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26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Dungeon Crawl, April 15, 2009
This review is from: Assault on Nightwyrm Fortress: Adventure P3 for 4th Edition D&D (D&D Adventure) (Paperback)
This adventure takes place in the Shadowfell in a keep inhabited by a powerful shadow dragon. The dragon is doing bad things in the shadowfell, stealing souls he shouldn't be. It's a very similar premise to Bruce Cordell's other adventures: Heart of Nightfang Spire, quite possibly the exact same as Bastion of Broken Souls, just in a different locale. The players fight through hordes of monsters in the keep to get to the main villain. That's the plot right there, fight through keep to get to dragon, kill dragon. Did I mention you do this in a completely straight line? Players go room to room, with no choice of path.
There's nary an NPC with any personality in the whole adventure. In fact I can count on one hand the number of NPCs you get to interact with. Each of these gets a measly paragraph of description. The most fleshed out NPC is the final one and even that barely has any personality.
There's one NPC the players save from being the prisoner of a dracolich. This NPC has not a single word of what they were doing there or who they are!
There's a possibility that the encounters are so great they can hold the player's interest for the whole time. Great if you want hack n slash. Just giving the monsters names is usually not enough to make my players enjoy killing them, they need intrigue, personality, an urge for revenge, character etc.
Got a chance to run the first 6 or so encounters. Starts out with an encounter vs 4 wraiths. 4 wraiths (lurkers) who regenerate and escape constantly causing the fight to take forever and become very annoying. In the further encounters many of creatures cause the players to be dazed for entire fights, and not because of lack of saving throws. The bone naga's aura is auto-daze. Stone golems get two slam attacks every round both of which daze. It makes things very hard, and frustrating. There are entire encounters where the players can only take half their actions. One encounter drops a creature with threatening reach 3 right in the middle of the party, the creature poisons with its opp-atks, the poison immobilizes, and then stuns after a failed second saving throw, and all the saving throws take a -5 penalty. If your idea of fun and challenging is fighting a dracolich, who constantly stuns the players with interrupts and his breath weapon, then you'll love this adventure. All the encounters stack debilitating effects on the players who have to struggle just to do anything. If your players like playing D&D where they see half their turns go by useless and barely ever get to use their powers, this is the adventure for them.
This is not an adventure. It is not a story. It has no NPC's. It is a string of encounters and that's all it is.
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great maps, April 17, 2009
This review is from: Assault on Nightwyrm Fortress: Adventure P3 for 4th Edition D&D (D&D Adventure) (Paperback)
I have been buying these official 4th edition modules since they have come out. I was always perplexed that they didn't take advantage of their other products, in particular their map tiles when making adventures. If you own Dungeon tiles..you'll love this adventure. It is definately more of a hack n slash advanture, but I always add personality to my villians any way, so the lack of NPC depth doesn't bother me.
I like the adventure, and the combat scenarios look solid. The setting is not very diverse, since most of it is on the shadowfell, but it does add that otherworldly feel that moderate to high level play demands.
I just hope they make more official minis to coincide with monsters in these official modules. They made the troll king, will they make a huge shadow dragon?...or what about the shadow dragon wraith creatures?... sign me up for a fist full of those please!
It also features some Slaad's...and they don't suck like they did in 3rd edition. Finally a use for my slaad figures other than conversions/proxies for other things.
The cover artist is also great... I'm also fond of their work on the Monster Manual 2 cover..great stuff!
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Our departure point on the H-P-E rollercoaster, April 22, 2011
This review is from: Assault on Nightwyrm Fortress: Adventure P3 for 4th Edition D&D (D&D Adventure) (Paperback)
I really, legitimately enjoyed Keep on the Shadowfell. I loved Thunderspire Labyrinth. Pyramid of Shadows got repetitive & boring & repetitive & almost broke us. Trollhaunt Labyrinth redeemed it; it had the seeds of a great adventure, and was both memorable and fun. Demon Queen's Enclave was actually a pretty excellent module with enough openness and interesting NPCs that it was enjoyable to run.
P3... well, this one killed the series for us. At its best times, the H-P-E series is ... ah ... overly fighty. 4e's mechanics don't lend itself to filler fights; fights are an investment in table time, and if you have too many of them between plot developments, it's very easy to lose track of the story. Even at their best times, there are more encounters in the H-P-E series than there really need to be, often with debilitating environmental effects added to the mix. (What's more, these are often Level+2, Level+3, or Level+4, which draaaag under the old monster math, and can easily TPK under the new monster math.) The delve format makes finding a coherent storyline difficult, and somewhat constrains the sorts of adventures that could come out naturally. The earlier modules overcome these limitations to greater (P2) or lesser (H3) degrees, and sadly, this one is one of the worst.
At its core, P3 is a railroad with fights. Not just fights, but *badly designed* fights. There's some bizarre stuff here, like a Level 22 or 23 Efreet Soldier whose defenses are nearly unhittable at 17th level, a room full of sword wraiths which lets them retreat to recharge, a stun-happy dracolich, and so on. I was putting so much time into revising the adventure, fixing every monster and de-leveling every fight, I wondered why I bothered with it at all.
About 2/3 of the way through it, the 4e Dark Sun Campaign Setting came out, and we simply abandoned P3, about 3/4 of the way through. (And I'm happy to report that, 8 months later, Dark Sun is still going super-strong, and that I love DMing again!)
Will we come back to it? I don't know. I'd love to give Epic levels a shot. But I think this adventure is done.
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