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| Dark Mistress |
 Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 12:09 am Post subject: Lost City review. |
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Joined: 04 Oct 2010
Posts: 27
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Lost City by Open Design
This product is 95 pages long. It starts with a cover, credits, and ToC. (5 pages)
Chapter 1: Kadralhu (19 pages)
This setting sandbox style adventure is for characters of 14-17th level. It starts off with background about the city, a adventure summery, history of the city, factions of the city, adventure hooks, 3 new magic items, a bit of info on a local city, a nearby village and information about base camps within the city ruins. It finishes by going back to the factions with stat blocks and more information about them.
Chapter 2: The Phoenix Tower (7 pages)
The tower is the way into the old ruined city. It starts off talking about all the rooms with in the tower, with nice descriptive text on what to read to the players in easy to spot way. It ends with the encounters being laid out at the end of the chapter.
Chapter 3: Impressions (13 pages)
This next section introduces a new race of creatures a type of lizard people in a couple of camps. It mostly deals with the PC's coming into contact with them and advice on how to run the creatures. There is also a couple of set encounters in this section as well.
Chapter 4: The Hanging Garden (10 pages)
This section of the city is now known as the hanging gardens. It lays out this section of the city and the creatures that can be found with in it are insect people. It ends with a series of encounters.
Chapter 5: The Corpse Commons (18 pages)
This is a part of the city where giants use to live. Like the previous parts it explores and lays out this section with easy to read and understand descriptions. Then ends with a series of encounters and a mini dungeon. There are still giants and other things in this area of the city.
Chapter 6: The Waterworks of Kadralhu (10 pages)
This section still has those roaming from when the city fell making their home here. The beginning is descriptions of the sections with encounters laid out at then end of the chapter.
Chapter 7: The Vault of Kadralhu (13 pages)
This final section will likely be undertaken by the PC's as a sort of quest. It is a nice little final quest to the city with a interesting ending. Other than the well laid out sections and encounters at the end. There is also sections on what happens after the adventure is over with some likely surprising options that some players will love to take advantage of.
It ends with a back cover. (1 pages)
Closing thoughts. I should note I was given this for the purpose of this review. The art work is mostly black and white and range from fair to good. Layout and editing was well done. The maps are well done and there is a lot of them, they focus on small sections within each chapter. There is no larger overview maps of each section which is something I personally like. There is a couple of small maps with general overviews of the whole city though, but they lack much detail.
Now I found this adventure very hard to review. For one I found the format hard to read, I am told it is the normal format for 4th edition called a delve format. I can see how when running things it could be helpful when combat starts, but I found it made it harder to read. Also while I have played 4th edition some, I have not played it a ton and never GMed it. So I not sure how well balanced and how hard the encounters are from a mechanical stand point. I will say most of them was interesting and presented in a way to make for fun encounters.
I did really like the sandbox style to the adventure and how there is a lot of options for combat or RPing depending on what the players and characters want to do in the adventure. So what's my rating? Well I found this one as I mentioned hard to review. I found the format a distraction personally. Perhaps if one got use to it, it would be easier. So I am going to give this one a 4 star review, mostly on how interesting and well laid out the adventure is. If it plays as well as it seems like it would I could see giving it a higher rating. This could easily be a half star up or down. I just lack enough experience with 4e to give it a more precise review.
Trust me, I'm a Succubus. |
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| uhf |
| Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2011 3:02 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 28 Nov 2010
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Location: Unreal
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I picked this up just the other day and I loved it. I couldn't put it down.
This is exactly what 4e needs in terms of adventures. Its free form... so many people won't be comfortable with reading a great open void of story, then trying to drop the adventurers into it and somehow running it.
But that's what I prefer. (Can't stand crawls. Just can't.)
Anyways... if you read it, the DM needs to prep, or guide what kind of story he wants his players to enjoy. And the amount of information is vast, especially if you consider how few combats it really flows into.
In 4e if you're going to get into a combat that is long, you want it to be challenging, and varied. You want it to be fun. Oklu (sp?) provide a great backdrop, and aid or enemies for the players. 3 dimensional fighting in the Hanging Gardens....
I'm only 2/3 through reading this, but I think its easily the best adventure for 4e out there, and I'm getting ready to run it. |
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| metatsu |
| Posted: Thu Aug 25, 2011 6:42 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 22 Nov 2009
Posts: 104
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The hanging gardens is definitely fun, considering the flying insects, and imagining an upside down section of the city. You may want to reference the end of the adventure, in regards to the insectoid prince that is captured, so you have a reference to work back into the hanging gardens and use as a potential plot hook. The other thing I added was part of the sewer system will still intact for that section of th city. This offers a place of safety if the party is overwhelmed with climbing, and may offer the extra boost of confidence for them to explore that area. So the party would cliimb for a while, and look for wells where major streets intersected, then traveled in the sewere for a bit, rinse, and repeat.
The is also an outside encounter for the insectoids which was alot of fun running it in the evening hours, where all the players heard the flapping of insect wings, and when they produced a light source, they saw one of their comrades being dragged away in the desert. I attacked them from mulitple directions to add more confusion, and the hunters carried some of the insect minions over, ala troop transport. |
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