Game: In the Shadow of the Devil
Publisher: Paradigm Concepts
Series: Arcanis: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 11th, September 2004
Reviewer’s Rating: 6/10 [ On the ball ]
Total Score: 6
Average Score: 6.00
In the Shadow of the Devil is the second in the Coryani Chronicles. Actually, though, you don’t strictly need the first Chronicle to use in the Shadow of the Devil. Similarly the adventure is set in Arcanis – The World of Shattered Empires – but you can get a way with converting it to almost any setting. To get the best out of this good adventure you’d want to set it in Arcanis and you’ll want to be able to use the rest of the Coryani Chronicles too. Arcanis, published by Paradigm Concepts is well supported and there are plenty of other juicy supplements. This is an important point, it makes investing in the Coryani Chronicles a safer bet.
In The Shadow of the Devil is Living Arcanis approved. It would be though, wouldn’t it? Paradigm are strongly behind Living Arcanis and it isn’t just a token effort.
I like the effort In The Shadow of the Devil makes. It divides encounters into two key groups; soft points and hard points. Soft points are ambience and atmosphere, put them in if you can and when you can. Soft points are plot critical and the DM shouldn’t attempt to wrangle events too strongly here. On the other hand, hard points are closely tied to the plot and do need to happen. I think any plot twist which might happen is a liability in a game; you must either be prepared to railroad players or to let the plot point slip. However this pre-written adventure doesn’t suffer too badly here as many of the plot points are encounters and events between two or more NPCs which will happen a way from the players. I think that’s exactly the way to do things; I think a plot should have pre-planned nodes when NPCs do this and that except the PCs come along and throw a spanner in the works. If the PCs do X then one NPC has to change his plans and do Y. That has a knock on effect to the other NPCs… and the thrilling chain of In Character Consequences for In Character Actions starts to rattle.
This is a pre-written adventure, there can and will be spoilers beyond this point. If you’re a player, especially if you’re a Living Arcanis player, it’s time to turn a way.
The premise is simple. The player characters get hired to get an expensive wedding present to an important wedding. What they don’t know is that a monk hired them specifically because a deity told him to. That revelation will come as a surprise to the players as well as the characters. Any overtures of something bigger and much scarier are carefully hidden. The Chronicles have a carefully interwoven strand of plots; the second, that of secret horror is obscured, on purpose, by the investigative theme in the hope that the players are deeply involved before they know it.
I think it’ll work.
The characters have to bring an ornamental egg to the wedding. If they’re my players then I’ll do whatever I can (without railroading them) to stop them discovering they’re moving an egg around. I don’t know about you – but my players are that cynical, that paranoid and that savvy. True to form – there’s something in the egg, another relic. Oh, okay, it’s called the “Orb of Saint Meritricus” but I don’t think that’s much cover. The orb gets nicked – not on the player’s watch so it’s not so bad – by the infamous bandit the Water Serpent. Yeah; it’s a strange moniker for a bandit. She’s been tricked, she thinks a deity has instructed her to do this but it was actually an illusion.
The relic the Water Serpent’s been tricked into thieving relates to a suppressed heresy. This is a relic which the Church doesn’t like but which seems to be entirely holy and accepted by their God.
The characters will wind up (most likely) chasing after the stolen goods and thus end up finding a hidden temple. Temple bits are predictably linear, as is the start of the adventure where the plot trundles along and picks up enough speed to sweep the characters along. The middle bit, or the third quarter more like, isn’t linear and the characters really can potter around and do things in their order and meet people (or try to) when they like. This is great. It’s this third quarter which could open out and take up a couple of sessions if the DM wanted. The DM needs to be prepared with world info and suitable NPCs though.
The adventure’s own appendices do a good job of informing the DM. The first thing that I noticed – and this is a bit cheap of me – is that the illustrations for the NPCs show real people. The Water Serpent, female bandit extraordinaire would stereotypically be portrayed as a beauty. She isn’t. It’s not a wise idea to guess whether someone is a villain or not by whether they’re scowling or not. More importantly the appendices have plenty of world info and describe the locale where the adventure takes place and there are less important (for this particular plot) NPC stats for people in interesting places too. There is a new Bloodline and new Bloodline powers – one of the reasons why In The Shadow of the Devil offers best value for money for Arcanis players.
This is a d20 adventure so there’s a new prestige class (the Mordant; 6 levels of) and stats for an important new monster – the Ekimu (or Myrantian vampire) as well as spawns and other sundry undead.
In the Shadow of the Devil is best suited to four to six characters of about 6th to 8th level. There are 80 pages; good text density and even cartography on the inside cover so at US$17.49 represents excellent value. Regular readers will be fed up of my mandatory caveat that I don’t particularly like pre-written adventures. I don’t think they really work and are therefore fundamentally flawed – however, In the Shadow of the Devil makes a very good drive at proving me wrong.
