By Christina Lea
Peryton Publishing
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 5-7
Those who who squint long enough through Mount Irem’s blinding snow storms can see lights flickering high on its slopes. The people in the town below tell stories of a castle made of ice that glimmers at the high end of Tharg’s run, but, when the weather is clear, no trace of it can ever be found. If it exists at all, it seems to exist only in the storm.
This is some weird wilderness adventure. It’s not, as the blurb above would imply, an adventure in a castle that only appears in the snow storms. It is, instead, an adventure on how to get to the snow castle. Just some wandering through the wilderness in the snow. It’s laid out in a point crawl type of style, without the map, and skews REALLY close to the ‘unintelligible’ side of the adventure spectrum.
Over eighteen pages you get six locations, plus the final “you found the castle!” entry. That is supplemented by four random-ish encounters that can be experienced with the party fails a travel check between the primary locations. The supplemental encounters are, essentially, just a paragraph describing a monster that attacks.
But … I’ve gotten ahead of myself. The way this adventure works is that you’re in a location and you make a Wisdom skill check. The check is your ability bonus plus 1/3rd of your level. Generally, if you roll at least a 15 you go to one of the locations and if you roll a 20 or greater you go to a different location. If you fail then the DM rolls a d8 table. The fail table might take you a location, sometimes with some damage being inflicted on the party, or send a wandering monster their way. Finally, if the DM rolls a 7 or 8 then you have some scary vision and loose a wisdom point, or 1d4 wisdom points.
This is, at best, an outline of an adventure. Site one is “The Crossing”, some crystal rails in the ground that lead east or west. Of the six encounters, two have monsters, one has someone to talk to, and one has a cliff to climb. The other two have nothing at all, just a weird feature that does nothing. The Ice Castle, proper, is the final encounter. The notes say that it’s supposed to be detailed in a sequel. Since this is an older product, I’d have to assume that never happened. There are other possibilities listed. It could be a mirage, a single encounter, or an entire dungeon underneath. This is more than a little disappointing.
There’s not really anything to this. It’s just an empty shell. And don’t give me that “the DM needs to fill it out” bullshit. There’s so little content, and it’s so … obtuse. And not in a good way. Combined with the goofy “wander in the snow until you get to someplace else” point crawl thing, it’s really hard to see any value in this.
This is available at DriveThru.