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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 2008852" data-attributes="member: 172">Dark Awakenings: GuardianRole-playing games are a concept that have long since transcended their pen-and-paper beginnings. Long ago, RPGs made the leap to interactive games such as Adventure (an ancestor of Zork) played on mainframes, and expanded to the point where computer RPGs are now played on PCs and game consoles across the world.Yet to die hard pen-and-paper fans, such games often fail to live up to the title of role-playing game. The technology just wasn't there to replace the imagination of a good GM, and a CRT was a poor replacement for social interaction. I had often wondered if one day it would be possible to take advantage of the features of modern computing technology to enhance the traditional RPG experience.Sooner or later, someone had to try it. There have been character generators and GM assistants for some time. Yet Auran's Dark Awakenings adventures try to enhance another aspect of the game with the aid of computers.Dark Awakenings: Guardian is a D20 system fantasy adventure for 4-6 characters of 3rd-4th level.A First LookDark Awakenings: Guardian is packaged as an 84-page, perfect-bound soft cover book with a CD-Rom disk. The CD-Rom contains a PDF document with the entire contents of the adventure book and an application that displays 2D and 3D versions of various scenes from the game. The package is priced at $19.95 US.The cover of the book has a gray earth-textured background with an image of the ship that the players travel on in the adventure.The interior is black-and-white. The illustrations are by an artist by the name of Bob Jones. His style is very crisp and detailed. I daresay he is easily one of the most talented artists to provide material for a d20 product, on par with artists such as Wizards' Wayne Reynolds and Raven Mimura or White Wolf's Talon Dunning.The book includes some slick full-color pages, as well as maps and player handouts.The text in the interior uses a small typeface, though there are many gaps between paragraphs and sections in the books. For a book of this size alone, $20 would be rather pricey, but the CD-Rom adds some value to the package.The Adventure(This section contains spoilers regarding the content of the adventure.)The Adventure book contains some brief instructions for using the CD-Rom's 3D scenes in the game. Parts of the adventure that provide 3D scenes are labeled with a CD symbol for easy reference. The contents of the disk are discussed in the next section.The background of the adventure is exhaustively detailed to a fault. In summary, the subject of the adventure is a demonic creature called the Grimorden, who was an implacable foe of elves in days long past. The Grimorden had three mighty magical powers at his command: the power to control minds, the power to call elementals, and the power to raise and control undead.The Grimorden was imprisoned by the elves, and they held its powers in check by creating a prison to contain it and three gems. Each gem countered one of the Grimorden's powers. The Grimorden almost escaped from its prison once, but the elves were able to stop it and with the help of the dwarves improve upon the power of their containment. This one attempt worried them enough, however, that they moved the prison of the Grimorden to a remote island, an island that would be called the Guardian.The elves were slain by raiders, leaving the Grimorden's prison behind. Eventually, the island became inhabited by humans, including a sect of monks devoted to a deity of knowledge. They established their own monastery there and started studying the runes that the elves had left behind.The Grimorden couldn't be held together, however. A greedy worker visiting the island set his sites on the three gems that imprisoned the Grimorden, ignorant to the possible consequences of removing those gems. All it took was the prying free of one gem to set the Grimorden in motion. The first gem pried away was the ruby, which allowed the Grimorden to use its mind domination power; however, it was the animation of the undead that doomed most of the monastery workers.The players are hired to go to the island. The assumed reason is so that the party wizard can examine some unearthed artifact from the dig on the island. Ye they are dropped off on the island soon after the incident that unleashed the Grimorden's power.The adventure itself is divided into an event-based section and a site-based section, and running it promises to be a somewhat complex task. The Grimorden is awakened, but its power is limited. To power its abilities, it must drain the souls of victims, which equates to Constitution drain. Part of the event-based section outlines the activities of the Grimorden as the party explores the island. The night after the PCs arrive, the Grimorden animates the first of its undead minions in a bid to get enough power to get free. Scheduling the Grimorden's activities as it harries the party is the primary function of the event section.Some of other events are location triggered and might have better been included in the site. Three of these location-triggered events allow the party to receive assistance from a new type of creature (a shapeshifter called a selchie) and two ghosts. The second ghost, of the ancient elven fortification, will spell out the depth of the PCs' problems.The site-based part of the adventure allows the party to explore and discover what happened on the island. The party can eventually stumble on the Grimorden's prison, which is the most exotic locale in the adventure.Overall, the adventure seems like it would be a lot of fun. It has a lot of investigation type aspects, and seems as if it would have a suspenseful horror type atmosphere. The details are lavish to say the least. They even throw in a possibility that allows one of the PCs to be on the take to get one of the gems, but hopefully he fesses up once he realizes the gravity of the situation.The one thing that bothered me the most about the adventure itself is that it is not truly complete. Once the PCs figure out what is going on, they have to replace the three gems to secure the Grimorden in its prison. The catch is that the third gem was transported to the shadowlands, the Grimorden's ancient home. You get to recover that gem in the second adventure.The CD-RomThe CD-Rom that comes with the adventure contains an Adobe Acrobat file version of the printed adventure. It also has an application that can display 3D renditions of scenes from the adventure.In the 3D application, there is a control panel that you can use to alter what is to be shown in the 3D scenes. For example, you can choose to hide the location of monk bodies, show a secret door, or even show the broken prison of the Grimorden if the party is that unfortunate. There is even a 3D scene of the ship, with day and night settings, and with a setting to turn on the rain or a thunderous storm. The 3D scenes come complete with background sound effects and a mute button.To hide the details of what is going on from any players who might be viewing the screen, there is an option to change the label for the settings to a set of numbered options, concealing the exact details from the players. The appropriate section of the book has the details on what options to choose.Each 3D scene allows you to pan or zoom the camera; some scenes have multiple cameras. Overall, the scenes are nicely done, but they are all background. There are no people or creatures in the scenes.The specs on the back of the product specify that you must have a PC with an NVidia TNT or equivalent card. I ran under the assumption that the ATI rage card in my laptop was "equivalent"; however, I was unable to get it to work on my laptop*. This is unfortunate, because if I was going to run this adventure, that is how I would do it. I was able to get it to run on my desktop computer (with a GeForce II MX card), and it looks very nice.* - An Auran representative did suggest I try updating my drivers, but I haven't tried this yet.ConclusionAs stated, I think the adventure is a little pricey if you count the book alone. Yet it you have the set-up and the mind to try a computerized adventure, I think the $20 asking price is fairly reasonable.The adventure itself is one of the more imaginative and well written d20 System adventures I have had the pleasure to own in some time. There are entirely too many site-based bash-em-ups for d20, and it was nice to see a suspenseful, investigative, event-driven adventure. My only concerns are that the background material was a bit exhaustive for the purposes of most GMs who run their own worlds, and that you have to get the second adventure in this series to truly finish the adventure.-Alan D. Kohler</blockquote>

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