BLACK ICE WELL
CAVEATS
This is a playtest review, conducted over a total of 12 sessions. The review contains extensive spoilers.
OVERVIEW
Black Ice well is a 104-page perfect bound adventure written for “6-8 characters of 13th to 14th level.” The plot involves following a high-level wizard and his band through a blighted forest, into a hill, and then into the Well itself, which is an ancient lair of necromancy-studying demon-worshippers, led by a marilith named Sajai. At the deepest part of this complex, the PCs become embroiled in a 3-way confrontation with Sajai and with the wizard Sammael Craven, whom the PCs are tracking. But before they get there they have to wade through a deadly assortment of foes.
I have no complaints about font size or spacing. The book does print fairly complete stats for all the creatures you may run into at the back, taking up a full 24 pages. Spelling errors are not very frequent, but there are cases where the text is unclear or contradictory, and I feel the general effects of each area (e.g., the Carnivore Mists, or properties of BIW’s stonework, or the Black Blood) could have been better organized, such as in a sidebar.
The art is quite good overall, with excellent drawings in particular of Sajai. The maps are another matter—while readable and accurately keyed, they look amateurish, and it is often hard to gain precise dimensions of rooms when transferring them onto a wet-erase surface for miniature play.
POSITIVES
1. This adventure is advertised as a tough dungeon crawl, and it definitely delivers! Your players will need to be at their peak, and even then you may need to scale things down or start them at higher than the recommended level. And I like an adventure that’s not afraid of killing off the occasional PC.
2. I also liked the potential infighting among the various groups—the slaadi, the followers of the demon Sajai, and the followers of the imprisoned being known as Shae Mora, whom Craven ultimately becomes an agent of. These conflicts add an interesting dimension to the module, especially if the players choose to capitalize on it (mine didn’t to any great degree).
3. The adventure features a number of new and lethal monsters. A few of these I’d tweak the challenge ratings of, most notably the talon beasts, but overall I was happy with them all.
4. The number of planned encounters in the surrounding forest, coupled with the dangers of the forest itself and the wandering monsters there, gives it plenty of variety, and gives the DM an opportunity to pick and choose among the encounters more easily, to set an appropriate pace.
5. The ultimate threat of the adventure, the essence of a vampiric dragon of epic levels named Shae Mora, makes an excellent future menace. And the key that controls her prison is an item too tempting for most parties to wish to try and destroy. Heh heh…
NEGATIVES
1. The module seems a bit disorganized at times. For example, information on the effects of the black blood and the carnivore mists are buried on a page in the middle of the book, and I occasionally wasted game time flipping back and forth hunting it down. Also, some of the writing can be confusing. For example, in describing the temporal variance between the area within the well and outside, the text reads, “PCs age normally in the Well’s accelerated time. PCs who spend 4 days in the Well have still aged 4 days, even though they will discover that the outside world has only seen 16 days pass.” ONLY seen? It seems unclear which way the time shift works. I asked about this on the Monkey God forum, and confirmed that the effect is as stated: for every day that passes in the well, 4 days go by beyond it.
2. As mentioned above in the overview, the maps are manageable, but only barely. There are several occasions where I’d draw a 10-foot-wide corridor from the map, then read boxed text that stated the hall is 15 feet wide. And some of the maps simply don’t match the text—a stairwell is described as circular, but shown as square on the map; the lowest level of the Well shows nowhere for the stairs to enter, and for some reason shows a square area inside a circular room, when it should be the circular top of a sphere in the center of a small square room.
3. I also didn’t care for the lack of mention of psionic use anywhere on the front or back cover, since this is a pretty major sticking point with many potential buyers (including myself). Fortunately, a web enhancement has been made available that details errata for some of the above unclear text passages, and which provide alterations to run the adventure without psionics—or with added psionics.
4. The difficulty level of the adventure is higher than the recommended 6-8 characters of 13th-14th level. I began play with a group of six 14th level characters, and they were frequently dying in the first part of the adventure. When you face a group of a half dozen beings, each of which can do 90+ points of damage easily on a single round of full attacks, even the doughtiest fighters can’t last longer than a couple rounds. Also, many monsters have higher than normal hit points, often 3/4 or more of the maximum allowed for their hit dice.
PLAYTESTING
I have posted a detailed session-by-session analysis of the campaign I ran on the Monkey God Enterprises forum; click
HERE to peruse it.
In brief, the first part of the adventure, through the Wormwood, was quite challenging just in the wandering monsters; the group followed the river, and only got lost once, and I used the set encounters flexibly, placing them in their path rather than adhering to the poor wilderness map. Once the dungeon was entered, the party had a lot of trouble through the slaad caves and particularly in the first level of the Well. At about that point I started easing up somewhat on the module difficulty, being more generous in allowing them to back off and rest, and I don’t think I ever rolled for wandering monsters after level 1. The group continued, and their only other fiasco was solving a riddle near the end that I thought was pretty easy; they ended up solving it mostly through guesswork, and lost the bulk of their party before they got the right combination. In the final encounter, the two remaining characters maintained a low profile as much as they could, then used the scrolls provided to deal with Sajai.
CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
At the end of the adventure, 12 sessions from the beginning, the players were high-fiving each other after defeating Sajai, with only two characters left standing at that point. That in my book is the sign of a successful adventure. I would have liked the module to be a more polished, but I heartily look forward to Steve Montano’s next work for Monkey God—the high level adventure
Hellstone Deep. For the $18.95 cover price, I think I definitely got my money’s worth on this one, and would recommend it to anyone who fancies challenging dungeon crawls with an emphasis on combat and battle, and doesn’t mind putting in some work to fix some of the problems. Strategist players should also enjoy this, but people looking for a lot of roleplaying and plot…well, it’s a dungeon crawl, and you’d be better served looking elsewhere.
If you do run this adventure, keep the following points in mind:
1. Due to the extreme level of difficulty, I recommend starting PCs at 15th or even 16th level to have a good chance of survival.
2. Almost all of the monsters have higher than normal hit points—often 3/4 or more of the maximum allowed their hit dice. Because of this, I would bump up the CR of most enemies by a point or two. I would also increase the CR of the talon fiends by 2 points, as any creature that can inflict the kind of damage they deal out should be higher than CR 10.
3. Don’t bother using the wilderness map to determine encounter locations; just place the encounters before the PCs as they progress towards the center of the forest, or roll them randomly.
4. Remember the effects of the black blood of Shae Mora, the carnivore mists, the limits on teleportation, the Wormwood insanity effect, and in particular the temporal jarring that takes place whenever PCs leave the Well itself.
5. Prepare a spell list for the wandering monster nagas if you intend on using them!
