More like "Thud"erspire Labyrinth. That "thud" sound you hear is the boring tactical encounters of this module hitting the floor like a sack of dwarven hammers forged from potatoes. It's the sound of the module's numerous great ideas going absolutely nowhere. In short, Thunderspire is a friggin' dud of an adventure, and the savvy DM will rip the guts out of this module, dumping the awful structure but keeping the great settings and ideas.
This module has, and I am not friggin' joking here, one of the best hooks I have ever read. The ancient minotaur city of...wait a minute, what am I doing? You already know the plot of the module, you've got the internet. Google Thunderspire Labyrinth if you need the gritty details. What you need to know is that the end result of all that minotaur nonsense is basically Mos Eisley Spaceport in the middle of a maze. Is that not awesome? Duergar rub shoulders with Drow and Ogres. Kobolds slink in the shadows, and anything can be had for a price. Are you not getting worked up about this? Are you not seeing the possibilities? It's an early introduction to the Underdark, it's a black market, it's a bunch of ammoral NPCs giving the players reasons to go down into the cool-as-heck minotaur maze and fight Ioun-knows-what in Vecna-knows-where. In short, it's a huge nexus of excellent adventure hooks. And they really are GOOD hooks. Yet without fail almost every single one that the designers touched turned into vanilla pudding. And it's not even good vanilla pudding. It's the kind you could make yourself, if you were in a hurry.
One of the reasons I wrote this review is due to that OTHER guy's review of Thunderspire Labyrinth on RPG.NET. He absolutely raves about it. Go and read it now: http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/13/13899.phtml. "You are not going to believe this crazy stuff!" is the general vibe of the review. Well let me tell you something right now: you are going to believe this crazy stuff. It's very believable. Most of it is a bog-standard, linear adventure through a slaver's lair, duergar keep, and abandoned tower. This is not cutting edge stuff here, folks.
Sorry to harp on that other review, but I spent over 20 bucks 'cause of it and I want to play the module that guy was talking about. I really do. The sad fact is the stuff in That Other Review doesn't happen unless the DM is not running the adventure as written. For example, the big line that jumps out at me is when the review says, "The slavers would be disgusted at the sick crap the gnolls are doing." Well as written, the party will have literally wiped the slavers out on their initial foray into the Labyrinth. Then they will decap the duegar, and only then will they meet the gnolls. So there's nobody to be disgusted at the gnolls, because the party murdered them. Except for maybe the party, because hey -- gnolls are disgusting.
There's other stuff like that through the review, too. Like this choice cut: "the party will be competing with TWO groups of adventurers, only one of which is alive!" No way! I gotta tell you that sounds friggin' awesome! Too bad it's complete crap. One "group" of adventurers are two dudes who sit in a room until the party kicks down the door and confronts them, then they try to trick the party and stab them in the back. The other group is a wight and his zombie buddies who wander the Labyrinth looking for treasure and don't give a hoot about the party (in fact, the wight will bail if the party start whipping his butt, and plead for his unlife if captured). So again, it's horse-puckey, unless you take these two concepts and extensively modify them yourself.
Now admittedly you can take all of the elements in this adventure and start chopping them up and creatively re-arrange them. For example, you could say that the plain ole' duergar fortress in the adventure isn't so plain anymore -- it sits on a major passage to the Underdark and they are controlling the slave trade. Now the fortress is under attack by Drow, and while they fight 'em off the party has to infiltrate the fortress through a secret entrance that they bought off a shifty kobold. And maybe some of the slavers from the other encounter are there negotiating with the duegar. Not very good, I know, but it's something a little different, something that uses the setting of Thunderspire in the adventure. You aren't going to find a lot of duergar fortresses under assault by Drow for slave trade rights in most campaigns. However that's not what Thunderspire Labyrinth gives you, as written. What it gives you is a bunch of demon dwarves in a keep that you fight through room-by-room. Boooooooring. That keep could be anywhere, in any adventure. It's something that *I* could have come up with myself without any help...and folks, I'm an idiot. Any adventure idea that I could have written myself is not worth paying for.
Now you might be saying, "Jeez dude, quit harping on the dang RPG.net review guy. Every DM adds and subtracts something from published adventures. Hardly anybody runs them exactly as they are." I know dude. I know. But there's a difference between little things like changing your NPCs around and moving the town a bit and maybe adding a small subplot your players care about, versus huge stuff like gutting encounters, changing the plot, and smashing together different concepts from the same module. If I have to take the floorplan that the module gives me and plug new encounters into it because the designers stunk it up then that's it. We're done, game over.
Also I want to take this opportunity to whine a little bit. Thanks Wizards of the Coast for putting 1(!) poster map sheet into my 25 dollar adventure, which gives you three locations total. Great work. They weren't even nice enough to put the final battle map on there! To put a cherry on this poo sundae, I can't even go to DnDInsider.com and download high-res mastersheets for the other 90 percent of the encounters that they didn't include on the poster map. So I'm stuck with the dumb little postage-stamp sized pictures with little markers showing me where to set up the monsters that come in the encounter booklet. Here's a hint for whoever is making these modules: take every encounter in any of your books and make sure they can be downloaded and printed at 1" = 5' scale with no loss of detail and no markers on them. Could you do that for me, please? Because this whole pre-generated thing is kind of useless if I end up using my dumb dungeon tiles with dry-erase beds, pits, and walls written on them for pre-generated areas, thus looking like something I pulled out of my butt at the last minute. I want to make my battle mat look nice. Is that so wrong?
Now I want to end on a positive note here. So let me say this good stuff about That Other Review and about the adventure proper: Thunderspire Labyrinth does have one of the best encounters in a 4th edition module ever. Yes, the other review is right: the Proving Ground friggin' rules super-hard. Good job there, Thunderspire Labyrinth. But you're not off the hook. There's still a small matter of all that other dull stuff you tossed at us. And for that, we're taking you down. To Chinatown.
No comments:
Post a Comment