It finally, appropriately enough, came. The long awaited and much anticipated Secrets of the Netherworld in all its glorious full color majesty arrived just in time for me to read it over my traditional Christmas dinner of Spam and powdered eggs with a blued-steel and gun oil desert. Flipping through the book helped distract me from how much I miss my three kids during the holidays, and gave me something better to do than drink heavy, listen to old country western songs, and ponder the emptiness of existence.
It’s a good looking book. Here’s a bunch of purely random shots of the interior artwork.
With art this good, I’ve been up reading it all night.
Sometimes twice in the same night.
It’s going to take me longer than expected to run this thing. I have been running a weekly pickup game down to the local friendly – the one that I can still play at without wearing a fake moustache and dark glasses – and that means mostly level ones and twos. There is a local convention coming up in early March, though. As a mid-level adventure, and one that looks to work best over multiple delves, old E. Reagan might just have to take a swing at a marathon multi-event legacy game with pre-gens.
This here module is decisively old school in feel. There are a lot of keyed locations, but the place is factional. A party could easily turn the denizens against each other, and wait for a lot of the problems to take care of themselves. The little bit of role-play available consists of dealing with strange and inhuman nasties, so I’m guessing grunts and gestures and a bit of the old charades are the best players will manage.
Which is a good thing.
Forget a mommyGF, who’s ready for a mummyGF, raise your hand!
The map does not adhere to B/X standards, which might be a problem. It’s crowded. Like, really crowded. With wandering monsters thrown in, a team might have some trouble sneaking and peaking. It might be worth logging wandering monster encounters, and as the players wipe out the natives, reducing the chances of encounters or reducing the numbers of creatures encountered each time. I don’t know, it might even say to do that in the rules, and I’m just not remembering it right now.
It surely does look like the kind of living dungeon that will keep a party and a thinking DM on his toes.
