3 out of 5 stars
As if the madness of the Chaos Scar itself wasn’t enough, a lost temple of Orcus has combined the might of a shard with necrotic energy to draw forth all the dead in the valley to give them a semblence of life. Can the party hold out long enough for the shard’s power to fade with the dawn and live to tell the tale?
Made up of 4 encounters, this Chaos Scar adventure is actually longer than is normal and contains a reasonable balance of combat to non-combat XP. It’s hard to see that right away, however, because the rewards listed at the head of some encounters seem to be off and are variable anyway.
The first encounter is a fairly straight forward fight, awarding the PCs 550 XP. The other three, however, involve an integration of a skill challenge and a combat. In each case, the skill challenge represents the character’s efforts to fortify their siege position. Failures represent gaps not closed in time or new openings forced on them which let a few more zombies in. These then have to be defeated while the party continues to try to shore up the defenses. Unfortunately, the adventure attempts to force these skill challenges into the standard mold and doesn’t do a very good job of it as a result. Several times it points out that there really isn’t a “failure” condition, as true failure would mean the characters are overrun and killed. However, the skill challenges still list regular complexities with required number of successes and failures for the skill challenge to end. What they really need to be listing is just the number of successes required to shore up the defenses enough to grab a breather. Each failure means a few more zombies leak through and the party has to expend time and resources beating them.
As a result, the amount of XP that any party gains from this adventure is going to vary wildly. They could come away with as little as 3130 (in a 2255:875 split), but there is no real limit to the amount they could gain (though luck and resource depletion probably puts an effective on it). Of course, if you limit them to the standard three failures that the adventure tries to force the skill challenges into, then there is a more definite cap (at 4717).
Also in the end, the characters are given a choice between XP and a magic item. Destroying the shard gets them the XP, keeping it allows them to turn it into a magic item. This similar to other Chaos Scar adventures which have put a shard into the party’s hands, but this magic item doesn’t have the usual drawback that goes with a shard powered magic item, making it a much more difficult and interesting choice for the party.
I personally really like the idea of the party fighting off a horde of undead, and think the skill challenge mechanic for the siege works (if you avoid forcing the normal 3 failure limit on it). What I don’t like about this adventure is the level and monster variety. The low level of the adventure (2) limits the number of creatures that can be called upon a bit (there are no monsters below level 1) and even so, the adventure limits itself to a very small selection of the available monster pool. Raise the level a bit (to 3, 4 or even 5), and use a larger variety of monsters and I think that this adventure idea has some real promise. Indeed, what I’d really like is for the composition of the different waves to be determined somewhat randomly and draw on all the different kinds of zombies there might be. Of course, such a solution would probably but up against the page limit set for the article, but would make for a really cool encounter.
