The Twilight Tomb (Forgotten Realms) [Paperback]

Disclaimer: I've just finished reading this module and haven't actually put my group through it - although I certainly intend to do so.

Firstly, this is an ok adventure but is nothing special. Which is kind of disappointing for me, given that I'm a huge Forgotten Realms fan. It is published as an adventure suitable for a group of 3rd level characters, I have some reservations about that. The creatures are reasonably low level mostly skeletons, zombies, hobgoblins and orcs. Every now and then there is an encounter that I think is way to powerful. For instance the two main antagonists, would if played right, cream four 3rd level characters.

Besides the power level of some of the encounters the rest of the adventure is reasonably solid. Its biggest selling point is that it's a site-based adventure so it can literally be dropped into any ongoing campaign with a minimal amount of prep.

The plot is reasonably good although the storyline weaved around the plot is a little wishy-washy, but a creative GM can certainly get around any difficult questions the players might come up with as to how certain people/creatures got to be involved.

The guts of the adventure are that a person/thing has gone missing in the forest and the characters are hired/instructed to retrieve them/it. They discover a stone circle of menhirs and wham-bam find themselves in the demi-plane of night with no way home. There is a citadel comprising of four towers (linked by bridges made of glass - in fact the entire citadel is made of glass - glass that you can't smash mind you!) over a raging sea which the characters get to explore, learning as they go that there are two factions at war in the citadel.

The original occupant and a mercenary band led by a mysterious half-orc. As I mentioned above the general level of the encounters shouldn't challenge most groups. GM's will have to be careful with the encounters that feature the Shardcaster, Mourel (original citadel owner) and Savera (mysterious half-orc). In fact if the characters aren't fully healed with lots of protection magic in effect then Savera will probably clean them up.

The adventure concludes once the characters have killed everything, secured the key that will allow them to travel back to the material plane (hopefully with the person/item they were sent to retrieve!)

One other thing has just occured to me as a little gripe. Towards the end in the description of one of the major bad guys it describes how 'it' got out and ended up capturing a certain item. Yet there is no explanation as to why the bad guy decided to return to the demi-plane?!? The creature comes from the Unapproachable East sourcebook and so further details might be in that which might add some contex.

Overall, it deserves its 3 stars, but nothing more.

I tried running my group through this adventure, but none of us got very excited and we had to scrap it 25% through. There just isn't a really strong plot motivation for the characters, as none of the "suggested hooks" really have a lot to do with the adventure. In fact, the whole point of the hook is really just to kind of fool the PCs into appearing in this magical place, and then their primary motivation is really just to figure out a way to escape. On top of that, the module would have the PCs searching through the wilderness for about a month before finding this area(25% per day of finding a half-elf village, 20% of having that village know anything about the area, and then 1-2 days travel time to get there.

So, the PCs have little reason to find the place, have to spend a lot of effort finding the place, and once they're there, the only point is for them to figure out a way to leave.

Edit: I believe that the only other review implies that good DMs can create a more plausible reason for why their PCs are here. That's a valid point, but is still a negative to me. A published module should minimize the amount of work that the DM has to do to prepare- that's the point to buying a pre-written module, isn't it, to save prep time? If the basic pre-packaged hook can't even really stand on its own with most groups, then the module is flawed.

Also, this is adventure has a *LOT* of quirky plot. This wouldn't be so bad if it more than just a small bit of it was easily learnable by the PCs. Unfortunately, without some strong DM creativity, most of the reasons for the goings on will be lost on the PCs and I'd guesstimate that 90% of the plot will only be known by the DM. I believe it's likely that the PCs will either treat it as a hack and slash or simply be confused as to why NPCs are acting certain ways.

Also, there are MANY sourcebooks other than the Core Rulebooks referred to in the module. Although the book says that only a few of them are "required", many monsters don't even have descriptions as to what they are, which would cause you to need these random books or search online thoroughly before playing.

Edit: Since it seems to me that it would be fairly easy to give a short, one-paragraph description of what a monster looks like and its basic reason for being, the absence of this seems to me to be a method of ensuring additional book purchases. Really, it is absoultely ridiculous to have a monster appear, and not even be able to describe what it looks like to the PCs.

In addition, and possibly most important, there are numerous challenges that are WAY too hard for the 4 3rd level characters recommended. Almost all of the major fights (4-5) are at least Challenge rating 5 or 6, and include monsters who can either do area of effect attacks, or do an attack/spell which has an 80% chance or so of killing/disabling one character per round.

This is a paint by numbers adventure with almost no artwork. Usually even the worst adventures have at least some material that can be repurposed and used as you see fit. Not so in this case. Extremely unfortunate, considering that Greg Vaughan has written many other excellent adventures.