Keep on the Shadowfell FREE

Hey - here's news. Wizards of the Coast are giving away the PDF of Keep on the Shadowfell for FREE.

I paid $35 AUD for this module and felt incredibly cheated. At the very reasonable price of FREE it's a much more recommendable product, particularly if you're new to 4th Edition. It comes complete with the Quick-Start rules so you can squeeze a good six sessions of play out of it even if you haven't bought a copy of the Player's Handbook yet.

What's more - this version is significantly better than the retail edition. There are major changes throughout the module, addressing many of my complaints. For example, the errata are incorporated, including the alternate skill challenge for closing the rift in the final encounter. The finale's meager scattering of enemies is replaced with a complete platoon of skeleton sentinels. Traps are properly formatted and their areas-of-effect are clearly marked on maps. Loot is more plentiful and the skill challenges are fixed. A spectral version of Kalarel has been added to the Burial Site encounter to create an earlier introduction to the main villain and more closely tie that encounter to the main plot. The various kobold ambushes have been corrected, and the punishing Irontooth battle appears to have been slightly retooled, presumably to make it easier. Typos are corrected throughout.

Go get your copy on the D&D Test Drive page. And thanks to commenter Anders for the heads-up!

Thunderspire Labyrinth

This post is the introduction to a series that looks at Thunderspire Labyrinth, the second Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition published adventure. Click the link at the bottom of this post or scroll through the archive to read the complete series.

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Thunderspire Labyrinth, by Richard Baker and Mike Mearls, is the second official adventure module released for 4th Edition.

Thunderspire is a self-contained adventure and suitable to be played straight out of its packaging, but for players of Keep on the Shadowfell, the attraction of Thunderspire is that it's billed as a sequel to Keep. Where Keep took characters from level 1 all the way to level 3, Thunderspire picks up the baton and covers levels 4 to 6. It's located in the same Nentir Vale setting as Keep, and players might reasonably expect Thunderspire to provide a continuation of the themes and plotlines that Keep set in motion.

On that count, they'll be sorely disappointed. The links between the two modules end up being trivial at best. Thunderspire is a wholly unrelated adventure with no continuing storylines or villains.

Additionally, where Keep made an effort to introduce new players to the diverse strengths of 4th Edition, Thunderspire is a more staid outing. Key mechanics are ignored completely or used poorly, and once again the loot opportunities are underwhelming at best. The first half of the adventure is dominated by a series of repetitive knock-down fights and it's only after the intermission that the module delivers the kind of classic D&D dungeoneering that rewards non-standard tactics and player resourcefulness.

Thunderspire is still a superior product to Keep. Set in the sprawling ruins of an abandoned minotaur city, Thunderspire provides a more interesting location than Keep's generic village, and sets its meanderings in the context of interesting NPCs, compelling sidequests and surprisingly usable optional encounters. Its layout is modular, letting you easily customise it or play it episodically. And while there's still a host of typographical errors and notable lacunae, they're neither as frequent nor as critical as Keep's unending parade of mediocrity.

Over the next few weeks I'm planning to go through the highs and the lows of this module. I'll be looking at what works and what doesn't, and as far as possible attempting to explain why. Feel free to follow along, and use the comments to tell me why I'm wrong.

(See all posts on Thunderspire Labyrinth.)

Keep On The Shadowfell

This post is the introduction to a series that analyses Keep on the Shadowfell as a microcosm of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition design decisions. Click the link at the bottom of this post or scroll through the archive to read the complete series.

NB: These posts relate to the original module as published, not to the edited 2nd Edition that Wizards of the Coast made available as a free PDF in 2009.

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Keep on the Shadowfell, by Bruce R Cordell and Mike Mearls, is the first official adventure module released for 4th Edition.

It's something of a homage to Keep on the Borderlands, a first edition module released in 1979. Like Borderlands, it features some limited wilderness adventure scattered around a central hardcore dungeon-crawl. Like Borderlands, it's full of evil lizardmen and feral humanoids. And like Borderlands, part of its design intent is to introduce the game to new players.

It's an old-school module. Too old school. If you've ever played AD&D before, you've already played this adventure. Despite the sharp new 4th edition combat mechanics, players of Keep on the Shadowfell could be forgiven for thinking that 20 years of evolution in game design and interactive storytelling have been unceremoniously swept under the rug.

It's not all bad. For veteran D&D players, Keep feels like coming home. The convoluted shenanigans of D&D 3.5 are thrown out the window and the focus is put squarely on 10 x 10 stone corridors and the looting of corpses. Certainly this is a lot of what I'd been missing during my sojourn away from D&D.

But even for an unabashed dungeon crawl it isn't firing on all cylinders. The hooks for the main quest chain are weak, the loot is sparse and uninteresting, and the piecemeal dungeon assembly invites players to miss large tracts of what's on offer.

I'm going to be taking a closer look at Keep on the Shadowfell over the next few posts, because it presents a great opportunity for pulling apart a published module. Virtually every 4th edition player has had a chance to try out part of this module, and the hundreds of game write-ups across the internet give us a large volume of anecdotal evidence of what worked and what didn't.

Follow with me over the next few days as I look at some of the highs and lows of this awkwardly implemented adventure.

(See all posts on Keep on the Shadowfell.)