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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dcollins" data-source="post: 2062029" data-attributes="member: 876">UnderwhelmingI just picked up "Lord of the Iron Fortress" in February of 2005 (my group is still playing 3.0). I wanted to see this 15th-level entry in WOTC's core Adventure Path series to see the "official" take on high-level D&D play, as my group is starting to experiment with that for the first time.I'm basically disappointed. For a high-level adventure in the outer planes, it has a surprisingly pedestrian feel to me. It's written by Andy Collins, author of the D&D 3.5 revision, and this hasn't increased my estimation of his body of work. Here's some specific observations below.- The current school of thought seems to have disappointingly removed the *wierdness* of the Outer Planes. Admittedly, I first encountered the Outer Planes in Gygax's 1st Ed. work (such as module Q1), and this module is in fact "dedicated to the fans of the Planescape campaign setting", which I found distasteful. Nontheless, in this new tradition, the Outer Planes are a minimally different setting with people living in villages and towns, holding down jobs, sleeping on cots, and cooking in the kitchen just like anyplace else. I don't understand what advantage there is to setting this on the Outer Planes; it seems like making the trip and then confronting banality is a real letdown.- Similarly, creatures on the Outer Planes generally don't seem to be the spirit-folk that I would expect. Occasionally the status of "petitioner" is mentioned, but there's really no look-and-feel difference in that. The fact that one Outer Planes battlefield of supposedly extraplanar humanoids is now haunted by some spectres of those killed in the fighting is particularly difficult to make sense of. Per Planescape, apparently creatures in the Outer Planes are in general simply somewhat exotic normal creatures.- In this adventure, the PCs travel to a certain Outer Plane and never encounter the kind of thing the plane is most well-known for, completely skipping that flavor. (Namely, Acheron and its eternal warring armies.) Likewise, the current milieu for the Outer Planes allows any creatures from any other planes to be travelling through, taking residence, and occupying parts of the plane, which again makes for a mishmash without a particular unearthly flavor.- The setting is a Lawful and military Outer Plane, but the illustrations of the environment feature randomly slashed up terrain, and the description of the ultimate fortress is one of "a ramshackle collection of metal plates". It seems like the author missed a chance to carry through on imagining what a truly Lawful extradimensional realm would be like.- The key villain is planning on taking over whole worlds in an extradimensional invasion, and yet he is described as being unwilling to confront 100 or so mundane resisters within a number of  miles of his stronghold. - The fortress itself is surprisingly small, only 100 feet square. For an extradimensional home of a would-be planetary conqueror, that's pretty puny -- most mundane D&D castles, and those in the real world, are significantly larger than that. Rooms described as "large" or "vast" are often fairly small compared to other D&D adventures. In fact, there are many locations where inhabitants practically fill the whole room shoulder-to-shoulder based on their standard 3.0 facing sizes.- Finally, I'm a bit let down by the way 3.0 adventures by Collins (or Cook) tend to be fairly predictable in having a fighting monster encounter in every room, pretty reliably set at exactly the Encounter Level of the adventuring party. You can often leaf through page after page of EL15, EL15, EL15 monster encounters in this text. I would expect more surprises, traps, tricks, and general wonderment in an extradimensional realm than this. Slapping on a bunch of "fiendish" templates doesn't quite cut it.Two things I will say in favor of this book are:- The levels in the fortress are cleverly laid out, considering that one location on a level may not be accessible from another location on the same level. This requires going up, down, back up, and up again (or something) in order to explore the entire fortress, and that's rather refreshing.- The section in the front of several pages addressing high-level divination effects, how much information they provide, and possible defenses against them is fairly helpful. Not anything too surprising or revolutionary, but I do like the fact that the defenses in this adventure are all basically tied in to core-rules spell effects, and not merely shut down by unknown magical forces.So I'll give this adventure a 2-Stars, "Bad" rating. Surprisingly disappointing, but not without a few redeeming qualities.</blockquote>

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