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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5659880" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, since I have become a thread, I might as well participate in it.The problems with Q1 are extensive.  Basically, I think that if this module had been submitted to Dungeon, it would have been rejected at any point in the magazines history.  I also think that had this work been contracted out by Pazio as part of their adventure path, they probably would have taken the virtually unprecendented step of releasing the author once the rough draft came back. Let's begin with the title: 'Queen of the Demonweb Pits'.  Now, this title invokes certain awesome images immediately in the mind.  There will be a queen presiding over demons, webs, and pits.  But the final module itself comes far short of the grandeur of even the most niave imaginings about what the Demonweb Pits are like.  There are few demons, fewer webs, and fewer pits.  The idea of an Escher like maze is fine, but the implementation is lacking most especially from the perspective of one within the maze.  Ultimately, the Demonweb Pits aren't a place of remarkable terror, but a mundane dungeon maze.Secondly, all this action is supposed to be taking place within the Abyss - an infinitely deep pit of infinitely hellish planes.  This is the 'far realm' before there was a far realm.  But Q1 describes the Abyss in terms that feel like a sublevel of Castle Greyhawk and not an infinitely vast and terrible place.  The vast and incomprehensible terrors of the Abyss are rendered down to the scale of a demi-plane.  The Abyss, suitable for swallowing worlds, is here presented as a narrow basically linear corridor.  Any vastness associated with the modules has more to do with its door ways to other worlds, but these are - in point of fact - little more than empty rooms in the dungeon left with just a bare description to be filled in detail by the DM who has the unfortunate job of actually running the module.  The supposed place where the action is taking place is relatively empty.  You might could do something interesting with chasing the demon spider queen through a bunch of set peice battles set in other universes, but this isn't it.   The doorways to other worlds are extraneous to the plot, have nothing to do with the adventure,  and are basically throwaway devices better suited as 'suggestions for further adventures'.Consider also how the dungeon, for that is all it is, is populated.  Removed from the context of the adventure, the list of combatants and obstacles would seem normal for a mundane dungeon for a group of mid-level characters.  They differ really only in numbers, and sometimes not that.  After six modules filled with terrors and increasingly alien and powerful foes, we arrive finally in the dreaded Abyss to find it populated with the same sort of creatures we were facing back before we thought Hill Giants were a particularly dangerous foe.  Moreover, its not merely a populated by mundane monsters in a mundane way, but its populated in exactly the sort of haphazard way that we associate with mundane early dungeon design by amateur authors.  The structure of the dungeon is similar to a more linear B2 or S4, in that the inhabitants seem to have been chosen without any clear purpose or relationship to each other or the setting in which they are found.  For example, a barracks full of 66 Gnolls seems appropriate to an entirely different demon lord and is likely to be a rote dice rolling chore at best by this level of play.  Thirty bugbears is little better, and again, we must wonder how Lolth has come to command bugbears rather than their natural lord.   The dungeon dressings and features - traps, torches, refuse, etc. - could all  have been pulled from any mundane dungeon of the ordinary mortal world.  Care to fight 20 ogres anyone?Finally, after navigating this utterly mundane dungeon which is oddly perhaps less alien and certainly far smaller in scope than what we encountered in the 'Descent' series that preceded it, and less threatening than what we encountered in the G series that preceded that, we get to the grand citidel of the Queen and find it is a spaceship.  Why isn't Lolth known as the Captain of the Spider Ship, rather than the Demonweb Pits?  What visitor to this place thought to call it the Demonweb Pits?  To me, the Outer planes represent a place where ideas become incarnated.  So, given what we are presented by the module, what ideas does Loth incarnate?  How does this star ship of hers fit mythologically with Loth being the great foe of Corellon Larethian?  I mean, I suppose you could do something with Lolth being the rejection of the natural world in favor of artificial environments, and make of Lolth a machine godess, but if that is the case - why didn't it show up more in the culture of the Drow?  It might have been cool for the Drow to live in a steam punk city filled with coal smoke and grinding gears, and for the Demonweb Pits to be the ultimate manifestation of that, but neither this module nor the campaign actually develops those themes in any fashion.  This is just me brainstorming one of the inifinite number of ways the module could have been better.Worse yet, the Star Ship is a mostly mundane dungeon as well, filled with the usual collection of mundane and out of place creatures with no apparent connection to Lolth.  The science fiction elements of setting aren't even well developed, especially in comparison to work like 'Barrier Peaks'.   There is just nothing memorable and iconic here compared to the 6 modules leading up to this 'climax'.Which brings us to Lolth herself.  While she's not as weak as her 88 hit points might lead you to believe, properly playing Lolth to her strengths as powerful spellcaster with an extremely broad ability set is very challenging.  You'll need to select the right M-U, cleric, or psionic abilty in each round to minimize the damage she takes and maximize how much she hampers the party.  In a toe to toe fight or played badly, she's likely to go down in 2-3 rounds to a party that got this far and has a few spells in reserve, resulting in a very anticlimatic ending to the game (using her heal ability would extend the fight, but if she heals without removing herself from the situation that resulted in needing to heal, this is a losing strategy).  On the other hand, if you do play her the way a player experienced with playing spellcasters would play her, you probably would just do everything you can to avoid going toe to toe with the party.  If the party makes early saving throws and seems to have the means of penetrating your defenses, you'd probably just opt to make use of one of her many means of evasion and withdraw from the fight.  Again, this is likely to be anticlimatic.I suppose it would be asking too much of a module at this early date to have some semblence of a coherent plot or a proactive antagonist who didn't just wait in her lair for the party to come and kill her, but I don't think it is asking too much of a module from this time period to be as good as what else existed at the time.  Instead, this is a regression by a less experienced author to an extremely primitive sort of design, that even by G1 we are seeing superceded.  G1 is a far better designed, more coherent, and better written module than Q1.  Gygax and his genius is sorely missing from the module.  Dave Sutherland would produce a masterpeice collaborating on Ravenloft, but module writing didn't prove to be his strongest point.The best thing about the module is that it mechanically tries to make the Abyss feel threatening by changing the way that spells work, making clerical spells weaker or not available, and dampening the power of magic items.  But even this is not something we ought to be praising without reservation.  Ultimately, this is an example of giving a player something and then taking it away - a practice which a DM should not do too often because it leads to player frustration.  It's also something of a reoccuring theme in the module, as for example the treasure trove that disappears when you take it home.</blockquote>

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