ASC3 Review - The Shrine of Kaliandra

Adventure Site Contest 3 review

This adventure was submitted for consideration in Adventure Site Contest 3 being run by Ben Gibson at Coldlight Press. It has been or will be reviewed by the official judges, who will be selecting the eight winning adventures. This is an unofficial review, which was written prior to reading (or watching) any of the official judges’ reviews. I will do my best to link to the official reviews at the bottom of the review.

I will use a five-star scale, based on both playability and interest:
*          Failing grade. The adventure doesn’t meet minimum standards of playability.
**         I could see running this, but it fails to inspire me or has significant playability issues.
***       I would consider running this.
****     I am considering running this.
*****   I want to run this. Now.

The Shrine of Kaliandra
By Grützi
For AD&D
Level 4-6 (4-6 characters) 

Time to grok the adventure: 30 minutes (markedly longer than most other sites)

Set-up:

A thief and illusionist find an impaled—but not quite dead—demon and establish a shrine to a false god, Kaliandra, to profit from the restorative property of the waters tainted with demon blood. The thief is eventually corrupted, turning into a pseudodemon. The party arrives in media res: the pseudodemons controlling the shrine grounds, the false abbot (the illusionist) plotting to escape, and a minor lord rallied the troops.

No hooks are provided. The most plausible one that presents itself is a player character needing to cure blindness or restore a limb, which can be accomplished with the shrine’s waters

Things I like:

Expecting to arrive to place of healing, the party will encounter a grisly scene and have to put together the pieces through exploration and possibly interrogation. It’s the movie Aliens—but a mystery!

Access to restoration for a low-level party is a god-send. Thank you. 

A truly powerful magic sword.

A safe with a double lock because there is no way the thief and illusionist trust each other. 

Things to note:

There is a lot of text and it took me a while to be fully confident that I understood all the complexities of the site. For instance, it seems that the doors to 15 can only be opened by a mechanism in area 15a. (This adventure likely would have been improved with a higher page-count.)

A little thing, but the reader isn’t ever told explicitly that Lady Kaliandra is the name that the thief and illusionist give to their false god. One must infer it from the description of “The Monks”.

The stat block for the impaled demon says it has spell-like abilities of a type V demon, but the GM should be warned that these will not function as long as it remains impaled. 

There is no explicit connection with Lipply’s Tavern, a winner of Adventure Site Contest I by the same author, but it should be noted that thief is also a Lipply. I have run that adventure and thought it was excellent, even though my group only played half of it and didn’t get to the bottom of things.

Rating:

****1/2  A great mystery adventure which feels constrained by contest parameters

 Links to official judges' reviews:

(forthcoming)