Back to the book/adventure: While I am terribly sour on 4E, this looks like the best 4E adventure out so far. I have the book and found it to be much more readable than the other 4E adventures. There is a story-line, and content which is quite adaptable to an ongoing campaign.
Hard to say much with revealing a lot of the plot, but there are a lot of event type encounters, and a few places where the players can choose the order of issues to deal with. The start-to-middle section, with the several research encounters, and the middle section, with the ice giants, seems to be the most developed. The third section, against the fire giants, seems to be the least well developed, with very confusing maps and pages and pages of encounters one after another.
I was a little confused by the last set of encounters, which seem like one extended encounter, rather than several, and I was wondering how the encounter powers are meant to recharge between them.
You might have a problem with the rigid overarching plot, but, a good GM should be able to hide that from the players.
The production quality was exceptional: High quality paper, and the binding seems to be better than for other products.
There are flaws: No index, a perforated map at the end, a few map errors, especially in the fire giant section. There may be more errors elsewhere, but I wouldn't spot stat block errors, since I'm not good at reading 4E stats. The map errors are most particular in the fire giant section because the map is already quite a bit confusing, and the errors compound the difficulty. (I got to feeling that the fire giant section was rushed and squeezed in, perhaps because of a fixed page count, and because the earlier sections used up more than there share of pages. Not that I would want less pages in the other sections, just more in the fire giant section.)
There are a few creatures that seem quite a bit underpowered for their level. For example, a level 18 (ish) fire giant soldier with 185 hit points and that can put our either 2d6+4 or 2d6 +4 + 2d6 damage, depending on immunities, and that has about a 40-50% chance of hitting itself. Two of these fighting each other would need from 12-16 ish rounds to kill one or the other, depending on whether you count their immunities, which seems too long.
The general tone of the adventure is very different than the original Against the Giants series. The only similarities are that there are encounters with earth (hill), frost, then fire giants, and the hill giant map has a small bit that is similar to the hill giant steading. Drow make an appearance, but for different reasons, and are mostly token. However, the tone is a very good fit for the 4E world, with a "Paragon Pact" and elemental themed giants and titans, and ties to the primordial chaos. Different, but worse only if you are requiring the new story to have a strong fit with the old one.
(You would be disappointed if you were looking for a clear continuation of the old story, as was done with Acerak and the Fortress of Conclusion.)
Speaking of which, does anyone have a problem with that particular set of encounters? I thought that encounter was rather un-heroic. "Sorry dude, we need your shinies, so hand them over or else."
All in all, I was much pleased with my purchase. This is a much more solid product than the other 4E adventures (I have them all), and a much improved quality of product. (That is, I think, quite a bit to say, given how much I detest 4E, and Hasbro's new approach to the game.)
Thx!
TomB
