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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4406002" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't know much about Red Hand of Doom, but I gather the PCs thwart an invasion by Orcs.That need not be at odds with my philosophy - if I as GM know the players (or their PCs) don't like Orcs, or if the invasion is of a place in which the players have a signficant thematic stake, then this is a situation which sounds like it could work.But if the adventure only works if the players take a pre-scripted approach to stopping the invasion then I probably wouldn't like it.In the Freeport adventure it was never really in doubt that the PCs would try and thwart the summoning - the party included three samurai with strong loyalties to the islands in question, a Buddhist paladin who couldn't tolerate beings from beyond the karmic order, an esoteric Buddhits monk who wants to escape the karmic order but via enlightenment rather than Lovecraftian entropy, and two nature sprits who had not shown any particular inclination to turn against their origins.But within that basic outline, the relationship to the various factions in Freeport itself played out in a pretty dynamic fashion. In the end, one of the Samurai ended up as military ruler of the town.On the other hand, in a different campaign the culmination to a situation drawn from the Jaiman module for ShadowWorld resulted in one of the PCs allying with the presumed enemies, and standing by while another PC was sacrificed on the altar of a dark god. (The player of the sacrificed PC sort-of consented - at least, he was happy enough to try a new character.)I guess the bottom line is - I don't like it when what would count as the successful resolution of an adventure is known in advance. I like that to emerge in play.I don't have it - largely because it was badly renewed on RPGnet. The four AP modules I do have are Sunless Citadel, Speaker in Dreams, Nightfang Spire and Bastion of Broken Souls. Speaker in Dreams looks very railroady to me, and I've never tried to pull it apart and run it without railroading - maybe in my next campaign! Sunless Citadel and Nightfang Spire I got because of the good reviews, but I've never tried to run them - my group tends to balk at that sort of dungeon crawling.I've used the first half of Bastion of Broken Souls (the second half I think is a pointless dungeon crawl and would never run, except maybe for the climactic bit where the heart leaps out, which is a dramatic image!). It has some interesting ideas, but handles them in a disappointing fashion. Just one example (SPOILER ALERT):To progress the adventure, the PCs have to make contact with an imprisoned former god. This requires opening a gate to the prison plane. That gate takes the form of an angel, and will open only if the angel is killed.So far, so good - this is great stuff! But the module writer assumes that the PCs will simply fight the angel to the death. And then go into the prison plane and fight the foremer god to the death. And all with no repercussions, no gods caring that their angel has been killed, no development of the situation. Boring! And completely draining away all the thematic power of the setup.When they eventually got to the angel (I beefed up that part of the adventure using a bit from the Infinte Staircase Planescape module and a bit from Beyond Countless Doorways) my party persuaded her to let herself be sacrificed in the interests of the greater good - and then had to fight off her companion (a Deva, I think, rather than a Planetar - or something like that), who wasn't wise enough to see the need for the sacrifice. Then they made friends with the imprisoned god and got the information they needed that way. And when they came back out of the prison plane they then had to fight their way through a combination of heavenly and diabolic forces (the imprisoning of the god having been a communal decision by both heaven and hell) in order to act on the forbidden information the imprisoned god had given them.It is this sort of variability of PC response to a situation that I feel many WoTC adventures (both modules and in Dungeon) don't really foster.(Also - Basion also has an irritating tag-along character, a Slaad called Nurn. My PCs met him in human form and got some interesting information out of him about a few of the factional issues at play in the module. Subsequently they discovered him in Slaad form while scrying a particular location and promptly killed him - I think one of my players suspected that the frog and the man were the same being, but couldn't get a warning out in time, and wasn't entirely sure that he wanted to.)</blockquote>

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