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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Simon Collins" data-source="post: 2009560" data-attributes="member: 9860">Beware! This review contains major spoilers.This is not a playtest review.Black Ice Well is an adventure from Monkey God Enterprises for 6-8 PCs of levels 13-14.Black Ice Well is a 104-page adventure coming in at $18.95, fairly standard for its type and size. Font size, margin, and white space are all reasonable. The internal mono art is good, most maps are scaled and have a compass direction where appropriate. The cover art is impressive, with good use of colour, texture, and a sense of movement and tension. Writing style and editing are good, with only occasional errors.Black Ice Well is essentially a dungeon crawl. At the heart of the adventure is the icy blood of an incredibly evil vampire dragon. The blood itself, seeping out from its central source, has corrupted an entire wood and all who have made it their home. An evil necromancer plans to use the blood of the vampire dragon for his own nefarious ends, not fully realising the danger of his attempt. The PCs must set out to stop him, travelling through the corrupted wood and travelling into a demonic tomb known as Black Ice Well, the source of the vampire dragon's blood. After fighting their way through a small demonic war, avoiding deadly traps, and negotiating with the demonic dragon blood guardians, the PCs should discover the awful truth behind the vampire dragon's blood and find a way to stop its potentially world-shattering evil.The author makes good use of three sections within each of the locations in the corrupted wood and the demonic tomb. The Tactics section describes the initial plan of attack of the creatures, the Treasure section describes what those creatures have in terms of reward for the PCs should they defeat the monster, and the Development section describes how the creature might react to different PC actions. Each location is given an EL, and there is an EL summary at the beginning of the adventure. The ELs run from 7 to 17, and unlike many other adventures the ELs seem to be about equal to the PCs level, probably reflecting that this is likely to be a fairly combat-orientated adventure (however, there are several locations which state that the EL varies - it should be noted that the ELs of these encounters could be very high and beyond the ability of the PCs to deal with). Indeed, little information is given on any of the NPCs' personality - rather, if there is a chance of interacting with the creature, the author gives the relevant information the creature holds in relation to the adventure with a little bit of historical background and description.The appendices contain several new creatures and templates (including shadow golems and undead giants). It should be noted that use of psionics is made in the adventure. There are also a few magic items detailed and stat blocks for all the major NPCs and creatures.The errata section on the MonkeyGod website gives some errata, advice on scaling the adventure, getting rid of psionics, increasing psionics, and full stats for the vampire dragon, Shae Mora.Conclusion:A superior dungeon crawl, with plenty of opportunity for combat and skill use, and useful advice to the GM to support this facet of the adventure. Though there is opportunity for roleplaying within the adventure, this aspect is not so well supported. Luckily for the author (and the GM) most of the creatures used here are monsters where the correct application of skill points is not hugely important. Where this is an issue, the author has made mistakes (and the editor has not corrected them), so GMs will have a little work to do to correct these.If you like demons, and if you like dungeon crawls, I highly recommend this adventure. Its a little weak on the roleplaying side, and may need some work to adjust stat blocks and ELs for some of the climactic encounters, but none of these cripples the overall quality of the adventure for use as a dungeon crawl, which is what it is designed for.</blockquote>

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