My friend just received this in the mail so I had a chance to look it over yesterday. I own every published version of Hommlet and have run each version of this adventure at least once. The 4E version of The Village of Hommlet is, in a word, awful.
T1 was my very first D&D module and I ran nearly every playing group I was involved with over the next 20 years through it. The immortal Moathouse claimed many an aspiring adventurer long before their youthful dreams were ever realized. (Watch out for that tick!)
When T1-4 came out I snapped up a copy and sent a small group to infiltrate the Temple. Many months, nay years, of game play later the adventure culminated with the successful exploration of the nodes, the retrieval of the power gems and the final destruction of the Goldenskull!
Imagine our surprise when Return to TOEE was published some years later. Iuz and Zuggtomoy were merely puppets! Mighty Tharizdun had been pulling the strings all along. I quickly jumped at the chance to revisit an old favorite reworked and reimagined for a new edition with new stories and surprises introduced throughout. Who knew that the Giant Crayfish guarded anything more sinister than the bones of its previous victims! As a DM I tried for a fresh approach to "Return" and thus framed it as quest to reclaim a lost Dwarven Homeland. Action was centered in Rastor and the original TOEE comes in only later in the campaign. Alas the adventure was not to be completed. After the discovery of the Dwarven shrine in the Temple of All-Consumption the campaign went on extended hiatus. Perhaps it will live again down the road.
Why then, given my enthusiasm for every previous incarnation, is the latest version of Hommlet so contemptible? Let me count the ways.
1) The cover. The original T1 cover depicted Lareth (the BBEG), the aforementioned crayfish, the Moathouse and guards wearing the flaming eye. The reprint of T1 depicted the ghouls (or are they the zombies?) from beneath the Moathouse. T1-4 had the facade of the TOEE itself on the front cover. (Was there ever a better front cover for a mod?) Even "Return" shows a guard or priest peering from a lit door into a shadowy hallway which could conceivably be an Elemental cultist guarding one of the Temple's many hallways. The cover of the 4E version of Hommlet, on the other hand, shows a shadowy skyline of a "village" that bears absolutely no resemblance to the original Hommlet. There are harpies, dragons, and what? gargoyles? quasits? imps? perching on roofs and hovering over what seems more like a small city, judging by the skyline. Huh? No way was this picture drawn with Hommlet in mind. This was a picture of an entirely different place pasted on the cover with little regard to what was printed on the pages behind it.
2) Interior art and maps. Almost all of the interior art is recycled from the original. (They even repeat the same picture on the bottom of both page 1 and page 2!) The maps are repeated endlessly as well. There are 7 different maps for the Moathouse basement alone. 1 on the back page that depicts the whole level and then 6 inside that show smaller sections of the basement with some additional tactical notations. Maybe my first edition is showing, but how many tactical maps must one have? The map on the back page was plenty big enough to add whatever tactical detail deemed necessary. The repetition was both unnecessary and unfortunate because it wasted interior space that would have been better spent on...
3) Flavor. As in there was nearly none. A great deal of the original flavor was watered down, generalized, or missing entirely. Elmo no longer has a "brudder Otis". Kobort and Turuko are also gone. Many of the other named NPC's from the original are given short shrift and have been drained of personality. Jaroo and Gundigoot are no longer well meaning snoops with a cache of weapons laid secretly by in the cellar as insurance against the reemergence of dark times. Furnok of Ferd is now a dwarf(!?) without his "loaded knucklebones" and he no longer offers up a scroll in the hopes of parlaying it into far more... Gone is the detailed look at the Church of St. Cuthbert (now replaced with the ubiquitous Pelor) with its delightful, almost Zen like, koans. (SQUARE CORNERS CAN BE POUNDED SMOOTH or LAWFUL CORRECTION LIES IN A STOUT BILLET - classic!) None of the missing material is replaced with anything of substance or anything new.
There is a new 2 sided color map, you say? It is a cheap version of a Paizo Flip Mat, I say.
It is an homage to D&D's roots, you say? It is a lazy, uninspired "effort" that does little to capture the feel of the original "Gygaxian" roots of the game, I say.
All in all, a shameful exploitation of one of the original icons of our game. I can't even begin to imagine what Gary Gygax would think.
