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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JoeGKushner" data-source="post: 2009552" data-attributes="member: 1129">Maze of Zayene: Tower of ChaosWritten by Robert J. KuntzPublished by Necromancer Games56 b & w pages$11.95First off, let me start with where I’m coming from.  I didn’t like the previous Maze offerings, and I don’t like Robert J. Kuntz writing style.  His use of exclamation marks is excessive and his use of telling players what’s going on instead of showing them leaves me wondering what all the hype is about.The third book in the Maze series has the players investigating the tower where the king lurks.  Characters have a few options here.  First off, they can be the same pregenerated characters from the first book.  Second, they can be the player’s own characters.  Third, they can be new pregenerated characters from this book.  Some options of getting the players involved are provided to help GMs who are using this as part of the series or as an independent module.  One of the more interesting aspects is now possible by having the characters scout out the tower prior to the events of M1, Prisoners of the Maze.It relies heavily on a timetable that determines who is in which area.  I found this device useful for keeping the players moving.  The goal of the module is the same as the first one, to kill the tyrant King Ovar.  Along the way however, clever characters will encounter some clues that hint that not everything is what it seems and that the court wizard, Zayene, has far more power in his hands than has been previously thought.The party gets to make their way through five different levels and as they do so, they encounter a wide array of NPCs, some of whom can point out the differences in King Ovar’s behavior and some of these differences may be traced to a stranger truth.SPOILERIt seems that King Ovar isn’t himself these days in a most literal sense.  The mage has replaced the King and has placed his own power base in the tower.  This includes killing the king’s pet falcon, the queen, and using a summoned creature to scare away the loyal servants who would have noticed the difference in King Ovar’s attitudes, taste, and morality.  The problem is that this duplicate is a faulty one and must be replaced every day.There are some good ideas in the module and players will have some fun with some of the different encounters like the encounter with Stony, an earth elemental who takes care of the china and silverware and the game room where players have unseen servants bringing them snack dishes.  One of the main problems with the adventure though, stems from the fact that it’s not a complete adventure as even if the characters put together the clues and realize that the king they’ve been sent to kill is a false creature, to find the real king and put an end to the wizard Zayene, they have to go to another plane via a gate in the tower itself and finish the series in the unpublished module M4, The Eight Kings.END SPOILERMost of the game stats seem correct but without trying to hard I’m able to spot some issues like kobolds with a CR 1 that have no classes and a reference to an adult Black Dragon being powerful enough to wipe out the characters.Art is all done by Brian LeBlanc and is top notch.  His illustrations appear to be charcoal base and make a nice difference from the ink and pen pictures commonly seen in modules.  Some of his pictures like the guards in the king’s throne room and the black dragon atop the tower are great pieces.  One of the nice things about having a module done by one artist is the whole book has a unified feel.There are several problems I have with the module.  First off, the first two modules used the interior covers.  Second off, this module has three pages of ads.  The expanded page length helps make up for these factors but there’s a lot of white space, mostly at the end of each section that takes up half a page or more, as is the case with pages 14, 20, 25, and 35.  The pregenerated characters are a nice touch, but the ones for the first module possessed special powers that were supposedly necessary to help balance them out against the issues they would face.  Are we now to believe that there isn’t an effect on the game if the group is using one set of characters as opposed to another?  Worse, the characters range from 8th to 11th level, strange in a module for 9th-12th level characters.  Why is King Ovar’s stat block repeated twice?  Do we really need pages upon pages of hall encounters?In a non-game related spin, Necromancer Games will not be publishing the fourth part of the series, as this will now be done by Kuntz’s own publishing group.  These elements may make for a fine tournament module, but having a mad king that the party is going to assassinate spread out through the course of four modules, especially with one of those modules being unavailable, is a problem and GMs who want to run the series as a whole will have a wait in front of them.If you need tower maps, some new monsters, items, and ideas for general play or want to use it whole in tournament play, Tower of Chaos may be for you.  If you didn’t enjoy the previous modules and want more details about the events going on without having to wait for an unpublished book, then skip out on the Tower and move onto the good old campaign setting of Necropolis.</blockquote>

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