Customer Reviews

Dungeon Crawl Classics #1: Idylls of the Rat King

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In hindsight you can see you're in for trouble from the very first word: Idyll. There's nothing the least bit idyllic in this module; the word they wanted was "Idol." There are lots of idols to rat gods.

My pithy summary of the module: Very little would be lost by replacing the room-by-room descriptions with "40 rooms full of goblins with a wererat here and there. There's a vampire sorceress down there, but don't worry, the Search DC for the door to her room is too high for characters of this level to find."

But until you've read the module you don't have the benefit of hindsight. I hope to save you the trouble. The failing of this adventure is that it's mostly filler: room after room of "dungeon dressing" waiting patiently for the "heroes" to come in and butcher them.

Apart from the dull design of the encounters, there's the repition of the stat blocks --nearly every encounter is with the same monster, but the stat blocks are repeated every time. This problem is compounded by the presence of lycanthropes, which, because of the dumb way the d20 3.5 rules for these monster work, require three separate stat blocks. So, every wererat in the module is presented in three (nearly identical) blocks for its different forms. Surely they could have found a better way to use the column inches.

Another serious flaw is the presence of ogre zombies on the wandering monster tables. These fatties do a MINIMUM of 9 damage with a successful hit. That will drop most 1st-level PCs. With ONE hit. Ogre zombies are a serious threat to any party in this module's level range (1-3) and a GM who let's them show up randomly is asking for his session to be ruined. What's worse, on level 4 of the dungeon the wander monster tabel actually calls for encounters with SIX ogre zombies. That must be a mistake.

I recommend you spend your money on something else --Wicked Fantasy Factory's (also from Goodman Games) modules are more fun, if you have a taste for the ridiculous; or even Dungeon Crawl Classics #2, also for 1st-level parties. Just glancing over it, it looks superior to #1. Stay tuned for my review.