Cataclysm on Cloudholme

[HalWhitewyrm]

Journey to a land lost to time and legend.

The mythical land of Astenthal where once the four races lived in a golden age of peace and mystical knowledge long passed. Where the very ideals of tolerance, equality and justice were a shining beacon of harmony. Yet the brightest light casts the deepest shadows and Astenthal fell, ruined to mist shrouded memory, a dream of a better world swallowed in a cataclysm of hatred, war and avarice. Legend speaks of the return of lost Astenthal's king, a good and righteous man who would reunite the virtues and peoples of the land bringing the dawn of a new age.

Dare you journey into the lost past where the darkest shadows grow and take a hand in shaping the destiny of a people who have abandoned the future long with the outside world? Will you confront the growing darkness that threatens to engulf Astenthal a second time? In a land of tainted with ancient loss and pain, can you reunite the people before darkness engulfs them.

In a world of shadows can you rekindle hope?

First in the Legendary Lands series, Cloudholme is designed to be inserted into an existing campaign world or form the basis of a new campaign. DMs will be able to use the rich and diverse cultures inside this book to enrich their campaigns, while the geographic locations provided are easily inserted into any existing world. Also included is a large adventure that will carry your players into the realms of legends and lost cities, testing their resolve and resilience.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

By Bruce Boughner, Staff Reviewer d20 Magazine Rack and Co-host of Mortality Radio

***Warning: Contains Spoilers!!***

Sizing Up the Target
Cataclysm on Cloudholme is a 124-page soft cover sourcebook/adventure published by MonkeyGod Enterprises. Andrew Lucas is the author. The cover is done by Allan Pollack and is reminiscent of the final few 2nd ed modules, black with an inset painting, this one depicts a red dragon about to take flight from a mountain top, a floating city in the background, interior work by Fred Rawles and retails for $24.95.

First Blood
Cataclysm on Cloudholme is what we come here for, a rock solid adventure. Set in the Kingdom of Astenthal, but adaptable to anywhere, Cataclysm on Cloudholme is for parties of 4-5 characters of 5-7 level and is the first of Monkey Gods’ Legendary Land series. The author tips his hat to the adventures in D&D he grew up with and states that this is much like those old TSR modules we all grew up with. The inside front and back cover is a color map depicting Astenthal and its environs, which the author likens to Camelot with a touch of Xanadu or Shangri-La. Instructions are also given as to how to incorporate this adventure into published worlds.

Dwarves, Elves and Orcs settled the valley of Astenthal before other races moved into the area. The Dwarven Freeholds, Orcish Tribes and Elusive Elves were united under the very human King Gareth Astenthal, who met with each race and won them over to his cause, forming a company of knights consisting of human, elves, dwarves, orcs and gnomes. At the height of the company, over 300 strong, they pledged to drive evil from their land.

King Astenthal expanded his land’s literacy and founded the College of Mystical Knowledge to promote the ways arcane. After many years of research, students discovered a rare mineral in the mountains around the valley, Mana Crystals.

Mana Crystals were found to have the unique ability to absorb, hold and later release that energy. As King Astenthal grew older, he felt the need for a legacy. So he had a grand city built. The College added 13 towers full of Mana Crystals, the combined energy of which was sufficient to raise the castle, called Cloudholme, into the sky, without the King’s knowledge. A solid bridge of rainbow light gave access to the city. The Castle Krystalin was christened to the delight of King Astenthal.

Conflicting rumors and myth tell of the fall of Astenthal three years after the rise of the castle. The college experimented into areas that should have been left alone. Under the new headmaster Vankor Laisen, they attempted to build a second mana engine, the Arcane Engine, similar to the one that lifted the castle. With the castle in the sky, the Knights grew lax in running down evil. Laisen, completed his engine as he was discovered by King Astenthal. Laisen ascended into immortality as the second engine was designed to draw all arcane energy into it and funnel it into Laisen. The castle plummeted to the ground as the towers ripped a quarter of valley into the sky and slammed tons of earth and rock together. A pit, 100 miles across, was left as an elemental wind blew the mass higher and farther from Astenthal. The remains of the castle now drift aimlessly dropping bits of mortar and stone over the areas it drifts.
More than 80% of the valleys population perished in the Cataclysm. The destruction of the towers caused the many magical devices of the land to cease to function and even the natural magic of the land failed, crops withered and refused to grow in the once fertile valley. Pestilence followed and a wasting disease struck, first among the Gnomes and Halflings, then women became infertile. The Pale Consumption drove the lands back into barbarity, stripping away the veneer of civilization. The little races were driven extinct; the other races came perilously close to following them.

Centuries passed, the plague subsided, the land regrew its forests and magic returned, though now hated and despised by the people. But the legend of the utopia of Astenthal grew as a bastion of hope. Each of races has a portion of the true story of how the city fell but they refuse to divulge their own culpability. The elves and dwarves have the closest truth while the orcs and humans believe the gods punished the kingdom.

The current state of the kingdom is four tribes of very insular people. The once pastoral kingdom now is home to foul swamps of orcs and black dragons, forbidden forests patrolled by elves, woods infested with goblinoids and treacherous mountain peaks. The rest of this half of the book is taken up with a gazetteer of the region.

It is here that the actual adventure begins. Vankor Laisen, now an immortal lich, seeks to complete the interrupted spell of ages ago and ascend to the heavens as a god. He has discovered the location of Cloudholme and with an army of slaves; he has subjugated a Red Dragon and wishes to complete his spell. Not a true Lich, he is very cautious.

The book ends with an appendix of stat blocks, new monsters, NPC’s (historical and current) and new magic items. Then maps of Cloudholme, past and present,, the ruins of the college, Laisen’s lair and excavation and others.

Critical Hits
While the base plot is very typical and has appeared in one form or another over the years, this has the makings of a good crawl. An insane immortal villain and his minions, the ruins of a formerly grand civilization, a quest for justice, this is a classic adventure.

Critical Misses
It is trite and has been done before, it doesn’t make it bad though. There is enough new material to make it seem fresh to long time players. But it does hearken back to other modules from the TSR days of first edition.

Coup de Grace
While being a retread story, Cataclysm on Cloudholme stays fresh and challenging. Recalling the tales of the Round Table, it calls for a good aligned party to save the region from the evil plot that could destroy the area.

To see the graded evaluation of this product and to leave comments that the reviewer will respond to, go to The Critic's Corner at www.d20zines.com.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Cataclysm on Cloudholme is a sourcebook-adventure from Monkey God Publishing that's the first in their new Legendary Lands series.

The book is broken up into two main portions, the history of the land of Astenthal and it's gazetteer, and then the adventure, which is broken up into four parts. The land of Asthenthal is larger than a city, but isn't so big that it'll be difficult to place into a campaign setting. The history is fairly Arthurian in that a low born man brings about a golden age of peace and that peace is broken but remembered by those of today's world.

The differences though, between the general hero, in this case, King Gareth Astenthal, and his fall and this book are vast because of the effect that fall had on the land. There were issues that didn't involve the ruler but did involve those who served under him. A power play took place with the end result being the fall of the headquarters of the knights of the realm, a flying castle, and the birth of a plague of consumption that almost wiped out all of the races.

Each of those races has it's own take on what happened and suffers the consequences of that long ago fall. The dwarves for example, have a new subrace, originating from the magical cataclysm while the elves feel that it was the fault of the 'lesser' races that this happened and are fairly belligerent and in a position of power, unlike many settings where the elves are in their twilight years and dying. Even the orcs aren't all evil and vile, making for a nice change of pace with some familiar elements, like the elven's haughtiness, thrown in.

Now the section on the lay of the land is brief, perhaps too brief for those GMs not used to having smaller chunks of information to work with. The information is enough to start some material and GMs who have other campaign material, like the small towns often present in the Necromancer products, can easily use those to fully flesh out the material here. One of the nice things about having a miniature campaign feature is that it allows the author to present the races in different manners. Now while I touched on this under the effects of the cataclysm, it also effects the orcs who have not one, but two variants, those from the swamp and that wander the lands as nomads.

The adventure itself isn't structured and this could be a huge challenge for players who aren't used to taking charge of their own destiny. GMs may need to throw in a few NPCs to keep the party moving along as they first gather information about recent events and work their way through the land, trying to get a method to Cloudholme. For instance, they can talk to the devious Raven and try and earn his help, or they can go for the big money and seek out the dragon, Merthfire who is willing to help them due to the person involved and her history with said person.

Because the adventure is so open, there are whole sections, like meeting the dragon or exploring Vankor's Freehold, that the party may just pass by. This allows a high level of customization but may not be for everyone. Each section is separated into its own chapter for ease of use and reference. Those who enjoy exploration and role playing will have ample opportunity as Cloudholme itself is home to the surviving races, orc, elf and human, of the cataclysm and wise players will seek out their assistance in overcoming obstacles.
In terms of adventure, many of the encounters are almost too weak. A party of 4 7th level characters will walk through many of the encounters here and perhaps only have difficulty at the climax where they must face an ancient evil that's been stirring the plot. The good news is that the adventure mixes traps, clever encounters and role playing. The bad news is that there aren't notes on how to customize the adventure for higher level parties.

Text is broken up into two columns with interior art by Fred Rawles. The weird thing about his art style is that it ranges from great, as in the the illustration of the Kelson family or the evil Raven and his comrades walking through the woods to less detailed, almost hasty work like his illustration of the red dragon which looks nothing like the one on the cover. Art is also minimal in the product with lots of pages of pure text. White space is very good in most instances with borders being less than an inch on three sides and an inch on the top. Maps, and there are pages of them, are crisp and clean.

At 120 pages for $24.95, some may think that the book is slightly overpriced. This is almost made up for with the internal covers, which are used for full color maps of the campaign setting. Spelling and grammar errors aren't common, but do happen indicating that Monkey God, like most d20 companies, needs to have another round of editing before final approval.

To get the five star rating, this sourcebook-adventure would have to be a little bit more of a sourcebook. For example, while we have statistics for historical characters, we have no tables for random encounters in the lands or the areas themselves. We have no adventure seeds outside of the adventures proper. We have no detailed maps of the cities. Artwork would all have to be consistant at the high level. Rawles does good work, just not with every illustration.

If you're the type of GM who likes just enough information to get the ball rolling, Cataclysm on Cloudholme is perfect for you. Less experienced GMs may want to work their skill level up a notch or two before trying to tackle a book of this size and freedom.

 

[tankmodeler]

Produced by Monkey God Publishing in 2003, Cataclysm on Cloudholme is a sourcebook-adventure combo that kicked off their Legendary Lands series.

The book provides both a description of the land of Astenthal and an adventure that eventually gets the characters to the floating island city state of Cloudholme. The underlying premise is simple enough, stop the mad lich-like mage from creating a magical machine that will increase his power incredibly thus spelling wrack and ruin for the rest of the land. I will let you, dear reader, peruse the initial reviews by staff member, JoeGKushner, and by the d20 Magazine Rack reviewer, Bruce Boughner, to get a synopsis of the plot and the setting. Both reviews accurately relay that basic information from the book.

Where my review will diverge from theirs is in my assessment of how well Monkey God have put together this package and how useful this will be to the average DM.

First off is the cover art, and I agree that it is both quite stunning and does serve to give an older module feel to the presentation. The interior artwork is generally well done as well, but does, indeed, suffer occasionally from what appears to be pieces drawn as filler. There are not very many of these and, overall, the artwork supports the plot and the background information.

The map drawings are reasonably good, if somewhat simplistic, however there are a number of problems. The placement of maps at back of the book is somewhat awkward but the fact that they do not follow the order of the encounters presented in the text makes them even more difficult to use. Given that this is not a sequential encounter adventure, it would have made much more sense to have the maps placed at the beginning or end of the text section that they referred to for easy DM access.

Additionally, the ID numbers of the rooms resets to 1 for every encounter. This can make it a bit difficult to establish where you are while running the adventure as you are continuously flipping back and forth from text inside the book to maps at the back. Losing your place between room 2 in Vankor's Excavation and room 2 in Laison's Freehold can cause confusion. Unique ID numbers would have been much better.

Another issue is the scale of some of the drawings. Most of the encounter maps are drawing with one square equaling 10 feet, the old standard. Why, then would one of the main buildings be mapped to one square equals 15 feet? It completely throws off the players and the DM. In addition, the actual building mapped seems disproportionately huge in that scale. An interior set of stairs is 30+ feet wide. The main hall is 150' wide and over 225' long. Individual rooms are 60' x 75'. The entire place is out of all human scale and will play significantly differently for this.

An overview map is provided of all of Cloudholme as well as slightly larger scale maps of Castle Krystalyn after the cataclysm (when the adventure takes place) and before the cataclysm as well as a side view of the floating castle in the pre-cataclysm days (these are nice to have, but have no bearing on the play of the adventure). Here are some of the most confusing map issues. The overview map has no scale at all, but if you make a couple of estimates you can figure out that the floating island is about 2 miles by 3 miles. The numbering system for all of these overview maps has no legend in the text. You can figure out where the human settlement is by inferring from the descriptions in the text, but the other numbered sites are meaningless. The numbers denoting areas on the post-cataclysm map of the castle do not match the numbers on the pre-cataclysm map and the side view has another set of numbers that calls up the same features as the top view but with different IDs again. There is absolutely no excuse for this. Trying to figure out what you are looking at should never be a DM's complaint with the module maps in his hands.

The inside front cover provides yet another map, of the whole Astenthal area this time. Unfortunately the publishers decided to bleed the map across the inside cover and the binding obliterates at least one ID number and makes it very hard to get a handle on the land you are running the adventure in.

Speaking of running the adventure, this module claims to be something that can be dropped into an existing campaign. This really isn’t true. To use this with another campaign will require a large amount of work by the DM and a lot of hand holding if the players are not to wander around aimlessly for subjective and real-world years trying to sort out what the problems are that will make them go on this adventure. As was stated by Joe's review, there is nothing explicitly linking the various locales laid out in the text. Unless you want your players to simply go directly to the flying island, then getting them to interact with the rest of the main NPCs will be difficult and will require a lot of pre-work by the DM.

If you are running this as a campaign setting, then having the various different encounters can be helpful. You can work to establish the reasons for the PCs to find the villain throughout the adventures that will advance them from 1st level to the 4th or 5th level that is appropriate for this adventure.

Regarding appropriate levels, this adventure really doesn’t have much to consistently challenge a group of smart 5th level players, especially if they are experienced as players. The bulk of the higher level encounters are generally larger groups of low level creatures where a lot of hack and slash will generally get the job done. There are very few encounters that will tax the minds and creativity of the players and this is a shame as the setting could be home to some very interesting creatures that the players could take pride vanquishing. Beating up on 20 orcs for a 7th level encounter is pretty lame.

The physical hassle of flipping back and forth through the book to find monster and NPC stat blocks is another knock on this product. There is no reason to have to flip back and forth in the middle of a combat, it makes for sloppy DMing and can ruin the flow of a cool encounter. It doesn’t help that there is no stat block for one of the main NPCs, the wizard Raven.

All-in-all I was not impressed with this publication. The publishing problems detract from the meat of the text and the layout of the book will make it vary hard to use in a gaming session. There is a lot of promise in the source material and there are things I may use in other campaigns. I might even save the whole thing as a place to start off a new campaign, but there is just too much work required to shoehorn most of these encounters into an existing campaign.

 

[d20books]

This was a great idea poorly executed. Unfortunately, this is typical of some Monkey God Enterprises work.

The maps, in particular, drove me batty.

The big misfortune is that these books get in the way of great books by this publisher, like From Stone to Steel and Frost and Fur. I highly recommend both.

From Stone to Steel is one of my "Desert Island Five".

 

[tankmodeler]

By the way, I forgot to mention one truely irritating problem with this book; the unending stream of proofreading errors. I realize that a book this size will have some errors, even the best books do, but there is no excuse for the 3, 4 even 5 errors in spelling, grammar and word usage that plague just about every page of this publication.

For the love of God, pay a journalism student $100 to proofread it before you spend lots more money printing it.

Paul Roberts