Although presenting a mystery which cannot be solved, The Murder of the Seven Points is probably worth checking out.

Review Originally Published October 1st, 2001

After initially being very enamored with the Adventure Boosters format pioneered by AEG, I found myself rapidly souring on the idea after a series of markedly lackluster efforts (my reviews can be found elsewhere on RPGNet by searching the Review Database). The Murder of the Seven Points offers some hope that the format will still realize its potential, but I remain skeptical.

PLOT

A series of grisly, ritualistic murders are being committed in a nameless city – and the PCs are drafted to help investigate them. Why, exactly, the PCs are singled out to help investigate the murders (rather than just patrol the streets like the other volunteers) is not exactly clear – but it appears that Yaple is attempting to provide an explanation by having the Captain of the Guard say: “You’re new in town. You couldn’t have committed the murders. I need your help.”

Okay, maybe I’m just needlessly paranoid: But if a bunch of strange murders started happening in my town (which is normally small and quiet) the first place I’d look would be recent arrivals. Looking for suspects I mean, not people to help with the investigation.

But I digress: The PCs go through a number of short scenes (checking out the murder scenes, interviewing family members, etc.), supposedly attempting to gather clues by which they will solve this mystery. In the end, though, they don’t really uncover all that much when it comes to valuable information. The next important plot point comes when the Captain of the Guard realizes he accidentally mixed up the order in which the murders took place – which makes it apparent that that murders are being committed in the pattern of a seven-pointed star.

While Yaple has a number of possible ways in which to explain why the Captain of the Guard might have gotten the order of the murders screwed up (perhaps the bodies were found out of order for some reason?), he instead decides to simply leave that as a Fact of Life™. Having concluded that this is all part of some sort of ritual, the Captain of the Guard will lead the PCs to a very specific scholar. They will have an unproductive conversation with that scholar – at which point we basically fast-forward to that evening, at which point that self-same scholar summons forth a demon and a Battle Royale ensues.

The PCs win (presumably). Roll credits.

CONCLUSION

In my opinion, The Murder of the Seven Points is not worth playing as it is written. To put it simply: It’s supposed to be a mystery; but it never lets the PCs solve anything.

But there’s a lot of interesting meat here which is being wasted: Yaple draws a number of interesting scenes and characters, and manages to evoke some rather effective images despite his railroaded plot. Essentially I would say that you need to do two things to make this playable:

1. Give the Captain of the Guards a solid reason to recruit the PCs into the investigation. (Simple solution: He’s heard about something heroic they’ve done in the past. He’s more than eager to accept their experienced help in strange matters like this.)

2. Strip out the railroading: Most notably, don’t obfuscate the order of the murders. Let the players figure out the seven-pointed star pattern for themselves. (And, if they don’t, then you can have someone point it out to them as the Big Deadline starts to approach.)

It’ll take a little bit of elbow grease, but I think there’s enough interesting material here to justify it considering the low price of admission.

Style: 4
Substance: 3

Author: Erik Yaple
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Line: D20
Price: $2.49
Year of Release: 2001
Product Code: 8312
Pages: 16

It turns out I’ve always been remixing adventures.

I did, in fact, give up on the AEG Adventure Booster series after this. That may have been a mistake, but at the time I had a single dedicated table and it was settling into a long-term campaign that had been pretty well mapped out, so I was no longer looking around for new D&D adventures to plug in.

Next AEG Booster Review: Castle Zadrian / Sundered Faith

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

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.

If you’re an Alexandrite member of the Alexandrian Youtube channel, you can check out the latest After Action report from my Mothership open table. This one has bloodwights!

WATCH NOW!

I’m also releasing another video tonight: An unboxing video for The Crooked Moon, which you can find over on my Patreon!

You don’t need to be a member to watch this one, but I’ve decided not to release this unboxing video on Youtube because our previous unboxing videos have performed very poorly and they seem to torpedo the algorithm.

But I did want to spread the word about The Crooked Moon, which I think looks really, really cool. Unboxing this one got me very excited to dive deeper! So we’re going to see how hosting videos on Patreon works out.

WATCH NOW!

Review Originally Published May 22nd, 2001

Every so often I read an RPG supplement and I just can’t figure out what was going through the head of the editor who green-lighted it. This is one of those books.

The D&D Gazetteer is, essentially, a 32 page excerpt from the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer which was released several weeks prior to the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer.. And I mean that literally: Every last scrap of information to be found in the D&D Gazetteer is to be found in the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer. Every last bit. Honest. Scout’s honor. (Would I lie to you?)

So the question which ran through my mind as I sat down to review this product was simple: Why would you release two products with the exact same information in them?

To get an answer I went to Ryan Dancey (a VP at WotC who was previously in charge of the D&D product line), and his answer was simple: There is a segment of the D&D market which doesn’t want fully developed campaign worlds: They want a gazetteer-style product which just briefly covers the highlight of a campaign world – something which gives them a common gaming environment, but also lets them fill in the details.

Okay, I can buy that. Sort of. It still leaves questions in my mind as to why the confusingly similar names were used for the two products (especially since the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer isn’t, strictly speaking, a gazetteer), not to mention the release schedule which seemed to scream “we’re trying to rip people off who aren’t following our upcoming release schedule like a hawk” (since the unwary consumer would most likely pick up the D&D Gazetteer without realizing that the much more complete Living Greyhawk Gazetteer was coming).

But I can buy it. So, if you’re one of those people who prefer a less-developed campaign world, this is the book you want – not the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer.

So what is this, anyway?

Well, as most of you probably already know, Greyhawk is – arguably – the original D&D campaign setting; designed and developed by Gary Gygax himself and originally released in a product with a very similar format to the D&D Gazetteer itself. During the last years of TSR, however, Greyhawk – which had been steadily losing ground to the extremely popular Forgotten Realms setting – was canceled. When WotC bought out TSR, however, one of the first things they did was announce the return of “the original campaign” and, with the release of Third Edition, Greyhawk was made the de facto standard of the D&D game once more.

The D&D Gazetteer is a 32 page pamphlet which, basically, serves as a broad introduction to Greyhawk – a campaign world with nearly three decades of development behind it: The history of the world is covered in broad strokes; the significant stats of the major kingdoms are given and they are briefly described (an average of three paragraphs or so is devoted to each); major geographical forms are detailed; and major power groups are given a similarly distilled treatment. A full-color map of the world is also included. All of this is done extremely well.

In other words, the D&D Gazetteer does exactly what it’s supposed to do. I just don’t have that much confidence that a large segment of the market really has a desire for what it’s doing. I, personally, would be happier with the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer – but your mileage may vary.

One thing I have considered doing with the Gazetteer, however, is using it as a player resource. My read-through of the material here didn’t turn up any deep, dark secrets of the world which I wouldn’t be comfortable with my players knowing – and the low price point would make it comparatively easy for me to pick a copy up for all my players (or for them to pick one up for themselves). As a result, the D&D Gazetteer could, essentially, serve as  “player’s guide” to Greyhawk – although you might want to preview the material yourself before okaying it for your own campaign.

Writers: Gary Hollan, Erik Mona, Sean Reynolds, Frederick Weining, Skip Williams, Ed Stark
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Price: $9.95
Page Count: 32
ISBN: 0-7869-1742-3
Product Code: TSR11742

I remain confused about the decision to publish both a D&D Gazetteer and D&D Living Greyhawk Gazetteer just a few weeks apart. It actually kind of echoes my confusion with Wizards’ release schedule at the tail end of 2025, when they released two different starter sets a few weeks apart, followed by two different campaign settings in back-to-back months.

I remember even in response to this review there were people saying stuff like, “Wait… this ISN’T the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer?” and, “There’s two of them?!”

I also found the decision to make Greyhawk the “official” setting of D&D 3rd Edition, but then only releasing a single setting supplement (or, I guess two setting supplements) to be a weird one. The official explanation, if I recall correctly, alternated between “this way the DM can feel like it’s a setting they can do anything they want with” and “we’re leaving it for organized play to use,” which were basically diametrically opposed. Ultimately, I’m guessing there was just some weird internal politicking going on as a result of Dancey’s decision to ruthlessly (albeit necessarily) slash the number of D&D settings that were being published, and these weird product decisions were the result.

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

Go to Table of Contents

LETTER OF CAUTION FROM SHIGMAA URASTA

Arquad—

These most recent requests have proven most challenging, and the resulting creations may prove both delicate and dangerous.

First, the members of the danse macbre are not to be trifled with. The gifts you ask of them have only been achieved by imbuing them with the essence of the Crimson Court. They harness, thus, the endless revelry of that eternal celebration, but also carry in the marrow of their bones the malefic curse of the Court’s taint.

As for the stitched zombies, their endurance and baleful death curse are all that we had hoped, and they require no special caution beyond avoiding any breaking of their skin.

—Shigmaa Urasta

LETTER FROM ALIASTER TO ARQUAD

Master Arquad—

I have need of additional brute labor capable of the utmost discretion. My sister suggested that you might be able to supply me with the perfect candidates.

Please dispatch four of your adamantine skeletons to our apartments on Crossing Street. Select those with slender phalanges, if you would. I may have need to employ them in tasks of a delicate nature.

—Aliaster of the House Vladaam

REQUEST FROM HOUSE SADAR

Arquad—

House Sadar requests one dozen skeletons be prepared to perform the danse macabre and delivered to their manse upon the 30^th in time for their celebrations.

The utmost care must be taken with their construction, for they must be capable of the most intimate interactions with the many and esteemed guests of House Sadar. Each must be capable of performing at least six dances in response to both music and vocal request — the waltz, bachata, tango, paso doble, cotillon, and gavotte. Lord Renn has also requested that they perform, upon command, a coordinated schuchplatter for the entertainment of the guests.

We have the greatest confidence in both your ability to fulfill these needs in the most exemplary of fashions, and also with the most respectful discretion. House Sadar wishes neither any untoward reumours to accrue towards them; nor do they desire that this most splendid display should be anything less than the most exquisite of surprises for the guests of their celebration.

—Majordomo of the Esteemed House of the Merchants Sadar

LETTER FROM GATHAR TO ARQUAD

A.—

Lilith offers to you a pair of great and wondrous gifts. Milady knows the craft of these Tomb Maidens of old, and these have been but recently discovered within a mausoleum in the deep vails of the Quiet. From the vast book of her memory, she speaks of a time when these beautiful maidens of iron were placed as guardians upon the great houses of the dead throughout the southern city-states. Sadly superstition and fear of the necromantic energies which course through their lithe forms led to the practice being outlawed.

Use them for your own protection or dispose of them to whatever profit or advantage you would wish. Lilith cares only that you know the value she places upon you and your work.

Regretfully, this will need to be the last shipment of consequence for at least a fortnight. My brothers among the Deathguild have grown suspicious of my activities. The correct application of additional coin may be required, but I am hopeful that a little time will serve to quiet worried minds. I certainly do not expect any lasting difficulty, but caution is never unwise.

Gathar

BILL FOR THE RATLING ARROWS

Owed: 240gp 5sp

You’re spoiling those ratlings! These arrows are too good for them.

Make sure they keep them in the sheaths we’ve prepared, lest more than your enemies come to regret our work.

The bill has been folded for delivery.
A return address is given on the outer fold:

F. Gld. — Vanguard Street
Guildsman District

Go to Part 18: Vladaam Drug Running