Hello to everyone out there in RPG-land and welcome to DM Samuel’s RPG Musings. This week’s post is a review of a one-shot adventure I ran a few weeks ago for my usual gaming group. I’m going to start by giving you my overall impressions after reading the adventure, and then there will be a follow-up post describing the actual play session in detail, with my comments interspersed throughout. Caution – there will be spoilers in this review, so if you are going to play this adventure, you shouldn’t read this until afterwards. And now, without further ado, I bring you…
A Review: Dungeon Crawl Classics #59: Mists of Madness
A 4e compatible adventure for character level 1
by Harley Stroh
Price: The price of this module is unbeatable! This is the classic $2.00 adventure – I kid you not, two dollars, it’s right on the front cover (see below). Goodman Games did a great job getting one of the first 4e published adventures out there (in fact, they published the module under the 3.5 edition OGL, before Wizards of the Coast announced that 4e would not be published under an open license… Whoops! Sorry for the digression) this adventure cost me $2.16 out the door – it was awesome! (5 out of 5 stars)
Quality: 32 pages, bound well with saddle staples, a nice sheen on the cover (printed on thick stock cardboard), and good print quality on the pages all add up to a high quality product. It has so-so internal art, a decent layout, and nice black and white maps and player handouts. Given the price paid, this is exceptional quality and value. (4.5 out of 5 stars)
Does it plays well as a stand alone or in a series? I DMed this as a stand alone one-off session for my group and it worked relatively well. While this particular DCC is not part of an official series of adventures, I can see it working better as a springboard module to get your group set-up together, with this being the first adventure in a long campaign. Since this adventure takes place South of Punjar, it could easily be added as the beginning of a Punjar focused campaign (using DCC #53, #56, and #60) or as a side quest during that story arc. It is also flexible enough to be plopped down into any world that the DM chooses to outline for his/her players. (4 out of 5 stars)
Ease of integration into your own system/world: As stated above, rather than making this occur near Punjar, any DM could easily port it to their own world and make it a side quest (or a major digression for the party, depending on how the DM worked it in). To be more specific, other than naming the ArchLich and giving a short background for him, the adventure doesn’t presume any particular pantheon of gods/goddesses or any specific type of government or legal system, or any type of professions or races that may exist in the world in which this module will be run. That makes it completely portable to any world or campaign. At the same time, if you do not already have an historic reference point for the adventure, the author provides a two page background story for you to get acquainted with. Either way, the module works, just about the only requirement that it has is for your world to have a swampy or boggy place for the action to occur. (5 out of 5 stars)
Writing Quality and Organization: Good clarity, few typos, easily understood flow of information. The only thing this adventure suffers from, in terms of organization, is the thing that they all suffer from… a map in the back that the DM must keep flipping to in order to see exactly what the next area will be, and the need to find different pages where information describing different areas is written. It’s not too bad in this adventure, but it is still there, as it is in all published modules (this is something that, in my mind, is unavoidable). (4 out of 5 stars)
Map(s): For the most part, they were well designed and easy to understand. A couple of pages of pretty good black-and-white renditions of the area being explored, with very good gridding so that I could tell exactly how big an area was supposed to be. This was important since I was improvising my dungeon tiles to try and make them fit the maps as much as possible. Unfortunately, the module didn’t come with a larger fold out battlemap to use with miniatures. The one major drawback was that the maps were not easily removed from the binding. To take the map page out I would have had to either A) remove the saddle staples and then replace them, or B) cut the maps out as close to the spine as possible. Neither of those options appealed to me, so I left the map page in the book and flipped back and forth when needed. (3 out of 5 stars)
Propensity for railroading: High, but this is the case for most published adventures. Unless this module is run as a part of a greater campaign, there is really no way to NOT railroad the players. If it was part of a greater campaign, and the players weren’t interested in pursuing this particular plot or side quest, then the DM could just let them move on to other places or quests. That’s easy in their own overarching story arc or campaign, but not so easy when running this as a spur of the moment one-off. This adventure does about average in these terms. (3 out of 5 stars)
Plot in a Nutshell: A cultist group is performing strange rights and threatening a small hamlet. The PCs are dispatched across a black swamp, towards a crumbling black spire, to put an end to the rituals. While doing this, they discover that the leader of the cult is a foolish warlock who hopes to awaken an ancient, powerful archlich and gain its power. (3 out of 5 stars)
And now for the Crunch – possibly the most important thing for the DM to know:
Are the encounters well designed? Yes and No. Yes because they fit the story-line impeccably. There are swamp crocodiles, half-naked human cultists doing a worship dance while a half-ogre uses large bones to beat a drum and a priestess prepares to sacrifice a female elf (see above picture). There are giant swamp frogs that reach down and grab unsuspecting humanoids with their long sticky tongues, plenty of cavern traps (including scythes and pits) and, as the players get further into the tomb, shambling creatures made of creepy crawlies, decrepit skeletons, and shadowy warders. So, this is just the sort of thing you would expect from a haunted tomb in the middle of a swamp. (3 out of 5 stars)
So yes, the encounters fit the scene, but are they all well designed? Not exactly. I think the problem may partially be one of scaling. The module is really made for a party of 5 first level PCs. There are scaling instructions on page 3 that suggest (if you have a weaker party, of fewer than 5 PCs) taking out a creature here and there (the author gives specific encounters) and changing one of the encounters so that the cultists don’t get timely reinforcements. It also suggests that, if you have a stronger party (6 or more PCs or higher than first level) you should increase the number of creatures in certain encounters.
This sounds very reasonable and I thought it would be fine, but I don’t like taking creatures out of an encounter. I had only 4 players, so I had a weaker party than the recommended 5. To counter this without removing creatures from the game, I had them make 2nd level PCs. You will see how that turned out in my next post, which will outline the actual session and my thoughts about the adventure during and after running it.
The encounter breakdown in this module is as follows:
7 encounters at encounter level 1
2 encounters at encounter level 2
3 encounters at encounter level 3
1 encounter at encounter level 5
This is set up so that all of the level 3 and above encounters, save one, happen at the end of the adventure. This makes for a very lopsided session. The party will have 11 easy encounters and then suddenly run up against some very difficult adversaries. So it didn’t seem balanced and that made me feel like the encounters weren’t well designed. Most of the level 1 and 2 encounters turn out to be rated easy under the 4e system (less than 500 XP). The level 3 encounters turned out to be standard difficulty for a 1st level party of 5, except the party can only realistically encounter two of them.
Part of this poor weighting of encounters may be due to the fact that they put this out very quickly after the official 4e release and was written before the core rulebooks were readily available (remember, it was written under the 3.5 OGL). So maybe they didn’t have a lot of guidance in generating encounters for the new system, but I think part of it was by design. If a party of 5 first level PCs finished every encounter (except killing Skoulos; see below) and received maximum XP for each one, it would still only net each player 1150 XP – barely to level 2! That fits with a party leveling every 10-12 encounters and I think that is what they were going for. In this way it sounds balanced, but when you look at the range of encounters and encounter levels, there are too many easy ones at the beginning and then the party gets hit with a couple of really difficult ones at the end.
For me, here’s the problem with the imbalance… as I was reading through this adventure, I got the feeling that they wanted the party to have several easy encounters and then suddenly enter the black spire tomb and be forced to switch gears and increase their intensity very quickly. This isn’t a bad thing in itself, but it doesn’t work well with my DMing style, and especially not in a one-shot game that we intended to complete in one 5 hour session. The PCs were taking a short rest after every encounter, but not taking any long rests. This means they would have to save their dailies for the climactic final, which means they are a little hobbled in the two rapidly occurring, relatively more difficult encounters right before the final conflict.
Lets talk about the final encounter for a moment… Depending upon how it goes, it could be a hard encounter or a nearly impossible one. The author even states “If Malakai is permitted to awaken [the ArchLich] Skoulos, the encounter will most certainly end in a bloody slaughter.” (page 18) This is because Skoulos is a level 14 elite controller with defenses that a level 1 party would be unlikely to even get close to hitting. Still, this in itself is not necessarily a bad thing if it is set up correctly, but let me set the scene for you:
The PCs have gotten to the ruined temple area via a portal that teleported them to specific spots on the outskirts of the map. They see Malakai the Mad (the foolish leader of the cult) ascending a stepped pyramid that leads to a sarcophagus. Malakai starts the encounter at the bottom of the stairs and has a movement of 6, since the pyramid is only 20 feet high Malakai only needs one turn to climb the stairs and get to the top. It then takes him 5 turns to awaken Skoulos. So the PCs get a total of 6 turns to get to Malakai and stop the ritual. Not so difficult huh? Ahhh, but there is a problem you see, the PCs start the encounter atop mounds of sloping scree in the corners of the encounter area. The scree makes the terrain difficult if they try and cross a slope, but increases their movement if they succeed on a DC 15 acrobatics check and they are moving towards the bottom of the slope, which is supposed to simulate them slipping down the slope.
To make matters worse, when they teleport into the area, Malakai immediately summons 8 skeletons (+1d6 skeletons per round, not to exceed 30 total). Each PC has been teleported to a different corner of the area, and each is between 16 and 20 squares away from the top of the pyramid. One-third of that area could be considered difficult terrain because of the scree. Being teleported into a dispersed pattern makes it more difficult for the PCs to use typical tactics since the combatants, and their allies, are all spread around.
If the closest PC succeeds on their acrobatics checks, and they have a movement of 6, they can make it to the top of the pyramid in 3 turns, less of they do a double move or run. Unfortunately they will likely be over-run with skeletons, which will probably slow them down. They have a choice of running by the skeletons and being subject to attacks of opportunity, or stopping to fight the skeletons, in which case they probably won’t stop Malakai in time.
Now, if the players entered the portal from one encounter area, then they still have their weapons and equipment, but if they entered from the other encounter area they have no weapons and no equipment (it was teleported to a place atop the sarcophagus). This could make the encounter difficult, especially since there is a 20% chance that any weapon they pick up is weak and will break after one use. If a PC gets to Malakai, he must defeat him (with or without weapons) and destroy the phylactery that contains Skoulos’ soul. If that is done they can loot the tomb and leave via the portals in which they arrived. They must do it quickly, however, since the destruction of the phylactery causes the weakened pillars (you know, the ones holding up the ceiling) to start to collapse and the roof is going to cave in within 5 rounds.
I admit this is an exciting scenario and it sounds like an exhilarating thing to run. If Malakai succeeds in awakening Skoulos, it takes the ArchLich only 3 rounds to rend Malakai limb from limb and then he turns his attention on the party. The only way to escape is to topple the pillars in the giant chamber in an attempt to make the ceiling collapse, and then run to the teleport entry point and escape at the last second. Very dramatic! It sounded great the first time I read it…
My opinion of the encounter may be colored by the fact that I was running the adventure as a one-shot, one-session game, and so didn’t have time to really give this last encounter the place it deserved. I could see this as a climactic end to a two or three session story arc in which the players all banded together and learned the whole history of Skoulos and the legends surrounding him, along with killing cultists and finding out who Malakai is and what he is about… but in a one-shot that stuff just doesn’t get enough time.
My poor planning is partly to blame since I should have cut out two or three of the earlier encounters and skipped some things to get to the end sooner. To be fair to myself, though, many of the encounters were needed so that the PCs could find tidbits of information and figure out that they had to destroy the phylactery before Malakai woke up Skoulos.
Does it play better or worse than it reads? For this you will have to read part two of the review, in which I describe the actual play session and comment on certain aspects of the adventure. There were a couple of encounters that made the session extremely fun, but I can’t tell you about those yet…
Main Pros: price, quality, easy integration into existing campaign
Main Cons: encounters need to be revised before running, maps need to be copied before use
Final Rating: Based on my initial reading, and my review here, the module would get an average of 3.9 stars out of 5. Overall, taking synergy into account and ignoring mathematics, I would give this adventure 4.25 out of 5 stars. It garners this great rating partially because the price is just so fantastic. But much of the module really does warrant a high rating. You will have to read part 2 of this review to see if my opinion of the module gets better or worse based on the actual play session.
Hopefully you will come back in a couple of days and see what I have to say about running the adventure.
Until next time, I wish you good gaming.
~DM Samuel
For more information on the Dungeon Crawl Classics line of adventures, please visit Goodman Games at:
Dungeon Crawl Classics #59 Mists of Madness is copyright © 2008 Goodman Games and was written under version 1.0 of the open gaming license copyright 2000 by Wizards of the Coast. Retail Price: $2.00 (USD) Item # GMG5058, ISBN # 978-0-9816663-2-7