A new near-epic level adventure from MonkeyGod Enterprises, Hellstone Deep sets the heroes on a race against time and pits them against deadly agents of evil to stop a fiendish plot to reactivate a devastating planar weapon disabled ages ago. It’s a d20 system adventure that utilizes updated material from the v3.5 revision, and is designed for 4-6 characters of levels 18-20.
The introduction wastes no time and gets right to the GM preparation for the adventure. All three core rulebooks are needed to run this adventure. The adventure background and information on the key players, locations, as well as a synopsis of the stages of the adventure are provided. It’s also pointed out that text inside gray "parchment" boxes is to be paraphrased or read aloud to the players.
Without wanting to give secrets about the adventure away and spoil the fun for potential players and GMs, I’ll do my best to summarize the story carefully. Basically, a betrayed general of Hell wishes to outdo the rival who robbed him of recognition by reassembling the parts to an incredibly powerful artifact. The road to learning about the plot, dealing with the enemies, and recovering the artifact is paved with deception, treachery, and some seriously badass opponents.
The adventure is fairly well written, with good descriptions of locations, and tactics of the enemies provided for each encounter. Stats of major NPCs and creatures are included in the appendix, including descriptions of new creatures and two new creature templates. There’s a new spell, a couple of magic items, and a number of artifacts – though I have a question for the designers/editors: how can something be a mirror if it doesn’t reflect anything?
Several maps and cross-section views of specific locations in the adventure finish off the last few pages. They’re nicely detailed yet clear and easy to read. That’s sort of interesting, because the first thing that struck me about this book is how stark the rest of it is. There are only 15 pieces of art in the 104 pages (not counting maps as art), which comes out to about 1 every 7 pages, and there are no page borders or other decorations whatsoever. Maybe that was intentional to set some sort of tone, but it came across to me as a lack of tone and hasty production to be ready in time for GenCon.
Hellstone Deep is a decent adventure for your high-level adventuring party, giving such potent characters a real challenge. For a price of US $19.95, a GM can threaten the PCs with serious difficulties at every turn. Nearly all of the creatures and NPCs encountered have challenge ratings around 18 and up. Will the PCs prevail? Or will unparalleled destruction be unleashed on the world once again?
Miss: Very plain in terms of graphics and "decoration."
Hit: A pretty cool story, though perhaps a little cliché.
Critical Miss: Cool art to bring things to life is really lacking.
Critical Hit: It appears to a be a true challenge – even deadly – for a near-epic level party.
Content/Value: 8
Originality/Creativity: 7
Adaptability/Flexibility: 9
Breadth/Depth: 8
Quality/Appeal: 6
Overall: 7.6
Kithmaker
