| Keep on the Shadowfell (Dungeons & Dragons, Adventure H1) | 
 enlarge | Authors: Bruce Cordell, Mike Mearls
Brand: Wizards of the Coast
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $15.85
You Save: $14.10 (47%)
New (41) Used (8) from $15.85
Avg. Customer Rating:  63 reviews
Sales Rank: 13224
Media: Paperback
Edition: 4th
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 96
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 11.2 x 9.3 x 0.5
ISBN: 0786948507
Dewey Decimal Number: 793
EAN: 9780786948505
ASIN: 0786948507
Publication Date: May 20, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New! Save 30 - 50% off of retail prices on our wide selection of comic book graphic novels, manga and anime, role playing games, DVDS, Osprey military history books, and more!
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Good Plot, a little light on alternatives. September 10, 2008
My party began our 4e game with this module. I love the plot, and appluad the good use of lightly connected but essentially unrelated missions, allowing the PCs to feel like going after the kobolds or heading to the keep was a meaningful and hard choice.
The only thing I did not like was a lack of assumption that the PCs would try and use wit instead of brawn. Little guidance is given on how to handle PCs trying to ferret out spys, or trick the villains into thinking they are there to help them.
Still, a very fun adventure, and the maps are worth the price by themselves, and highly reusable!
 A little tough but straight forward adventure September 5, 2008
To be very simple, this is a pretty good introduction to a 4th Edition adventure. The encounters are interesting (although maybe not quite unique enough) and the new format is a great improvement over the previous edition. Should be easy enough to fit into any campaign.
 Terrible September 4, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
My group just got finished running through Keep on the Shadowfell. It's so badly written, our group is going to hold to vote to see if we want to revert to 3.5 D&D. Problems with the module include:
1) Horribly trite. It's like the authors read "How to make a 1st module for a new edition of D&D" and copied everything from it. First, you fight kobolds. Then more kobolds. Then some goblins. Then more goblins. Then some skeletons. Then hobgoblins!
2) No plot to speak of. What plot there was was trite and uninteresting.
3) The final boss was a generic mustache-twirling villain who was as uninteresting as hell, especially because the PCs don't even meet him or really know who he is until the final encounter. The rest of the monsters were also all generic as hell. (A goblin commander who was also a coward?! Brilliant writing!)
4) Combats were boring, with no real memorable set pieces or situations except possibly the Irontooth combat. This was not helped by the fact that monsters in 4ed have more interesting abilities than the PCs.
5) The color maps that came with the game were good (very pretty), except a lot of the maps had rooms and other features on it that had no monsters on it, and had no reason for the PCs to go into. It was like they couldn't figure out what to do with the extra space they had.
6) Worst trap encounter ever. The party gets trapped in a room with statues in it. However, the statues all have a limited range, and the room is larger than the range of the traps. So the party can safety stand there from 10 squares away and destroy all of the traps without taking a single point of damage.
Now that we're finished with the module, this overpriced thing is going straight up on Ebay. I'd rather ram pencils into my eye than run it again.
While I appreciate they might have been trying to make a generic, boring game to serve as an introduction to 4th Edition, they made it so bad we might not ever play 4th Edition again.
It's a start September 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
We started on this campaign a few weeks ago. It was promising, had a good amount of detail, NPCs had descriptions, motivations, interests, etc, maps were fairly detailed... In general, it gave me a good first impression.
Then I started reading the module itself... and quickly found that the ink on the covers comes off rather easily on your fingers. This wouldn't be too terrible if the text of the adventure were not written on the outside cover (rather than having a graphic on the outside cover instead to take the hit). As soon as I discovered this, I took preventative measures (don't touch the book, use a stick to turn the pages, let it lie on the table, etc), and the damage was not to the point to make it unreadable... but it was an unpleasant revelation.
The encounters seem a bit unbalanced to the player's favor, but a good GM could always make minor adjustments to balance things out.
The maps are a good touch, but they are not quite complete... you'll end up making your own to play on in the larger areas (either using the minis or by doing things the good old-fationed 3e way).
A pretty good 4e adventure August 15, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
We're partway through this adventure after six sessions and are really enjoying it. It's not perfect by any means, and the actual "Keep" portion of the adventure can degenerate into a dungeon crawl of repetitiveness if the DM isn't careful.
Personally, i've added my own flavor and flair to the adventure as written, fleshing out the dull NPCs and adding multiple new encounters, treasure, and monsters. The whole story is nothing new in the realm of epic of fantasy, but i find it to be a great vehicle to show off what 4e can do. a
And what it CAN'T do.
My biggest complaint is the lack of maps for the keep itself. It has taken me painstaking hours to scan and print these maps, but the end result is fantastic. And they're reusable to boot. I look forward to the next part, Thunderspire Labyrinth, and just hope there's an easier way to print the high quality maps shown in the books.
|
|
|
