| Dark Tower | |
| by Daniel Ray | |
| Gizmo’s Review | |
A Review of Daniel Ray’s The Dark Tower — by Gizmo
I have to admit that I came to this scenario dreading it and really only seeking the stats from it for submission into Alexandria. Not wanting to waste time I gave in and read some of the hint file as well as starting with my god party. This may be the biggest reason that I did not find it so offensive. The wandering monsters are all tough and most did not flee my level 50 party. I would recommend playing this scenario with at least level 20 or even 30 for an enjoyable — winnable — game.
This scenario is obviously the author’s first with many details left unattended that seasoned writers would have taken care of. Even so the coding and some of the dungeon design were very impressive to me. He had custom monsters, items and graphics, and showed quite a handle on nodework for a newbie. He had potential and could have greatly improved his scenario simply by beta-testing it on a few willing players. He even wrote ‘Beta-testers’ in his readme but there are no names after it.
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The author definitely favors mind games and puzzles in the dungeons to straight fights. Just look at the maze in this dungeon! This scenario was not effortless. |
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Not
all dungeons got this much attention to detail. My biggest
disappointment was the Citadel of Fire. Here there was supposed to be a
very powerful woman with next to impenetrable forces, but a simple
stealth, major blessing, and firewalk got my party to the villain in
short order. Plus there was no booty to collect for the deed. The
outdoors section could have been greatly improved also if the author
had just made the random lava field into a maze to traverse.
I see the authors main goal as making the player think, making them
figure out the reason for the seeming madness. Unfortunately, he does
not guide the player well enough. Even for the very first task of
finding the Tower of Light, the player is not told where to look except
in the hintfile.
The most important statement that the author makes in the readme is:
“…many hostile dungeons may not make sense at first.”
My first time through I was completely lost as to what it was all about. The reason for the dungeons wasn’t revealed until late into the scenario. After finishing the scenario and realizing it wasn’t all that bad I decided to run through it a second time to create a walkthrough for my website. In doing so I observed some things that made sense for the first time. For one, the wandering monsters roam near their homes. The Wyverns near their den, the Golems near their tower, and the Hezrou (who are demons able to summon Haakai) roam near the Temple of Demons were the most powerful of them all resides. The placement of a goblin outpost and giant cave very near the starting point showed no reason at all on the first go around and in truth did not contain anything of value for actually playing them. Yet again hindsight showed me the reason the author put them there: The top villain, who it is your ultimate goal to stop, has put all of the evil into place in his effort to control the world. The four dark gates were also very frustrating to play through the first time. Yet while they were frustrating, it seemed obvious to me that there was another piece to the puzzle that I was missing. This did help keep my interest when nothing seemed to make sense.
Playing with my god party did hinder how I viewed his town design and shop placement. Since I didn’t need much of anything I didn’t pay attention until I was writing the walkthrough. You can find everything that a level 30 party could ever want mostly concentrated into the few towns. At closer look the author did not have a well thought out plan for where the player should get certain things as many items and spells are offered three or four times in the space of 12 outdoor sections with only the pricing as different. Also in the starting town you can get identification for free while having to pay 8 gold for it in just two sections down. This is one of the areas where the author needed to improve. The other major one was in storytelling. Not only did the his storyline have many holes in logic, but also his telling of the story was sparse and incomplete. And until you read all of what the author puts in about the story (which is truly not much and not enough) you probably won’t understand that it is an alternate universe and not really your character’s world at all. This point should have been made very apparent very quickly for the player to understand the game.
In
conclusion I will admit that this scenario is a far cry from great, but
it is also not terrible. If graded only in comparison to other first
efforts, in my opinion it is better then most. The author has much to
learn and much to improve on to make a really good scenario, but I
believe he could.
My score – 4.9
— Gizmo