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Dark Sun Epic #DSE2
Black Spine
Unknown to even the mightiest of the great sorcerer-kings, a fire is stirring deep beneath the barren soil of Athas. Sheltered by the titanic bulk of the Black Spine Mountains, a terrible force has ripped open the very fabric of time and space. Now a shimmering portal stands open and a long-forgotten enemy assembles its sinister forces to invade the kingdoms under the dark sun.
The only thing that stands in the way of this terrible fate is a band of heroes. Assembled from the four corners of this tortured world and bound together by the tangled cords of fate, they must face an enemy the likes of which they have never seen before. The odds are against them, but they dare not fail. The fate of the world is in their hands.
Black Spine is an adventure for 4 to 6 characters of 10th through 13th level. The previous flip-book modules (Black Flames, Merchant House of Amketch, and Marauders of Nibenay) precede this adventure, but they are not necessary to enjoy Black Spine.
The only thing that stands in the way of this terrible fate is a band of heroes. Assembled from the four corners of this tortured world and bound together by the tangled cords of fate, they must face an enemy the likes of which they have never seen before. The odds are against them, but they dare not fail. The fate of the world is in their hands.
Black Spine is an adventure for 4 to 6 characters of 10th through 13th level. The previous flip-book modules (Black Flames, Merchant House of Amketch, and Marauders of Nibenay) precede this adventure, but they are not necessary to enjoy Black Spine.
288 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1994
10 people want to read
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August 13, 2015
This actually wasn't a bad adventure, even if it was a bit of a railroad. However, I had huge issues with the basic premise that dropped it by an entire star, and probably would have dropped it by a star and a half if Goodreads allowed for half-star ratings. I'll get to that in the end, though. First, the plot.
The PCs--going by the pregenerated ones, the same group that went through Black Flames and Merchant House of Amketch--are hired by a representative of Tenpug's Band, the group of artisan ex-slaves detailed in Slave Tribes, to protect their secret camp. Apparently they're under attack by weirdly-organized bands of gith and need hardened murderhobos to train them to fight. So the PCs head out to their camp, navigate their tribal superstitions, deal with gith patrols, and then defend the Tenpug's Band against the gith tribes of the Hand, the Eye, and the Rune.
The adventure suggests using BATTLESYSTEM for the battle, but then also tries to set things up so that the battle has a dramatic conclusion where Tenpug's Band is forced back into their fortress stronghold and the PCs have to use ancient artifacts from the days when Athas was green to win. Which is cool, but directly counter to using an impartial means of resolving the battle. Ugh.
Anyway, after the battle, Tenpug's Band wants revenge and the PCs are probably curious where the gith got all the steel weapons they were using, so they form up a posse and pursue the gith across the sands toward their secret stronghold. On the way, the gith leader blasts the army with a psychic dream assault that the PCs have to stop, and then they reach the iron mine that the gith are holed up in.
What's that, you say? You thought the book repeatedly emphasized that the only iron mine in the Tablelands was near Tyr, and that was the source of Kalak's power? That any other city-state controlling a source of iron would hugely upset the balance of power among the city-states? That this is a huge game changer?
You're completely right, and I will devote as much space to the ramifications of this as Black Spine does.
...
Moving on.
Apparently, the iron mine was found by Nibenay, but they Dug Too Deep and opened up on to a gith nest, which slaughtered most of them and left others for dead, like the dwarf who, if saved, reveal that he heard the gith repeatedly refer to their attack as "The Reclamation." Ominous!
The PCs fight their way through the mines and the breach and find an old city underground with an artifical sun, which the book reveals was an old stronghold of the githyanki when they tried to conquer Athas. However, it was abandoned after the githzerai detonated a psionic superweapon, reducing most of the githyanki on Athas to blithering idiocy...producing the modern gith! Black Spine also hints that the reason why psionics is so common on Athas might be that the major psionic predators that exist on most other worlds were wiped out by the weapon, leading the way for the development of the powers of the mind.
Of course, none of this fits with the history of Athas in later products, but it is kind of neat.
The city, called Yathazor, has several insane earth clerics who think the city was built by earth spirits and the gith are their descendants, so the PCs need to fight, sneak, or talk their way past them to get to the deeper tunnels and across a chasm to the combined gith/githyanki stronghold wherein lies the Nightmare Gate, which the githyanki plan to use to bring an army into Athas and conquer it again!
There is a neat section here about the githyanki food sources. Specifically:
Anyway, the PCs have to make their way to the Nightmare Gate, which misfires as they get near and sucks them in, dumping them into the Astral Plane and resulting in their capture. Of course, this is a Dark Sun adventure! The PCs have to be captured at some point. Also, they end up fighting in the arena.
That's later, though. After they break out of their cell, they meet with a githzerai spy and she leads them to a nearby githzerai base, but is shocked to find it in ruins. At the base, they are briefed on the threat--a githyanki ruler called Trinth wants to conquer Athas and use the power base there to challenge the githyanki's lich-queen--and sent back. There they fight their way to the queen, get dropped into the arena in a scene reminiscent of a certain movie, and when they win, they face the queen again and have to kill her. After they do, the evil artifact she possessed offers them power and freedom and tries to take them over if that fails, but after they race back with it to the Nightmare Gate as the base is collapsing around them and jump through, the artifact explodes as it passes through the spaces between dimensions. The end.
Okay, so that's all not that bad, right? What's the problem I have with Black Spine?
Well...if planar travel is not only possible but easy, and all it takes is casting plane shift, then the resource scarcity makes no sense. One of the sorcerer-kings could take an afternoon, travel to some other plane, and come back with enough metal to outfit his entire army with new weapons and armor, and then go on to conquer the entire Tyr region. Why is gold so scarce when the sorcerer-kings exist and their cold war gives them a constant incentive to go get more money and use it to try to kill each other? Why doesn't anyone go to the Plane of Enormous Amounts of Water and bring some back? Sure, elemental clerics can do it and they don't seem to have much effect, but the sorcerer-kings don't have any limits on how much they'd bring back. A water cleric does one cubic foot per level, but Kalak would bring back 250-tun barrels if he could. So would all the others.
And that isn't dealt with at all. Apparently plane shifting to Athas and back is really easy, because the githyanki can do it without breaking a sweat--though now that I think about it, I'm not sure why they even need the Nightmare Gate when they can plane shift innately--but if it is that easy and there are super-high-level wizards out there with every incentive to haul back tons of resources from other dimensions, why is Athas such a dump? Who knows. The book certainly doesn't tell you.
So four stars for the adventure, and minus a star for destroying the entire basis of the Dark Sun campaign setting. I do like the backstory this hints it, but it needs more effort to integrate it into the rest of the world.
The PCs--going by the pregenerated ones, the same group that went through Black Flames and Merchant House of Amketch--are hired by a representative of Tenpug's Band, the group of artisan ex-slaves detailed in Slave Tribes, to protect their secret camp. Apparently they're under attack by weirdly-organized bands of gith and need hardened murderhobos to train them to fight. So the PCs head out to their camp, navigate their tribal superstitions, deal with gith patrols, and then defend the Tenpug's Band against the gith tribes of the Hand, the Eye, and the Rune.
The adventure suggests using BATTLESYSTEM for the battle, but then also tries to set things up so that the battle has a dramatic conclusion where Tenpug's Band is forced back into their fortress stronghold and the PCs have to use ancient artifacts from the days when Athas was green to win. Which is cool, but directly counter to using an impartial means of resolving the battle. Ugh.
Anyway, after the battle, Tenpug's Band wants revenge and the PCs are probably curious where the gith got all the steel weapons they were using, so they form up a posse and pursue the gith across the sands toward their secret stronghold. On the way, the gith leader blasts the army with a psychic dream assault that the PCs have to stop, and then they reach the iron mine that the gith are holed up in.
What's that, you say? You thought the book repeatedly emphasized that the only iron mine in the Tablelands was near Tyr, and that was the source of Kalak's power? That any other city-state controlling a source of iron would hugely upset the balance of power among the city-states? That this is a huge game changer?
You're completely right, and I will devote as much space to the ramifications of this as Black Spine does.
...
Moving on.
Apparently, the iron mine was found by Nibenay, but they Dug Too Deep and opened up on to a gith nest, which slaughtered most of them and left others for dead, like the dwarf who, if saved, reveal that he heard the gith repeatedly refer to their attack as "The Reclamation." Ominous!
The PCs fight their way through the mines and the breach and find an old city underground with an artifical sun, which the book reveals was an old stronghold of the githyanki when they tried to conquer Athas. However, it was abandoned after the githzerai detonated a psionic superweapon, reducing most of the githyanki on Athas to blithering idiocy...producing the modern gith! Black Spine also hints that the reason why psionics is so common on Athas might be that the major psionic predators that exist on most other worlds were wiped out by the weapon, leading the way for the development of the powers of the mind.
Of course, none of this fits with the history of Athas in later products, but it is kind of neat.
The city, called Yathazor, has several insane earth clerics who think the city was built by earth spirits and the gith are their descendants, so the PCs need to fight, sneak, or talk their way past them to get to the deeper tunnels and across a chasm to the combined gith/githyanki stronghold wherein lies the Nightmare Gate, which the githyanki plan to use to bring an army into Athas and conquer it again!
There is a neat section here about the githyanki food sources. Specifically:
These creatures, called morphs or biomorphs by the gith and githyanki, are half-animal and half-plant. As such, they feed by both photo-synthesis and caloric intake. They are almost certainly completely unlike anything the player characters have ever encountered before on Athas.I like the idea that Athas used to be a weird civilization with psychic technology better than the idea that it was just another D&D world until Rajaat screwed everything up, and biomorphs fit with the D&D-crossed-with-Gamma World feel I like from Dark Sun. Even if the name doesn't fit.
Anyway, the PCs have to make their way to the Nightmare Gate, which misfires as they get near and sucks them in, dumping them into the Astral Plane and resulting in their capture. Of course, this is a Dark Sun adventure! The PCs have to be captured at some point. Also, they end up fighting in the arena.
That's later, though. After they break out of their cell, they meet with a githzerai spy and she leads them to a nearby githzerai base, but is shocked to find it in ruins. At the base, they are briefed on the threat--a githyanki ruler called Trinth wants to conquer Athas and use the power base there to challenge the githyanki's lich-queen--and sent back. There they fight their way to the queen, get dropped into the arena in a scene reminiscent of a certain movie, and when they win, they face the queen again and have to kill her. After they do, the evil artifact she possessed offers them power and freedom and tries to take them over if that fails, but after they race back with it to the Nightmare Gate as the base is collapsing around them and jump through, the artifact explodes as it passes through the spaces between dimensions. The end.
Okay, so that's all not that bad, right? What's the problem I have with Black Spine?
Well...if planar travel is not only possible but easy, and all it takes is casting plane shift, then the resource scarcity makes no sense. One of the sorcerer-kings could take an afternoon, travel to some other plane, and come back with enough metal to outfit his entire army with new weapons and armor, and then go on to conquer the entire Tyr region. Why is gold so scarce when the sorcerer-kings exist and their cold war gives them a constant incentive to go get more money and use it to try to kill each other? Why doesn't anyone go to the Plane of Enormous Amounts of Water and bring some back? Sure, elemental clerics can do it and they don't seem to have much effect, but the sorcerer-kings don't have any limits on how much they'd bring back. A water cleric does one cubic foot per level, but Kalak would bring back 250-tun barrels if he could. So would all the others.
And that isn't dealt with at all. Apparently plane shifting to Athas and back is really easy, because the githyanki can do it without breaking a sweat--though now that I think about it, I'm not sure why they even need the Nightmare Gate when they can plane shift innately--but if it is that easy and there are super-high-level wizards out there with every incentive to haul back tons of resources from other dimensions, why is Athas such a dump? Who knows. The book certainly doesn't tell you.
So four stars for the adventure, and minus a star for destroying the entire basis of the Dark Sun campaign setting. I do like the backstory this hints it, but it needs more effort to integrate it into the rest of the world.
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July 11, 202221/32 of the Dark Sun re-read, two-thirds into the project, and just now confronting the dread of trying to rank the adventures in order of my favorites, because, as you may have seen, I'm not a fan of these adventures. (Though: what D&D 2e adventures do I like? Well, after Dark Sun, I've got Planescape, Ravenloft, and Forgotten Realms to get through, in some fashion, so maybe I'll discover something I really like.)
Black Spine is another epic box set, more like Dragon's Crown than Marauders of Nibenay, and it features that hallmark of epic adventures, planar travel. But wait, I hear you say (because I have invented you, my perfect reader), isn't the world of Dark Sun defined in part by how isolated it is and how difficult if not impossible planar travel is? Yes, perfect reader, that is the case! And though we've gotten hints before about other connections between Athas and other dimensions (mostly the elemental planes), this is really the first time that they say, "oh yeah, well, there used to be a whole other set of gates and a war from the planes spilled out onto Athas a long time ago."
I'm not crazy about that premise, and there's a bunch of other problems in this adventure, but to get to them, I have to outline the adventure -- and I also get to talk about some stuff I liked.
The adventure starts with the PCs getting recruited to save a small town from an army of gith raiders. I may not have used the word "gith" before, perfect reader, so here's what you need to know: they are humanoid monsters and they raid. Now, obsessive D&D-heads like me, when we first saw the word "gith" might have done a double-take since it was so close to a classic Fiend Folio monster, the githyanki. Well, just put a pushpin in that for now.
OK, I'm perfectly satisfied with "small town needs help from raiders," but there's no work done here to explain why the PCs would be motivated by this. In fact, the text notes that the appeal is to the PCs heroic side -- which is probably about as good a motivation as any D&D 2e adventure ever gave, but is in stark contrast to the thesis that Dark Sun is not a place for heroism. (But at this point, the writers have played that "come be a hero" card so many times, we should probably just rip up the thesis that Dark Sun really is so different in tone from other D&D worlds.)
Anyway, once the PCs get into the besieged city, there's some uninteresting scenes -- a debate, a scouting party adventure -- before we get into the meat of Act 1, which is helping the townsfolk get ready for the attack and then the attack itself. Now, I'm a sucker for any "armed outsiders come to teach a small town how to defend themselves," and there's a nice list of optional actions the PCs could take: training the folk, fortifying the town, even forging or getting weapons -- the latter of which is nicely given a Dark Sun twist in that the PCs can make bone and teeth weapon out of a monster if they can recover it from the Silt Sea.
Then there's the attack, and here we have a problem where the game both wants to set up a little mini-game (here using one or other of TSR's mass combat rules, like Battlesystem) but also wants to predetermine the end, where the PCs' side loses. And they need to set that up because there's a whole chapter where the PCs investigate the town ruins and recover a deadly (and evil) artifact. Does that artifact matter in any other way to the story? No, not really, it's just a "get out of jail free" card that the author gives to the players after forcing them into jail. Is it thematically resonant? Well, it's not the only evil artifact in this adventure, but no, not really.
What would I save from Act 1? Fortifying the town. I'm just a sucker for the trope of people working together and sharing their skills/knowledge to accomplish something that none of them could accomplish alone.
Act 2 is: now that you've defeated the gith raiders, you track them back to their headquarters, face a dream monster version of them along the way, and eventually take back the iron mine that the gith took over from Nibenay, with the help of the Nibenese left over. Now, taken out of context, this could be a fun example of that other trope I like, "enemies turned allies." Because usually PCs and Nibenay wouldn't be getting along so well.
In context, however, there's just a bunch of problems here, like the fact that Nibenay has an iron mine even though _so much_ is made of the fact that only the city of Tyr has iron mines. Add in the fact that this is supposed to be a follow-on from Marauders of Nibenay -- it even has the same pre-generated characters for the PCs! -- which is the adventure where the city of Nibenay was half-destroyed, and it's beginning to feel like someone forgot to look at the show bible. (These days, the company would have an internal wiki or something, so maybe there would be fewer issues like this.)
And then, there's no battle stats here because the DM is advised that the PCs should win. Which again sets up that opposition between playing a game where anything could happen vs. a story where you need something to happen. In the first battle, they told the DM to run it but make sure that PCs end up needing to retreat. Here, they fall on the opposite side and almost seem to be saying not to run it at all. It's almost as if someone needed to be watching the different writers who are credited here to make sure they're all pulling in the same direction.
(On that note: is some of the art reused from other Dark Sun products? Of course it is, but who can blame them for that? I'm working on laying out an adventure now, and it's hard to find art that fits certain spaces. But does some of the art show up multiple times? Yes, it does, and even I'm not making that mistake.)
Act 3 of this adventure is just going into the iron mine and clearing out the gith, but it's also the adventure where the DM is first told about how these gith are being supported by... the githyanki! OK, fine, will the PCs learn that? Unclear.
Act 4 is the PCs finding a bigger underground city that the githyanki built and maybe learning about the potential history here: the githyanki tried to colonize Athas a long time ago, but their hated rivals the githzerai blew them up with psychic bombs which turned the githyanki left behind into the almost mindless gith. That's fun history, and finally an explanation for why they're called gith and look a bit like githyanki. This part also has notes about how the PCs could use different skills to uncover some of the clues about this history, which is a nice, almost proto-Gumshoe System method.
And then there's a pointless scene where the PCs may run into some earth clerics who are led by a madman who thinks the gith should inherit the world. Again, it feels like filler, since there's no need for them in the plot: they neither are necessary for clues nor for making this part a little dangerous. (There are, in fact, wandering monsters from other worlds here, which is a nice bit of foreshadowing that there's gonna be a portal involved. And even if the PCs don't recognize kobolds, the players will, so they'll get that foreshadowing.)
Then there's act 5, where I really hit a wall: the PCs damage the portal, end up sucked through it, captured by the githyanki, escape, then have to break back in to get the artifact that they're using to create the portal, then end up fighting in a series of arena games just because, then destroying the artifact and being sent home.
OK, what can we save from that? I don't know -- the arena fight is particularly dumb, almost as if they said "well, it's Dark Sun, and we always have arena fights, right?" Then there's all the breaking out and breaking in, which could be thrilling but could also leave the players with the sense that there's a lot of nonsense just to bring them back to the same position.
And then, the big thing, is the planar gate. OK, maybe there's an artifact that makes it possible to travel to Athas. But having left Athas, why would the PCs rush to close the gate or even to go back home? The end is so short -- maybe because they include Monstrous Compendium pages for all the non-Dark Sun monsters, even though most DMs are sure to have them already -- that it feels perfunctory. I mean, in a game world where the status quo is so terrible, why do the adventures feel so typical: "your job as an adventurer is to undo whatever evil plan was put into action before you started"?
OK, but there's stuff here that even I like: defending the town from raiders; investigating the city; uh, you know, I thought I had a third thing, but I don't. I was really excited to get to this adventure -- a big box, a promise that it involved githyanki -- but... well, I'm interested to see if there are any D&D adventures that I really like now. Maybe I just remember them being better (the ones I read back then, that is -- this is a first time read for me) just because I was young and excited.
But I think even back then I would have recognized the reused art.
Black Spine is another epic box set, more like Dragon's Crown than Marauders of Nibenay, and it features that hallmark of epic adventures, planar travel. But wait, I hear you say (because I have invented you, my perfect reader), isn't the world of Dark Sun defined in part by how isolated it is and how difficult if not impossible planar travel is? Yes, perfect reader, that is the case! And though we've gotten hints before about other connections between Athas and other dimensions (mostly the elemental planes), this is really the first time that they say, "oh yeah, well, there used to be a whole other set of gates and a war from the planes spilled out onto Athas a long time ago."
I'm not crazy about that premise, and there's a bunch of other problems in this adventure, but to get to them, I have to outline the adventure -- and I also get to talk about some stuff I liked.
The adventure starts with the PCs getting recruited to save a small town from an army of gith raiders. I may not have used the word "gith" before, perfect reader, so here's what you need to know: they are humanoid monsters and they raid. Now, obsessive D&D-heads like me, when we first saw the word "gith" might have done a double-take since it was so close to a classic Fiend Folio monster, the githyanki. Well, just put a pushpin in that for now.
OK, I'm perfectly satisfied with "small town needs help from raiders," but there's no work done here to explain why the PCs would be motivated by this. In fact, the text notes that the appeal is to the PCs heroic side -- which is probably about as good a motivation as any D&D 2e adventure ever gave, but is in stark contrast to the thesis that Dark Sun is not a place for heroism. (But at this point, the writers have played that "come be a hero" card so many times, we should probably just rip up the thesis that Dark Sun really is so different in tone from other D&D worlds.)
Anyway, once the PCs get into the besieged city, there's some uninteresting scenes -- a debate, a scouting party adventure -- before we get into the meat of Act 1, which is helping the townsfolk get ready for the attack and then the attack itself. Now, I'm a sucker for any "armed outsiders come to teach a small town how to defend themselves," and there's a nice list of optional actions the PCs could take: training the folk, fortifying the town, even forging or getting weapons -- the latter of which is nicely given a Dark Sun twist in that the PCs can make bone and teeth weapon out of a monster if they can recover it from the Silt Sea.
Then there's the attack, and here we have a problem where the game both wants to set up a little mini-game (here using one or other of TSR's mass combat rules, like Battlesystem) but also wants to predetermine the end, where the PCs' side loses. And they need to set that up because there's a whole chapter where the PCs investigate the town ruins and recover a deadly (and evil) artifact. Does that artifact matter in any other way to the story? No, not really, it's just a "get out of jail free" card that the author gives to the players after forcing them into jail. Is it thematically resonant? Well, it's not the only evil artifact in this adventure, but no, not really.
What would I save from Act 1? Fortifying the town. I'm just a sucker for the trope of people working together and sharing their skills/knowledge to accomplish something that none of them could accomplish alone.
Act 2 is: now that you've defeated the gith raiders, you track them back to their headquarters, face a dream monster version of them along the way, and eventually take back the iron mine that the gith took over from Nibenay, with the help of the Nibenese left over. Now, taken out of context, this could be a fun example of that other trope I like, "enemies turned allies." Because usually PCs and Nibenay wouldn't be getting along so well.
In context, however, there's just a bunch of problems here, like the fact that Nibenay has an iron mine even though _so much_ is made of the fact that only the city of Tyr has iron mines. Add in the fact that this is supposed to be a follow-on from Marauders of Nibenay -- it even has the same pre-generated characters for the PCs! -- which is the adventure where the city of Nibenay was half-destroyed, and it's beginning to feel like someone forgot to look at the show bible. (These days, the company would have an internal wiki or something, so maybe there would be fewer issues like this.)
And then, there's no battle stats here because the DM is advised that the PCs should win. Which again sets up that opposition between playing a game where anything could happen vs. a story where you need something to happen. In the first battle, they told the DM to run it but make sure that PCs end up needing to retreat. Here, they fall on the opposite side and almost seem to be saying not to run it at all. It's almost as if someone needed to be watching the different writers who are credited here to make sure they're all pulling in the same direction.
(On that note: is some of the art reused from other Dark Sun products? Of course it is, but who can blame them for that? I'm working on laying out an adventure now, and it's hard to find art that fits certain spaces. But does some of the art show up multiple times? Yes, it does, and even I'm not making that mistake.)
Act 3 of this adventure is just going into the iron mine and clearing out the gith, but it's also the adventure where the DM is first told about how these gith are being supported by... the githyanki! OK, fine, will the PCs learn that? Unclear.
Act 4 is the PCs finding a bigger underground city that the githyanki built and maybe learning about the potential history here: the githyanki tried to colonize Athas a long time ago, but their hated rivals the githzerai blew them up with psychic bombs which turned the githyanki left behind into the almost mindless gith. That's fun history, and finally an explanation for why they're called gith and look a bit like githyanki. This part also has notes about how the PCs could use different skills to uncover some of the clues about this history, which is a nice, almost proto-Gumshoe System method.
And then there's a pointless scene where the PCs may run into some earth clerics who are led by a madman who thinks the gith should inherit the world. Again, it feels like filler, since there's no need for them in the plot: they neither are necessary for clues nor for making this part a little dangerous. (There are, in fact, wandering monsters from other worlds here, which is a nice bit of foreshadowing that there's gonna be a portal involved. And even if the PCs don't recognize kobolds, the players will, so they'll get that foreshadowing.)
Then there's act 5, where I really hit a wall: the PCs damage the portal, end up sucked through it, captured by the githyanki, escape, then have to break back in to get the artifact that they're using to create the portal, then end up fighting in a series of arena games just because, then destroying the artifact and being sent home.
OK, what can we save from that? I don't know -- the arena fight is particularly dumb, almost as if they said "well, it's Dark Sun, and we always have arena fights, right?" Then there's all the breaking out and breaking in, which could be thrilling but could also leave the players with the sense that there's a lot of nonsense just to bring them back to the same position.
And then, the big thing, is the planar gate. OK, maybe there's an artifact that makes it possible to travel to Athas. But having left Athas, why would the PCs rush to close the gate or even to go back home? The end is so short -- maybe because they include Monstrous Compendium pages for all the non-Dark Sun monsters, even though most DMs are sure to have them already -- that it feels perfunctory. I mean, in a game world where the status quo is so terrible, why do the adventures feel so typical: "your job as an adventurer is to undo whatever evil plan was put into action before you started"?
OK, but there's stuff here that even I like: defending the town from raiders; investigating the city; uh, you know, I thought I had a third thing, but I don't. I was really excited to get to this adventure -- a big box, a promise that it involved githyanki -- but... well, I'm interested to see if there are any D&D adventures that I really like now. Maybe I just remember them being better (the ones I read back then, that is -- this is a first time read for me) just because I was young and excited.
But I think even back then I would have recognized the reused art.
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