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Message: <blockquote data-quote="demiurge1138" data-source="post: 4696589" data-attributes="member: 7451">DCC #17: Legacy of the Savage KingsAn adventure for 4th-6th level characters.Ah, Harley Stroh. We meet again, although this is his first adventure in order. Mr. Stroh also wrote Iron Crypt of the Heretics and Into the Wilds. Apparently, he’s a fan favorite.This adventure seems sort of like a template for Into the Wilds, in that it’s set in a sandbox-potential wilderness area with multiple smaller dungeons thematically linked and an evil sorceress for a villain. This time around, that villain is Kyleth the Witch-Queen, and she’s come to the creatively-named Great Swamp in order to mine it. The Great Swamp was host to a battle between a barbarian king and the glabrezu prince Obitu-Que, and where the demon’s body fell grew sick with magical taint. This tainted earth, referred to as Blight, makes for cruel weapons, so Kyleth has been sent by her paramour, the orc (?) warlord The Mountain King, to extract the Blight ore and turn it into swords for his troops. Kyleth is a clever witch-queen, and knows the source of the Blight. She’s also figured out that if the demon’s remains are returned to the mine (referred to as the Maw), they might cancel each other out and cut off the taint. Don’t ask me why. The skull of Obitu-Que is still in the area, worshipped as a god by a tribe of lizardfolk inside the tomb of the barbarian who slew him. In order to prevent the Blight from spreading, the PCs must retrieve Obitu-Que’s skull and cast it back into the Maw.What I liked: Kyleth the Witch-Queen is a fantastic villain. She’s cruel and cunning, and her backstory (in which she gained her sorcery fending off the unwanted advances of the Mountain King, culminating in her convincing the Mountain King to treat her as an equal and put out his own eye as a sign of their pact) is awesome. It’s too bad she’s not really the Big Bad of the module, because it’s clear that Harley Stroh cares more about her plot than the rest of it.There’s a shrine in the lizardfolk lair that is very similar to one in Into the Wilds (perhaps a Stroh trademark?). The idea is that if the PCs leave a monetary offering, they’ll gain a small blessing. Steal from the shrine, and the PC becomes cursed. This shrine is rather darker than the one in Into the Wilds, depicting the Three Fates of Men: Starvation, Disease and Violence. There’s also a feat that several NPC spellcasters possess—Craft Fetish, which creates a one-use magic item that grants the user a luck bonus to one roll. They’re cheap and easy to make, making them favorites of hedge wizards and adepts. These touches help to make Legacy of the Savage Kings feel more mysterious and magical—they’re less fireball and more folkloric. Oh, and the leader of the kobolds is named Torgo. Nice touch.What I disliked: The intro to Legacy of the Savage Kings states that some encounters are intentionally of overwhelming difficulty—this in order to encourage guile, stealth and strategy rather than just hacking and slashing. It, uh, doesn’t work. For example, the first encounter in the module is with a CR 9 black dragon. There’s no running from him. He can’t use his breath weapon due to his Blight-sickened state, but if he gets a full attack on a PC, that PC (who might be 4th level!) is a dead man. He’s described as being “half-dead and nearly blind”, but this isn’t reflected in his stats at all. If he was suitably crippled (50% miss chance due to near-blindness and could only make a single action a round), this encounter would properly foreshadow Blight’s dangers and be memorable. As is, it’s a massacre. There’s a lot of stuff in Legacy of the Savage Kings that doesn’t really work well within the d20 System rules. The skull of Obitu-Que, for instance, has a weird domination effect that requires a warm-up period of three rounds, during which the person it’s trying to dominate takes damage and hallucinates. There are multiple effects with a duration of 20 minus the relevant ability score, which is how ability checks worked in 1st Edition, but no longer. And the final encounter with the Lizard King is just bizarre. The statblocks also (and by now, this should no longer surprise) are in need of a good editing, with iterative natural attacks, multiple sources of armor stacking, needless multiclassing, bad CRs, and other sins. No wonder Goodman Games hired Blackdirge on as an editor!Was it worth the $2? I really, really wanted to like Legacy of the Savage Kings, but in the end I was forced to surrender to the ever rising bile and say that it wasn’t worth it. The Witch Queen is a good baddie, though.</blockquote>

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