SoccerRef73
First Post
Greetings...
I own every D&D product that Wizards of the Coast has produced since the advent of 3rd Edition and in my opinion "Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk" is the single best "official" adventure that has been released for the 3.0 / 3.5 line. "Red Hand of Doom" was my favorite up until now, with "Bastion of Broken Souls" in first place before that, but this one tops them both and takes the prize.
I've pretty much decided that I do not like the new "Delve" format for adventure encounters very much, or at least I don't like the way it's generally been used. I think it has a tendency to constrain encounter design in a number of very undesirable ways unless the author works very hard to overcome its limitations. I also think it chews up way too much of the total page count to justify what benefits it does provide (and, to be fair, it is not entirely without merit, and certain types of encounters do work well with it). Given a choice between the old (pre-Delve) format and the new Delve format I have yet to see a product from WotC that would cause me to choose the new format.
However, the authors of Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk managed to make the new format as painless as possible while still including a ton of story and other types of encounters within the adventure text. Calling out specific side quests was a nice addition to the overall Expedition adventure format. The "railroading" elements that force (or at least expect) the PCs to explore the dungeon in a certain order were, I thought, handled with a very light touch that in the hands of a good GM should be completely invisible to the players. The mixture of material on the Free City and the Castle's dungeons was just right.
Even the use of the Delve format in this product mostly worked for me, because (thankfully) they didn't burn off 2/3 of the page count on the encounter layouts but rather left it up to the DM to fill in many of the obvious combats. They also featured larger, tactically interesting encounter areas and did some creative things with the stat blocks (such as making the three "proctors" different within the context of a single base creature). The spread on pages 104-105 is a great example of how the new format can be used to create an encounter that is more than just "one room with monsters in it." Page 106 shows that you can use the new format for something other than a straight-up fight. (I'll bet a beer that Jason Bulmahn did that one, since it looks very much like an abbreviated version of a fun chase scene from the Greyhawk adventure "Mad God's Key" that appeared in Dungeon Magazine.)
There were a couple of strange choices (such as the 20ft. square encounter area on page 79 in which the PCs are supposed to face a Large invisible foe with a base move of 40ft. ... huh?) but overall the battle areas were good-sized and interesting. I think one of the biggest weaknesses in 3.5 adventure design is that so many of the "cool" monsters are Large-sized, and many of the PCs' best combat tactics require them to "get big" as well, but most of the battle maps do not take 10ft. square creatures into account, resulting in painfully cramped combat spaces. Whether it is historically accurate or not, D&D combats seem to need to take place in large open areas or else they simply do not work very well. (There are obviously exceptions to this, but as a rule, I would favor larger combat zones over smaller ones.) For the most part, Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk seems to agree with this philosophy, and it provides suitably-large encounter areas to accommodate both the foes that are included and the player characters.
The way they treated the dungeon levels that did not get full write-ups as a "wilderness" (while still providing four non-trivial "random" adventure areas, complete with maps, suitable for customizing by the DM and doing so in an impressively small amount of space) was very clever. I was rather skeptical of this when I first heard about it (before I got my copy of the book) but when you read it, it makes perfect sense. Some of the layout decisions were simply inspired, such as page 56 (on which the map of the surface ruins of the Tower of War was merged with the text instead of bumping those few paragraphs and leaving white space in the upper right-hand corner of the map/page). Maybe that only saved 250 words but it shows the lengths to which the team went in order to cram as much as possible into the book despite the nefarious page-count-devouring ways of the Delve format.
Of all the Delve-using adventures that have come out in the last year this one felt like it had the most "adventure" and the least amount of space wasted by things that didn't really need to be done in the new format because they could have been left up to the DM to handle. Even with that said, I'd probably have cut about five of the combats that used the new format and just mentioned them in the main text, thereby buying about 10 more pages for adventure material instead of combat material, but overall I can't complain about the balance they struck.
Without going into spoiler territory, I love the explanation of what happened to Lord Robilar (whose unexplained change of behavior has always bothered me... it never made sense that he would do the things he did, and especially not that he would go to work for Rary) as well as all of the other cross-references that they manged to sneak into the text (including a specific mention, by name, of the Age of Worms, heh). Excellent use of classic NPCs (up to and including demigods) and every page oozes love and respect for the Greyhawk setting (which of course is precisely what one would expect from a team that includes Erik Mona).
The writing is really smooth. It reads like one DM talking to another DM. There are no jarring changes in tone that make it obvious who worked on which sections (as opposed to Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, which was not bad overall, but reads like it was written by someone with multiple personality disorder... or several authors who collaborated very little during the writing process).
Bottom line is that Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk is an A+ all the way. The writing is great, the plot is great, the use of (and love for) the setting is great, the encounters are (mostly) great or at least good, the layout is great, and the maps are great. Reading this is like a master class on how to design an engaging, lengthy, meaty adventure that has a concrete plot and tells a specific story, but still leaves a tremendous amount of room for the DM to get in there and customize things. Someone who was expecting a definitive atlas of every nook and cranny of Castle Greyhawk might be disappointed, but I wasn't. Forget the whole 3.5 / 4.0 argument -- this is an adventure that would be a blast in any edition of the game. In 2nd Edition this would have been done as a boxed set and it would have been right up there with Night Below. They could have released this (with 3.5 stats) on the day after the 4th Edition PH shipped and it would still have been a worthwhile investment to me.
Well done guys!
Talk to you later --
Sean
----
M. Sean Molley | sean [at] basementsoftware [dot] com
I own every D&D product that Wizards of the Coast has produced since the advent of 3rd Edition and in my opinion "Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk" is the single best "official" adventure that has been released for the 3.0 / 3.5 line. "Red Hand of Doom" was my favorite up until now, with "Bastion of Broken Souls" in first place before that, but this one tops them both and takes the prize.
I've pretty much decided that I do not like the new "Delve" format for adventure encounters very much, or at least I don't like the way it's generally been used. I think it has a tendency to constrain encounter design in a number of very undesirable ways unless the author works very hard to overcome its limitations. I also think it chews up way too much of the total page count to justify what benefits it does provide (and, to be fair, it is not entirely without merit, and certain types of encounters do work well with it). Given a choice between the old (pre-Delve) format and the new Delve format I have yet to see a product from WotC that would cause me to choose the new format.
However, the authors of Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk managed to make the new format as painless as possible while still including a ton of story and other types of encounters within the adventure text. Calling out specific side quests was a nice addition to the overall Expedition adventure format. The "railroading" elements that force (or at least expect) the PCs to explore the dungeon in a certain order were, I thought, handled with a very light touch that in the hands of a good GM should be completely invisible to the players. The mixture of material on the Free City and the Castle's dungeons was just right.
Even the use of the Delve format in this product mostly worked for me, because (thankfully) they didn't burn off 2/3 of the page count on the encounter layouts but rather left it up to the DM to fill in many of the obvious combats. They also featured larger, tactically interesting encounter areas and did some creative things with the stat blocks (such as making the three "proctors" different within the context of a single base creature). The spread on pages 104-105 is a great example of how the new format can be used to create an encounter that is more than just "one room with monsters in it." Page 106 shows that you can use the new format for something other than a straight-up fight. (I'll bet a beer that Jason Bulmahn did that one, since it looks very much like an abbreviated version of a fun chase scene from the Greyhawk adventure "Mad God's Key" that appeared in Dungeon Magazine.)
There were a couple of strange choices (such as the 20ft. square encounter area on page 79 in which the PCs are supposed to face a Large invisible foe with a base move of 40ft. ... huh?) but overall the battle areas were good-sized and interesting. I think one of the biggest weaknesses in 3.5 adventure design is that so many of the "cool" monsters are Large-sized, and many of the PCs' best combat tactics require them to "get big" as well, but most of the battle maps do not take 10ft. square creatures into account, resulting in painfully cramped combat spaces. Whether it is historically accurate or not, D&D combats seem to need to take place in large open areas or else they simply do not work very well. (There are obviously exceptions to this, but as a rule, I would favor larger combat zones over smaller ones.) For the most part, Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk seems to agree with this philosophy, and it provides suitably-large encounter areas to accommodate both the foes that are included and the player characters.
The way they treated the dungeon levels that did not get full write-ups as a "wilderness" (while still providing four non-trivial "random" adventure areas, complete with maps, suitable for customizing by the DM and doing so in an impressively small amount of space) was very clever. I was rather skeptical of this when I first heard about it (before I got my copy of the book) but when you read it, it makes perfect sense. Some of the layout decisions were simply inspired, such as page 56 (on which the map of the surface ruins of the Tower of War was merged with the text instead of bumping those few paragraphs and leaving white space in the upper right-hand corner of the map/page). Maybe that only saved 250 words but it shows the lengths to which the team went in order to cram as much as possible into the book despite the nefarious page-count-devouring ways of the Delve format.
Of all the Delve-using adventures that have come out in the last year this one felt like it had the most "adventure" and the least amount of space wasted by things that didn't really need to be done in the new format because they could have been left up to the DM to handle. Even with that said, I'd probably have cut about five of the combats that used the new format and just mentioned them in the main text, thereby buying about 10 more pages for adventure material instead of combat material, but overall I can't complain about the balance they struck.
Without going into spoiler territory, I love the explanation of what happened to Lord Robilar (whose unexplained change of behavior has always bothered me... it never made sense that he would do the things he did, and especially not that he would go to work for Rary) as well as all of the other cross-references that they manged to sneak into the text (including a specific mention, by name, of the Age of Worms, heh). Excellent use of classic NPCs (up to and including demigods) and every page oozes love and respect for the Greyhawk setting (which of course is precisely what one would expect from a team that includes Erik Mona).
The writing is really smooth. It reads like one DM talking to another DM. There are no jarring changes in tone that make it obvious who worked on which sections (as opposed to Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, which was not bad overall, but reads like it was written by someone with multiple personality disorder... or several authors who collaborated very little during the writing process).
Bottom line is that Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk is an A+ all the way. The writing is great, the plot is great, the use of (and love for) the setting is great, the encounters are (mostly) great or at least good, the layout is great, and the maps are great. Reading this is like a master class on how to design an engaging, lengthy, meaty adventure that has a concrete plot and tells a specific story, but still leaves a tremendous amount of room for the DM to get in there and customize things. Someone who was expecting a definitive atlas of every nook and cranny of Castle Greyhawk might be disappointed, but I wasn't. Forget the whole 3.5 / 4.0 argument -- this is an adventure that would be a blast in any edition of the game. In 2nd Edition this would have been done as a boxed set and it would have been right up there with Night Below. They could have released this (with 3.5 stats) on the day after the 4th Edition PH shipped and it would still have been a worthwhile investment to me.
Well done guys!
Talk to you later --
Sean
----
M. Sean Molley | sean [at] basementsoftware [dot] com
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