Traps & Treachery has received more use in my D&D games than any book outside of the core rules.

Originally Published March 14th, 2002

If a publisher walked up to me and said, “Justin, I want to produce a D20 sourcebook. What should I do first?”

Then I would say: “Buy a copy of Traps & Treachery so you can see how to do it right.”

CONTENTS

Traps & Treachery is a 172-page, hardback D20 supplement which retails for $24.95. Although printed in black and white, this makes it roughly equivalent to the Monster Manual in terms of content. So the simplest question to ask is: Will this book prove to be as useful a reference as the Monster Manual?

In my opinion, the answer to that is a definitive yes.

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for Traps & Treachery. Players who may find themselves pitted against these fiendish traps should read no further.

Traps: Undoubtedly the centerprise of Traps & Treachery are the traps. There are seventy pages of these – including basic mechanical traps and magical traps. A few examples:

Blackstone’s Clever Cage is designed to imprison trespassers, rather than killing them. Simple traps like these can provide a welcome change of pace, particularly at lower levels – where abandoned traps of this variety can serve as minor encounters, without actually draining any significant resources from the party.

Devilish Dungeon Double Slide is designed to split parties up while moving them to deeper and more dangerous areas of a dungeon. This can cause problems if you’re not prepared to run two groups simultaneously, but can pay big dividends if you are.

One Last Coin… sometimes even the simplest of temptations can carry large consequences. In this case, a single coin is being used to seal away a demon.

Blackstone’s Confining Conundrum shrinks the character as they fall down a shaft which diminishes in size right along with them. At the bottom, however, they are returned to full size – essentially trapping them in the room they come to rest in.

Deep Dwarf Darknetter is triggered by the presence of light, making it a perfect trap for all those underground races which do without it.

Puzzles: This section is short, but shouldn’t be undervalued. Logic puzzles, math puzzles, word puzzles, and chess puzzles are all given – along with some unique challenges and tests.

Trap Design: Several people I know have disparaged this chapter as “worthless.” I, on the other hand, consider it one of the high points of the book. This chapter not only covers some basic elements of trap design (expanding vastly on the guidelines provided in the DMG), it also discusses the different ways that traps can be implemented during the course of an adventure. This chapter is also very useful if you’ve ever wondered exactly what it means to “detect” a trap; let alone “disable” it.

Way of the Rogue: And now, kicking sand in the face of Logic, I close my summary with a discussion of the first chapter in the book. This chapter opens with a discussion of trap lore (which is also a valuable resource when it comes to describing the detection and disabling of traps), moves onto the “business of thievery” (guilds, extortion, smuggling, and a half dozen other types of rackets), tosses out a handful of prestige classes (Discreet Companion, Guildmaster, Roofrunner, and Trapmaster), a new NPC class (Thug), new skills, new feats, new equipment, and more.

This chapter is something of a catch-all at times, providing some of the raw tools necessary for the traps which follow it: A couple new arcane spells; several new divine spells; a thievery domain for clerics; etc.

For me, the highlight here (in terms of crunchy stuff) are the new skills, feats, and equipment. The rules for making and using poisons, along with new poisons, are also very valuable.

GOOD STUFF

All the good stuff about Traps & Treachery can be summed up very simply: Information. Lots and lots of information. Accompanied by lots and lots of crunchy stuff just waiting to be dropped into your campaign.

If you’re a DM with any predilection towards spicing scenarios with fiendish traps, then Traps & Treachery definitely deserves a place on your reference shelf. Nor should you be fooled into thinking this book worthless if you don’t run dungeon crawls: The very first use I put this book to was swapping out a trap in Terror in Freeport that I felt was far too absurd. (The concrete mixer became Blackstone’s Killer Kennel.)

If you’re the player of a rogue, then you’ll definitely want to take a peek at all the material in the front of the book (but keep out of the back, you snoop!).

In short, it doesn’t matter who you are: You’re going to find useful material in this book.

One thing I touched on briefly, above, but want to mention again, is the attention to detail. For example, every single trap in the book not only describes the effects it has, but also goes into detail on what it means to detect and disable the trap. This is the type of thing which is invaluable to me as a DM, because it saves me a ton of work.

BAD STUFF

I would have liked to see a narrower focus for Traps & Treachery: I would have preferred to see 172 pages of traps or 172 pages of thief-oriented information. Not half-and-half.

The reason for this is simple: As a DM I would want the traps. As a player I would want the class-oriented information. There’s very little crossover there. And, to make matters worse, as a DM I don’t want my players looking at the trap information.

The other thing you should consider is your tolerance for elaborately engineered and/or over-the-top traps. I, personally, have a very low tolerance for that type of thing – so I will not be using the trap which turns the victim into a mouse and releases house cats to eat them. Or the treadmill which feeds you into a spinning blades. Or the corridor which shoots buzzsaws at you. For me, such things are atmosphere killers and deflators of suspension of disbelief. (This is the same reason why you will never see a tinker gnome in my campaigns. Ever.)

On the flipside, the frequency of these types of traps is rare in T&T. And, in fact, if you – like I – thought Grimtooth’s trap books were great ideas but threw up your hands in disgust at how absolutely ludicrous and ridiculous the content was, then Traps & Treachery is like a dream come true.

CONCLUSION

If the first time you read through a supplement like Traps & Treachery you are constantly stopping to jot down notes of different ways in which you want to use the material, then the book is a success. If the book then earns a place in your gaming bag (so that it comes along with you to every gaming session) because you’re using the material in it in every single game session, then the book is something really special.

Traps & Treachery sits right next to my PHB, DMG, and MM every single time I sit down to the gaming table.

‘Nuff said.

Note: The reviewer has worked on a number of projects for Fantasy Flight Games, including five adventure modules and Mythic Races. The reviewer did not work on Traps & Treachery.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: Greg Benage, Kurt Brown, Mark Chance, Brian Ferrenz, Lizard, David Lyons, Brian Patterson
Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games
Line: D20
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 158994020-2
Product Code: DD17
Pages: 172

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Go to Part 1

I scooped up a handful of Mothership trifolds today with an eye towards restocking the jobs board for my Mothership open table. I’m beginning to dive deeper into the vast sea of Mothership content, which may mean a few more misses, but also the opportunity to uncover hidden gems and a few diamonds in the rough.

RECLAIMER

The PCs has been hired to “scavenge usable resources from the Galloway Outpost, a long-abandoned mining and research facility on the desert moon Kara-9.” Coincidentally, despite this outpost being “long-abandoned,” another corporation has hired another team to scavenge the outpost at the exact same time. The PCs will need to compete with this other team to “secure and extract as many undamaged resources as possible.” Even more coincidentally, the whole place collapses two to three hours after the PCs arrive.

Despite the inexplicable string of coincidences, this is a pretty solid concept for a scenario that’s anchored to a pretty good map that’s well xandered and ready for potential conflicts to break out between the rival salvage crews.  (Although for some reason the map depicts a space station with a docking bay instead of the land-based outpost from the scenario’s introduction, just one of a surprising multitude of continuity errors.)

Unfortunately, Reclaimer is senselessly hostile to any GM wanting to run it.

First, it’s designed for a custom micro-pamphlet format that requires you to print, cut, and then origami the PDF. The result is cute, but completely impractical: Among other things, it splits the map of Galloway Outpost across multiple spreads, making it painful to use.

The map also uses a number of custom symbols, all of which are unkeyed. You’ll probably be able to figure out most of them, but some remain complete mysteries to me.

Once you work your way past the unfriendly formatting, what you’ll discover is that the adventure is functionally unfinished:

• There are no stat blocks for the rival crew.
• Colored keycards are used to unlock various areas of the base, but the keycards not included in the key. Instead, the GM is instructed to “spread keycards around the outpost and allow crews to find them through exploration.”
• There’s a potentially interesting little mini-game where power has to be rerouted to different areas of the base… except it’s unclear why the PCs would need power restored to any of these rooms.

Perhaps most importantly, the central dynamic of the adventure is scavenging on a time limit: How much can you salvage before the competing team arrives (unless they got here first in yet another continuity error) and before the base collapses?

The collapse of the base is put on a specific time limit described in six stages from Minor Structural Damage to Total Collapse. Which would be great, except no guideline for the time required to salvage material is given. And although a list of salvage types is given (industrial fuel, raw minerals, rare electronics, etc.) these are keyed to the map in only vague, incomplete, and, yet again, contradictory ways. Also missing is any sort of value for this salvage.

Most of the adventure, therefore, simply isn’t here. If you want to run Reclaimer, you’ll need to be prepared to do most of the design work yourself.

GRADE: D

MEAT FARM

A lone hacker has suborned the computer systems of Cibus Station, a corporate research station. They’ve freed the experimental subjects, killed (almost) everyone onboard, and are demanding a ransom. The PCs’ corporate overlords want them to board the station and regain control.

Pyry Qvick’s Meat Farm is another adventure that does a great job of layering threats: The hacker will turn the station’s automated stations against the PCs; a suborned android has gone homicidal; and the station is overrun with dangerous/weird/disturbing experimental animals.

What will make or break a creature feature adventure like this are, of course, the monsters, and Qvick delivers a nifty combo pack, including turret gooses, parasite pigs, and albino mammoths, among others. These are stocked in minimal-but-vividly keyed rooms, which are both varied and interesting.

The only real problem I have with Meat Farm is the pointmap itself, which is maddeningly vague to the point of incoherence. I’ve had this problem with vague pointmaps in other Mothership adventures. The problem is that, yes, the pointmap is meant to be an abstract representation of the game world. But it still needs to represent the game world. If I look at your map and (a) I have no idea how to describe the game world to the players and/or (b) the connections between rooms appear nonsensical, that’s a problem.

So when I run Meat Farm, I’ll be taking the adventure’s room keys, but rearranging them into a coherent map.

GRADE: C

CARRION PROTOCOL

Here’s another adventure of experimental meat. (I’m tempted to connect them in some way.)

The PCs answer the distress call of the FUV Irene only to discover that the ship’s meat labs — designed to provide fresh food for the crew — have catastrophically malfunctioned. Multiple compartments have become overgrown by semi-sentient flesh and violent fleshhounds are wandering through the ship.

Carrion Protocol is short, creepy, and fun.

The only real problem with the adventure is the lack of a clear vision of what, exactly, happened on the ship before the PCs showed up. There are a bunch of “clues” thrown around (blood trails, corpses, etc.), but none of it seems to add up to a coherent narrative, which makes the scenario unnecessarily difficult to run. (If I, as the GM, don’t understand what happened, it becomes much harder to answer the questions the players are asking consistently.) Somewhat related to this is a continuity issue where “every 10 minutes a room adjacent to meat growth is overgrown.” But at that pace, the entire ship should have been overgrown long before the PCs could have answered the distress call.

Also, the adventure is presented a pamphlet, but every PDF is screwed up in a different way so that you can’t actually print any of them and get a functional pamphlet, which is rather frustrating.

These problems are not terribly difficult to fudge your away around, however, and as a pay-what-you-want title, this one is worth checking out.

GRADE: C

BURYING GROUNDS ON PAVEL THETA

Rebecca Bennett’s Burying Grounds on Pavel Theta is a Pet Sematary riff: On a newly terraformed world, the corporation has lost contact with the team who was supposed to be establishing a base camp and the PCs are sent in as the backup team.

Unfortunately, it turns out that any corpses buried in the ground become reanimated undead. This includes Mikey, a member of the original team who died and was buried by his teammates, and a bunch of undead opossums.

Conceptually, I really like this adventure. The undead opossums are incredibly creepy and Bennett includes a great pacing mechanic for them.

Where it unfortunately falls apart is, once again, the details. Like Carrion Protocol, Burying Grounds desperately needs an authoritative background: The previous team is missing, but (other than Mikey) what happened to them? Where are they? Where did the opossums come from? How did they get buried?

It’s a lot of cool stuff, but it kind of all falls apart when you look at it… which, of course, the players will definitely do.

The adventure also includes three recorded audio logs you can share with your players, but they appear to be performed by voice generators with a flat intonation, so they’re probably not worth using.

GRADE: C-

QUANTUM CARGO

Researchers on the FMV Dirac have been attempting to perfect quantum duplication technology, allowing the Quantum Dynamics Corporation (QDC) to collapse multiple quantum states of an object simultaneously, functionally creating a perfect copy. Dr. Flora Ciama attempted to steal the prototype device, accidentally triggering a quantum collapse.

From the outside, the ship appeared to vanish only to reappear several weeks later broadcasting multiple distress signals. The PCs have been dispatched to retrieve the top secret research (although, of course, QDC doesn’t trust them enough to tell them what that research is). They arrive at the Dirac and find it trapped in a quantum flux: At ground zero, three different versions of Dr. Ciama carry out the heist against and again and again — one succeeding, one failing and triggering the quantum explosion, and one stuck in the quantum core chamber.

Quantum Cargo has a few issues — like Burying Grounds on Pavel Theta, for example, it could really benefit from a definitive crew list and a slightly more coherent explanation of what’s been happening on the ship — but the incredibly clever structure of its core premise, in which four different zones of random quantum effects dynamically combine with a location key filled with reality-bending set pieces, make this adventure something special. And despite a few lacunae, there’s also a lot of loving attention to detail here, which includes providing detailed player maps.

GRADE: B-

In the midst of the legion horde, the Thousand Eyes of the Destroyer laughed at the blood of the fallen and the souls of the dead.

This collection of texts tell of the many battles of the Galchutt known as Bhor Kei – the Eyes of Legion, the Laughing Destroyer, the Black Reveler.

ASPECT OF THE TITAN: “Its quaded arms – each raised in beclawed glory – wrought fountains of blood and rivers of gore. And in its flesh was reflected the gore of its fury.”

In its aspect as the titan, Bhor Kei maintains a humanoid form with four arms, each ending in huge, terrible claws like serrated cleavers. The eyes of the Bhor Kei titan glisten deeply green, staring out from a long and pointed face. In this form it strides the fields of battle wreaking destruction.

The Aspect of the Titan is also referred to as the “Eye of the Legion”.

ASPECT OF THE MANY EYES: “A murder of craven eyes. A fury of orbed sight. Seeing all that is ending; knowing all that is broken.”

In its aspect of the many eyes, Bhor Kei is seen as a cloud of bloodshot eyes and blackened wings. In this aspect it has no true shape or substance, but exists as a spiritual manifestation of destructive might.

In all its forms, Bhor Kei is seen to work alone. But there are those texts which describe it as actually representing the destructive thoughts of a multitude of beings – and in that form it is the Many-Eyed Prelate of the Blooded Death.

The Aspect of the Many Eyes is also known as the “Eyes of Legion”.

THE TRAIN OF SOULS: Many tales claim that every living thing that Bhor Kei destroys is doomed to follow forever in its ethereal wake – ghosts bound in spirit to its material form for all eternity. From these souls, Bhor Kei is said to draw upon an endless reserve of strength and power.

THE PAEAN OF DESTRUCTION: Bhor Kei is guided only by emotion and instinct. It lives in the moment. It lives for destruction. It lives with a tireless lust for destruction.

The sum and total of its life and deeds is the Paean of Destruction – the Song of All Chaos. In this song, Bhor Kei moves across the many worlds, rending and killing with a scream of dire pleasure. It revels in its endless pursuit of annihilation.

Back to Chaos Lorebooks

Go to Part 1

The Rimbound series by Stella Condrey is a set of twelve Mothership trifold supplements and adventures. These are pay-what-you-want and also available for free download. (However, while they’re available on a variety of platforms, it seems that the series has only been partially uploaded to many of these platforms, so you may need to poke around a bit to track them all down.)

I’m reviewing these in the order I read them in. I admit this is quite idiosyncratic, but I wrote these reviews as I went along, and when I reorganized them into numeric order I discovered it was like giving a presentation after dropping your notecards on the floor and shuffling them into a random order. So you’ll just have to join me on this journey.

RIMBOUND #6: REDSCREEN

One of the challenges with executing a micro-supplement, whether trifold or otherwise, is making sure that it offers something of value beyond the basic pitch. This is something that Redscreen: A Disease for Androids unfortunately struggles with.

The basic concept is that Redscreen is a virus that infects AIs (including androids) and makes them murder humans.

And now that I’ve told you that, you don’t need to buy Redscreen, because you already know everything in the trifold. Ostensibly there are three sample infected AIs, but these largely have no actual value: One full panel (out of six) explains in laborious detail that a space station AI could turn off the life support systems. Another full panel goes into great detail about how a ship AI could slam automatic doors to hurt the PCs. If you can make the intuitive leap from “infected AI wants to do harm” to “will use computer-controlled systems to do harm,” you’re good to go here.

The other challenge is making sure your micro-supplement includes all the necessary information to use it. Here, too, Redscreen struggles. For example, guidelines are given for what to do “if a PC becomes infected with Redscreen,” but it forgets to explain how the PCs could get infected in the first place.

GRADE: D-

RIMBOUND #11: UNDER THE DUNES

Under the Dunes is a pretty solid foundation for a cool adventure: While scanning a desert planet for ore deposits, they stumble across the buried wreck of a spaceship. As they breach the wreck, a sandstorm rolls in: It’s going to be hours before they can leave. What mysteries, dangers, and wealth will they find inside?

Opening up the trifold, there’s a good map and a functional key.

Unfortunately, with this foundation in place, it seems as if Condrey wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it. I’m left with the impression that she just started throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something would stick: The ship is from three years in the future! …and maybe one of the PCs could find their own dead body? It’s a cool moment, but there’s no explanation for how this happened and no real development of the idea.

Okay, so there’s a squad of military fleshbots onboard! They’ll activate and attack the PCs! … but why? And also, what are they doing on an ore transport vessel?

In short, there’s a bunch of ideas here, but nothing fully developed or coherent.

With that being said, I’m slipping Under the Dunes into the stack of adventures for my open table. But it’ll need a little TLC to build something compelling on top of its foundation.

(While Under the Dunes provides the sample desert world of Euthana, it would be pretty easy to locate this adventure on The Desert Moon of Karth, among others.)

GRADE: C-

RIMBOUND #9: UNDER THAT BLACK SKY

The clever thing that Under That Black Sky does is taking TWO cool concepts and combining them into a single adventure. If an adventure only has one big idea, it can be easy for it to run out of gas, but when you combine ideas you usually end up with something greater than the sum of its parts as you combine and contrast them in countless ways.

The first idea here is a colony planet with a cloud cover so thick that no visible light can penetrate, so you can only see what your artificial lights illuminate.

The second idea is that this planet was once the bioengineered hunting grounds for an alien species, and now something has awakened the ancient xenofauna generators, unleashing horrific beasts into the wilderness.

These aren’t just cool sci-fi concepts, they’re both unique vectors for horror.

Here’s the problem:

Why are there are no monster stat blocks or descriptions?

To let the beauty of your imagination create your own Hyades V, dear warden.

So you completely failed to actually write the scenario, but you’re pretending it’s a virtue?

Well… That’s too bad.

GRADE: F

RIMBOUND #7: GEAR FOR A SPACEFARER

The central feature of Gear for a Spacefarer is a couple dozen pieces of new equipment for Mothership. I quite liked this. Items like airlock foam, jerry cans, an algal starter kit, and trail cameras provide a nice blend of unique functionality and gap-filling. There are several times, while reading through the equipment list that I realized something should obviously be available for sale and even more where I said, “Ooh! That’ll be fun!” Like all good equipment lists, therefore, this one both adds tangible depth to the game world and great gameplay options.

I would, however, recommend reviewing the listed prices. Many of them seemed a little wonky to me, with the worst example being a drone listed at 2% the price of a drone from the core rulebook.

Gear for a Spacefarer also includes the Cadwal Trade Depot, a caravan of vessels providing the services of a C-class starport. This is only sketched in with the broadest strokes, but does include a fun 1d10 table of plot hooks that immediately started inspiring my creative muse.

GRADE: B

RIMBOUND #10: COLD OPENING

Twelve years ago the PCs were placed in cryosleep onboard the Thelma 2. Three months ago, the ship went off course. Two minutes ago the ship’s AI woke the PCs up.

You’ll be shocked (shocked!) to discover there’s an alien predator called the Cretin onboard.

Nothing wrong with a good trope. (Although I will note that this particular trope can be troublesome to pull off in Mothership since android PCs don’t enter cryosleep.) The problem here is that nothing makes sense: Why is this journey taking twelve years? How did the Cretin get onboard? Why are the PCs being woken up now?

As with Under the Dunes, I’m overwhelmingly left with the impression that a bunch of random, undeveloped ideas were just randomly dumped into the adventure key in the hope that something would stick: The Cretin turns out to be a robotic creature, but someone smeared feces all over the airlock. There are “yellow-tinged eggs” in the antigrav generator. There’s religious ramblings in an unknown xenolanguage scrawled across the rooms of the reactor room. A seemingly unrelated religious organization engraved a metallic cube with a message and stuck it inside the Cretin. And so forth.

Perhaps the kindest thing I can say for Cold Opening is simply Unfinished. This one doesn’t make the cut for me and I won’t be running it.

GRADE: D

Go to Part 8: More Trifolds!

This supplement can’t quite focus itself: As a sourcebook it tries to cover too much. As an adventure it doesn’t cover enough.

Originally Published March 14th, 2002

Slavers was published in 2000 as part of the effort by Wizards of the Coast to revive the Greyhawk line. As a supplement for the second edition of AD&D, it would require conversion before it could be used in a D&D3 campaign. This review assumes that this conversion is going to take place: In other words, the question “Is this worth taking the time to convert?” is going to be part of the final judgment of the product.

CONTENTS

Slavers bills itself as a sequel to the “Slavelords saga”. For those of you unfamiliar with AD&D history, the Slavelords saga encompasses the first edition A1-4 modules (A1: Slave Pits of the Undercity, A2: Secret of the Slavers Stockade, A3: Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords, and A4: In the Dungeon of the Slave Lords).

This is, in my opinion, the first mistake that Slavers makes. When Slavers came out, the original modules had not been available for more than a decade. Yet Slavers relies heavily on the DM’s knowledge of the previous adventures, and even (at some points) seems to assume that the players will at least have a passing knowledge of the importance of past events. (Slavers was not the only product in the renewed Greyhawk line which suffered from this problem. Return of the Eight, which I reviewed here, referenced products which had been out of date for nearly three decades.)

The second mistake Slavers makes is billing itself as a sequel, when it’s really more of a sourcebook. Of course, as a sourcebook it also seems confused as to its identity: The sourcebook seems to go wherever the sparsely plotted adventure takes it. So it’s sort of a sourcebook about the Pomarj; and kind of about Nyr Dyv; and somewhat about the lands of the Flanaess (but not all of them).

We’ll come back to that.

PLOT

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for Slavers. Players who may find themselves playing in this adventure should not read beyond this point.

The problem with the plot can basically be summed up with this quote from the book: “However, these sites and people have only vague links that tie them together into a grand adventure.”

“Vague links” and “grand adventure” do not really belong in the same sentence together.

Here, however, is roughly how the plot is constructed: The PCs are based out of the city of Dyvers. Slavers begin operating in the area, and players eventually hear rumors of slavers operating out of the Blackthorn Caverns. The outline tells us that: “Care should be taken so that the heroes don’t discover the precise location of the entrance to Blackthorn’s Caverns.” This prevents the heroes from doing logical things (like informing the authorities of the slaver’s stronghold). The outline also gives us several ideas about how to go about doing this… none of which actually work. The PCs are also supposed to lose at Blackthorn; and lose badly.

When the PCs return to Dyvers in defeat, they will witness the end of a slave raid by the Pirates of the Yellow Veil. “They can only stop a few of the raiders, and are too late to prevent the ship from setting sail and escaping.” (That’s great: Not only is the adventure vague, it’s railroaded.) Of course, the PCs’ friends are among those kidnapped by the Slavers.

And off they go: To the secret base in Nyr Dyv. To the Slavers’ Cove. To the slaver ship Eternal Sun. To more slaver bases. To more slaver bases. And still more slaver bases. And a few more slaver bases. And, eventually, the Big Slaver Base.

What the adventure lacks in epic structure, it makes worse through lack of imagination. The scenarios quickly boil down to a series of very short, very boring, practically identical raids. There is no sense of the epic here, and very few original ideas. Simply put, Slavers lacks greatness: The PCs never go anywhere with more than two dozen encounter keys (and most have a half dozen or less). An epic requires scope, and Slavers never finds it.

SOURCEBOOK

As a sourcebook, Slavers provides background material for Dyvers, North Woolly Bay, the Orcish Wild Coast, and the Pomarj.

The first problem here, as noted above, is that there doesn’t seem to be any particular rhyme or reason why these particular locations are covered in a sourcebook together: Other than the fact that the accompanying adventure outline supposedly carries the PCs through these locales.

This begins to create a cascading problem: The book appears to be more interested in being a sourcebook than an adventure, and the adventure suffers as a result – becoming little more than a rough outline of ideas. But as a sourcebook, it’s only definite use is in supplementing the adventure it’s busily undermining by trying to be a sourcebook.

The problem is made worse by the fact that the adventure (which, remember, is rendered into little more than an outline) warps the presentation of the sourcebook material. For example, in the section on Nyr Dyv you don’t get comprehensive coverage of Nyr Dyv – you get paltry coverage of Nyr Dyv, with some focused detail on a handful of locations which are only important for the adventure.

Once again, this creates a cascading problem: You don’t have enough of a general focus to provide a good general-purpose sourcebook. At the same time, you don’t have enough of a specific focus to provide a good sourcebook for the adventure.

CONCLUSION

Ultimately, Slavers can’t quite focus itself: As a sourcebook it tries to cover too much, too randomly. As an adventure it doesn’t cover enough.

As a result, I really can’t recommend this one to anybody who isn’t a compulsive collector of Greyhawk material. Fans of the original Slavers adventures might enjoy this book more than others; but, by the same token, there’s also a good chance that they’ll hate its flaws even more.

One mitigating note, however: Those willing to dig a bit will find a lot of juicy material here that can be pried out and used in other places. I, for example, used material from Slavers to help flush out and fill in the weaknesses I perceive in the original Slavers modules: Essentially combining the strengths of both the original and sequel, while excising the combined weaknesses, to give the raw material for a single epic adventure track.

Style: 4
Substance: 3

Author: Sean K. Reynolds and Chris Pramas
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 0-7869-1621-4
Product Code: TSR11621
Pages: 128

Around this time I was planning to run the Slavelords saga as a follow-up to the Freeport Trilogy. I wanted to expand the original tourney modules into a node-based campaign (although I wasn’t referring to it as node-based design yet) and I’d picked up Slavers in the hopes that I could use it to flesh out the original material. This, as you can see from the review, didn’t really pan out. I eventually just dumped the original A-series modules entirely and started designing my own Slave Lords campaign from scratch. Unfortunately, that group fell apart after running through the first couple slaver adventures and I ended up never finishing the campaign.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.