The Forge of Fury

The Forge of Fury. An Adventure for Dungeons and Dragons Characters of Third Level.

By Richard Baker.

As always, if you are a Dungeon Master, there is no such thing as a spoiler. If you are a player, stop reading here and rate this review "Very Helpful."

The Forge of Fury. is the next step in the Adventurers Path to glory. Having completed the adventure of "The Sunless Citadel" the characters are following a map found in that place that leads them on to the stronghold of Khundrukar. Two centuries past a great dwarven smith crafted peerless weapons. It is likely that caches of these treasures may yet remain.

The Forge of Fury. like The Sunless Citadel before it are designed for novice Dungeon Masters (DMs) to help them run an entertaining game. Well laid out in rich in detail, they are somewhat lacking in plot, understanding that novice DMs may lack the skills to carefully steer there players along a well scripted path. (Running a game of Dungeons and Dragons is like herding cats)

Its first component, the Introduction, lays out everything the DM needs to know and bear in mind. It has what is needed, (Preparation) the history of the Stronghold, (Adventure Background) and the way the adventure is supposed to flow (herding cats!) in the Adventure Synopsis. Character hooks help integrate the adventure into an ongoing campaign.

The Forge of Fury. contains the main body of the dungeon. It is broken down into The Stone Tooth, or getting to the site. Entering Khundrukar which details the main entrance and the guards posted there. This area is under the control of The Great Ulfe, an ogre, and his tribe of orcish minions. The Glitterhame is the largest level; a natural cavern controlled by a tribe of Troglodytes and other monsters. The Sinkhole is a mysterious corner of the dungeon unexplored by any of the current inhabitants. The Foundry was where in days of old, the master smith created art for war. These days, the foundry rings to the hammers of the duergar, evil dwarves from the deepest reaches of the Underdark! And finally, The Black Lake, home of the most formidable denizen of the caverns...Nightscale, a black dragon!

The dungeon is a classic crawl, but it introduces the players to several new monsters, and concepts. One is damage reductions. In this whole complex, the creatures that came the closest to killing off my party were the gricks. A grick is a C'thuvian horror whose best trick is that its thick hide means that not all of your damage comes off its hit points. If you swing a battle axe and manage to do sixteen points of damage, if that battle axe is not magical, you do one point of damage. It also introduces the heroes to oozes (think the blob), stench attacks, and level draining undead.

The Conclusion includes how things play out depending on which hook you used, and gives you a list of possible adventures stemming from this place, as well as the hook to set up the next adventure, "The Speaker in Dreams."

Finally, you have the Appendix with its statistics on the monsters and named creatures found in this adventure. The inside covers include maps of the various levels, the Mountain Door and the Glitterhame on the front cover, and the Sinkhole, the Foundry and the Black Lake on the inside of the back cover.

The art on the cover is by the very talented Todd Lockwood. The Cartography, also quite detailed, is by Todd Gamble. Dennis Cramer provided the interior illustrations.

At $9.95 for 32 pages, this product is priced averagely. The usefulness in being recycled

is perhaps slightly less than The Sunless Citadel, though I will admit I have used the Glitterhame map several times in different caverns, usually if I needed to expand the adventure to push the players up to the next level.

While not the flawless masterpiece of the Sunless Citadel, the Forge of Fury is a worthy successor.