Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Darklance" data-source="post: 2008971" data-attributes="member: 289">First of all, I received Deathright as a free giveaway from Kenzer & Co in return for and unbiased review which I am happy to do. Thanks for the module Kenzer.Production & Presentation:Deathright is a 80 page softcover book. The front cover is a fairly good color picture of three adventurers being assaulted by a lich. Its by no means great but for some reason it conjures up scenes from my Mystara days (especially the guy throwing the knife). I enjoyed it quite a bit. The preview picture for this review is not a very good version of it BTW. The back cover is a fairly long description of the adventure and a small map showing the adventures location on the kingdoms of Kalamar map. The inside front cover is a large map of the area the adventure takes place in and the inside back cover is a map of the main dungeon of the module.The text is arranged in an easy to read size in two columns. The margins add nicely to the book and do not take up undue space. The text has small images spaced throughout, most of which are shrunken versions of ones from the image quest area. Areas to be read aloud to PCs is conveniently highlighted. Four pages have been devoted to maps and an additional 16 to a very nice concept called "Image Quest" Image quest is a series of large excellent quality B&W pictures that do a nice job of capturing the various scenes throughout the book. They are meant to be shown to players during play. I really liked this part of the book and I hope more publishers start to use it. 22 pages were devoted to an appendices which were not really necessary but went a long way towards polishing up the adventure. Included here are monster/NPC stats, new monsters, new magic items, "other items"  a new spell, two prestige classes (which were unoriginal and are really just rehashes of different prestige classes with some changes), a time line, a new disease, encounter tables, A card trick (nice touch), information on the area and the otherwise generic "evil undead group", a glossary, a library manifest including book name/weight/value/language (this was nice and I plan to use it for my game) and finally some more encounter tables.The Story:The story takes place in the Kingdoms of Kalamar setting. It is set up in such a way that it could take a considerable amount of DM time to transplant it. A major drawback.This adventure is unfortunately very bland and unoriginal. A group of NPC called the harvesters (their church being the Congregation Of The Dead) has started a series of events that has lead to undead rising throughout the area. A plague is spreading leading the PCs to be boxed in for the adventure. The backstory is one of a scholarly queen who would only take a suitor if he could solve her riddles (was intelligent). A bard came forward and solved the riddles and she actually fell in love with him. He died suddenly one day and the queen went nearly insane with grief. She seals herself into a dungeon and (skip forward to present day) the Congregation of the Dead finds records of the queen and a book she used to control undead, the Darklight Codex. They attempt to awaken her and her mind reaching out is what causes the undead to rise. Enter the PCs and a little investigating later they find her dungeon where they must endure the usual dungeon trappings with some interesting puzzles thrown in.Thoughts: This product had everything going for it BUT the adventure. Great support information to top the cake but no cake. For a group the is interested in mostly hack and slash then they might find this to be fun but I can see many group bored to tears. No plot twists, intrigues etc. A saving grace for it was the inclusion of multiple adversaries and goals. Don't get me wrong. This is not a BAD product. For a dungeon crawl it does fine. I just feel that it could have been better. Also, the prestige classes were rehashes of similar ones already available in a flooded Prestige class market. The flexibility could also use some tweaking.Conclusion:I see great potential with this product and I would definitely consider buying other Kenzer products which kept up this high level of support material while making the focus something more enjoyable.</blockquote>

Verification