Shadows of the Last War--written by Keith Baker
The criteria I use to evaluate a d20 adventure includes the following:
1. Interesting and varied encounters: I look for unique encounters, allowing for a variety of role and roll playing.
2. Motivations for NPCs and Monsters: or some detail of how they interact with their environment or neighbors.
3. Logical: the adventure should obey a sense of logic that clever players can use to their advantage.
4. Writing Quality: this includes foreshadowing, mystery, and descriptions that bring locations and NPCs to life.
5. Ease of DMing: Clear maps, friendly stat blocks, skill check numbers, player handouts and illustrations.
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 I consider them to be only decoration.
*important* I'd like to think that I am authoring an adventure for a 3rd party publisher. I don't believe that my review is biased, but thought you should know.
THE BASICS: (not exactly spoilers) The adventure is 32 pages long, cover price of $9.95 American.
1 page of credits
1 pages of background
8 pages of city adventure
9 pages of adventure in outdoor ruins
4 pages of wilderness(travel) adventure
9 pages of underground dungeon adventure
All of these pages break down into the following encounters:
Approximately 10 combat encounters.
Approximately 5 roleplay/negotiation encounters.
Approximately 2 trap encounters.
Approximately 2 puzzle encounters.
Approximately 7 exploring encounters (interesting things to examine)
Approximately 2 "overpowering" encounters in which the players must use stealth or retreat.
The adventure is fairly straightforward "find the macguffin". The players are asked to recover a schema, they must travel to get it, they find it. The investigation, travel, locations, and action are quite exciting. It reminds me of the saying "it isn't what you do, its how you do it," and this adventure does it in style.
THE SPECIFICS: (Some Spoilers Follow)
1. Interesting and varied encounters: (4/5)The adventure gets very high marks for the good negotiation encounters. The different people to meet bring a lot of life to the adventure. There is also a very nice variety in city, overland travel, ruins, and dungeon encounters. The overpowering encounters were well broadcast and there was not much chance of a smart group getting trigger-happy. Over half of the combats involved creatures without brains or anatomy (skeletons, zombies, constructs). There were a lot of variations on "wolf" encounters, with skeletal wolves, normal wolves, a dire wolf, and a half-golem wolf. If there were a few more creatures with anatomy, and perhaps some interesting environmental effects (balconies, rivers, wind, etc)... then this would have been a 5 out of 5.
2. Motivations for monsters and NPCs: (4/5)This was pretty good. The opponents with minds did have personalities. The NPCs and opponents had good personalities with believable motives. The vampiric priest "Garrow" is a especially well done, as was the driver Failin. I will digress for a moment to talk about "intrigue." Intrigue seems to be an important element that Ebberon is trying to capture... with the various factions and whatnot. I believe it is possible to write very interesting adventures with intrigue... but this adventure did not have it. The employer claims to work for one faction, but really she works for a different faction. Perhaps it will come into play much later in the series... but for the purposes of this adventure, there is no difference between someone working for faction A, and people working for faction B. The fact that things are happening behind the scenes may be interesting for the DM, but it certainly has no impact on this adventure.
3. Logical: (3/5)For the most part, this was fine with a few exceptions: There was a fairly easy puzzle that the PCs are expected to solve, but a crew of reasonably intelligent NPCs couldn't figure out. As players, we wondered why the bad guys were hanging out when they clearly should have been able to solve the puzzle. There was an attack by skeletons (see "Flaws" below), that didn't seem to make much sense. One NPC ally (Rorsa) asked the party to help her fight a battle in which she was virtually assured of victory even without the party's help.
4. Writing Quality: (4/5)The writing is evocative. The scenes come to life. There was excellent imagery in the ruins of the village covered with glass. There people and places had good names. There was good use of foreshadowing... when players try to predict what is going to happen, and are sometimes correct, you know you are on the right track. There were some nice little touches that were not overdone. The glass-covered zombies stood out as an eerie encounter. The scenes were interesting and brought to life with the writing. On the down side, the DM noticed that some flavor text was cut and pasted directly from the Ebberon Campaign Setting.
5. Ease of DMing: (4/5) There is italicized text which can be read aloud to players. There are no illustrations or handouts. The monster stats and maps are included in the text. In an adventure this short, there is almost no page flipping. The linear layout of the encounters makes this a breeze to run. The action started immediately and the pace kept up from event to event... there was little chance of the players getting off-track. It was linear, which makes things easy for the DM, but it also had many elements of a traditional action movie... you sort of knew what was going to happen next, but were enjoying the ride. This would have been a 5 out of 5, except for a few flaws described below.
Playtest Results: (Major spoilers from here on down)
The playtest was entertaining. The adventure moved quickly. The combat at sea with the skeletons was a close match becuase the party was unprepared (no armor), One combat in the ruined city (R3) was a very even match, with most of the PCs taking some damage and using most of thier spells. One combat in the Mournlands with a Carcass Crab was very dangerous... knocking out two players. Most of the other combat encoutners seemed quite easy. The adventure lasted for 3 sessions, each was about 4-5 hours long. Some of the elements were almost "too" cinematic. An encounter with "Faelin" seemed to be taken right out of the cantina scene in the original Star Wars. A map room in an archeological dig was an homage to the original Raiders of the Lost Ark. The final encounter in Part 6 was actually predicted by the players well before it happened... I am not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing.
Flaws:
The adventure had a number of flaws, some glaring, some not so bad. I can overlook two or three flaws in a larger adventure (96+ pages), but in a 32 page adventure, especially one so linear, (and published by WOTC) there shouldn't be this many mistakes. I did not go over all of the stat blocks with a fine tooth comb, but I looked at the stats for two opponents (dwarf zombies and stone wolf), and neither of them seemed to have accurate stats.
First Flaw: While a ship is at sea, it is attacked by a swarm of skeletons. The skeletons were sent by a necromancer to attack the party. Some obvious questions arise: how do skeletons (which presumably are not the best swimmers) get on a galleon at sea? They are unlikely to be swimming, the galleon is not scraping along the bottom of the water... how does a necromancer even know where the ship is to send his skeletons? How does the necromancer arrive or leave? Who is the necromancer and what level is he? How can the skeletons catch up to the ship? If this encounter was meant to happen while the ship is docked, that would be fine... but it happens while the ship is at sea (the crew must maintain thier posts). The encounter was certainly exciting, but it raises many questions that cannot be answered... this was highly frustrating for the players. (in the playtest, the players demanded that all of the crew and passengers be interrogated, etc...)
Second Flaw: There is an awakened dire wolf "Rorsa" that asks for assistance against a half stone-golem wolf that has imprisoned some of her pack. You would expect the half stone-golem wolf to be a serious combatant if an awakened dire wolf cannot conquer it. It turns out that the half stone-golem wolf is a CR 4 monster with only 17 hit points. This was built up to be a fairly significant combat... a mini-mission, if you will, but during the playtest it was dropped in one hit by a barbarian shifter (though it was a spear set vs a charge). A CR4 creature that is meant to be a brawler simply must have more than 2 hit dice and 17 hit points. I looked closely at the creature because I assumed that the DM must have made a mistake. It turns out that it is a construct with HD 2d8+8 (constitution of 19). Ok, perhaps I am not familiar with the half-golem type, it might be a template in a book that I don't own... but according to the Monster Manual, a medium construct should be using 2d10+20 hit dice and it should not have a constitution score. A "battler" type opponent should have a CR that is 1/2 to 1/3 its hit dice... not a CR that is double its hit dice. As long as I am mentioning this, there were dwarf zombies with 2d12+10 hit dice. I don't know how they are coming up with these numbers... Just for the heck of it, I ran a few sample combats between Rorsa and the stone wolf. Even if Rorsa loses initiative and fails the save vs slow effect, she still easily wins every time.
Third Flaw: There is a very nifty "trick" in the dungeon, in which keycharms are used to navigate an underground complex. This would have earned fairly high marks, but for two sort of blunders. Logic indicates that in a complex like this, keycharms would have different colors for a reason... perhaps brown keycharms for "utility" rooms, blue keycharms for regular people, and red keycharms for "officers". You would expect that a keycharm that allowed access to the officer's rooms would also allow access to the regular rooms, so that people didn't have to carry around handfulls of different keys... but this was not the case. That isn't my beef with the rooms yet. The first problem is that based on the layout, if someone had only a green keycharm, they could to travel from room W2 to W4 to W16... but then not be able to return because the return route requires blue keycharms... it is sort of a one-way passage unless you have both keys. This is a design problem that the people creating the structure would have considered. The second problem with this whole setup is that the adventure had two rooms behind a yellow keyed door... but there were no yellow keys in the adventure! There is a slim chance that the characters might have been expected to burrow through the steel walls, but that seems unlikely. Condidering this, you should discount one combat encounter and one exploration encounter from my index at the top of this review.(perhaps someone with a better eye can see the place where the yellow key is listed, I guess when that happens I'll eat my hat.)
Fourth Flaw: This is not so much a flaw, but in a fairly climactic battle in room W22, there were a pair of fire elementals. On the far side of the room was a locked chest with a pair of potions of resist energy (fire). The adventure says "the treasure contained within could play a critical role in the character's surviving the encounter". A good rule of thumb is that most combats will be over in 3 rounds, and few will ever pass 5 rounds. If players are expected to make use of those potions: they will use up 1 or 2 rounds simply moving to the chest, at least 1 round to pick the lock (assuming they are successful), one round to extract the potions, and another round to use a potion. The potions are certainly not going to be used in the battle for room W22. If the potions were adjacent to the door in an unlocked chest, there is a possibility they would be used in the combat.
Fifth Flaw: The adventure had a LOT of treasure considering the scope. This was enough encounters to get a party from 2nd level to nearly 4th level.. the treasure included: a +1 longsword, a handy haversack, a +1 steel shield, a +1 light mace, a double-bladed intelligent sword, a cloak of resistance, a pearl of power, 3000 gp in rewards, and another 3000 gp in miscellanous treasure, potions, masterwork items, etc... all said nearly 20,000 gp in treasure. This isn't a totally serious flaw... the playtest group sold most of the magic at 1/2 price, so that balanced things out a little.
FINAL WORD:
Clean up the flaws, and this is easily a high 4 out of 5.
