It's the end of the game world as we know it.
It's the end of the game world as we know it.
It's the end of the game world as we know it.
And I roll dice.
Now is the beginning of the end, in more ways than one. Originally I overlooked these final few adventures, but quickly went back and added them in once I realized how perfect they were to close out the second retrospective of old AD&D 2E products. And what better product to name these "Apocalypse Adventures" after than the first one published,
The Apocalypse Stone.
While I suspect that everyone knows this already, the "Apocalypse Adventures" are notable for the different ways that they take on the same task, which is ending your AD&D 2E campaign in preparation for D&D Third Edition. Namely,
The Apocalypse Stone is meant to bring about an end (or, alternatively, transform) your homebrew setting.
The Dungeon of Death is just meant to bring about a TPK. Finally
Die Vecna Die! overhauls the canon D&D multiverse (i.e. the Great Wheel).
That Wizards of the Coast (who by the time these were published had owned TSR for a few years) took such different approaches to the same task is something I still regard with admiration. While having in-game reasons for changing up editions wasn't anything new by this point –
WG8 Fate of Istus brought Greyhawk from 1E to 2E, while the Avatar Trilogy (i.e.
FRE1 Shadowdale,
FRE2 Tantras, and
FRE3 Waterdeep) would do the same for the Forgotten Realms, which rather oddly left Dragonlance out in the proverbial cold – this was the first time, and the last, that they'd offer up a multi-pronged approach designed for different levels of obtrusiveness in terms of changing up your game. (There might be something similar in Mayfair Games'
Apocalypse boxed set, released as part of their Role-Aids line, but I confess I haven't pulled that off the shelf in quite some time.)
Of course, it should be noted that
The Apocalypse Stone doesn't necessarily need to be used with a homebrew; the module has suggestions for where it can be set in various campaign worlds. But the nature of the adventure requires some premises about the nature of the world that make it semi-incompatible with most published settings. Namely, that it all rests around the Stone of Corbinet, the game world's version of the
Foundation Stone, and what happens when it's removed from its
axis mundi...which is basically that the world is irrevocably doomed. Tell 'em, Spoony!
See, the Stone has been guarded by a long line of protectors who live in the teleporting castle where it's housed. And that worked just fine until the brother of the current protector (who was always a bad seed), a guy named Garloth, went nuts with jealousy and entitlement when he wasn't chosen to inherit the title, at which point he proved that he never deserved it in the first place by driving his brother mad and
polymorphing everyone else in the castle into monsters. He didn't actually take the Stone though, because this Big Bad Evil Guy's line can't personally handle the Stone that they've been charged to protect (and our villain conveniently doesn't know that removing the Stone will pull the plug on the entire world), which is why he needs some unsuspecting dupes to grab it for him.
Enter the PCs.
At this point, the setup is relatively clear: the group is sent on what looks like a fairly typical (almost stereotypical) fetch-quest, where they're given the means to track down the castle from it's current location on a remote island, slay the monstrous inhabitants, and fetch the stone. It should be noted that the book is very blatant in telling the DM about how much this should be hidden from the PCs. It not only outlines how Garloth seeds the campaign with fake tales (told by unsuspecting bards and actors hired to pose as sages) of a quest to recover the stone as a challenge by the gods, but it also cautions the DM against letting the
players know what this adventure is, to the point of saying "Don't let them see the cover of this book!"
So, in other words, the PCs should be if at all possible tricked into being the ones who actually doom the world...which I suspect is something the players will have mixed feelings about if that actually goes off without a hitch. I mean, it's better than saying "by the way, someone else has doomed the setting, and there's nothing you guys can do about it except wrap up some loose ends before the world goes kaput," but at the same time I just don't see a lot of characters reacting well to having one pulled over on them, at least not when it's this serious.
Actually, I think it's less about what happens than it is the entire premise being based around deceiving your players in order to end the campaign. Don't get me wrong, DMs
have to be less than totally honest with their players a lot of the time, but isn't ending the campaign world (and, presumably, switching to a new system, since that's clearly what this book wants) the sort of thing that you
should talk to your PCs about before doing it? I dunno, this just...feels like it's the D&D equivalent of your landlord telling you that you have until the end of the week to move out.
To further drive home the deception, the book then tells you to run some other adventure, since it takes time for the campaign world to begin going to pieces (exactly how long is up in the air; the book deliberately uses undefined "time units" so as to let DMs set their own pace in that regard). Meanwhile, there's a long list of stuff that happens, since the loss of the Stone cuts the world off from the planes of existence. As a result, no one can be restored to life, and the newly dead are ghosts trapped in the Border Ethereal (which is apparently part of the world itself), clerics start losing their powers, undead and extraplanar beings are weakened, and of course you have your usual array of cataclysmic signs: fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, rivers and seas boiling, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
The major part of this interlude, it should be noted, is that none other than Grand Duke Moloch, the deposed lord of Hell's sixth layer, just so happened to be hiding out on your campaign world while waiting to make his triumphant return to Hell. Now he's stuck on a dying world, and he's beyond pissed off at your characters, and decides that if he can't get back to Hell, he'll bring Hell to them.
This is by far the darkest part of the book, and quite possibly the most grimdark of any official D&D publication. It starts off with Moloch's servants slaughtering the guests and staff at an inn that the PCs go to, disguising them all with magic, and then serving them "pork buns" that are actually (wait for it) made of people! They reveal the deception later, undoing the illusion in the middle of the night – revealing that the PCs were, in fact, sleeping on sharp razors rather than featherbeds – to showcase the slaughter, along with a cordial note telling them what they ate.
To be fair, the module warns against the PCs
actually eating the pork buns, and has a sidebar discussing the level of horror that's appropriate for something like this, but it's still shockingly hefty stuff...especially since the next thing that Moloch does is murder all of the PCs' families and friends, turn them into flesh golems, and send them after the party, complete with auditory illusions to make it sound like they're moaning in agony and demanding to know why the PCs let this happen to them.
Oh, and then he personally leads a kill squad to wipe the PCs out when they're conducting the funeral for their dead loved ones.
Yeah...as it turns out, Hell's upper echelons tend to play for keeps.
It's after this that the adventure turns its attention to the last act, and this is where the premise starts to get a little awkward. See, the God of Justice (who really should have brackets around his title, considering how it's a generic stand-in for whichever deity fits that bill in your game) sent an avatar to the world just before the PCs switched the stone, and now he wants them to put it back...after they pass a series of tests in which they prove their worthiness. That seems kind of stupid, since A) the world is doomed anyway (although the module does waffle a lot as to whether its fate is irrevocable or not), and B) why would you need to conduct tests of character when
existence is on the line? I mean, is justice served by letting the world, with its myriad innocent people, be destroyed because some murderhobos couldn't prove they were generous enough or honorable enough to save it?
To its credit, the book tries to get around this by saying how the avatar is cut off from the full scope of its godly consciousness, and the gods themselves are bound by a pact when it comes to the Stone, etc. It's not much of a reason, but it works just enough to keep things going. Even then, the tests themselves seem to be largely designed to go
against stereotypical PC behaviors, such as giving up major magic items, ignoring a chance to go hunting enemies worth a lot of XP, refusing to fight for others who bribe them with treasure, etc.
In theory, I can see how the above is a good idea, as it hearkens back to folk tales of righteousness and self-sacrifice, where the strength of spirit is more important than strength of arms (or magic), but if anything this strikes me as a section that highlights why those
don't work in Dungeons & Dragons, i.e. they result in tangible penalties in a game where authorial fiat can't make them poetically appropriate. Being honorable, at the end of the day, won't earn them a +2 on attack and damage rolls, which helps to kill the bad guys who are preventing you from saving the world. So really, this entire section seems like it's going through the motions with no sense that it's dancing to the beat of a different tune. It could have been better.
Presuming that the PCs prove themselves worthy, they go back to the old castle, where the not-dead-yet king who was in charge of protecting the Stone has now recovered enough of his sanity to send them to his evil brother's keep. Garloth, of course, is busy trying (and failing) to find a way off-world. So the PCs break in, kill him and his minions, get the Stone, and...then things end, in whichever manner (death or rebirth) the DM thinks is appropriate.
If that sounds a little abrupt, the book does spend a good ten pages or so going over the various options. It says, for instance, that you could have Garloth's final ritual work, and the PCs are there as he manages to transport his keep to another world (or out onto the planes), and you can continue the campaign in a different setting. Or you could say that the world is saved, but that it's noticeably changed from how it was (and, rather hilariously, it outlines these changes in such a way that D&D Third Edition reflects them perfectly, saying how wizards around the world were looking for answers to what was happening and accidentally discovered metamagic (feats) in the process, orcs swarmed into human territory and now half-orcs are everywhere, a lot of people turned inward in search of answers and now monks are more common, etc.).
Interestingly, it also has four new kits for death knight PCs (one kit for each class type) representing them being cursed by the gods for their part in what happened. It's not exactly the same as what you'll find in
Requiem: The Grim Harvest, since these are more punishing to play (i.e. the "godly curse" part of it), but it's still an interesting idea to consider, if you want to take things in a
radical new direction? Amusingly, in what almost seems like a way to close out the page-count, it also has an artifact presentation for the Stone of Corbinet itself, along with the special armor Garloth wore (since, being a wizard, they needed a way to let him wear enchanted platemail without ruining his spellcasting ability).
Overall,
The Apocalypse Stone is a decent adventure, albeit one that at times wants to be a sourcebook to discuss the various reasons, methods, and consequences of the death/rebirth of a campaign world. The major issue is that, in trying to tailor things to a one-size-fits-all approach, they necessarily lay down some ideas that might not mesh with what's already here. More than that, while the seriousness of the situation is impressed with everything from epic dungeon-crawling (i.e. the castle where the Stone is housed, which is now full of high-level monsters) to horror (i.e. Moloch's revenge) to exalted idealism (i.e. the tests of character), these elements don't seem to fit well together, clashing more than complementing each other. Throw in the indeterminate nature of how things end, and it doesn't feel as epic as it could have been.
The answer, I think, is to treat this as an outline more than a hard-and-fast adventure. With some tailoring, especially for the tests, could make this into a truly impressive presentation, albeit one that would be specific to your campaign world. Even if it does end it. But at least this takes things out with a bang instead of a whimper.
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