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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2008632" data-attributes="member: 18387">Aparently my first review of this product has disappeared, so here I go again...WARNING: This review contains spoilers.I ran this adventure last weekend, until 4am in the morning!  The Last Dance is somewhat reminiscent of 2nd edition Ravenloft.  There's an old castle, shrouded in mist, and filled with walking (ok, dancing) dead.  The time shifting castle idea was, in fact, used before in the Ravenloft box set Castles Forlorn, but it still retains its charm.  Although the plot is quite interesting, it is not without inconsistencies.  The module is 38 pages and uses the same dull pink color found in The Tide of Years.  The art is fantastic.  I love the style and how ugly the orcs are!  The adventure is combat-light, like most of the Penumbra line, with an emphasis on mystery solving.Below are some problems I found with the adventure:* The dancing scene is hard.  It is particularly difficult for a small party, or if the players split up like mine did.  Only one of my players danced with Frog in the beginning, and he wasn't paying too much attention to the rules of Davosian dance.  (The others kept thinking Frog was trying to get them to perform some evil ritual.)  There are just too many possible moves, which can lead to tedium during the dance scene if the players try to go through each systematically.  I would often have to give them hints, such as "You feel like maybe you should gave gone the other way, as a magical force painfully wrenches you in the opposite direction."* The Manavore is listed as having an unbinding attack that deals 1d8 damage.  The text description says the attack "ignores natural armor, armor, and shields, though deflection bonuses and force effects work normally against it."  However, no attack bonus is listed for this attack.* Although it wasn't clearly stated, it seems that Lady Dezaria began her spell at the end of the 3rd dance.  Why are the player characters forced to dance in the reinactments of the three dances if they happened before her spell?  Didn't the PCs travel back through time as indicated by the stars on p. 10?  If the dance floor is enchanted for all time (which I thought was why the dead are still dancing), how is the Aster corpse able to walk onto the dance floor to fetch Kylea and Gragtor for the toast?  I had to do a lot of fast talking in order to cover up these and other (what I thought were) logic holes.  And my players were especially attentive to details since they were solving a mystery after all.* According to the Dancing in Combat section (p. 34), during the end fight the PCs do not have to follow the particular sequences of dance steps they needed earlier to avoid subdual damage.  This didn't make any sense to me (or my players), so I forced them to move by the rules of the 3rd dance in the last scene.In the end, I think a fun time was had by all, but it was a lot of work coming up with explanations that would satisfy my inquisitive players.</blockquote>

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