This review is a little different as it's based on me as a player instead of a GM and reviewer, and as a player whose finished the whole thing. My group stayed the same for most of the adventure with only one fatality. Two players switched characters as one player's character role played not getting along with my character, and another player was unhappy with his choice of mage blade. So we had a pretty stable group for the most part with a stable place to play and standard start and end time. We used a grid map with miniatures and the
Fiery Dragon cutoutswhen possible.
What can a party expect from the module? Well, in the starting town, there are lots of places to explore. I played it pretty cool in there and just wanted to get the adventure started but others enjoyed exploring. The place was flushed out nicely with several NPCs and locations the party got to know fairly quickly.
Another strength was that not all encounters had to be combat oriented. For example, there was an encounter with a bandit party but we were able to talk our way out of that. Our group is combat hungry but don't like attacking fellow humans or player races. This includes the start of the adventure with the bandits as mentioned, as well as the end of the book, where litorian scouts offer bounties for rhodin horns. The rhodin are pretty much the main bad guys here as they are goat men, very similar in appearance to the beast men or gors from Warhammer.
In terms of adventure, there was variance. A lot of open encounters on the road for the most part. My group being combat oriented even went out of the way to augment combat opportunities, sometimes when we shouldn't have. For example, there is an encounter in the adventure where a large amount of rhodin (10+) are moving by and I guess we were supposed to follow them or something. Instead we ambushed them. This was at like 2nd level and we should've probably died but dice and good tactics were on our side so those puppies feel too.
For those who enjoy exploring, there is a lot to see and do. We went from the city, to the open road, to the keep, to the forest, to other areas inside and by the forest, back to the keep. This provided a nice change of environment and scenery. The only bad thing was because it covers so many levels, it felt a little cramped and we kept wanting to go to the capital city but didn't want to stray too far from the adventure so kept with the main story line.
For those who enjoy puzzles, there were several instances where you could put brains into play. Me with my giant warmain, pretty much avoided all such instances in order to focus on merely crushing my foes. One of my friends playing a akashic managed to hog the lime light on more than one occasion.
My favorite parts of the adventure was after we retrieved the Ring. There was more going on in the world. The encounters became more life like and adventure prone. Nothing against those 1st-2nd level characters but there are only so many times a combat prone character can take being knocked out. This might be because there seemed to be little magical treasure or potions on the road.
For us, the best part in my opinion, was that the keep itself had fallen and the army that held it was in our hands. We used a quick and dirty system from
Cry Havoc as several of us lead an internal sneak attack with the ring and others lead the men in battle. It was great and ended with us in charge of the keep.
The bad parts? Too much repetition of the rhodin as enemies. My character just started killing them pretty much on site at the end of the adventure. No mercy for women or children. I just couldn't take it any more. Some of the character's in the adventure also seemed too carton like. Take the Warlord for example, a chorrim who lead the rhodin at the end of the adventure. The Walord? The bandit Wulf? Surely the folks at Mystic Eye could do better than that.
From my own perspective as a player, I hate small towns and like 90% of the adventurers on the market today, that's where this one starts. In addition, while there are events and instances where the setting comes to life with its own unique factors, it seemed much like a standard D20 campaign with just the names changed in many instances. rhodin for orcs for example.
From personal experience, make sure that if you are going to run the adventure, to read the whole thing through at least two to three times. After you do that, make sure you note what customizations you've made to it. There were several instances where our GM was lost and cursed the text as he felt that there were areas that could've been more effectively boxed off as read aloud text and that the actual bonus encounters should've been in the meat of the adventure as opposed to the back.
The adventure is huge though. It took us from 1st to 6th level and took over two months of real time to play. We played about once a week for about four to five hours a session. That's a lot of gaming for one adventure. One of the great things is that there are a lot of sections that are easy to hand out and give to the players. Our GM did this with several things ranging from menus and rumors and riddles, to NPCs and monsters. Gave the setting a nice feel as the art of Ed Bourelle, Brent Chumely, Marcio Fiorito, David Hendee, Roel Wielinga, and my favorite two, Scott Purdy and Patricio Soler, did a great job on this one, based on handouts alone.
In short, if you want something more than
Fiery Dragon's adventure in terms of length of duration and areas, Siege on Ebonring Keep is for you.
