Arcane Shadows

Dark Sun Quest #DSQ2

by Bill Slavicsek, Thomas M. Reid (Editor), William W. Connors

Tyr has been freed, and the mighty army of Urik has been turned back. These are new and strange times, indeed.

Now Urik has become home - at least for a while - and there are new markets to shop, new streets to explore, and, oh yes, preservers to meet. Preservers, the keepers of good magic, have sent a mysterious summons. They are ready to embark on a new and dangerous plot to thwart sorceror-kings and bring new life to Athas. To associate with preservers is dangerous to say the least, but when the king's templars uncover the schemes, a death mark falls upon all involved.

Will a desperate journey across the wastelands, with the templars in hot pursuit, end in victory or chaos? The answers lie in the hearts of mighty heroes and the recesses of Arcane Shadows. Designed for four to six characters of 5th to 8th level, Arcane Shadows is set in Urik.

A stand-alone adventure, Arcane Shadows can aslo be played as the sequel to Freedom and Road to Urik.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Fantasy, Dungeons and Dragons

112 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1992

About the author

Bill Slavicsek's gaming life was forever changed when he discovered Dungeons & Dragons in 1976. He became a gaming professional in 1986 when he was hired by West End Games as an editor. He quickly added developer, designer, and creative manager to his resume, and his work helped shape the Paranoia, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, and Torg roleplaying games. He even found some time during that period to do freelance work for D&D 1st Edition. In 1993, Bill joined the staff of TSR, Inc. as a designer/editor. He worked on a bunch of 2nd Edition material, including products for Core D&D, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, and Planescape. In 1997, he was part of the TSR crowd that moved to Seattle to join Wizards of the Coast, and in that year he was promoted to R&D Director for D&D. In that position, Bill oversaw the creation of both the 3rd Edition and 4th Edition of the D&D Roleplaying Game. He was one of the driving forces behind the D&D Insider project, and he continues to oversee and lead the creative strategy and effort for Dungeons & Dragons.

Reviews

[Benjamin]

8/32 -- the 25% mark of this ridiculous project where I review all the 2nd edition Dark Sun materials.

(Heya, in a previous review I noted some whiners complaining that WOTC was too worried about politics to revisit Dark Sun, and I just realized I forgot to add some important context to that whining: WOTC revisited Dark Sun in 4th edition! Whiners!)

Also, another point I had in my notes from the very first review, but which I realize I haven't mentioned is that a lot of Dark Sun has a sort of Mad Max aesthetic; some of it is just probably convergent evolution around the theme of dystopia/dying world, but I almost wonder if it would be fun to push that aesthetic and truly make Dark Sun more like Fury Road.

Arcane Shadows is the third adventure for Dark Sun (fourth if you add the intro adventure in the box set, which I do not), and it continues a little bit in the footsteps of Freedom and Road to Urik:

(1) we're still doing the slim box with flip books form factor;
(2) we're still using really generic names for these adventures;
(3) heck, even the pre-gen characters are the same, just slightly more powerful.

This adventure departs a little in that it is not explicitly tied in to a novel. (I think the third novel in the Prism Pentad series follows a single wizard as she goes on a solo quest, so there's less room for an adventure to parallel that; this adventure does sort of follow in that it's about a wizard's quest, so it's at least linked thematically/trope-wise to the third novel.)

The adventure here is: the PCs witness a magical ceremony that is interrupted by bad people, which wounds the super-powerful good NPC and puts them in a coma -- so they can't help the PCs, who now have to transport them out of the city, out into the wastes, and to a magic valley. That's... a fine setup -- I mean, it's fine enough. It definitely raises questions about Dark Sun as a brutal world where the PCs can't just be heroes since this adventure is just asking them to do something heroic for the salvation of the world. It is a super clear goal (get guy to a place), which is good, but since the magical ceremony is mysterious, the PCs won't really have a sense of the stakes.

Also, I have to note a business and/or editorial decision that is curious to me, and let's compare this to the GDW Space 1889 books: a book about the deserts and desert tribes of Mars would have a bunch of info on those tribes and then an adventure that threw the PCs into the wastes and among those tribes, so the GM would have the info necessary for the game and the game that would make the info playable.

Here, the adventure involves a lot of trekking through the wilderness and interacting with some of the tribes covered in the book Slave Tribes. Now, you don't need that book to make this adventure make sense, and yet... it feels a bit like this adventure is meant to introduce the players and the DM to both the info in Slave Tribes and the next book I'm going to cover, the Veiled Alliance.

So why does this feel a little blah overall? I think it's a combination of this being an escort mission -- where what the NPC will do is more important than anything the PCs will do -- but without any clarity about the NPC's mission. The book even notes that it will be a little mysterious even to the DM! (And just so I don't have to dance around it: the ceremony was going to advance the NPC along the track to being an avangion, the preserver wizard version of a dragon. What's really a bummer here is that this person is already a 22nd-level avangion. This would have been more meaningful and interesting if they were just starting their transformation, so that the PCs could help bring into being something that hasn't really existed yet in the Dark Sun world. Also, the avangion design is just not as interesting as the dragon design.)

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This module needs quite some work if you want to run it.
Knowing more of the setting (Athas) helps a lot, so you’d best invest time to read up to make the most of this adventure. Even then, though, there’s work to be done to make all the strange redundant things work, or come up with the non-descriptions for if players take other choices or finished encounters earlier than they are written out.

In the end, this module is mostly hampered by railroad-y writing and basic sequential plotting. But it could definitely work in a setup of a restoration-themed campaign in the blasted landscapes of the Athasian desert world.

Plus it gets one star more because I like avangions and there is a link in the lore to the city of Kurn and it’s sorcerer-king Oronis who is an avangion himself.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ah yes, "escort quests." The type of mission that allegedly forces the players to work together while tying them deeper into the setting and the surrounding NPCs. We have dismissed that claim.

This one is just about halfway between Freedom and Road to Urik. I would have given it 2.5 stars if half-stars were an available option on Goodreads, but I'm breaking my typical round-up policy and rounding this one down. I mean, Arcane Shadows isn't badly written, and it does give a relatively free path for the PCs to take, but the rails are still visible and I have a problem with the basic premise.

Arcane Shadows involves the PCs attending a meeting of the Veiled Alliance in Urik after possibly being captured, have the meeting crashed by one of Hamanu's templars who injures a super-famous wizard named Korgunard who was in the process of performing some kind of ritual, and then the PCs have to haul Korgunard's magically comatose body across the wastes between Urik and Tyr, avoiding slavers, rampaging thri-kreen, one of the most evil slave tribes in the wastes, the templar from Urik who's hell-bent on capturing the PCs again, and an elf who requires 1 silver per head to water at his watering hole. Or maybe they go by the road, since Korgunard's last words were to take him to Tyr, but not by the road, but since he was falling into a coma it's easy for the PCs to only hear "...by the road."

What's up with starting the adventure with "You're captured!" anyway? I get that it's a good way to get the PCs where you want them to continue the rest of the adventure, and that Dark Sun has slavery as a major point of the setting, and that In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords is one of those iconic Dungeons & Dragons modules, but if you're running these in order, it already happened in Freedom, and considering how that turned out, it's not something you want to remind your players of.

Here's an example of what I mean:

If the PCs have avoided capture by the Black Sand Raiders, they can be captured here.

And if they aren't captured there, maybe a train can appear in their path that they're forced to board? The conductor demands capture!

Anyway, the part of the premise that annoys me is that Korgunard is a 22nd level wizard/psionicist who's becoming a 23rd level wizard/psionicist, and that means he's an avangion. There aren't supposed to be any avangions. I mean, in the description of avangions in Dragon Kings, it says:

The avangion is the first of its kind in recorded history, a focus of change toward good, the most powerful good character that a player can have.

Not anymore, it isn't! Any PC avangion got upstaged by some random NPC in an adventure! Assuming he lives, anyway, since the PCs are on a time limit to get him to to Tyr before the magic shield that surrounds him fades away and he dies of thirst.

The secondary conflict is the PCs being captured and the slave tribe known as the Free breaking them out, though the main point of the Free is to help get the players back on track if they're wandering aimlessly through the wilderness or just sticking to the road the entire time. That's the problem with making the world so deadly and focusing a lot of the conflict on surviving the elements: if the players get lost in the desert, they're probably dead, and that definitely screws up the narrative.

After all the capturing and fighting, the final battle requires the preservers in the party to help Korgunard finish his ritual while everyone else fights off the templar from Urik and his retinue who have come to finish the job. No guidance is given as to what to do if the PCs have managed to kill him earlier on. Also, the actual mechanics of the preservers helping isn't very exciting. It suggests cutting back and forth to raise tension, but while the non-wizards get into a big battle, the wizards...make intelligence checks. That they can automatically pass by using up a spell. It's not exactly impossible to make this a nailbiting, edge-of-your-seat fight, but I suspect it would be really difficult.

And then at the end:

The animals, the elements, even the land itself seems to reach toward the transformed Korgunard. Everything wants to bask in his life-giving glow. In the future, the Great One will have much to do to help Athas, but for now he is content to rest with those who helped him achieve this state in the hidden valley.

Arcane Shadows, aka The Story of Korgunard and Those Dudes Who Helped Him That One Time.

It's not quite to the level of centering the game on Korgunard instead of the PCs, since he does spend the entire time in a coma and it's not like he busts out ridiculous magic and kills everyone at the end. And the PCs do get the choice of how they carry out their mission, and the adventure does account for the PCs taking the road or going overland. The avangion thing really annoys me, though, and I'd never run it just because of that. But hey, it's better than Freedom.