find out where the wizard is holed up, and then fight through the trap-filled dungeon to defeat the wizard.
The advertising blurb certainly calls to mind Fred Saberhagen's "Book of Swords" novels. Some of Saberhagan's swords were "Woundhealer", that cured/healed people as it passed through them; another sword was "Wayfinder" that acts like a divining rod taking the wielder to whatever they need; another was "Farslayer" that would fly through the air to seek out its named target, killing them wherever the target might be. Sadly, this adventure fails to follow through with Saberhagan's concept. Only one of the swords in this adventure has a power, the "Sword of Lust." It can charm or possibly dominate any creature it hits. Unfortunately, the six other Swords of Sin are only +1 longswords, no longer having any special abilities. The adventure doesn't even mention what their powers might have been. The "sword of sin" doesn't even play any particular role in the adventure, and is a generic MacGuffin, as the villain wielding the sword is better suited to use her spells. The adventure isn't really even about swords, rather the Paizo staff got together in 2007 and designed a bunch of deadly rooms, and then gave them to James Sutter to try to make a coherent adventure around the random rooms. So this adventure is a dungeon crawl through some inventive and creative traps.
To make sense of the encounters, the main villain moved into an underground research facility, once run by mad scientists that abandoned the place. The place has magical equivalents of a nuclear reactor chamber, a nano-machines room, an operating theater, an incinerator, a pool of water that moves like the creature in the abyss, and some large air-circulation turbines that the party could leap through as seen in just about every action-adventure movie.
In addition to these science type elements, there is a mummy in a sarcophagus, gates to other planes, a summoned vrock, shambling mounds, a black dragon, and plenty of standard fantasy elements.
Strengths of the Adventure
The adventure does have a number of creative encounters with traps and monsters that are able to take advantage of the traps. The plot is interesting. I generally find trap-filled dungeons very fun to read.
Weaknesses of the adventure
The encounters are very random, with virtually no consistency is style or theme from room to room (except for a sequence of high-tech rooms that seem to work well together). There is virtually no role-playing. Each monster is isolated, most of them trapped or bound to their rooms and unable to leave or retreat. This makes for a very static environment.
THE SPECIFICS:
I don't give much weight to text density and cost per page... I'd rather pay a lot for a small clever mystery than pay a little for a huge repetitive monster bash.
I don't give much weight to new monsters, prestige classes, and magic items... they can add a little variety to an adventure, but to me they are minor decoration.
1. Interesting and varied encounters (I look for unique encounters, allowing for a variety of role and roll playing.): (3/5)
There was a shortage of role-playing encounters and puzzles. Most encounters were simply variations on "deal with the monster while trying to avoid the crazy trap or environmental effect". That being said, the trap-plus-monster encounters were very well done.
Some examples of the crazier rooms are the anti-gravity room with spiked floor and ceiling, with the gravity regularly changing direction and a floating will-o-wisp for added difficulty. Another example of an interesting room is the clean-room inhabited by a nano-machine swarm that attempts to take-over a living host.
Some encounters really had the potential to be great, but didn't quite deliver. One old temple-like room had slots in the floor and ceiling, and swords falling through the slots in the floor to be teleported back to the ceiling. The falling swords do damage to people walking through the room, and act as a obstacle to missile fire. I would like to have considered the ramification of swords falling forever until they reach terminal velocity—how much wind would there be? How could the teleporters be used or abused by clever players? There also could have been some interesting sword-of-damocles reference here.
There was a vivisection room in which a dead creature was splayed out on the operating table.
2. Motivations for monsters and NPCs (or some detail of how they interact with their environment or neighbors.): (1/5)
The first two expository encounters are pretty reasonable, the first being the clerics requesting the characters' assistance; the second encounter is from a merchant that will tell the party where to find the wizard if they will deal with the gang extorting protection money from the neighborhood merchants.
The vast majority of the monsters are trapped or bound in the dungeon, unable to leave their room and unable to interact with neighbors. Their motivation is simply to fight the PCs to the death. Each combat encounter has a "morale" section that usually states that the monster fights to the death because it has nowhere to run or because it is magically compelled.
3. Logical (the adventure should obey a sense of logic that clever players can use to their advantage): (2/5)
There are a few dangerous rooms that are powered by a sort of nuclear reactor. If the party can shut down the reactor, they will disable some of the latter traps and make some encounters easier. Other than those few linked rooms, the rest of the dungeon seems entirely random and unpredictable.
There is a high-tech "incinerator" room that has no business being room-shaped, as anything that passes through the doorway gets incinerated (you wouldn't need space on either side of the door, as nothing is ever going to take up that space). There is a room deep in the dungeon with 6 human clerics summoning a vrock, but the humans have no way in or out of their room, no names, and no business being there. There is a xill and destrachen trapped in the same room for years with no food source and no way to leave (and in this dungeon, no regular source of wandering monsters or vermin to eat).
4. Writing Quality (foreshadowing, mystery, and descriptions that bring locations and NPCs to life): (2/5)
There were several bits of flavor that stood out as being clever, funny, or interesting. There is an alchemy room with paintings on the wall, and the paintings sort of give clues on how the ingredients can be mixed together. Another bit I liked was that one piece of treasure was a pair of gloves of dexterity in a chuul's lair, but one of the gloves still contained a severed hand. Another encounter has a goblin corpse, killed by the trap it was creating; in the goblins pocket was a diagram planning the trap and a dead mouse. In another place, there were two cockatrice' that the villain named "Wattles and Squeker"—that was amusing to read, but there is no way for the players to learn this rich background element, and no NPC that could tell them, so it is purely for the GM's enjoyment.
A lot of other parts were inconsistent. The fact that swords played no meaningful role in the adventure despite the introduction and background. There were several rooms in which the creatures attack the party because they have been neglected by the wizard (the green dragon and giant squid), yet other describe how much the wizard cares for her "pets" (like the cockatrice' and the red dragon).
5. Ease of GMing (Clear maps, friendly stat blocks, skill check numbers, player handouts and illustrations): (3/5)
The maps are clear. The stat blocks good. There is read-aloud boxed text for each encounter. The complex traps and monsters are presented very clearly and easy to follow. There are no handouts or illustrations.
There were a few creatures that seemed to rely heavily on some magic items, but the text didn't include the stats so I had to consult the core rules to remember what they did. (One creature uses a Ring of the Ram exclusively, another creature has multiple ioun stones). Another creature was a vampire cleric that has special abilities "calling" and "genuflection", but those non-core abilities were not described and I am not sure which supplement they come from (this was particularly troubling because in this encounter the tactics call for the vampire to heavily rely on both of those abilities.)
FINAL WORD:
If you love crazy trap-filled dungeons, and don't care for a lot of exposition or logic, this adventure should suit your tastes. I personally like crazy trap-filled dungeons, but I strongly prefer there to be a reason for the traps, and some logic between the various encounters. If there are intelligent living creatures in a dungeon, I want them to have some motivations or desires other than "kill the adventurers".
And most importantly, if you are going to have an adventure based on "Seven Swords of Sin", then there should be swords and those swords should have some interesting impact on the adventure. I think the idea is certainly worth exploring and I would have loved to see a series of 7 of these game-mastery modules devoted to each of the swords. The "lust" sword would have large numbers of creatures enslaved by the mind-control, and perhaps a plot by the villain to meet with leaders of various kingdoms to put them under control of the sword as well. The gluttony sword could be providing much-needed food to a starving desert oasis, or it could be in the belly of some bloated monstrosity grown to epic proportions, in which the party has to go inside the creature and extract the sword to keep it from growing. I just think there are a lot of better things that could have been done with this plot.
You can see my other reviews on the forums at GrippingTales
By James Sutter
D&D 3.5 edition for level 7 characters
A powerful seductress has stolen seven mighty blades, each tied to a deadly sin, and secreted them away to her monster-infested dungeon. Located in Kaer Maga, one of the most dangerous cities in all of Varisia, the trap-laden halls must be overcome before the sorceress can bind the swords to her will and gain unimaginable power.
THE BASICS:
The adventure is 32 pages long, cover price of $12.99 American.
- 1 page of credits/legal/advertising
- 2 pages of background
- 3 pages of city adventure (2 encounters, one with heavy exposition)
- 22 of detailed dungeon adventure
- 3 pages of new monsters and new magic items
- 1 page of 4 pregenerated characters
- 2 pages of maps on the inside covers
Depending on how thoroughly your party explores or how mission oriented they are, some encounters will be bypassed. In my estimation, there are:
- Approximately 16 combat encounters
- Approximately 3 negotiation/role-play encounter*
- Approximately 8 encounters with things to examine or discover
- Approximately 8 trap-with-combat encounters.
Overview:
A powerful sword, one of seven prepared by the ancient runelords, has been stolen from a temple treasury by a wizard. The priests ask the party to recover the sword. The party must find out where the wizard is holed up, and then fight through the trap-filled dungeon to defeat the wizard.
The advertising blurb certainly calls to mind Fred Saberhagen's "Book of Swords" novels. Some of Saberhagan's swords were "Woundhealer", that cured/healed people as it passed through them; another sword was "Wayfinder" that acts like a divining rod taking the wielder to whatever they need; another was "Farslayer" that would fly through the air to seek out its named target, killing them wherever the target might be. Sadly, this adventure fails to follow through with Saberhagan's concept. Only one of the swords in this adventure has a power, the "Sword of Lust." It can charm or possibly dominate any creature it hits. Unfortunately, the six other Swords of Sin are only +1 longswords, no longer having any special abilities. The adventure doesn't even mention what their powers might have been. The "sword of sin" doesn't even play any particular role in the adventure, and is a generic MacGuffin, as the villain wielding the sword is better suited to use her spells. The adventure isn't really even about swords, rather the Paizo staff got together in 2007 and designed a bunch of deadly rooms, and then gave them to James Sutter to try to make a coherent adventure around the random rooms. So this adventure is a dungeon crawl through some inventive and creative traps.
To make sense of the encounters, the main villain moved into an underground research facility, once run by mad scientists that abandoned the place. The place has magical equivalents of a nuclear reactor chamber, a nano-machines room, an operating theater, an incinerator, a pool of water that moves like the creature in the abyss, and some large air-circulation turbines that the party could leap through as seen in just about every action-adventure movie.
In addition to these science type elements, there is a mummy in a sarcophagus, gates to other planes, a summoned vrock, shambling mounds, a black dragon, and plenty of standard fantasy elements.
Strengths of the Adventure
The adventure does have a number of creative encounters with traps and monsters that are able to take advantage of the traps. The plot is interesting. I generally find trap-filled dungeons very fun to read.
Weaknesses of the adventure
The encounters are very random, with virtually no consistency is style or theme from room to room (except for a sequence of high-tech rooms that seem to work well together). There is virtually no role-playing. Each monster is isolated, most of them trapped or bound to their rooms and unable to leave or retreat. This makes for a very static environment.
THE SPECIFICS:
I don't give much weight to text density and cost per page... I'd rather pay a lot for a small clever mystery than pay a little for a huge repetitive monster bash.
I don't give much weight to new monsters, prestige classes, and magic items... they can add a little variety to an adventure, but to me they are minor decoration.
1. Interesting and varied encounters (I look for unique encounters, allowing for a variety of role and roll playing.): (3/5)
There was a shortage of role-playing encounters and puzzles. Most encounters were simply variations on "deal with the monster while trying to avoid the crazy trap or environmental effect". That being said, the trap-plus-monster encounters were very well done.
Some examples of the crazier rooms are the anti-gravity room with spiked floor and ceiling, with the gravity regularly changing direction and a floating will-o-wisp for added difficulty. Another example of an interesting room is the clean-room inhabited by a nano-machine swarm that attempts to take-over a living host.
Some encounters really had the potential to be great, but didn't quite deliver. One old temple-like room had slots in the floor and ceiling, and swords falling through the slots in the floor to be teleported back to the ceiling. The falling swords do damage to people walking through the room, and act as a obstacle to missile fire. I would like to have considered the ramification of swords falling forever until they reach terminal velocity—how much wind would there be? How could the teleporters be used or abused by clever players? There also could have been some interesting sword-of-damocles reference here.
There was a vivisection room in which a dead creature was splayed out on the operating table.
2. Motivations for monsters and NPCs (or some detail of how they interact with their environment or neighbors.): (1/5)
The first two expository encounters are pretty reasonable, the first being the clerics requesting the characters' assistance; the second encounter is from a merchant that will tell the party where to find the wizard if they will deal with the gang extorting protection money from the neighborhood merchants.
The vast majority of the monsters are trapped or bound in the dungeon, unable to leave their room and unable to interact with neighbors. Their motivation is simply to fight the PCs to the death. Each combat encounter has a "morale" section that usually states that the monster fights to the death because it has nowhere to run or because it is magically compelled.
3. Logical (the adventure should obey a sense of logic that clever players can use to their advantage): (2/5)
There are a few dangerous rooms that are powered by a sort of nuclear reactor. If the party can shut down the reactor, they will disable some of the latter traps and make some encounters easier. Other than those few linked rooms, the rest of the dungeon seems entirely random and unpredictable.
There is a high-tech "incinerator" room that has no business being room-shaped, as anything that passes through the doorway gets incinerated (you wouldn't need space on either side of the door, as nothing is ever going to take up that space). There is a room deep in the dungeon with 6 human clerics summoning a vrock, but the humans have no way in or out of their room, no names, and no business being there. There is a xill and destrachen trapped in the same room for years with no food source and no way to leave (and in this dungeon, no regular source of wandering monsters or vermin to eat).
4. Writing Quality (foreshadowing, mystery, and descriptions that bring locations and NPCs to life): (2/5)
There were several bits of flavor that stood out as being clever, funny, or interesting. There is an alchemy room with paintings on the wall, and the paintings sort of give clues on how the ingredients can be mixed together. Another bit I liked was that one piece of treasure was a pair of gloves of dexterity in a chuul's lair, but one of the gloves still contained a severed hand. Another encounter has a goblin corpse, killed by the trap it was creating; in the goblins pocket was a diagram planning the trap and a dead mouse. In another place, there were two cockatrice' that the villain named "Wattles and Squeker"—that was amusing to read, but there is no way for the players to learn this rich background element, and no NPC that could tell them, so it is purely for the GM's enjoyment.
A lot of other parts were inconsistent. The fact that swords played no meaningful role in the adventure despite the introduction and background. There were several rooms in which the creatures attack the party because they have been neglected by the wizard (the green dragon and giant squid), yet other describe how much the wizard cares for her "pets" (like the cockatrice' and the red dragon).
5. Ease of GMing (Clear maps, friendly stat blocks, skill check numbers, player handouts and illustrations): (3/5)
The maps are clear. The stat blocks good. There is read-aloud boxed text for each encounter. The complex traps and monsters are presented very clearly and easy to follow. There are no handouts or illustrations.
There were a few creatures that seemed to rely heavily on some magic items, but the text didn't include the stats so I had to consult the core rules to remember what they did. (One creature uses a Ring of the Ram exclusively, another creature has multiple ioun stones). Another creature was a vampire cleric that has special abilities "calling" and "genuflection", but those non-core abilities were not described and I am not sure which supplement they come from (this was particularly troubling because in this encounter the tactics call for the vampire to heavily rely on both of those abilities.)
FINAL WORD:
If you love crazy trap-filled dungeons, and don't care for a lot of exposition or logic, this adventure should suit your tastes. I personally like crazy trap-filled dungeons, but I strongly prefer there to be a reason for the traps, and some logic between the various encounters. If there are intelligent living creatures in a dungeon, I want them to have some motivations or desires other than "kill the adventurers".
And most importantly, if you are going to have an adventure based on "Seven Swords of Sin", then there should be swords and those swords should have some interesting impact on the adventure. I think the idea is certainly worth exploring and I would have loved to see a series of 7 of these game-mastery modules devoted to each of the swords. The "lust" sword would have large numbers of creatures enslaved by the mind-control, and perhaps a plot by the villain to meet with leaders of various kingdoms to put them under control of the sword as well. The gluttony sword could be providing much-needed food to a starving desert oasis, or it could be in the belly of some bloated monstrosity grown to epic proportions, in which the party has to go inside the creature and extract the sword to keep it from growing. I just think there are a lot of better things that could have been done with this plot.
You can see my other reviews on the forums at GrippingTales
