The Slow Build

Here is something that the Well of Demons does well: building tension.

Without a doubt the best section of Thunderspire Labyrinth is the Proving Grounds. This is the central portion of the Well of Demons, intended to test potential worshippers of Baphomet before allowing them access to the inner sanctum. The Proving Grounds is essentially an extended lock-and-key puzzle consisting of a total of five encounters and culminating in an epic battle with a green dragon.

Thunderspire knows that the Proving Grounds is good. It knows that fighting a dragon on its home turf should be a big thing. And so it finally does what it should have been doing all along: it gives us a little showmanship.

The module introduces us to the Proving Grounds end-first. The very first part of the puzzle that the players see is the conclusion - the massive purpose-built arena in which they'll end up fighting the dragon. Of course, at this stage they don't know about the dragon, and very fact that such a massive and complex area is apparently unoccupied is both ominous and foreboding. There are a number of deep holes, a looping corridor with disturbing grooves in the floor, and other odd features such as glowing pools of liquid and ruined statues; players have another four encounters before they see how it all works and that's plenty of time for their imaginations to hype the area into a killing floor of unmatched ferocity.

The first of the four preliminary encounters is one of Thunderspire's rare non-combat moments. Shortly after beginning to explore the Proving Grounds, the players come across the ghosts of a group of past adventurers who failed Baphomet's test. The three ghosts are essentially good guys, and are willing to share some information if they feel the PCs are equally motivated by unselfish goals.

The ghosts aren't exactly wacky Ghostbusters-esque spirits. They're ever so slightly more gritty. Each of the trio bear the marks of their death - one's head is crushed by the dragon's jaws, one's features are deformed by the dragon's breath, and the third has his torso rended by giant draconic claws. Throughout the encounter no one says the word "dragon" or reveals the nature of the Guardian, but the clues are there for players to begin harbouring some suspicions. It's great for players to see three competent heroes who have already failed at the task the PCs are attempting, and it builds the reputation of the climactic encounter well before its nature is even revealed.

As-written, interacting with the ghosts involves a skill challenge, with the ghosts interrogating the players and the players attempting to show their good intentions. I've never been a fan of the skill challenge mechanic and it's as clumsy as ever here. Rolling on Diplomacy, Bluff, and Insight seems appropriate, but, realising that that would leave one player doing all the talking, the designers have added extra skills. Players must roll Athletics to flex and pose for the pleasure of the martial ghost; Arcana to please the magical ghost with random trivia; but apparently not Religion for the paladin, presumably because Divine characters tend to come with Diplomacy as a class skill and will already have enough to do.

Personally I threw the mechanical element out the door and roleplayed it but I guess that's dependant on how entertaining you find skill challenges.

Here's what the ghosts reveal: to pass the Proving Grounds and progress to the inner sanctum, players must open the gate at the south-eastern end of the test. Doing so requires finding four holy artifacts of Baphomet and laying them simultaneously on the four holy circles scattered around the central complex. When the items are in position, the gate will begin opening and the Guardian will emerge to administer the final test.

One of the items is the Book of Wrath Unveiled which players have already liberated from the gnolls; the other three items are in the three rooms adjacent to the central arena. Each room contains a test that players must pass to secure the relevant artifact.

So this is the Proving Grounds - a slow and ominous exploration of the central arena, a conversation with ghosts, and then three gimmick-focused tests leading to a climactic brawl. This is a near-perfect example of how to build a satisfying traditional D&D dungeon, and how to manipulate pacing to have players genuinely excited about finding out what happens next. They'll be straining at the bit to try themselves against the Guardian, and thankfully Thunderspire - finally - doesn't disappoint.

Confession:

[1] Actually, according to the printed text, the ghosts do reveal the Guardian is a dragon, if players get enough successes in the skill challenge. But it's such a vastly better set-piece if they don't that I'm exercising a kind of willful blindness. It's obvious enough from the injuries that there's a dragon involved; spelling it out in words just seems so crass.

The Well of Demons

The third and most significant mini-dungeon in Thunderspire Labyrinth is the Well of Demons.

That's a dramatic name. It's got "demons" right there in the title. But jaded players might be too burned out by the repeated disappointments of the Labyrinth to really get excited about it. "Oh boy, demons," they'll be declaring sarcastically as they make their way to what will probably be another laundry list of unexciting beat-'em-ups. Demons are a classic enemy dating right back to the earliest editions of D&D, and it's just plain cruel to tease them if you're not going to follow through.

So it's great, then, that Thunderspire finally delivers.

The Well is crawling with demons. Your players are probably going to see more of the extraplanar buggers in the next ten encounters than they will in any place outside the Abyss itself. Once the players get past a couple of introductory encounters they'll barely be able to go two steps without running into an Evistro or a Barlgura.

This is the promise of 4th Edition, finally made good: Epic Tier encounters on a Heroic Tier budget. Players don't have to wait 20-something levels to go toe-to-toe with the fiery fury of the planes beyond - they can do it right at the start of their careers, and feel damn good about it all the while.

Demons aren't even the best of what's on offer here. The Well features the best-designed encounters in the module, starting with a exotic match-up against a group of grab-happy abominations, continuing to a trio of clever puzzle rooms and concluding in style with two fantastic set-piece boss battles. This is classic dungeon-crawling done well, and it's almost good enough to single-handedly lift the rest of Thunderspire Labyrinth out of mediocrity and into the ranks of the halfway decent.

So what's going on here plot-wise?

The Well of Demons is yet another piece of local minotaur history. In the days of Saruun Khel the Well was a monastery dedicated to Baphomet, demon god of the minotaurs. It included barracks for the minotaur priests, and an inner complex known as the "Proving Grounds" designed to test the dedication of potential Baphomet devotees.

Today, the Well has been invaded by a band of gnolls. Their leader, Maldrick Scarmaker, is intent on rededicating the Well to the gnoll god Yeenoghu. He's obtained two slaves from the Duergar that he intends to sacrifice on Baphomet's altar as part of the rededication ceremony. These, naturally, are the two slaves the players are still trying to rescue.

Maldrick's got some kind of vague deal going on with Paldemar. Paldemar's giving him... something... and in return Maldrick's providing Paldemar with any "artifacts and items" he finds in the Well. That relationship is never really elaborated on in any form that the players can get to grips with, which leaves the Well feeling like yet another disconnected station on the all-stops Thunderspire railroad. Thankfully, the inherent quality here is high enough to stop you from caring.

The goal for players, then, is to overcome the gnoll guards, solve the riddle of the Proving Grounds, and burst into the inner sanctum of Baphomet just in time to stop Maldrick from sacrificing the captives and completing the rededication.

Sounds easy enough, right?

Too Many Gods

I am a great fan of focus. The developers of Thunderspire Labyrinth are not.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the pantheon of evil deities that appear in the module.

Thunderspire opens with the Chamber of Eyes, an abandoned shrine to Torog, the King Who Crawls. We move to the Horned Hold, where things are run by Murkelmor, a paladin of Asmodeus. Next we go to the Well of Demons; this was originally a temple to Baphomet, demon lord of minotaurs, but the gnolls who have invaded are trying to re-dedicate it to Yeenoghu, the gnoll deity. Finally we wind up at Paldemar's Tower of Mysteries, where Thunderspire's Big Bad turns out to rather inexplicably be acting on behalf of the lich-god Vecna.

That's five separate Lords of Evil who get name-checked. Vecna actually shows up in person to officiate ceremonies during the final chapter. If we move into the bonus Dungeon Magazine encounters we find a former follower of the Raven Queen and another shrine to Torog.

What's going on here? None of this is central to the plot. These evil gods are being waved at the players for no better reason than that they can be. Torog, Asmodeus, Baphomet and Yeenoghu don't have any particular beef with the players or anyone they care about, and Vecna is so deeply un-committed to his own evil scheme as to abandon Paldemar in exchange for a few paltry secrets.

It's doubly confusing for players who've beaten Keep on the Shadowfell. "Hang on a minute," they'll say. "Weren't we fighting Orcus?" It's typically unwise to pick a fight with a second evil god before you've finished off the first one. By the end of Thunderspire players can have more epic-level adversaries than they have fingers on one hand.

This is the real problem, of course. There's no closure. There's nothing wrong with a brief tussle with Baphomet, providing that it has a conclusion. Thunderspire offers nothing - no beginning, no middle, and certainly no ending - and when it's all over you have to realise that the sole purpose of all these Elder Evils is to lend artificial significance to an otherwise deeply mundane story.

Bonus Post: XP Totals

Everyone loves bonus content, right? Here's an extra post in addition to the one queued to publish at 10 PM.

Eleven Foot Pole commenter Brian took up a challenge I set when I was talking about Thunderspire's XP budget. He's gone away and done the maths to bring us the total XP handed out by each of the three modules of the H series. I think that's incredibly awesome and I'm secretly gratified that it doesn't turn out to contradict me. I'll give you his words:

Brian: I have totals for H1, H2, & H3. Assumptions are that all encounters are finished, one major quest is awarded per module, and all minor quests within them (Find the Boar, etc.) are completed.

H1: 4047
H2: 11447
H3: 25838

This'll obviously vary somewhat if you don't do Quest XP, skip parts of dungeons, etc. but it looks like you end up on the cusp of level 11 at the end of H3 if you actually manage to clear the whole thing out. It also means that you do indeed end up over-leveled if you add in side treks and random encounters without adjusting XP. It is possible to skip/miss parts of H3, though, so that might not be a big deal... depending on how complete your party normally is.

--

Thanks Brian! And you can check out his blog at The Amber Tower.

Moving Goalposts

The players may have defeated Krand and finished the Chamber of Eyes, but there's a question still remaining: where are the slaves?

The whole point of assaulting the Chamber and grappling with the Bloodreavers was to rescue the innocent surface-worlders who the hobgoblins had enslaved. It's annoying, then, that when the mini-dungeon is complete no rescuing has occurred.

It turns out the Bloodreavers have sold the slaves to a nearby faction of Duergar (evil dwarves). There are a couple of random Duergar included in the last battle to help set up this link, and if that's not enough for players to put two and two together, Krand (like any good villain) is carrying a note on his body to make sure even a half-ogre can tell where the plot will be going next.

That's great for moving the players on to another enemy-packed killfest, but from the players' perspective it's unsatisfying. They've just slaughtered their weight in hobgoblins, and at the end they're no closer to achieving their aims than when they started. The goalposts have moved.

The combat is good in 4th Edition - so good it can lead to backwards thinking. It can become tempting to use the plot as the way of leading players to the next fight. That's the reverse, of course, of using fights as a means of furthering the plot. It's a trap that Thunderspire falls into both here, and over the course of the next mini-dungeon.

Combat should be about something. It's more that just the triumph of the players over the monsters - it's also about the triumph of order over chaos, or community over selfishness, or life over death. At the end of each and every battle, players should feel that they've achieved something larger - that the world has changed as a result of their actions.

You can't move the goalposts. When your plot has a climax, and the players survive it, you have to give them something. Whether it's a horde of cheering villagers or the discovery of an ancient and powerful secret, the final defeat of a hated rival or just blowing up the dungeon after they leave, there has to be both closure and progress. It's not acceptable to just say, "Great, but can you do it again with dwarves?"

If you're running Thunderspire there are a couple of ways you can mitigate the damage here. One is to foreshadow that the slaves have been on-sold long before players get to the Chamber; their goal then becomes not to free the slaves but to discover their location, which is something they'll fully achieve. Another way is to emphasise that the slavers are about to mount a new expedition - this time to the Seven-Pillared Hall, or some other place that the players care about; by cleaning up the hobgoblins the players have saved named NPCs who matter to them from a horrible fate.

Whichever way you choose to go, though, you'd best make it good, because there's still a long slog ahead through the Horned Hold before we finally get to what passes for Thunderspire's "good bits". In the mean, I hope you like Duergar, because everything we just saw in the Chamber we're about do again. With dwarves.

A Thousand Words

Thunderspire Labyrinth comes with a chunky handful of art to jump-start your imagination and bathe players in raw atmosphere. Pictured above is the Chamber of Eyes Narthex, the first area of that mini-dungeon.

Module-specific art is a fantastic resource. Wizards' access to the world's best fantasy artists is one of its greatest advantages over the competition, and it's always a pleasure to wallow in the sumptuous graphics that come as part-and-parcel of Dungeons & Dragons.

It's a little unfortunate, though, that the art in Thunderspire doesn't always match the module. Take the picture above. It represents the following descriptive text:

Two fearsome looking statues squat on either side of a stairway leading up to double doors. Inscribed upon the doors is an image of a great eye with multiple eye stalks, as well as a symbol of a circle with a crossbar rising out of it.

Well, the statues are there, and so are the stairs (sort of). We've got an eye, but where are the eye stalks? And the circle-crossbar motif (the symbol of Torog) is nowhere to be seen. Much like with the map of the Labyrinth, it seems the artist wasn't working from the final text of the module.

The image is also a little disappointing in that it doesn't depict the most important feature of the room. A balcony runs along the room's northern edge, terminating at a second-storey door that opens into the hobgoblins' lair. It's a deliberately-placed opportunity for players to try an approach other than just bludgeoning their way through the front door. It's sad, then, that the front door is the sole emphasis of this picture.

Luckily, the remainder of the art is pretty solid, and with the un-troubling exception of a picture of the Horned Hold that doesn't quite seem to match the battlemaps, players and DMs can look forward to a selection of great images to enhance their Thunderspire experience.

The Chamber Of Eyes

The Chamber of Eyes is the first of Thunderspire Labyrinth's mini-dungeons. It's the lair of the Bloodreaver Slavers, and if the party are serious about rescuing the Slavers' victims this will be their first stop after reaching the Seven-Pillared Hall.

But what is the Chamber of Eyes?

As I've mentioned previously, Thunderspire is obsessed with its minotaur-themed backstory, even though the minotaurs never actually turn up. The story of the minotaurs is basically a re-telling of the legend of Moria from The Lord of the Rings.

Long ago, the minotaurs came to Thunderspire to build a great city in honour of their god Baphomet. They created a vast empire that stretched from Thunderspire to the borders of the Underdark. However, they delved too deep, and discovered that the lower caverns lay beneath the shadow of the deity Torog, the Patient One, known as the King that Crawls.

The Patient One got his claws deep into the minotaurs; sects to him sprang up, temples were built, and a nation once dedicated to Baphomet turned to the worship of an even darker and more vile patron. Civil war raged between the Torog followers and those faithful to Baphomet, and in the end both sides fell to a violent madness that consumed and destroyed the entire race.

None of this is at all important to the players, but in the Chamber of Eyes we start a kind of reverse archaeological tour of the minotaurs' holdings, beginning at a temple to Torog built in Saruun Khel's final days, and eventually continuing to a civil-war era fortification and finishing at one of the original temples to Baphomet.

Minotaurs and Torog have long since abandoned the Chamber of Eyes, which lies some distance from the Seven-Pillared Hall, "deep within the labyrinth". The Bloodreaver Hobgoblins have taken over the abandoned ruin and now use it as a headquarters.

It would have made sense, given the above, to call the area, "The Temple of Torog" or "The Cursed Temple". Neither of those are terribly imaginative but they have the advantage of being both descriptive and firmly in the D&D tradition. Instead the developers went the extra step and called the place "The Chamber of Eyes".

It's not just a name. The approach to the Chamber features a lintel carved with "five staring eyes", and the door of the Chamber itself shows an image of "a great eye with multiple eye stalks".

Even as your players come to this doorway, they'll be sharpening their weapons and patting each other on the back and declaring, "Oh boy! Beholders!" Beholders are a classic enemy and one of the great things about 4th Edition is that the Monster Manual comes complete with low-level versions of iconic monsters, so that even a 4th-level party can tangle with an Eye Tyrant.

Unfortunately, once again, it's not to be. There's no Beholders in the Chamber of Eyes, or anywhere else in Thunderspire for that matter. Possibly they're hanging out with the Minotaurs and the Mages of Saruun. Never mind that the developers inexplicably drew a Beholder on the dungeon's door - it's all just a fake out. If you don't reset their expectations quickly, your disappointed players will spend hours searching the Chamber for secret doors, convinced they still haven't found the room with the Beholder in it.

What we do have in the Chamber of Eyes are some very cantankerous hobgoblins and a big frikkin' wolf. Which is good, and all. I suppose. But wouldn't a Beholder have been great?

The Mages of Saruun

Thunderspire's Seven-Pillared Hall is governed by the Mages of Saruun, the arcane order who tamed this section of the Labyrinth half a generation ago.

They're clever enough that they've subverted several of the ancient minotaur magics to their own use, including the giant Bronze Warders that they use as guards, and they're powerful enough that both the Drow and Duergar are wary about angering them.

The mages have a secret, though - they're not actually present. Regardless of how many Mages might once have dwelt in the Labyrinth, only two remain. One, Paldemar, has gone rogue, and takes the role of Thunderspire's final villain. The other, Orontor, remains in the Hall, trying to keep things ticking over despite the absence of his peers.

The disappearance of the Mages is never explained. The module offers that Orontor "keeps the fact hidden that he is the only one of the Mages of Saruun currently in residence in the hall". It also seems that the Mages have been gone for some time, as Paldemar went rogue "while the Mages were away", and, as we'll eventually see, his schemes have been in motion for an extended period.

Where did the Mages go? The preamble to the Tower of Mysteries area suggests they "departed Thunderspire to engage in the various arcane studies that often occupy their time", although wherever they've gone it seems that Orontor can't contact them, as he ends up needing to hire adventurers to check up on Paldemar.

Given the central role of the Mages in Thunderspire's setting, it's baffling that we aren't told their whereabouts.

It may have been a smart choice, though. It's important that events in Thunderspire can only be solved by the players. The Mages represent a potential deus ex machina that the developers have wisely taken off-stage. Their uncertain whereabouts sends a clear signal that summoning them back to the mountain is not an option, and that whatever salvation is ultimately achieved will come through the direct action of the PCs.

Questions:

[1] Despite there being no current information on the Mages, the backstory gratuitously volunteers names for three of the order's founding members - Hasifir, Niame and Samazar. It's a suspicious abundance of information, given that the three aren't referenced anywhere else in the module. Are these an in-joke - possibly holdovers from one of the developers' previous campaigns?

Surina

Surina doesn't work.

The Thunderspire Labyrinth developers obviously think she does. They give her half a page and a stat block, making her the most fleshed-out character in the Seven-Pillared Hall. But as printed, she's just not a success.

Surina is a female Dragonborn Warlock, on something of a crusade. She's apparently the veteran of past campaigns against gnolls and suchlike in other parts of the world, and she's brought her war with her into the Seven-Pillared Hall. The module describes her as agitating for aggressive action against "the evil factions within the Hall" (the duergar and drow) and she's engaged in an attempt to turn the Hall into a kind of armed base-camp for military expeditions into the Underdark.

Her story arc is a traditional tale of corruption. She's letting her zealotry guide her into some fundamentally bad decisions involving violence and intolerance, and eventually someone's going to get hurt as a result. It doesn't help that she's picked up an Imp companion somewhere who's giving her some mischievously terrible advice.

That's a great character, but it just doesn't fit Thunderspire Labyrinth. The players can't get involved in her story. The module has the players scheduled to fight the Duergar in Act 2, before they head off to the Horned Hold. If they get into a fight early, they're going to significantly complicate things later, and when it is time to take on the dwarves they don't need any encouragement.

On the flip side, the players aren't likely to want to stop her, either. She's right. The Duergar and Drow are vile, malevolent slavers who bring pain and misery to everyone they meet. If Surina announces an intention to declare war on the entire Underdark, the best the players can do is pat her on the back and say, "Go get 'em, tiger!"

Much like Brugg, Surina is ultimately an accessory character - to be used or ignored as your particular game demands - but the problem really is that she has an arc. If you want her to help the players when they attack the Duergar, or confront the players if they get too friendly with the bad guys, then it really works best if you introduce her early. On the other hand, if you do introduce her early, you're in danger of your players jumping straight on her Duergar-slaying bandwagon the moment they meet her and picking a fight they're not ready to win.

This is the problem with the Obvious Questgiver model of adventure design. Both Keep on the Shadowfell and Thunderspire Labyrinth are replete with random strangers who have tasks they'd like someone to do. So when a basically well-intentioned Dragonborn idly mentions that it'd be swell if someone murdered the entire Duergar race, players are all too likely to obligingly note it in their quest logs.

About Face (and the Seven-Pillared Hall)

Sorry for the delay. Long work hours sometimes get the best of posting. But the delay has given me time to reconsider my opinion of the current adventure. I've been saying that Thunderspire Labyrinth is, in the final analysis, a good module.

But... that's just plainly not true.

I'm not saying it's Keep on the Shadowfell. It's not nearly as rampantly delinquent and it's got a good supply of strong ideas scattered up and down its spine. But it's a flop. It's an adventure straining against its own constraints, unable to make its scattering of strong points work together as a cohesive whole.

We'll get into why soon enough (providing I'm not sidelined by more 50-hour work weeks) but for now my schedule says I should be posting about the Seven-Pillared Hall.

Thunderspire Labyrinth's quest hub is the Seven-Pillared hall, a large cavern which houses the offices of a number of influential trading companies. The area serves as a kind of business precinct, where merchants of the surface world come to do business with the drow and the duergar. The whole area is watched over by the Mages of Saruun, a mysterious order of knowledge-seekers who tamed this part of the mountain a half-generation ago.

The place feels like a frontier town. There's grizzled prospectors, unscrupulous entrepreneurs, friendly innkeepers, and brutish enforcers. All it needs is Al Swearengen delivering racial epithets for it to be the fantasy equivalent of HBO's Deadwood.

Unlike Keep on the Shadowfell's town of Winterhaven, the Seven-Pillared Hall is functional. It has everything adventurers will need to spend a very long time exploring the labyrinth. Magical items and rituals are on sale, there's a competent clergy able to raise the dead, and the outpost features a constant flow of interesting characters ready to hand out sidequests.

Oh, such sidequests. It seems like Thunderspire is more interested in its sidequests than in the main plot. And this is one of the problems of the Hall. There's a lot on offer here for players to discover - but will players discover it? Presuming the DM used the Slave Rescue plot hook, the players are here to rescue some slaves. It's a time-critical mission. Casually exploring the Seven-Pillared Hall and getting friendly with its denizens runs specifically contrary to the story's central drive.

Perhaps this is why the plot hooks were so casually glossed over. Perhaps Thunderspire wants you to be metaphorically yawning and stretching your limbs when you get to the Hall. There's certainly a heap to do, very little of it related to the task of slave-rescuing.

On the other hand, Thunderspire promises to cover levels 4 to 6. The main quest spine alone will take you from the start of level 4 to the start of level 7 even with a couple of skipped encounters. Players who want to spend more time in Thunderspire will need the DM to thin out the XP to avoid outlevelling the content - further prolonging 4th Edition's gruelling "sour spot".

It's a dilemma. Thunderspire wants to be a player-directed open-world environment full of places to explore and secrets to discover - but at the same time it wants to be a focused race against the clock to save imperilled innocents from evil denizens of the dark. It reaches for both at the same time and ends up hurting itself in the process.

I'm going to proceed on the basis that players and DMs intend to complete the main quest spine. I've not had a chance to experience what happens if you throw out the slave rescue and run it as a more sedate, un-directed experience, but if any of you have tried that let me know how it went in the comments.

The Labyrinth

Thunderspire Labyrinth's titular maze may well not meet player expectations. Those who have seen the module's title may be imagining a kind of classic mega-dungeon, with level upon level of sprawling, mappable corridors. In the alternative, it would seem reasonable for the Labyrinth to pose some kind of direct challenge to the ingenuity of players and their characters.

In practice, the Labyrinth has little to no mechanical effect. It "covers nearly a square mile, with hundreds of chambers and passages", and "is too convoluted to be completely mapped". A rough outline (above) is provided to the DM, although it bears no relationship to any of the descriptions of distance and location scattered throughout the module. Moreover, "hundreds of small chambers and halls [...] aren't shown", and "even the major roads include countless intersections and smaller passages".

The way this works in practice is that players will need guides or accurate directions to reach a destination. Much like a computer game, players can visit new areas only once they are "added to the map".

If players try to explore without guidance, they risk wandering lost for hours before eventually ending up at a random choice of one of the module's major quest destinations. Interestingly, this can have the effect of bringing them straight to the penultimate mini-dungeon, bypassing the majority of the module's content. That's probably an effect of the module as-written that DMs should feel free to completely ignore.

Foreshadowing At The Minotaur Gate

I've got a lot of nice things to say about this module, but unfortunately it's going to take a while before we get to them. Right now, I've got a problem with foreshadowing. We've barely finished talking about Chekhov's Gun, and Thunderspire Labyrinth is doing it wrong already.

Thunderspire Mountain is, as the name implies, a huge mountain whose tip is constantly swathed in swirling storms. Within the mountain lies the ruins of the abandoned minotaur city of Saruun Khel. The minotaurs apparently once ruled this area, until a civil war broke out between followers of the demon-god Baphomet and cultists of Torog, the King Who Crawls. Now their once-mighty streets are infested with hobgoblins, duergar, and worse.

Players don't necessarily have access to this information up front. However, the module isn't subtle in showing off its flavour. The players approach the undermountain through "a 50-foot-tall stone archway hewn out of the mountainside", on each side of which "a towering minotaur statue stands [...] glowering down at travellers."

This is foreshadowing. This is giant letters writ across the shape of what is yet to come, spelling out "Here Be Minotaurs" in stark red writing. This is telling players that Thunderspire is watched over by ancient guardians, and those guardians have the head of a bull.

Even as your players pass beneath this archway, they'll be sharpening their weapons and patting each other on the back and declaring, "Oh boy! Minotaurs!" Minotaurs are a classic enemy, yet not so overused as to feel cliched. They're a great theme villain for 4th Edition's second outing, and the idea of taking on a tribe of these beasties in the claustrophobic setting of a ruined underound city is enough to get you really excited about what's coming up.

Unfortunately, it's not to be. There's not hide nor hair of a living minotaur to be seen throughout the length of Thunderspire. Again and again, the module serves up minotaur statues, minotaur corpses, minotaur carvings and minotaur loot, but the cow-men themselves are nowhere to be seen. Thunderspire marches proudly through hobgoblins, duergar, gnolls, and a very human master villain without ever firing the gun it spends the entirety of its flavour-text loading.

It's not the last time we're going to see this kind of misguided foreshadowing, either. We're going to see a beholder-themed Chamber of Eyes that's missing a beholder, a Horned Hold devoid of horns, and a Tower With No Doors featuring a very prominent door. There's the mysteriously absent Mages of Saruun whose vanishing is never resolved, no less than five different evil gods to offend who never take their vengeance, and by ironic contrast the final villain comes completely out of left-field with no solid connection to anything that's gone before.

On the plus side, though, we're going to get to see a dragon...

Points of Light

Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition is, by default, embedded in a campaign setting known as "Points of Light".

Points of Light is a significant departure from previous campaign worlds. It does not offer a fully-realised geopolitical landscape in the style of Dragonlance or the Forgotten Realms. In instead offers an unmapped wilderness into which individual adventure locations can be freely inserted.

There's several reasons for the change. One is that larger published campaign worlds come with baggage. In a setting like Dragonlance or the Realms, it's easy for player characters to be overshadowed by high level NPCs and have their stories pale beneath sweeping global events and epic international conflicts. Players can come to the table with unhelpful pre-conceptions based on earlier experiences with the world. DMs can feel pressured to absorb fantastic amounts of information in order to present a canonical "real" version of the setting to their players.

More importantly, though, the change highlights the core assumptions underlying D&D. The D&D universe is one where civilisation is scattered and fragile. Small "Points of Light" are divided by miles of wilderness teeming with lawlessness and horror. It's a world in which armies and constabularies are either absent entirely or deeply unable to clear back the darkness.

Points of Light is a world that needs heroes. It has problems that can only be solved with swords and spells, and those problems are so numerous that a nation of heroes could strive for a hundred lifetimes without stamping out the last of the evil. The gods are not active, the kings are not brave, and such elder wizards as exist are provincial and un-charitable. There are no higher forces making the players redundant - their characters are literally the last line of defence.

You can see the problem of canonical settings in Marvel or DC comics. Before any new hero can get a shot at defeating Dr Doom's evil plans, the writer first has to establish that the Avengers are off-world, the X-Men are busy, and S.H.I.E.L.D. have their hands full. Before an up-and-comer can go toe-to-toe with Darkseid, we need to know why the Justice League, Justice Society, Green Lantern Corps, Teen Titans, Outsiders, Doom Patrol and, in a pinch, Batman, have not already dealt with the problem. It's no fun feeling like the night-shift janitor who only gets called in when all the competent people want the day off.

Points of Light is modular. If you have five adventures describing aspects of the setting, you can use three and ignore two without leaving suspicious blank spots on the world map. There's no global cartography and the relationship of one location to another need never be better defined than "to the north and east". Moreover, if you pick up a Forgotten Realms product and like the sound of Shadowdale, you can insert it wholesale into Points of Light without worrying about its larger context.

This will all sound familiar to the experienced player. It's the way many of us have built up D&D campaign worlds since the earliest editions. Points of Light gives official sanction to this kind of simple patchwork design, and directly offers it as a design model to the beginning DMs who will get the most use out of it.

The theme of Points of Light is something that Thunderspire Labyrinth takes to heart. Thunderspire's quest hub is the Seven-Pillared Hall, a small community of traders presided over by the mysterious Mages of Saruun. The Hall lies within the underground ruins of the long-abandoned minotaur city of Saruun Khel, better known today as the Thunderspire Labyrinth. While the Hall may be a safe haven, the remainder of the Labyrinth is haunted by lawless humanoids and horrific below-ground predators.

The Hall itself plays home not only to humans, halflings, and the usual array of civilised races, but also to drow and duergar, emissaries of the malevolent Underdark races sent to the hall on semi-peaceful missions of trade. The Seven-Pillared Hall is a genuine frontier town, eking out a profitable existence in a place where an organised community should not be viable.

Questions:

[1] Points of Light may be well-designed for encouraging beginning players, but it's far less useful for selling a series of novels, something that has traditionally been a profitable sideline for Wizards of the Coast. This approach is reflected in the D&D product line as well, with a much greater emphasis on core rulebooks and far fewer setting-specific products. What has changed in WoTC's market position to prompt this shift away from setting-based merchandising?

The Hook

Thunderspire Labyrinth starts off with a question that's faced published modules since the dawn of time: how do you get players to travel to the location of their next adventure?

In a way, it's a false dilemma. The correct answer is to not ask them to. In a perfect world, your second adventure would grow organically out of your first. Players of Keep on the Shadowfell would be drawn into the next story by a direct threat to Winterhaven, or by a desire to continue their crusade against the cult of Orcus, or through pursuit of the specific priorities their character has developed over the preceding sessions of play.

Thunderspire isn't having any of that. It wants players to get to its Labyrinth as quickly and efficiently as possible and it's not really concerned how that happens. A charitable view sees the module as wisely focusing on its core content, but there's no real dispute that in skimping on its hooks it's doing itself a disservice.

Thunderspire offers four key hooks to get player characters involved in its story. The first is entitled "Investigate the Bloodreavers". The Bloodreavers, if we remember back to Keep, are an organisation of hobgoblin slavers based out of the distant Thunderspire Mountain. The hook involves the players taking on the role of self-appointed slave police in order to look into the unfocused and fairly nebulous threat presented by this organisation. Those investigations will lead them quite quickly to Thunderspire, which is where our story begins.

If the players aren't quite the zealous vigilantes contemplated by the hook, the module provides for Winterhaven's Lord Padraig to offer up a 1,000 gp reward for the head of the Bloodreavers' chief. There's an unfortunate escalation here; in Keep, Padraig could summon a mere 100 gp to pay for the extermination of kobolds who were directly threatening the village; now he's got access to ten times that to spend on hunting down a group who are, on any fair view of it, Someone Else's Problem.

A more pressing problem with the Bloodreaver hook is that while it gives players a reason to tackle the first of Thunderspire's four mini-dungeons (the Chamber of Eyes), there's no through-line to keep them progressing on to the rest of Thunderspire's content. If your group is characterised by a mercenary nature or merely keen practicality, it's open to declare the adventure over after defeating the Bloodreavers in the story's opening act.

The second of the hooks is worse still. It's called "Trade Mission" and it's what computer gamers refer to as a "fetch quest". Winterhaven shopowner Bairwin asks players to make a delivery for him to the Seven-Pillared Hall, the small bastion of civilisation hidden beneath Thunderspire. Once again, this will occupy players long enough to get them to the adventure location, but then give them no reason to tackle any of the mountain's challenges. Also, the Forgotten Realms conversion for Keep re-cast Bairwin as a secret cultist of Orcus, so for groups that have used that article Bairwin may well be long dead.

A third hook, "Call to Adventure", is so brazen as to be almost deserving of respect. It amounts to little more than Winterhaven sage Valthrun telling players that Thunderspire is kind of an awesome place, in which they will probably find adventures. I quote:

Valthrun doesn't have any additional information, but he longs to convince a party of adventurers to explore the place and bring him back firsthand news. "Such wonders you will see," he keeps on repeating. "Such wonders, I am sure!"

As hooks go, this is on a par with the DM declaring that the next adventure is going to be in Thunderspire and asking if anyone has a reason not to go there.

The last hook is the real meat of Thunderspire Labyrinth and is ultimately so critical to making sense of the module that it should have been highlighted as compulsory. It's called "Slave Rescue".

As we know, Thunderspire plays host to the Bloodreaver Slavers. In "Slave Rescue" the Bloodreavers have recently captured a dozen slaves from a nearby village and absconded with them to the mountain. The players are engaged by a local do-gooder (the module suggests Winterhaven's Sister Linora) to pursue the slavers and rescue their victims.

The reason this works is that the slaves provide the module's much needed through-line. When the players confront the slavers, they find the slaves have already been sold to a nearby duergar faction. Attacking the duergar (located in a second mini-dungeon) results in the liberation of most of the slaves, but also reveals the depressing news that the last two of the captives were on-sold to a gnoll band for use as human sacrifices. A desperate pursuit of the gnolls leads to the third of the module's mini-dungeons, and eventually reveals the identity of Thunderspire's master villain.

There's an opportunity here so obvious that it's amazing the module misses it. What none of these hooks provide is a personal connection between the players and the adventure. As-written, the best-case scenario sees players motivated by a combination of greed and do-good-itude. To make Thunderspire a genuinely compelling game, you need to provide a reason why these problems are the players' problems.

It's as simple as personalising the captured slaves. The faceless villagers abducted by the Bloodreavers can just as easily be the PCs' family, friends, or even the entire named population of Winterhaven. Such a simple change instantly transforms a quest into their quest and gives them a unique and dynamic stake in the outcome of what follows.

In a worst-case scenario, if all you manage to do is coax players into visiting Thunderspire, you can at least be confident that once they get there, they'll find plenty to do.

The Living Dungeon

Keep on the Shadowfell assumes players will head back to Winterhaven for their extended rests, rather than camp in the dungeon. That's not a well-founded assumption, but at least it's a good intention. Regular trips back to Winterhaven help build it up as a home base, and allow for further interactions with its anaemic residents.

The problem comes, however, from mixing the "home base" philosophy with the idea of the "living dungeon".

The "living dungeon" theory of D&D suggests that dungeons and other monster lairs are not just static environments stocked with loot-bearing fleshsacks. The dungeon residents do not rest eternally in their designated rooms, twiddling their thumbs while waiting for heroes to come and slay them. Rather, they roam naturally throughout the available space, forming a kind of ecosystem, and respond intelligently to incursions into their domain. If players enter a dungeon, and then leave and come back later, they will find the denizens waiting for them and well-prepared.

Living dungeons can be great in a campaign that's tailored for them. This kind of realism can very effectively build immersion. However, 4th Edition is not well built for it, and in Keep on the Shadowfell in particular it would be a mistake to run the game this way.

Keep is presented in the "delve format" first pioneered by Wizards of the Coast late in the lifespan of D&D 3.5. Each encounter is set out over a double-page spread in the adventure booklet, with only the largest and most important encounters getting a third page. Each room is presented as a self-contained encounter, with the monsters for that room set out in full. It's a great format for easy DMing, as everything you need for the encounter is in one place, without requiring you to access the Monster Manual or flip back and forth between multiple pages. On the downside, it means many monsters are reprinted several times in a single adventure and comparitively little space is available for descriptive and roleplaying support.

This means that encounters really are linked to the physical space in which they're intended to take place. The geography of each encounter is as integral to its setting as the creatures which populate it.

Keep recommends that if players engage the goblins on the first level of the keep and then leave without finishing the rest, when they return they'll find the remaining goblins waiting at the stairwell ready to ambush them.

This is terrible advice; you're cheating players out of the much more interesting encounters in the Torture Chamber and Chieftain's Lair, while simultaneously making them replay the Goblin Guard Room, an encounter that they've already beaten once. Plus there's a good chance that "all the goblins at once" is an encounter significantly tougher than they can handle.

4th Edition encounters are, in general, carefully balanced affairs. Moving a group of monsters from one room to another or, worse, combining them with another encounter, is tempting a total party kill, and at best will be a frustrating experience for your players.

Speaking personally, the feeling of "clearing" a dungeon, room by room, is one of the more satisfying aspects of dungeoneering. It may not be realistic, strictly speaking, but when you look at gelatinous cubes sharing space with zombies, and ghouls just down the corridor from hobgoblins, there's already a certain suspension of disbelief necessary in accepting these deadly creatures living harmoniously in close proximity. A further abstraction is a worthwhile sacrifice.

Let the dungeon stay put. Let its malevolent residents twiddle their thumbs as they wait to be slain. It may not be realistic, but - and this is what's important - it's just more fun.

Sir Keegan's Tomb

Sir Keegan's Tomb is the climax of the first level of Keep on the Shadowfell. Keegan is the last commander of the keep, who went mad and slew his soldiers and his family. Here the players encounter his undead remains, and after a tense conversation, they are rededicated to their mission to defeat Kalarel and close the rift.

The room at first appears to be empty save for a single coffin; however, when players investigate the coffin or attempt to leave, the coffin pops open and Keegan's bones jump out. Keegan is initially suspicious of the intruders, and the players must complete a skill challenge to convince him of their good intentions.

If they fail, Keegan goes into combat mode, and as a level 4 solo brute he's a convincing challenge to a party who at this stage are presumably level 2. It turns out he has a "necromantic burst" power, for unknown reasons, which he can fire off every turn once he's bloodied for 2d6+3 damage against everyone within close burst 3. Ouch.

In the more likely event that the players pass the skill challenge (and with a reasonably generous GM, it would take some hard-headed players indeed to fudge it), Keegan will decide to place his trust in the players, at which point he becomes surprisingly chatty.

If you're playing the module as-written, this is the first chance players will get to learn the true history of the keep. In fact, it may even be the first time they've heard Keegan's name, as although the module spends a couple of pages telling the DM the guy's life story, it doesn't trouble to give the players the same scoop.

There are some valid criticisms to be levelled at Sir Keegan's tomb as a whole. For example, if Keegan slew all his men, and then came down into the crypts to die, who the hell built him a tomb? One poster on ENWorld.org offers the compelling vision of Keegan himself being the architect, post-death, and refers to him painstakingly crafting the crypt "with his cold dead hands".

Keegan rewards players who pass the skill challenge by giving them the undead-slaying longsword Aecris. This is a great moment. Like many players, I love named weapons, and it's even better when they have a history. Not only does Aecris trace its descent back to King Elidyr of the fallen Empire of Nerath, but it is also the very weapon with which Keegan struck down his family and those under his command. It's a tangible link to the campaign world that will stay with the players long after they leave the Keep.

It can fall flat though. In our group, Keegan's dramatic presentation of the sword was followed by a silence, and the players exchanging glances for long moments, until eventually someone asked, "So, does anyone here actually wield longswords?"

Luckily D&D is a world of inexplicable magic; when our fighter grasped the weapon's hilt, the blessing of Bahamut transmuted Aecris into a much more useful bastard sword. Praise Bahamut.

Environmental Hazards

Something's been striking me as missing from Keep on the Shadowfell. Something that should be there, but isn't.

Well, plot, characterisation, cohesive adventure design, a wide range of monsters, and opportunities for roleplaying, obviously. But something else.

I eventually needed to run down the old-school dungeon checklist to work out what it was. Keep has goblinoids, magical items, nasty traps, incomprehensible magic, multiple dungeon levels, and even a riddle (which we're getting to, slowly).

What it doesn't have are environmental hazards, which I think is a great shame.

Rooms filled with gas, lava, or ice; rooms with gaping chasms and crumbling ceilings; rooms with slippery floors next to precipitous drops; thundering underground rivers and rickety bridges over umbral abysses; these are staples of the old-school dungeoneering tradition. They don't always make sense, but it's clear by this point that making sense isn't something that's greatly troubling Keep. It should have taken the next step and included this classic terrain.

Environmental hazards are great because they create atmosphere. They remind players that dungeons are dangerous because they are claustrophobic holes in the ground. They reinforce that what the players are doing is inherently dangerous, not merely dangerous because there might be monsters down here with them.

A Dungeon By Any Other Name

There's a tendency to describe any enclosed and dangerous space visited by heroes as a "dungeon". After all, the game's called Dungeons & Dragons. Literally, though, a dungeon is really only something found beneath a fortification or palace, used for the the primary or ancillary purpose of detaining prisoners.

Keep on the Shadowfell promises a ruined keep as its main location. As players set out from Winterhaven for their first journey to this key structure, they may be looking forward to standing at ancient battlements, crossing haunted courtyards, peering through weathered murder holes, and nervously exploring crumbling feast-halls.

Upon arriving, they find that the keep's been reduced almost totally to rubble, there is clearly nothing of interest at surface level, and in the middle of the ruins is a recently-used and well-maintained stairway leading down to the crypts. There may as well be a large arrow pointing downwards, helpfully labelled "Dungeon!".

Keep on the Shadowfell has already laid down its credentials as an unapologetically old-school dungeon crawler, so in a way it's refreshing that it gets right down to business like this. It's still a little jarring though. The internet reveals my players weren't alone in finding it hard to believe that the entire setup of the "keep" was just window-dressing on a series of crypts.

Probably a more accurate name would have been "Crypt On The Shadowfell".

The Tragedy Of The Keep

In amongst all the done-to-death evil priests and goblins, Keep on the Shadowfell presents one section of honest-to-god story, that being the downfall of the Keep and its final commander.

Winterhaven and all the lands that surround it were once part of the Empire of Nerath, a vast continent-spanning kingdom that brought light and civilisation and suchlike to every corner of the wilderness. During the time of the Empire, followers of Orcus tore a rift to the Shadowfell, plane of undeath, and used the energies therein to call forth a great tide of undead.

The Empire mounted a response, and after much battle and sacrifice the undead were driven back and the cultists defeated. Priests of the Empire sealed the rift, and a great keep was built on its site so that it might be watched and guarded forevermore.

However, all things fall into decline and with the passing of decades the Empire collapsed under internal and external pressures. Its borders were drawn inwards, and the Keep and all its guardians were abandoned and forgotten.

The commander of the Keep at the time of the Empire's collapse was a man named Keegan, a staunch and brave knight of the realm. However, finding himself forsaken by his nation, and with resources and manpower running always tighter, he let the darkness and malaise emanating from the rift take hold of his mind.

Keegan went mad; he took up his longsword Aecris, dedicated to the Platinum Dragon Bahamut, and used it to strike down his wife, his children, and almost every man under his command. As the survivors fled the keep, Keegan descended into the crypts that contained the rift, and was never seen again.

It's a great story and adds some real flavour to the keep. Keegan's ultimate fate, of course, plays an important role towards the midpoint of the main dungeon, so it's something you can use as a sub-goal to keep players alert while they're still some distance from Kalarel.

The problem is that the module gives you no way to get this story across to your players. No one involved in the story is still alive, no one in Winterhaven really knows the details, and even if you did have someone ready to narrate the whole tale, a big infodump of non-interactive history makes for terrible storytelling. World class writers often have difficulty finding audiences for prose readings; how much less interesting will you be rattling off something you've jotted down on the back of your game notes?

My personal solution was to use interactive dreams in which the players got to directly live out Keegan's story from a first-person perspective, which seemed to work well, but this isn't typical D&D-style roleplaying and it can be very challenging for beginning DMs.

A more traditional solution would be to integrate Keegan's story into the dungeon design. There are plenty of encounters that cast some light on Kalarel's recent activities, but very few that tie into the keep's tragic history. The players are able to find the corpses of Keegan's children, but these are inexplicably located after the in-dungeon resolution of the Keegan subplot.

The opening areas of the keep should have been littered with the identifiable corpses of Keegan's victims; there should still remain barricades where they attempted to desperately fend off their maddened commander. Terrified survivors trapped in tiny chambers should have left despairing messages scratched in the walls while they heard their comrades being slaughtered all around them.

The writers of Keep on the Shadowfell seem to be aware of the opportunities they're missing. Much in the vein of their "make up your own stories" and "paint the scene" advice, they exhort DMs to "bring the dungeon to life and carry the tragic story behind the dungeon's origin to the forefront" (page 35). This advice, if followed, would indeed make for good storytelling, but it would be nice, in a $30 module aimed at starter DMs, if there were some concrete examples of how it could be achieved.