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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JustKim" data-source="post: 3539746" data-attributes="member: 5478">This seems to come up in every campaign adventure recommendation thread, and I don't understand it. I've always found Mongoose products to be on the poor side, and when you approach a 30-level adventure from start to finish it's harder to say "I just won't use this and this and this, and all of chapter 3".I started writing a review (read: rant) of Drow War a while back, but abandoned it. Here it is if you care to know why I disliked the adventure:[sblock]The Drow War, Book One is the first volume of a three-part drow themed adventure campaign which promises to take PCs well into epic levels. At 256 pages for $34.95, the hardcover is nicely priced but a significant investment for something as hit or miss as an adventure. Does it all come together? In a word, no.As a foreword of caution, this review contains Drow War spoilers.The first 10% of the book contains history and detail for a setting made especially for the adventure. Those of you familiar with Mongoose's tendency to replace non-Open Game material with new pantheons and cosmologies, discontinuous across all products, will not be surprised by the pages and pages of new deities and mythology. Thankfully, the most crucial deity of a drow campaign is preserved under the pseudonym of "She". Alongside all of this setting information are house rules about the way spells work, which have convenient exemptions for player characters and beg a question of professionalism: is this a finished product or a homebrew that someone thought we might get a kick out of? The setting may be adequate for someone going into a Drow War campaign a blank slate, but it defies modularity every step of the way.Further problems arise when the adventure requires that all PCs be given a constellation-related template which ties into the cosmology but has little consequence in the adventure, except to give PCs a tingle when they're close to something important. The book mentions that the template is not powerful enough to warrant a level adjustment, so why bother? It's required that all PCs have clearly visible, blue birthmarks for easy NPC identification, but the template must also be secret to the players. How?The adventure begins with the PCs waking up in a dangerous area with no memory of how they got there. This situation is for the convenience of handing the PCs the fate of the world from a goddess, and it's recommended that the DM get the PCs there another way if they're likely to not enjoy the old "you wake up elsewhere". This would certainly apply to people I've shared the table with. From here the PCs go on a quest to find relics that they're destined to have. The door is left open to what type of weapon, armor or shield each PC is questing for, but the requirement that it be one of the three mean monks, sorcerers and wizards at least are left out.[/sblock]</blockquote>

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