Customer Reviews

The Dungeon of Death: A Dungeon Crawl Adventure (Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Forgotten Realms)

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I just finished running this adventure and I have to say that my players and I were both pretty satisfied. The traps were good, especially the "Indiana Jones"-style staircase to nowhere with the 8ft iron ball...it had a very good trigger and gave the characters a chance to do something rather than just stop a flying arrow with their face or fall...My lead character missed a dexterity check I made him roll, and tripped. The other three characters had to then make a Dex check with a +4 to the roll to leap over him...they all made it! Luckily for them he was a dwarf! Anyway, the idea of the Shadow Curse was good, except that I changed it to subtract one HIT POINT per hour from character max, rather than subtracting one from the character's prime requisite attribute. That was a bad choice for two reasons: 1) the characters would never have completed this dungeon in 18 hours or less, and certainly would be in no shape to fight the nabassu Tanar'ri at the end if they had come close and 2) I would rather not take adventure time by changing the characters attributes every game hour! Imagine the adjusting it would do to THACO charts and things of that nature. Just too much character adjustment for me. Subtracting a max hit point every hour seemed to work out well, though. By the end, my characters were struggling at just over half their normal hit points, which I believe proved to be a much more realistic and convenient expression of the Curse. But, all properly run modules by good DMs are never run completely as the author intended, because AD&D will always be the consumate "house-rules" game. I recommend the adventure. One of the better ones put out lately.

You might not want to tell your players the name of this dungeon first--it seems to make them very nervous. The traps in particular are very well-done, and I thought the curse on the complex is a great idea to make things more difficult for the players. This should be a lot of fun to play without being too deadly for the players.

This is truely an excellent adventure, in the classic AD&D style dungeon crawl format. Deep and involved it provides extensive backround and good ways to use this dungeon in your campaign. It will take some skilled PCs to get through this adventure, as many traps and a curse lay in thier way. This will try the skills of even some of the best gamers around. If you get this module, be careful not to take it easy on your players because they will complain a lot about some of the nasty little quirks of this module. A must have for all the worlds devious DMs.