Has anyone played the Shackled City Adventures?

[Shellman]

Hey all,

Has anyone played the Shackled City Adventures originally published in Dragon Magazine? I would like to get some feedback on them before I decide to buy the Shackled City Book comming out this month!

Thanks,

Shawn

 

[delericho]

Has anyone played the Shackled City Adventures originally published in Dragon Magazine? I would like to get some feedback on them before I decide to buy the Shackled City Book comming out this month!

Yes, my group finished the campaign this weekend. I highly recommend the campaign - it was a lot of fun.

The only criticisms of the campaign I have are as follows:

1) There seems to be a bit of a "mission of the week" feel to the adventures - the group gets sent on an adventure by first one NPC, then the next, then the next. It's not until quite close to the end that the group gets the opportunity to plot their own course, and even then my group seemed quite dependent on NPCs for guidance.

2) The role-playing elements in the campaign are quite light. The DM will probably have to bulk these elements up a bit.

3) The last adventure, Asylum, seemed excessively difficult. Two of the major encounters seemed like they should have ended with a total party kill. In particular, the last one seemed to be certain death for any non-epic group.

These weaknesses are quite minor - a good DM can easily change any of these to fix the problems.

All of that said, I should point out that my group have been playing the campaign for 11 months, and we've had a lot of fun with it. The hardcover book is expensive ($60), but I reckon we had something like 240 hours of gameplay in the campaign, which works out at a quarter per hour.

Anything else you want to know?

 

[HellHound]

I've run over half of it, and it is excellent.

And the book is gorgeous - even though I have the full set of dungeon magazines, I'm picking up the book because it rocks so much.

 

[IronWolf]

I've played the first adventure in PBeM format. The group I played with had a good time with it. I think it would be fun to play with a RL group sometime.