Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Illuminati" data-source="post: 2009102" data-attributes="member: 6961">I have to say I thought this product was poor overall.  When I originally bought it I was full of high expectations (it really looks neat, ordered, and attractive), and really only after playing it did it fall short.To put it simply, this adventure seems to have been written to become a computer game, not to perform as a traditional pen-and-pencil scenario.  It is full of too many monsters, too many potentially large-scale encounters, and almost impossible odds at every turn.  The party I took through this adventure consisted of six well-balanced characters, and still must have died four or five times.  The survivors always ended up fleeing to the nearest big city after each high point of the adventure, casting True Resurrect ad nauseum until the illusory excitement of the adventure's deadliness just became tedious.I definitely got the feeling there is supposed to be a "Save game" feature in this adventure.  God knows you'll need it...This isn't a classic "deathtrap" dungeon like Tomb of Horrors or other old favorites (though certainly in retrospect many of these really weren't all that great either); this adventure is just designed to be HUGE - and it loses a LOT because of it.  The focus at times seems to just be "Hey, you thought the old Temple of EE was bad?  Take a look at this even BIGGER temple complex we've made a few score miles away."  This shouldn't have been titled "Return To The Temple of Elemental Evil" - it's misleading.  The real focus and meat of the adventure doesn't even take place in the temple from the original adventure, it takes place in a newer, even more grandiose dungeon complex that tries to be classic but ends up feeling more like an imitation of Castle Greyhawk's worst incarnations.Specific points I disliked:  the introduction of a blue dragon so early in the adventure (with, no surprise, no real treasure for the colossal effort).  Green dragon in the mines.  Red dragon as part of the temple's on-call "air force".  Half-dragon T-Rexes (come on now, that's just silly).  Too many dragons.What else?  The lightning bolt towers surrounding the Outer Fane were absolutely ridiculous deus ex inventions.  If such super-powerful apparatus existed in the world, why would there be castles?  These things could easily be made as siege weapons, destroying entire armies, not to mention fortifications.  Or, why build walls when you could just have a perimeter of lightning towers to defend you.  Awful.  Very poorly conceived, way too powerful, and obviously just the writer's way of preventing PCs from flying over the ring of 200+ encounter areas to the heart of the island complex.  Terrible!I was also disappointed in the way Tharizdun (who in my opinion was portrayed perfectly in Gary Gygax's old Gord The Rogue series as THE ULTIMATE evil) seems to have "absorbed" all the elements that made Ghanadaur what he is.  Tentacles, ugly colors, all that.  I could be wrong on who came first or whatnot, but in Return To The Temple of Elemental Evil you could easily switch out Tharizdun for Ghanadaur and never know the difference.  Then again, maybe that was the idea...Positive aspects of the adventure include a touching upon the old village of Hommlet, and the same attention to small details that made (in my opinion) the old Village of Hommlet such a great module (though the new computer-generated map of Hommlet leaves a lot to be desired).  It also has some interesting NPCs that the characters will undoubtedly end up working with/for.  If you want a gigantic dungeon complex to lose yourself in for literally weeks of game play, this module has it.All in all, though, these elements just weren't worth it for me.  As I said in the beginning, I expected a lot from a "Return to..." scenario, and this just didn't do it.</blockquote>

Verification