| The Draining | |
| by Flamefiend | |
| Review of The Draining by Drizzt | |
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: in the world of Blades of Exile scenarios, valleys are the most dangerous places to live. They always seem to be on the verge of being taken over, besieged upon by all manners of horrible creatures, forgotten, misruled, poisoned, cursed, fought over, destroyed, burned, frozen, invaded, filled with spooky fog. and otherwise rather unhospitable places to live. If I were the average Empire family, I’d rather quickly find myself a home in a large city in the plains, no mountains anywhere near me, as nothing ever seems to happen there.
Now, valleys everywhere can add the title of this scenario, by Flamefiend, as another curse that has befelled them. Magical draining, that is, as the otherwise fertile plains of Mossy Vale (ie. valley, don’t let the alternate wording fool you), is being sucked dry of its food and magical energy. The mages are desperate, creatures roam the lands harassing the townfolk, what’s a valley to do?
Well, apparently, it’s to hope that the proverbial band of noble adventurers wander by, with nothing better to do than help out a poor Vale(ley). Which is, of course, exactly what happens. The Empire has applied its usual “Seal it up!” response to this latest problem, which conveniently provides the player a small valley to explore and in which to solve the problems.
Right off the bat, it should be said this scenario comes with an _excellent_ readme file, nicely done in HTML, with notes from the author, installation instructions, hints and a walkthrough. If there were awards for these sorts of things, The Draining would win easily.
Unfortunately, the rest of the scenario is not quite up to the standard set by the readme. Custom graphics are used, but not really anything special or new, besides a nice monster Catapult graphic. The scenario is certainly technically competent, with no obvious bugs, but nothing new or difficult is done with Special Nodes or Items, perhaps besides the Draining effect. Then again, there isn’t much done with this other than drain spell points from time to time, not often enough to be annoying. Worse things are said to happen if you stay longer, but my party finished the scenario with plenty of time to spare. The Draining effect does add to the atmosphere and some sense of urgency, but for the most part is nothing remarkable or new is done with it.
The story is somewhat of a mixed bag. You are given free reign of the valley, and if you wander into one of the main towns, one of the mages there gives you his theory of why the draining is occurring, and send you off on a quest to investigate. You end up slaughtering an entire dungeon-full of “crazy cultists”, only to find they are not the source of the draining, to which your mage friend basically responds with a ho-hum, go try something else type of response. The fact that you killed roomfuls of innocents is apparently not much of a concern to him, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.
Essentially, this story is of the “bad guy out to rule the world” type, and the fact that this comes as no big surprise when this is revealed is rather disappointing. True, your party can wander among the gremlins, pixies and goblins terrorizing the humans, and find they have all sworn allegiance to apparently different entities. There is a bit of suspicion with the other mages of the Vale, but when the bad guy is revealed as someone else, up until then completely unknown to everybody, there isn’t much impact. A good mystery, as this scenario at times strives to be, offers several plausible solutions, and then when the solution is finally revealed, previously known clues suddenly make new sense in light of the information. However, in The Draining, to follow this analogy, it’s not the butler that did it, but instead the next door neighbor that no one ever knew anything about, or ever mentioned. Oh, and by the way, he lives in a massive black tower in the mountains, right next to your backyard.
As said before, this is a competent scenario. Much of the dialogue is well done, and the atmosphere of a drained valley is well realized. There are enough extra things to do, outside of the main plot, that give the Vale the feeling of being a real place. A very Redemption-esque dream sequence and attack in a deserted farmhouse perhaps felt a bit derivitave (I expected Andrus to appear at any minute!), but it was still effective.
For me, though, the plot was the weakest part of this scenario. At one point, you are sent to the Glade of Wisdom (which could also be called the glade of “riddles for no good reason”) to find out the identity of the bad guy, which apparently no one had considered to inquire about before. There is also the ever-present, there for no apparent reason puzzle gauntlet in the bad guy’s lair. They must learn about building pointless riddles and puzzles in bad guy school, at least one gets this impression from many of the scenarios that are out there.
Things like plot and motivation have to make sense, and that is where this scenario suffers. But it is still not a bad scenario, and it certainly gives hope for what this author will produce in the future.
I give The Draining a rating of 7.5.