Customer Reviews

The Shattered Gates of Slaughtergarde (Dungeons & Dragons d20 3.5 Fantasy Roleplaying Adventure)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This adventure sets a campaign background, and sets an excellent adventure pace for 3 dungeons, as well as dropping great hints for the DM to set up side adventures during and after the dungeons.

I ran this adventure for a group of 5 players, and it was excellent.

The encounter format is typically 2 pages, with room and encounter description going together, along with monster tactics, in some cases, broken down round by round, explaining when monsters flee, etc.

I'm very satisfied with this product.

This says 'An adventure for characters 1-6' but it's really much more. You're getting a mini-campaign setting. This has to be one of the better adventure products I've seen from WOTC in a while. Lots of source material inside and outside the dungeons themselves, lots of places a DM can insert his/her own campaign elements. The maps are well laid out. There are lot of things here that could be easily adapted and used outside of this mini-campaign.

I've been running The Shattered Gates of Slaughterguard for three weeks now and I'm very pleased. My players are having a blast too.

I've been DMing games for a long time, both published and self-made campaigns. I've played/run several of the "official" Wizards of the Coast modules as well as a lot of generic adventures intended for D20 use. Hands down, this is the best I've encountered. The good points are as follows:

-Easy to run.

-The information is presented in a concise, lean format that makes finding information a breeze (for example, the overall maps of the dungeon are in one book, while the individual room descriptions are in another. So you can have both open at once for the first 2 dungeons)

-The story is more of a framework as opposed to a specific set of events, allowing you a lot of creativity.

-It's very adaptable. There's a small section that deals with making it fit with just about any game. Including Forgotten Realms and Eberron.

-Comes with lots of handouts for the players as well as a short "players guide" that the players are free to flip through.

The list goes on and on. If you are new to D&D, this is a great place to start. If you are a veteran, this will provide a wonderful starting point for just about any campaign you might have in mind.

This module has done everything right, Beautiful color, great maps, not only is each room easily noted on the map but each room has its own map on its pages as well as ways to either up or lower the difficulty of various rooms.
All modules should use this as their standard.

This was a very good module in many ways, but it fell short in many others. Some of the pluses where the layout, the plans of tactics, and the very nice illustrations to pull out at key moments of the adventure. The variety of foes was also very nice, though it really began to stretch credibility in the second section.

Some of the things that issue was found with were the lack of treasure rewards for the challenges faced and the near need for railroading players along some lines if their character concepts did not fit at all with how some futhering of the plot was planned (had some particular problems getting the group to warm up to the introduction of the Luminary Knights). The later was as much an issue with my running of it as anything, but the first issue raised was a pretty big one.

By the DMG, there should be a certain level of wealth for a character at a certain level. Not necessarily cash, but including things like items, armor, etc. In 3.5, this was one of the main ways of pumping your character up enough to handle the coming challenges. If a character has a severe deficit in wealth, they might not have the resources to handle the challenges thrown at them as written. And many modules are notorious for being stingy to some degree with treasure... even when they have guidelines in place to help determine how much treasure should be in place in a particular adventure.

The first section of the module was by far the best. Low level PCs, really strange and creepy environment, some difficult foes but with some restraints on them to keep them from being over-powering, and some unusual encounters. The second section was the weakest as while there were many possibilities with it (the whole political ramifications of such a major family siding with the forces of evil), it more or less bypassed all that. There was also practially no connection between part two and part three, unless the party goes to work with the Knights Luminary. The third part was a moderately decent wrap up of the campaign, though in ways it threw in foes of a higher challenge than the characters were ready to handle (in part due to that earlier issue of low treasure). This became especially bad when the tactics used began to group foes from different encounters together (while understandable, the grouping of say the gnoll archers and the hill giant made for a very deadly encounter. One definite PC death and a near party wipe).

Good points: artwork, first section, layout, tactics, premise of the campaign

Bad points: second section, low treasure to challenge ratio, at times excessively high challenges to party level.

When i first came upon the adventure at a local used books store i fell in love with the layout because it reminded me of the old 2nd edition box sets. I bought it right then and there and have since read through it twice. Unfortunately the layout was not quite as good as i had thought it would be and the adventure itself was lacking. The problems with the layout begin with the settings book and the campaign book where they have split up the dungeons and while the first two are in the settings book the final one is in the campaign guide. Then there are the handouts which really don't seem that useful but i won't complain because they are extras. The play map included looks like it will be useful but i hardly ever use the poster playmats included because they are too small and lacking.

Now comes my main complaint. The Adventure itself is a standard boring dungeon crawl and while it's true that a lot of information about the surrounding area is provided and fleshed out as to make it a mini campaign the overall story is lacking.

I don't like standard dungeoncrawls and my players hate them. So after seeing a few reviews on here i thought i would post mine. I normally don't post a review until i have ran or played an adventure but unfortunately i will probably not be running this one any time soon. I will have to take the campaign info and make an interesting story from it and there are just too many other great campaigns out there like ...red hand of doom and expedition to castle ravenloft which are both mini campaigns with a lot more story than "The Shattered Gates of Slaughtergarde." I will probably eventually run it but with 4.0 on the rise it will probably get pushed back behind some of the newer campaigns before i find time to convert it.

For all of the negatives ive stated i still like the packaging and the adventure idea as well as the areas that are mentioned rather than the dungeon itself. I actually think the surrounding areas are more interesting. So that being said i wish they would have just went all out and made it a boxed set and doubled the size of the guides, i would gladly pay 50-60 bucks for a nice box set full of info, maps, and key items. Wizards will never produce box sets and i think this will be just about as close to those classics as we ever get. (Note: the new 4.0 quest seems to be packaged the same way but i'm not sure if it contains more than a standard quest and quick rules)

In closing, Shattered Gates was a great step in the right direction for wizards in layout. I would rank it #4 in mini campaigns from wizards of the coast behind redhand of doom, expedition to castle ravenloft, and expedition to the ruins of Greyhawk. As an overall quest i would rank it farther back behind some of the other greats. It is a good adventure even if it is a standard dungeoncrawl and it can be fleshed out. I just don't think its worth my time to flesh it out right now and may come back to it down the road but if your looking for a big dungeon (all 3 parts can be connected)or a mini campaign with 1st edition flavor then this one is for you.

This is so different from your usual module that just lists "there's a stream, and six goblins" and only in play do you discover that the goblins have no way to get across the stream. This module explains what tactics the monsters will use, round by round, how they'll react to what the players do, and how the relevant sections of the rules work. You could run this adventure straight out of the book with no prep. It's amazing and the way all modules should be written.

It would also make a great module for a new DM who doesn't know the rules for cover or would never think of putting a blind troll in an encounter because they don't know the rules for blindness. By the end of this module you'll be a rules expert.

My main issue with Slaughtergarde is that it is very light on non-combat interactions. Granted, it's true that it gives you a good deal of background info about the area, and indeed serves as a sort of mini campaign setting. However, when the PCs interact with important NPCs (when they are being given their assignments and so on), I largely had to write all that interaction myself-- the adventure glosses over such things, with only a few pages of non encounter stuff in the entire book (not counting the appendices).

I was also not terribly impressed by the dungeons, which were somewhat large and repetitive. The first had perhaps too many fights against the same type of opponent, and the second (the shrine) was so big and winding my PCs began to get frustrated at how long they had to stay down there.

I also feel the adventure was not given a proper ending-- the last encounter is somewhat anti-climatic. Had I finished DMing this adventure (the party broke up before then, I'm afraid), I planned to write a final encounter in which the Demon Lord Muh-Tan-Lah (I believe that was his name) is summoned and fights the PCs.

Of course, there was some quality adventure material in here as well-- the encounter with the Maug in the first dungeon, for example, and the boss fight against the giant spider in the shrine was also fun. Additionally, the encounter against the Yuan-Ti and his Dragon was one of the most satisfying I ever DMed, though probably due mostly to specific aspects of my PC's party.

I am not saying, then, that Slaughtergarde is awful-- just that there is no reason to run it when there are other, better adventures available for purchase. Running it was my first DMing experience and I think it was harder than it had to be. If you don't mind having to fix it up, though, you can still go for it.

This is a great way to introduce begginers to the way a D&D adventure could be played and ran.