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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Simon Collins" data-source="post: 2008857" data-attributes="member: 9860">Beware! This review contains major spoilers.This is not a playtest review.Price: $14.95Pages: 96Price Per Page: About 15 cents per page, very good value compared to other products of this type.Designed for Character Level: 4-10External Artwork: A very atmospheric gothic piece of art depicting a glowing-eyed undead being approaching a woman either 'sleeping' or dead. The perspective of the environment is slightly off and the woman's hair is actually rising up off the pillow to give a very unnatural feel to it. Shpooky.Additional Page Use: The back page gives an (over-the-top) introduction and overview of the module with a good pencil drawing in the background. The two inside covers are both blank. The first page contains credits and contents, the last page has the OGL.Internal Artwork: The black and white penned art ranges from poor to good, with most being average.Maps: Maps are computer-generated and of fairly poor quality, some very small and dark, making detail difficult to pick out. The indoor maps are all scaled to 5 feet per square.Layout: Margins are average, text density is good (font is small but readable, no spaces between paragraphs) but there are regular chunks of white space, some quite large.Style: Despite several different authors the style is surprisingly similar - a definite gothic horror-style of writing with a good sense of atmosphere and succinct rules explanations. The grammar isn't always up to scratch, and drifts into verbosity occasionally but it doesn't greatly interfere with its readability. Editing is patchy.Whats Inside:The book offers seven short adventures and four stand-alone locations. The adventures and locations are all designed to be used in Mystic Eye's world of Gothos, which appears to be a gothic horror fantasy setting which is affected by dreamers in a modern-day world. The book begins with a clever piece of flavour text introducing us to the module and gives a summary of the  contents and a note about OGC.Suffer The Children (8 pages) is an adventure designed for 5th-level PCs involving a village haunted by the dreams of a girl in the modern world, comatosed by a traumatic experience at the hands of a paedophile. The PCs must enter the shifting dreamscape the girl's dreaming mind has created in a hellish house in the world of Gothos in order to defeat the dream manifestation of the paedophile and associated childhood nightmare figures.Perchance To Sleep (9 pages) is an adventure deisgned for 10th-level PCs who must set right a ritual gone wrong, that has drawn a composite monster made of the negative energy of dreamers' nightmares to a forlorn tower.  The PCs are clued in by the only cultist to escape the effects of the ritual in the tower. Trapped within the tower is an ancient vampire, the original focus of the cultists' ritual plus some other undead.Undying Love (10 pages) is an adventure designed for characters of 4th-6th level who must discover the story behind a dark mansion cursed by a lovelorn wizard. If the PCs can solve the puzzle, they may return the undead denizens in the mansions to mortal life, breaking the curse on the household. They must also find the pieces of the puzzle before a vampire gets his hands on them, attempting to cure his undead state.Condemned To Live (11 pages) is an adventure designed for 5th-level characters. The PCs arrive at an inn at the edge of a swamp. A mummy and his incinerated zombies is intent on revenge against those that caused his 'death', which include the PCs. The PCs must fight against physical and mental dangers as well as a conflagration that literally threatens to bring the house down.The Guilty (10 pages) is an adventure designed for 4th-5th level PCs. The PCs find themselves in a jail run by vigilante guards. One inmate has raised the dead in order to try and escape and the PCs find themselves in the middle of a horrific jailbreak.The Bloated Toad (14 pages) is an adventure designed for 8th-10th level PCs that surrounds a series of thirteen bars run by fiends. Each bar disguises its real function as a sacrificial altar. The PCs must solve the mystery of the diabolic bars and stop the slaughter of innocents on the sacrificial altars, whilst facing all kinds of devils and a possible trip to the astral plane.Crossroads (12 pages) is an adventure designed for 7th-8th level PCs and involves the PCs saving a bard from a contract with a devil, with some strong overtones of the film 'Crossroads' running through it. The PCs must face various undead and fiends before attempting to terminate the contract (and the devil behind it).The module ends with four foul locales, each with a brief description, some NPCs and some adventure hooks:The Electrocutioners Spire is a five story tower, home to a vigilante magistrate who uses gargoyles and a pet ogre to round up criminals.Great Smiles describes the shop of Alister McCormick, a barber and dentist with multiple personality disorder. His alter ego, Doctor Morte, is killing his patients/customers, and keeps gruesome mementoes in the form of the customers' smiles.Museum of Rarities and Oddities is a freak show including wax models of people into which the curator has bound the souls of the newly deceased, after killing them that is.Rock of Lost Souls is a lighthouse on an island. A pirate lord is using the lighthouse as his residence and commands some undead who have lost their lives against the jagged rocks in years gone by.The High Points: The module has lots of creative ideas, and those ideas can, with a little work, be used outside the world of Gothos for which they are designed (and there is advice on how to do this). The use of primarily horror-themed adventures is a welcome change of pace from standard fantasy and could be used as a one-off adventure in a larger campaign. It is particularly appropriate for those GMs who enjoy freaking out their players with undead and fiends.The Low Points: Several of the adventures had a tendency to be a bit railroading - the story/plot seemed sometimes more important than allowing the characters freedom of choice within the scenario (though most adventures did not suffer from this). There were missing ELs and CRs in some of the creature stats and the grammar was poor at times, making for confusing reading at times. Conclusion: Despite some cracks in the paintwork and a couple of railroaded endings, the selection of horror-themed adventures within this module were creative and exciting, with plenty of inspiration and grotesquerie. Not that its going to make any difference, I'm sure, but several of these adventures had a very adult theme to them - not for the faint-hearted or conservative out there.</blockquote>

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