By John Grigsby, Staff Reviewer d20 Magazine Rack
Sizing Up the Target
Bane of the Salt Fen Lich is an adventure for 5 to 8 characters of 5th-7th level. It is produced by Heathen Oracle and written by Christopher Heath, with artwork by V. Shane and cartography from John Huston. It retails for 6.95 in PDF format and is available from RPG Now.
First Blood
This is the first release from Heathen Oracle and it’s a big one! This adventure weighs in at a hefty 63 pages, though not all of it is text. Instead, there is a mini-illustrations booklet to share with your players, two pages of black-and-white maps, a full-color map of an archmage’s tower (which is also fully detailed within the adventure), six new magical items, eight pre-generated characters (suitable for use as PCs or NPCs for the DM’s campaign), two new monsters, and notes on using the adventure as an epic-level scenario. Also included are stand-ups of all the pre-generated characters. With a portrait on one side and the character background on the other, these are designed to be placed before the player playing that character with the portrait visible for everyone to see.
The adventure is formatted according to the standard for Wizards of the Coast, though it is specified as being intended for 5 to 8 characters, where the accepted standard for D&D has been reduced to four characters. This isn’t a big problem, as most DMs can easily adjust the strength of the encounters to work for their group, but it should be noted for future reference. The adventure does have one consistent formatting error that was frequent enough to prove annoying. Several words have been hyphenated for a line drop that does not occur. I could excuse one or two instances without mention, but it happens frequently enough that it actually distracted me from my perusal of the text. There are also points at which basic rules of grammar are ignored, such as indentation at the start of a new paragraph. In an amateur production, such errors can be overlooked, but for a company to produce these kinds of problems doesn’t speak well.
The adventure is well-supported at Heathen Oracle’s website, which I was pleased to see. The site offers a downloadable mini-comic book, featuring the pre-generated characters from the adventure, a composition of background music in MP3 format, and (supposedly) 1-inch diameter pogs of the pre-generated characters, suitable for use with miniatures or map grids. I couldn’t find the pogs during my visit, but everything else was readily available. It may well be that the pogs had not yet been put into place when I visited.
The scenario is pretty straightforward. The PCs are hired to go and take care of a lich problem that an area is suffering. Unfortunately, it’s so straight forward as to be almost boring. The website promises an ending that is “guaranteed to astonish and unnerve the players.” Having read the adventure, I think that my players would be apathetic at best, and angered at worst. Without giving too much away, the plot reads something like this: “Okay, here’s a secret weapon left by my master to defeat the lich. But he’s gone, so we need you to do it before the lich can raise an undead army. Here’s the map, go to it.”
In some ways, this adventure is homage to the classic Gygax scenario, Tomb of Horrors. There are traps for the unwary, plenty of baddies to fight along the way, and an angry lich to face. But that’s where the similarity ends. This adventure just doesn’t have the impact that classic did.
Critical Hits
The saving grace of this work lies in it’s inclusion of extras; the pre-generated PCs (into which a good deal of work has gone), the art booklet, the PC stand-ups, the new monsters, and the maps. Extras like this are always well-accepted and even if you discard the adventure, there might be enough here for you to salvage and still make the purchase worthwhile.
Critical Misses
Between the grammatical errors and the “surprise ending” that seems anticlimactic to me, I’d say that the adventure portion is a bust. That isn’t to say that it was bad, it just seems rushed, perhaps even unfinished. With a little more thought, this could have been a great adventure. As it stands, it’s mediocre at best.
Coup de Grace
The adventure is largely compliant with d20 standards, save for a few minor points and seems to be mostly balanced. The climax could, depending on how it is played, be overwhelming, but the characters are given sufficient warning to avoid this result, so I can’t fault the adventure for that. There’s a fair amount of Open Game Content here, with most of the game mechanics of the new material being designated as such.
The adventure is, as I stated earlier, inspired by Tomb of Horrors, but it’s different enough to stand out as an original work. Unfortunately, it’s not strong enough to stand on its own merits. In fact, without the additional material, I’d be forced to rate this a solid ‘C’. It’s certainly playable, but don’t be surprised if your party isn’t thrilled. It’s very straightforward, with little room for deviation.
I usually rate adventures at an average on the Playability score, because, well, they’re mostly intended for the GM, but this one has such good handout material that I felt it would be a shame not to recognize it. Thus, this one scores higher than average in that category for their great player resources. Overall, I’d say that you get a fair value for your money, but it isn’t something I’d been happy to have purchased as a printed product.
To see the graded evaluation of this product, go to The Critic's Corner at www.d20zines.com.
