| The Caverns of Stylbore Mountains | |
| by Ben Frank | |
| Alcritas’s Review | |
After playing through Trouble In Mendor by Benjamin Frank (wendyben@mail.idt.net), an occasionally frustrating but typically solid and entertaining scenario, I decided to give another of his scenarios, The Caverns of Stylbore Mountains, a chance.
Unfortunately, all the good work and design concepts employed in Mendor appear to have been abandoned in Caverns. Whereas Mendor was filled with a detailed and well developed plot, with no shortage of personalities to flesh it out, Caverns lacks anything resembling well developed. What passes for the plot in Caverns is as follows — a long long time ago some really powerful mage died, and all of his treasure is sitting in his lair somewhere deep in the mountains. You’ve been told to go find it. And that’s about it.
Caverns intends to be a “wilderness” adventure, but it really never lives up to this billing. Using a party built via the HLPM included, I fought a grand total of three combats outdoor — one wandering monster, and two special encounters — traveling through the wilderness was never really an issue. Most of the time, when not constantly banging into the sides of mountains trying to find elusive secret passages, I found myself wandering from one small civilization to another, with no real idea why I was doing this. I got the impression I NEEDED to complete these little mini-quests (and in many cases I in fact did) — but it never was apparent WHY I needed to, either before or after the fact. An example — you’ll run into some insane mage and his two familiar cats, who’ll ask you to find something to help cure their master, and in exchange will give you a “Flying Scroll”, and you should help them because “you’ll never know when you’ll need to use it.” Now, as it turns out, you will need the scroll to complete the quest, but the way it’s done it comes off as just another plot device to force the scenario to run a bit longer. If the cats had offered me information in exchange for my help, or had they known in advance that would need the scroll, it might have worked. But as it is, it’s just a happy coincidence.
Without an interesting plot or well developed atmosphere to carry it, Caverns is forced to rely on its dungeon design for its strength. Fortunately Caverns is stronger in this aspect than the others, although ultimately nowhere near strong enough to completely redeem the scenario. Early “dungeons” (using the term broadly) in the scenario are fairly bland, with a possible exception of the hobgoblin lair. The final dungeon, however, picks this up a great bit, at least once you get into the lower caverns with a half dozen or so very interesting and entertaining tricks and traps. The problem is, these just aren’t nearly as interesting as would need be to justify the rest of the scenario.
My suggestion — skip this one, and go download Trouble In Mendor. The Caverns of Stylbore Mountains is designed for medium level parties, and is rated PG.
My score — 6.5