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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JoeGKushner" data-source="post: 2010748" data-attributes="member: 1129">The review below contains spoilers so GM's only please.Hellstone Deep is a high level 3.5 adventure designed for 18th-20th level characters that takes them through three separate locations. How best to sum up Hellstone Deep? It's got a three things going for it.The first thing is that it's not static and that it keeps the players moving. Players, once they learn what's happening, are on a deadline. This forces characters to act, a problem that high level characters sometimes have as they often go about gathering resources, information, allies, and other goodies that are typical of high level play. This movement is also felt through the whole adventure. Creatures do not wait for the adventurers. They actively hunt them down, seeking their deaths. They prepare spells ahead of time when they know that the players are on the way. They prepare traps and take advantage of the terrain around them in order to inflict maximum pain on the characters. This ranges from throwing the characters into acid pits to using teleportation chambers to escape from the characters to leaving delayed blast fireballs behind them.The second thing is customization. While there are new monsters and magic items included in the adventure, many of the adversaries here are customized versions of regular creatures. This ranges from the augmented beholders to fire giant with fiendish blood to the advanced iron golems that guard various passages in the lower levels.I like customized creatures because they save me time, showcase how improvements can be made with standard monsters, and allows the GM to surprise the characters without having to reinvent the wheel. It also follows the pattern set down in the Monster Manual 3.5 where there is a normal version of the monster and a more powerful version for higher level play.The third thing the adventure has is danger. Players are going to have to be at the top of their game to have any chance of survival. They're going to have to know the value not only of their own spells, especially in preparing to fight the big battles, but also in having lots of dispel magic scrolls about to take care of the enemies bluff spells. They're going to have to know when to retreat and when to use raise dead because I can almost guarantee that mages and rogues who get caught by just a few bad rounds of combat in some of these encounters, even at 20th level, will quickly wind up dead.Now that the praise is out of the way, what is the adventure about? Well, long ago a dark god fought a war with a powerful weapon. God was defeated, weapon supposedly destroyed and now a fiendish fire giant seeks to augment his rank in Hell by reactivating the weapon. This requires a bit of work though and the players, while on an unrelated mission, come across this danger. Once on the move, players will discover that not all is well in a city of mind flayers that's been conquered by the drow who have in turn been corrupted by the dire energies from the fiendish weapon. Once they finish there, they have to travel to a demi-plane in order to finish their business.Along the way, the adventure makes good use of unusual terrain. In some locations, magic doesn't work. This allows lower powered creatures to take advantage of the terrain and strike the characters where it hurts. In other situations, it's the mere places they travel that are dangerous. For instances, if the players breech the gates around the Shadow Gate, they may find themselves cast into another plane or if they're not careful on the demi-plane called the Sea of Endless Knight, they'll discover that the ocean water is level draining.Layout and art are about average in this product. It's a shame too as so many of the new creatures here could really use some great full page illustrations. The maps are workable but not up to the standards set by Green Ronin and Mystic Eye Games. The editing is fair and everything looked good on a first pass. At 104 pages for $19.99, Hellstone Deep is a little overpriced.Hellstone Deep is the perfect way to get the party ready for epic level adventure and take up their mantle as warriors who've traveled across the planes and battled against ancient evils.</blockquote>

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