A trek across the Shadow Marches leads weary travelers to Blackroot, a quiet village of ramshackle huts nestled among the darkwood trees. Here, orcs and humans live in peace. However, all is not well. Something evil has crawled up from below, threatening to devour the village and its denizens. Only a party of brave heroes stands in its way.
This Dungeons & Dragons adventure, created for Free RPG Day 2009, is set in the Eberron campaign setting although it can be adapted for any D&D campaign. Khyber's Harvest is designed for 2nd level characters and includes a complete adventure plus five pre-generated D&D characters and 1 Dungeon Tile.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting, but hard,
By
This review is from: Khyber's Harvest with Dungeon Tile (Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition) (Paperback)
First off, I have only played the free download version, the difference being the inclusion of dungeon tiles with this set that actually costs money. A reasonable facsimile of the encounters as shown in the module itself can be created using Lost Caverns of the Underdark: Dungeon Tiles 5 (Dungeons & Dragons) (No. 5) -- in fact some rooms can be set up exactly using this set alone, so if you have that tile set, you probably are fine downloading the free version from Wizards; and that assumes you even care about dungeon tiles. This mostly takes place in a cave, so you can get by quite easily with a dry erase mat and probably save a lot of time laying out rooms.
But I digress. How about the module itself? I have read reviews on other forums from other people who love this module. In particular, they like some of the enemies, such as the living darkness and the freaky eye in the wall, etc. Granted that stuff can be pretty cool, but I still rank this adventure with only three stars. I'm not going to list the plusses; I can summarize them simply by saying, it's a basic adventure module and almost any of those have their good points if you are adapting them to your own campaign. I didn't try to work this into my campaign; my group has tried it exclusively as a standalone "side" adventure using characters rolled at level 2 specifically for this module. I've run parts of it now several times as alternately DM and player, so I've a bit of a taste from both perspectives. I'll also say that in a fair assessment of my own abilities, I'm a great storyteller but only a so-so DM. So others might succeed famously with this module in the same places where I've failed. 1. The opening town and its associated skill challenge don't have much going for them. I have yet to run a 4e Skill Challenge that was fun, but this one in Kyber's Harvest is particularly unsatisfying, because the results don't give the players a sense of accomplishment. Nothing they do is going to get anybody to give them any information, so you have them rolling these great diplomacy checks and still getting stonewalled by the person they are talking to. If they pass the whole skill check, the DM is allowed to show them a blood trail leading out of town toward the cave they need to go to. Meh! That has nothing to do with the skill check itself! If they fail, the DM is supposed to have the villagers attack them. But the villagers are just a bunch of innocent minions, so your party will kill the whole town with ease and then what? So, your party is going to be stuck if they fail unless you show them the blood trail anyway, so in the end, there's really no point for the skill challenge. Have your folks walk around and get a sense for how unwelcome they are and how on edge the town seems, and then put them on the trail to the cave. 2. The fights are too hard for a modestly geared level two party of five players. Maybe my group just sucks, but it took us FOUR tries -- each time with different classes in the party -- to finally beat the very first combat encounter, composed of two orcs and two casters. The orcs have almost twice the hit points of anybody in the party, and depending on their damage rolls can two-hit kill just about anyone. On top of that, they get to heal once when bloodied, so effectively, they have three times the HP of any party member. If you use one of the pre-gen characters that comes with the download -- such as a pally that does an average of maybe 10 dmg per hit -- you'd better roll a lot of hits in a row. A couple of bad attack rolls and your party is on its heels very quickly. Subsequent encounters are just as hard. You'll want a controller in your party that can take out groups of non-minions, along with tactics that get your melee fighters out of his area of effect. Also, if you don't have some serious radiant attacks in your level 2 party, you're going to be screwed when you face a level 8 living darkness that takes half damage if non-radiant (but is nicely vulnerable to radiant damage). 3. The reward is not all that great. The "Coat of Eyes" artifact may or may not even be something you want in your campaign and the module also introduces "symbiont" gear (such as a tongueworm and coercive gauntlets) that actually attach to your character and cause problems for you if you roll a 1. Neat idea, but not supported in subsequent D&D documentation (not found in any manual or online resource that I can find). So, all in all, not a waste of time, but we've wiped a lot, and spent a lot of time healing up when we didn't. And I didn't care much at all for the way it opens.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
freely available,
By Caraculiambro (La Mancha and environs) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Khyber's Harvest with Dungeon Tile (Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition) (Paperback)
This was distributed for free on RPG Day in 2009.
The reason Amazon doesn't have any used copies of this for sale is probably not just because of that, but also because this adventure can be downloaded in its entirety for free on the WoTC website, minus the tiles, of course. As the WoTC blurb has it: "This D&D adventure, created for Free RPG Day 2009, is set in the Eberron campaign setting, but it can be adapted for any D&D campaign. Khyber's Harvest is an adventure for 2nd-level characters who travel to a peaceful village only to discover that it's threatened by an evil which has crawled up ... from below."
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