Although marred in the execution, Night Below is still a classic is well worth your attention and effort.
Review Originally Published October 1st, 2001
There needs to be more products like Night Below. Period. End sentence.
Night Below, a supplement for the now defunct AD&D, was marketed as both “The Ultimate Dungeon Adventure” and “An Underdark Campaign”. It fails at the former (there are a plethora of dungeons which succeed at being bigger, more innovative, more believable, more exciting, and/or some combination of the above), but its success at the latter is what makes it notable and worthy of imitation.
To put it simply, Night Below did not content itself with merely being a module: It is, in fact, a complete campaign – designed for months of gameplay and complete with more than a dozen adventures tied into a cohesive plot.
This is a type of product that the industry needs to see more of. (For other examples, check out Dream Pod 9’s The Paxton Gambit for Heavy Gear and Gold Rush Games’ Shiki for Sengoku.) I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I would welcome the ability to pick up a complete campaign in one shot and start playing. If nothing else, it gives me time to prepare for the next campaign.
Let’s take a closer look at what Night Below has to offer:
PLOT
Warning: From this point forward, this review will contain spoilers for Night Below. Players who may end up playing in these modules are encouraged to stop reading now. Proceed at your own risk.
The Big Concept: Deep within the Underdark, the Aboleth Savants – powerful creatures with the power to dominate others – lurk within the Sunless Sea. There they have laid plots for the construction of a massive magical artifact, designed to expand their innate domination powers for hundreds of miles, allowing them to subdue surface creatures without any need for battle or risk. The PCs, of course, have to stop them from doing this – although, for a very long time, they won’t have the slightest clue of the true evil which lurks behind their foes.
The Night Below campaign is split into three parts:
The Evils of Haranshire: In Part I of Night Below, the PCs begin as 1st or 2nd level characters in Haranshire, a typical, rural fantasy setting (which can be easily slipped into any campaign setting – suggestions are given for placement in Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms). In order to construct their artifact, the aboleths have need of spellcasters – and to get those spellcasters they have established bands of kidnappers on the surface. The campaign, in fact, opens with a kidnapping attempt involving one or more PC spellcasters. As the campaign unfolds, the PCs slowly uncover the full truth behind the kidnapping rings – while also going on some a few side-trips. In the big wrap up for the first part of the campaign, the PCs succeed in destroying what they believe to be the central lair for the kidnappers… only to discover the kidnappers’ connection to an unknown power in the underdark.
Perils in the Underdark: In Part II of Night Below, the PCs pursue their leads into the Underdark. They almost immediately make contact with friendly svirfneblin, who will provide them with cautious aid. This section of the campaign is largely concerned with the PCs slowly building up enough strength to assault the City of the Glass Pool – a settlement of kuo-tua deep within the Underdark which guards the gateway leading to the Sunless Sea and the root of the evil. Along the way, the PCs will make contact with a variety of bad guys (trolls, grells, quaggoth, hook horrors, puddings, oozes, and derro) and good guys (the svirfneblin and a group of good elves living in the Underdark). Part II comes to its smashing conclusion as the PCs succeed in overthrowing the City of the Glass Pool (or, at the very least, pushing through it into the depths beyond).
The Sunless Sea: In Part III of Night Below, the PCs have succeeded in penetrating all the way to the Sunless Sea – wherein dwell the sinister Aboleth Savants. But they will have to make their way the Aboleth’s city – and along the way will encounter a number of other enemies and allies. Again, a thin line needs to be tread in the forming and maintaining of alliances. In the campaign’s epic conclusion the PCs will (hopefully) defeat the Aboleth Savants and overthrow their seat of power for all time.
BOX CONTENTS
Night Below is one of those boxed sets which you can shake without hearing the echoes formed by empty space within. Three 64-page books, 16 pages of Player Handouts, 8 two-sided reference cards, 8 new Monstrous Compendium entries, and 6 full-color poster maps are packed into the box – making it a hearty value for the $30 price tag.
STRENGTHS
Night Below succeeds at crafting a comprehensive, epic campaign. Carl Sargent demonstrates how a well-constructed campaign looks less like a series of disjointed modules, and more like a cohesive story – with a distinct beginning, middle, and end all of its own. This, above all, is Night Below’s most impressive accomplishment, and is reason enough to pick up the boxed set in and of itself.
But you can also strip-mine Night Below with great ease: There’s a great wealth of material here (literally enough on which to base an entire campaign), and you can use large hunks of it without ever touching the overall structure of the campaign at all. For example, I plucked out the source material for two of the towns in Haranshire for use in completely different campaign. You could also pluck out such jewels as the Rockseer Elves subplot and use that as a stand-alone adventure in and of itself (or even as the basis for an entire campaign). And so forth.
WEAKNESSES
Unfortunately, Night Below also comes with its share of weaknesses:
1. The most pervasive problem in the campaign was the lack of clear organization and/or layout in the product. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s a lot of material here and – unfortunately – it’s organized in such a poor manner that it’s extremely easy to get lost in it all. In many ways, the campaign is presented almost as a stream of consciousness. As such, it desperately needed to be reorganized into distinct chunks: Here’s the section where the PCs fight the orcs. Here’s the section where we describe Haranshire. Here’s the section where the PCs investigate the troll lair. And so forth.
2. Although he’s constructed an extremely impressive story arc, I feel that Sargent doesn’t always take advantage of the opportunity to foreshadow future developments. Perhaps this is a minor complaint, but I feel that a little more interweaving of the overall structure would have resulted in a story with more depth.
3. Night Below suffers, unfortunately, from the standard 2nd edition problem of referencing/requiring every supplement under the sun. This type of thing drives me nuts: Did these people actually expect their fans to own all 10,000+ supplements they produced?
4. At several points in the course of the campaign, Sargent brings what I can only describe as “XP mentality” into the game world. Most notably, the svirfneblin are constantly advising the PCs to go take care of one threat or another in order to “strengthen them up” (i.e., gain the levels necessary) for the final challenge. I just can’t accept this with a straight face. For example, imagine the United States during World War II saying: “Well, we need to take on Japan. I think we need to go take out Argentina and Venezuela in order to ‘strengthen up’ for the final challenge.”
5. I’m not a big fan of the “1001 fantasy races” model of campaign world design – in which, every time you turn a corner, you’re bumping into a new race of intelligent humanoids. Night Below has this syndrome in spades – which is why, as much as I respect and appreciate the product, I will probably never run it in full myself. If you have a similar distaste for this particular style of D&D, be warned that Night Below will require significant amounts of alteration (and may, in the end analysis, simply not work for you).
CONCLUSION
Night Below is a bang well worth your buck. If you can track down a copy, it’s well worth your time – either to use in whole or in part.
Style: 3
Substance: 4
Author: Carl Sargent
Publisher: TSR
Line: AD&D
Price: $30.00
ISBN: 0-7869-0179-9
Year of Release: 1995
Product Code: 1125
Pages: 225
Now that the full campaign model of Night Below has become almost bog standard in the RPG industry, it’s interesting to look back at a time when that wasn’t true. With that being said, I think Night Below has still stolen a march: There are a lot of reasons why these big campaigns just work better as boxed sets. (Although we’re starting to see more and more of that from third-party D&D publishers.)
As I mentioned at the end of the review, Night Below is not a campaign that I ever ran for myself (although I did cut off chunks and use them elsewhere). There was a point where I was dabbling with the idea of remixing it to have a less linear form, but the group I was running for back then fell apart and I haven’t revisited it since.
For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.
I remember buying this one and mining some of it, although I’m almost certain I didn’t run much of the actual module.
Totally agree with objections #4 and #5. 5 irritates me to the point where I usually don’t run modules featuring too much of that, and ask my PCs to stick to the races in the player’s handbook or Volo’s, sometimes (aasimar, firbolgs, and goliath aren’t bad), although I’ve very occasionally allowed other races if there’s a clear concept presented.
Thanks for another excellent post.
I read this module two years ago with the intent to plan a big underdark campaign. I (probably over-) reacted poorly to the clear XP gates, like the locked door that won’t open until the PCs are level 5, even with a knock spell (for no in-world reason). I was really, again probably unreasonably, annoyed at the heavy handed methods Carl Sargent used to keep the campaign on rails. That being said, the vibes were awesome and still tempt me sometimes. I think Haranshire is the perfect vanilla fantasy setting (like an artisanal vanilla bean gelato).
Great review explaining why Night Below remains such a memorable D&D campaign despite some execution flaws. I liked the balanced perspective on its design and ambition. What part of the adventure do you think most captured the feeling of a true epic campaign?
How do you feel about this compared to Out of the Abyss?
The adventure sounds like a cool concept!
I tend to GM my games on the written assumption that XP is part of the fantasy elements of the setting; that if you adventure enough and don’t die (which you almost certainly will if you aren’t fighting an endless series of carefully balanced fights between CR-4 and CR+4), you become stronger. So that never violates my suspension of disbelief.
I played Night Below when it was released 20+ years ago, and DM’d much of it about 2 years ago. Very different experiences. As a player, I found the combats challenging, and didn’t mind the railroad.
As a DM… there are a lot of things that didn’t sit right, once the PCs go underground in the second book. The short cut the bad guys use that the players arbitrarily can’t access, because magic. The endless slog through enemies that aren’t part of the evil plot (trolls, grells, hook horrors, dragon) but nonetheless have vital clues. The vast amount of loot the PCs acquire. The screwjob at the end of the adventure. It’s definitely a railroad; the DM is encouraged to not let the PCs go to certain places unless they’ve already been to other places. Were I to DM it again, I’d probably use milestone advancement and redistribute the clues/MacGuffins where the PCs can plausibly find them.
I came to know this campaign from a Youtube campaign diary from a channel called “Mage’s Musings” and beyond it being a very entertaining diary, it provides a lot of advice on running the module as well.