Shackled City: In My Hands

JoeGKushner

Adventurer
Well, I've got my review copy of the Shackled City the other day. I've just started reading through it. In terms of organization and utility, the hardcover format is certainly a lot better than the individual issues. For example, they've broken a lot of new material into the appendices as opposed to being in the main text of the body.

Two seperate map book pull outs. The paper is a little thin there. I know this because the weight of the handbout for the maps of the dungeons and mazes, almost ripped the staples out of the book. The good news is that the maps are easy to remove, attached with four drops of easy to pull off glue, as opposed to say the old pre-cut lines that you had to yank out and hope not to rip the maps.

I haven't got into the book in depth enough to answer any deep questions yet, and never read/played through the original 3.0/3.5 adventurers to do any deep comparisions, but do own 'em. One thing I noticed right away is that there's a new adventure here to bridge the gap.

Another interesting thing, especially when looking at the Age of Worms, are the more obvious links between the two campaigns. I can see someone running Shackled City and then another group in Age of Worms and the players going, "Ah, that's where that came in."

One useful bit is that the authors don't detail everything either. There are several groups and plots left for the GM to develop.

Well, let the questions start off.
 

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How much detail is given about the Ebon Triad? What links, if any, are there to the Wind Dukes, the Rod of Seven part and Kyuss?
 

One of my big questions, which is general to the adventure path and not the book:

What's the flavor like?

From what I've read ... with Cauldron and fallen angels and "shackleborn" and the like, it seems to have a very definate flavor to all of the goings-on. Sort of a Cthulhupunk-ish tone, almost.

Contrasted against, say, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil ... which had a big interdimensional bad-guy and all these element-oriented themes but still seemed VERY "standard D&D, standard Greyhawk".

Does it seem like Cauldron is going to be very kitchy? I'm not a fan of kitch.

--fje
 

Did they add a campaign overview/cast of characters up front? That was one thing I thought was missing in the serialized magazine version. It made it tougher to link the adventures.
 

Olgar Shiverstone said:
Did they add a campaign overview/cast of characters up front? That was one thing I thought was missing in the serialized magazine version. It made it tougher to link the adventures.

This is done well in the introduction. It's one of the things I can recall without having the book right in front of me. It makes it easier to see what's going on when, and having knowledge of all the important characters, and tells you when X is going to happen, i nterms of what chapter/adventure, making it easier to plan for and adjust if your party does something...different than expected.
 






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