Tammeraut’s Fate
By Greg A. Vaughan
Level 6
A harpy attack leads the party to a lonely monastery on an island which is strangely deserted. A few lingering monsters roam about, as well as some hidden monks, before the undead attack again at dark. The party can shut down a maw of evil, nearby, to stop future attacks. This looks straight from the 2e era of Dungeon with long read alouds and longer room descriptions with lots of “supposeds to be” and past happenings. The party has to find the survivors to know the undead are attacking again, the core of the adventure being the prep for the night attack … which is sorely, almost nonexistent, provided support for. If the adventure is supposed to be preping and defending an attack then you would expect some support for that beyond a couple of sentences on which way the undead attack from. This thing fails to provide support for the very purpose it defines … and then loads on the massive extra and extraneous text to boot.
The Black Egg
By Steven Montano
Level 12
WTF is it with the Tiamat/half-dragon obsession? This nothing piece of garbage is just a series of forced fights, in eight rooms, with some half-dragon cult members. Oh, and your ally betrays you, of course. There’s nothing going on here other than rolling nice.
Hard to imagine they actually had some quite decent stuff in the later issues.
They had decent stuff even at the same time. Dungeon #106 is dated January 2004 so would have been on the shelves in November and December 2003. WotC had web freebie adventures released those months “Sheep’s Clothing” and “Matters of Vengeance.” Each was about 16 pages and would have perfectly fit into Dungeon. Neither was great but did have options to resolve parts of the adventure without combat including the possibility of negotiation.
Tameraut’s Fate seems to be a well-regarded adventure. I’ve never played it myself, but plenty of people who have done appear to have a lot of fun with it. From your review, it seems like that must have been down to the DM being prepared to put in the extra prep time to get it to work, which kind of defeats the point of buying it in the first place!
I ran Tameraut’s Fate recently. I almost never run published adventures, just because I find them too hard to use. But I liked the central premise of having to prep for an attack the party knows is coming. I stripped out almost everything BUT that part…it was in 5e, so I was afraid the party would try to rest too much before they discovered the central hook and ruin the whole thing. Mostly, I just ended up using the map and a few of the general ideas, but it worked alright. I was able to strip it down to a page or so of notes and it was fairly manageable.
We played Tammermaut’s Fate as a stopover during a ship journey as part of an ongoing campaign. It was OK, and the best part was the preparation. The large battle afterwards was a little tedious. The characters never followed up to try and close the rift, and moved on.