I'm a sucker for planes, and I feel like my gaming collection is incomplete without a boxed set (I cut my teeth on the TSR MSHRPGs.) Would it be worth my while to pick up a copy of Gygax's Hall of Many Panes at my FLGS? I know it's dual-statted for d20 and Lejendary(sic) Adventures.
Is it very setting specific, or can it be dropped into most settings with minimal work?
Is it modular? That is, would it be easy to pull bits and pieces out of it and drop them into other adventures?
Are there any new classes, races, or monsters in it? New mechanics?
I ignored all the mechanical stuff (since I don't play either d20 or LA) so I can't tell you much about it -- there are quite a few new monsters and magic items, though. Don't think there are any new classes, can't remember if there are any new rules or not.
The adventure itself is a mixed bag. The premise is very cool (and reminds me a lot of Philip Jose Famer's "World of Tiers" series, which is cool, because that's one of my all-time favorites) but the execution varies wildly -- there are 51 'panes,' each leading to a separate demi-plane, but the demi-planes aren't like mini-settings or environments, they're all mini-adventure situations where the party has a specific goal/task -- a few examples that stand out in my memory:
the party find themselves in a castle surrounded by an army of humanoids and must sneak past the humanoids to rendezvous with an army of good guys who are coming to help the castle's inhabitants; the party find themselves in a forest, magically transformed into sentient acorns, and must escape before they're caught and eaten by squirrels; the party find themselves in an arctic waste and must find shelter before they freeze; the party find themselves in the middle of a 1970-style dungeon level and must gather keys from various parts of the level to escape, etc.
A lot of the situations are pretty straightforward (fight some bad guy, or solve some puzzle) but a lot are also pretty outlandish (especially the ones involving the party magically transformed into creatures of various types). It would be pretty easy to extract specific panes/episodes and run them as stand-alones, but only a handful have a particular "otherplanar" feel -- most are set in typical D&D locales: forests, villages, caves, etc. -- and a lot of the weirder ones would be pretty hard to integrate into an ongoing campaign.
Running the adventure itself (instead of extracting bits) would IMO take considerable work because, frankly, the adventure as-written has way too many panes, way too many of them are either bland and forgettable or too weird, and the premise of the adventure is that the party must visit every single pane. A scaled-down version, either with fewer panes or the party only required to visit a fraction of the total (with the DM stacking the deck to make sure they visit all the 'good' ones) seems much more feasible. I also found myself disappointed by the fact that
there's no particular pattern or reason to the panes (at least that I could discern while reading the module) -- panes of a particular shape or color don't have similar difficulties or types of challenges/settings, the party can't really use knowledge gained in one pane to help them in another, etc.; the module felt like it was lacking sufficient 'narrative arc' to me -- like it's just one challenge after another, until you run out;
I got bored reading the module (and, to be honest, didn't finish reading all of it, though I did skip ahead and read the 'finale' panes) and can only imagine how bored a group would get trying to play through it (considering that if you average one pane per session, which is probably about right -- some panes would likely take less than a session, but others might take several sessions -- you're looking at approx. 50 sessions to play through the module -- at the rate my group meets that would be over two years!).
While I'm definitely a Gygax fan, I consider this adventure an "interesting failure" (but, that said, you should probably buy it anyway to read and strip-mine for ideas, because there really is some good stuff in here, as even a Gygax failure is better than most other rpg authors' successes).
I've been running this for about a year and it's been a blast. I do admit a couple of the panes were kind of lame - 8-10th level characters fighting hordes of 1-2 hd monsters is not my idea of fun. And if the party lucks up on one of the tougher panes early, they might have their hands full. I suggest fdividing exp by half as suggested in the module, or else the pcs could easily outgrow the module. The various panes contain the entire cusp of D&D from role playing to hack and slash to puzzle solving. If there's a particular pane you don't like, toss it.
I liked it myself. Not all of it is pure gold, a lot is so-so, some are silly, a few are bad, but more good than bad. And you can probably get it cheap (I got it as part of one of the Troll Lords X-mas sales along with a bunch of their other products)
