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This really is the kind of adventure you can wrap a whole campaign around. I highly recommend it. This is the Seven Pillared Hall, a trade city built in the ruins of an ancient minotaur city, ruled by the ironfisted peacekeepers the Ordinators Arcanis, deep underneath a mountain and lit with magical green flame.
It's the best of 4th edition D&D. Just great stuff.The adventure is broken into three open-ended objectives, tracking down some slaves captured and taken for trade in the hall. In fact, for the past month I have been.
Duergar, drow, halflings and dwarves meet and trade beneath it's vaulted stone roof.It's populated with a wonderful mix of nonplayer characters, a guilt ridden man cursed with lycanthropy, an exiled drow curio shop dealer, the big ogre bully tasked with keeping the peace, the grim righteous dragonborn who finds herself being bent down the path of warlockery by the corrupting enticements of her imp mentor. Gone is the quaint little thatch roof village surrounded by farmland. Gone.
Liberating them leads you between the various parts of the Labyrinth beneath the mountain, taking on various of the Hall's factions, and then to unravelling a conspiracy which threatens the entire Nentir Vale.But beyond the adventure, there's lists of places to explore, detailed just enough to let you spin your own adventures through the many cool places they hint at, and a list of encounters with a rogues gallery of specific enemies that can become an even bigger part of the storyline--like the creepy deathlock wight Az-Al-Bani.Just great stuff. It'll give you a wonderful place you can keep gaming in for months, even after the adventure is done.
This module was the polar opposite of Keep on the Shadowfell (H1). If your group wants to kill Duegar and Drow then this module might work for you, but if you want something like a believable story you should make your own adventure. This is a problem for any GM with little time to prepare.
There is only one map sheet and it is very location specific which makes it not re-usable. Everytime my players ran into a "generate your own dungeon" section they started having more fun. Keep on the Shadowfell's encounters hung together cohesively, and map tiles were numerous, reusable, and high quality.Thunderspire on the otherhand is pure dungeon crawl.
Playing this module after that Keep made it almost insufferable. Unlike Keep on the Shadowfell which had very handy monster stat blocks and encounter notes, this module required you to make your own monster reference sheets for battle. Also entire sections of the module were left for the GM to implement.
Eventually the group decided to leave the module's track and do something else because it wasn't fun. This was $25 dollars I wish I had spent elsewhere.
You're able to improvise all parts of the story rather than being stuck with the encounters that are written. It came in a very timely manner, well packaged and the booklets are of much better quality than the last published adventure, H1: Keep on the Shadowfell, of which the booklet for that adventure had some printing issues in that the ink rubbed off on whoever was reading it mid-session. This adventure is really an overall improvement over Keep on the Shadowfell in every aspect. And there are more NPC character personalities described than H1: KotS, so out-of-combat situations are more interesting. It's a great buy if you're looking for an adventure with intrigue and depth, without having to spend the time writing it out yourself.
At first I was upset that my books were no longer valid for RPGA campaigns but I got over it soon enough. The DM's job is easier, even designing a campaign of your own is streamlined.As far as this product is concerned. I have been waiting for 4e D&D for a year. I bought the books, and pl;ayed a few games. The story makes sense in the context of the gameworld. I still didn't want to spend another $100 on books. The game is streamlined and fast moving.
The encounters are easy to follow. I was at the Con last year when they made the official announcement for 4e (and the demise of Living Greyhawk campaign). I have to say it is a well written adventure with plot twists and surprises for every D&D fan. But after following the development and teh changes they proposed I was admittedly curious. That changed my mind. the NPC's are easily identifiable and easy to run. I give this adventure a thumbs up.
I love 4e and this sequal to Keep on the Shadowfell is awesome. The illustrations and the story are fantastic.
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