OSSR: Ancient Kingdoms: Mesopotamia

[Blicero]

OSSR: Ancient Kingdoms: Mesopotamia: Colon: More Colons

I do not know how this pdf came to be on my computer. I do not remember buying it. But it's here, so let's do an OSSR. Ancient Kingdoms: Mesopotamia is a third-party D&D producted published by Necromancer Games. The name suggests that it is a sourcebook for fantastic settings resembling Mesopotamia; this is not really true though. The book is 178 pages long. Of those, only twenty or so sketch out a setting. Thirty pages contain the requisite new feats, spells, and prestige classes that no one will ever use. Then we get about a hundred pages about The Red Waste, a sandbox locale found within a specific part of their setting. We end with a twenty or thirty-page mini-bestiary. Sidenote: The pdf has neither a table of contents nor bookmarks. This is really fucking annoying.

Necromancer Games put out a number of dungeon crawls (The Tomb of Abysthor, The Vault of Larin Karr, The Crucible of Freya, Rappan Athuk) that seem to be reasonably well-regarded by people who know that they exist. (Their back catalog also contains a 2001 adventure written by none other than a fledgling Mike Mearls, but we will try to not hold that against them too much.) The colon in this book's title suggests it may have been intended to be the first of an Ancient Kingdoms series. If so, these plans were for naught, because no other Ancient Kingdoms books ever was ever published. Necromancer Games continued trundling on until 2012, when it was acquired by Frog God Games, a company run by one of the guys who initially ran Necromancer Games. So it's more likely that this book just sold like shit.

Necromancer Games products are advertised as having "third edition rules, first edition feel". This might be sufficient to send many Denners heading to the hills immediately, and not without good justification. But it's not as bad as it could be. For products like this, it means that the adventure locations are not meant to be encountered in a specifc manner, and, as such, little attempt has been made to ensure that opponents are encountered in a level-appropriate order. Done well, this can make the game world feel much more real and less centered around the PCs. Done poorly, it can lead to MCs slapping you in the face with their giant CR 20 cocks while you're still dicking around in the low levels. Hopefully AK:M is more of the former.

Ancient Kingdoms: Mesopotamia hails from the long-ago days of 2004. D&D's revived success had probably peaked by this point, but WotC had not begun spewing forth the stream of shovelware (mixed with those neat sporadic successes) that would characterize mid- and late-era 3.5. This book claims to be compatible with 3.5, but it contains reference to 3.0 artifacts like the Scry skill. So it was presumably written before 3.5 came out and then hastily updated. The statblocks, as in many other early 3E products, are terrible. Another Necromancer Games adventure contains as its final boss a lich Sorcerer 12 / Druid 6. Clearly a challenge worthy of a 20th level party.

As a final note, this book was written by a dude named Morten Braten. That would be the most metal name I've heard all day, if not for the list of his playtesters, which includes Roald Aronsson, Yngve Danielsen, Trond Oliversen, Egil Rekdal, and Kjartan Sletvold.

Chapter One: Mythic Mesopotamia

The glittering fires of civilization beckon the weary desert traveller, who drives his heavily laden camel-train through the desert sands towards the city-states dotted like pearls on a string along the twin rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Here, despotic priest-kings rule from ziggurats that stretch skywards to the starry realm of the gods, while robed priests heap sacrifice upon the earthly altars of brazen and obscene idols.

Bearded men and women from a hundred nations throng the crowded streets of gardened Babylon, Nineveh with its libraries, age-old Uruk, and glittering Nippur. Woollen-robed stargazers guard ancient wisdom and science written on cuneiform tablets in their forbidding towers of mud-brick, while on the skull-strewn battlefields between the city-states, bronze swords clash against wooden shields and mighty warriors crash their chariots into the serried ranks of enemy spearmen.

This is the splendor that is Mythic Mesopotamia.

If you ask yourself the question "Why set my D&D game in fantasy Mesopotamia?", these opening paragraphs present a decent answer. You do it so that you can tell hardcore sword & sorcery stories. I am totally on board for that. I mean, if the phrase "despotic priest-kings" doesn't get you psyched for some gaming, then what are you even doing with your life? Unfortunately, these paragraphs make it sadly ambiguous whether just the "bearded" descriptor applies to both women and men, or just men. I'm hoping that all beardedness will be distributed without prejudice.

You'll note from this introduction that this book does not create its own pseudo-Mesopotamia setting, it just uses the actual place names. In the WHRP OSSR, Frank complained that it's kind of lazy to make a secondary world that defaults to real-world names for some of its countries. That may or may not be true. But even if it is, it's less applicable here because of distance. We have all been inundated with stories and games that take place in medieval England, France, Japan, ancient Rome, whatever, or that take place in thinly-veiled pastiches of those locations. Saying, "Okay, this world has a place called Albion" might actually convey more preconceptions than you want to your players. So you throw some syllables together and make up a word like Westeros, or Ferelden, or Nilfgaard, or the Nansurium or whatever and describe your word as "like X, but...". And everyone wins.

We don't quite have that surfeit of information with Mesopotamia. Like, maybe you got assigned part of Gilgamesh for high school English class, maybe you've read Snow Crash or Vellum, but, other than that, what do "Ur", "Uruk", "Enlil", and "Inanna" mean to you? You probably have some vague associations with those words, but that's it. So by using actual Mesopotamian names, this book is able to draw on that murky historical resonance without tying itself down to excessive specificities.

For this chapter, the book sez it will use "Mesopotamian" and "Sumerian" interchangeably. I cannot tell if this is just supposed to simplify things for the reader, or if it is suggestive of lazy editing.

We get a map, and it's basically this one,

which is fine, I guess. As maps go, it's not super informative, but it has enough proper nouns on it to start generating a narrative.

Next up there is a high-level overview of Morten Braten's Mesopotamia. It's a mix of wikipedia facts and decently gameable descriptions. So more or less what you would expect. It includes a few paragraphs about the cities of Asshur, Babylon, Eridu, Kish, Kutha, and Nippur. These are the only cities described in any detail in the entire book. So this is kind of an odd subset to focus on. You get their populations, but you don't care. More interesting are the bits that follow.

Babylon is devoted to Tiamat, and it has "mighty blue gates guarded by dragons and winged bulls". Kutha is "dominated by huge mortuary temples aboveground, and endless black halls and maggot-ridden mausoleums underground". Eridu was founded by Deep Ones, and now it is a realm of "sorcerers and demon-summoners of the blackest sort" who live in "great red towers". There's a very Zothique feel to this, which I dig. You can whip out your copy of The Dark Eidolon and just make Namirrha an NPC in Eridu or Kutha.

None of this is sufficient to run an adventure (or even a session) in any of these places, but it hopefully gets the imagination going.

There's an equally brief description of the neighboring lands. These include some mountains where barbarians live and some marshes (that do not appear on the map at all). The mountains feature a location called the "frigid plateau of Ong", which I assume is meant to be a Lovecraft reference. If it is, I am not sure why the author didn't just call it Leng.

We get a bit more than two pages of history. It's a mix of background information from millenia before that campaign starts that you don't care about and some interesting or useful details. (Apparently, Dagon is responsible for more or less all of human culture.) Ultimately, the section is too short to have that much chaff.

Every old-school product needs a reminder that alignment has always been incredibly stupid, and AK:M fulfills that amply with Hammurabi. We have the usual D&D thing where Hammurabi's Code is described as being good because it is divine in origin (which ignores the countless neutral and evil gods of D&D-land). The Code is described as a lawful good relic (okay) that eventually drove Hammurabi insane (what). It led him to pass laws under which all but the most pious of citizens risked death for "crimes both real and imagined". Which is obviously what any relic of Law and Good would compel its wielder to do.

The main issue with this section is that it starts with creation myths and ends with Alexander the Great. Nowhere does it stop and say "yeah, this is where your campaign should start" or even "this is when the other setting bits are most relevant". You can cross-reference this section with the city and deity descriptions and get something of an idea, but that is not something you should have to do with a published product.

There's an equally brief setup of Mesopotamian society: social classes, laws, festivals, architecture, that sort of thing. Today, you could get everything here with a quick trip to wikipedia, but presumably you could not back in 2003 or 2004.

Sometimes you get neat bits like this:

Under Sumerian laws, everyone is not equal under the law. It is a far more serious crime to harm a noble or priest than a slave or poor person; however, this works both ways, as a noble who commits a crime is more severely punished than someone from the lower classes that commits the same crime.

and other times you get rambling diatribes about how Mesopotamians measured time and distance.

Mesopotamia is meant to be a pre-Bronze Age setting, so the default material for weapons and armor is copper. Weapons made of bronze or iron get a bonus to attack and damage that stacks with magical enhancements. There's a list of what weapons and armor you are allowed to use. That would be fine for a historical setting, but this is pretty clearly not that. Chainmail and chain shirts are forbidden, as is all heavy armor. There are no longswords or greatswords, but there is the sickle sword, which is identical to a longsword except that it's better at disarming people. The author could have just made up items that match up with the mechanics of the banned equipment, and everyone would have been happier.

The chapter ends with a short (4/5 of a page) dictionary of Sumerian terms, and an even shorter (1/5 of that same page) list of Sumerian names. (Sadly, Gilgamesh is not one of the suggested names.) It probably would have been more useful to make the page space ratio more like 60-40 or something, but whatever. Now you know that the Sumerian word for vampire is "akhkharu".

Up next: Racism and Prestige Classes

[Ancient History]

Sounds like a transitional fossil into the retroclones. Fun! Looking forward to the next part.

[Blicero]

Yeah, this came out well before the OSR was even a twinkling in James Maliszewski's eye. It also predates Complete Arcane. I traditionally think of the Warlock and its everything at will schedule as being the first major shift in WotC's design paradigm for D&D. Prior to that, 3.x was really not that dissimilar to a lot of early AD&D-era stuff, the obvious exceptions being that the core system was actually functional and the DMG was not as rife with terrible advice. So I guess you could read the "third edition rules, first edition feel" statement as being a rejection of the plot-focused post-Dragonlance adventure style as much as anything else. Maybe. I might be full of shit here.

[Red_Rob]

Mesopotamia is meant to be a pre-Bronze Age setting, so the default material for weapons and armor is copper. Weapons made of bronze or iron get a bonus to attack and damage that stacks with magical enhancements. There's a list of what weapons and armor you are allowed to use. That would be fine for a historical setting, but this is pretty clearly not that. Chainmail and chain shirts are forbidden, as is all heavy armor. There are no longswords or greatswords, but there is the sickle sword, which is identical to a longsword except that it's better at disarming people. The author could have just made up items that match up with the mechanics of the banned equipment, and everyone would have been happier.

I've seen several attempts to do a "primitive" setting in D&D (Dark Sun being one) and they always seem to go down the route of restricting heavy armor and giving the weapons damage and to hit penalties. It's like they don't realise that the combat system was balanced against the inputs present in the basic game, and if you suddenly cut everyone's AC in half or make melee harder you will end up with an even less balanced experience than Core. I can understand the desire to make the setting feel unique and different, but fucking with the basic game math is not the best way to go about it.

[Blicero]

There are a few references to heavy armor in this chapter, which makes me wonder if the ban on it was decided late in the design process.

While looking for images, I discovered that, unsurprisingly, there appear to be at least two or three anime characters named Gilgamesh.

Chapter Two: Characters

I don't want to just repeat everything that Frank and AH have been saying in the Races of Eberron OSSR about how "race" in D&D often ends up being super offensive and how 3E products pad their pagecounts with scores of feats, spells, prestige classes, and the like. But that was basically what I was going to talk about to introduce this chapter. So go read that thread if you want to. This one will still be here when you are done.

This chapter begins by saying that you shouldn't use intelligent humanoid races all that much for reasons. The author dates himself first by referring to elves and dwarves as "demihumans" and second by saying that, if you want your PC to be an elf, Mister Cavern should have to transported to Mesopotamia via a magical portal or something. That sort of shit would be unthinkable to a modern secondary world creator.

That out of the way, the author moves on to discussing the different peoples of Mesopotamia. This sort of thing is important for establishing the different cultures and beliefs in your setting. You can do it in a racist way, or you can do it in a non-racist way. Morten Braten is unsurprisingly true to his Weird Tales heritage, and that is why Assyrians get +2 Constitution. At least the different divisions are not referred to as races. There are six groups of Mesopotamians described: Amorites, Assyrians, Elamites, Gutians, Phoenicians, and Sumerians. If you heard the number six and guessed that each people correspond to a different +2 ability score bonus, you would be tragically correct. Each people also gets +2 to two skills, and that's it for mechanical differentiation. Phoenicians are one of the six peoples, despite precisely zero Phoenician cities appearing on the map. I guess they're here because Braten needed a +2 Charisma trader group. A system like this is bad for the game because the optimal race-class pairings are so optimal. All it does is make every PC wizard an Elamite, which is super boring.

This sort of ethnic differentiation is kind of absurd, because all six of these peoples live together in the same 400 mile by 400 mile square, and they've presumably been intermarrying for hundreds if not thousands or years. It's slightly less offensive than when REH did it a hundred years ago, or when Eberron does it today, because the number of people today who identify as Elamites or Gutians is some number very close to zero. And the only Assyrian anyone currently alive cares about is named Yossarian.

You'll note that, despite these being described as the peoples of Mesopotamia, one of said peoples is the Sumerians. While in the last chapter "Sumerian" and "Mesopotamian" were used to refer to the same people. This is either a GNU-type matryoshka nesting, or the lack of a distinction in Chapter 1 was lazy editing.

The book next does the "this is how class X fits into my setting" thing. It is more or less what you expect. (Did you know that rangers in Mesopotamia operate on the fringes of civilized lands? Did you know that fighters sometimes turn to lives of banditry? Is your life measurably enriched by knowing these facts?) The standard Mesopotamian bard is apparently the dirgesinger, which would be cool if (a) the dirgesinger were at all worth using, and (b), it had existed when this book came out. All sorcerers in Mesopotamia are evil people who consort with demons. So this book tries to justify the sorcerer class, at least from a fluff perspective.

The writeup for the paladin casually mentions that many paladins perform animal sacrifices for their temple. Which makes me wonder how many paladin players jumping into a game based on this book would expect their lawful good champion of holiness to have to murder animals? This sort of thing emphasizes that the "moral philosophy 101" mishmash D&D presents as alignment is even less applicable to a setting like this. Babylon as described is a city of Tiamat-worshippers. Does that make every person in Babylon Evil? Do you have a reason to worship Tiamat if you are not Evil? According to the backstory, Tiamat's people gained control of Babylon after Hammurabi had gone crazy. So you could totally conceive of some people who are not evil but are still happy to see Her priests in charge of everything. The book really needs some sort of discussion about what exactly alignment means in this setting. It doesn't need to be long, it could even be something like "chaos is Cthulhu, not-Chaos is everyone else" or whatever. There aren't wrong answers to most of these questions, but answers should exist.

Prestige Classes

That out of the way, we get to the prestige classes. There are six of them; three are aimed at divine spellcasters, two are for fighting-types, and the last seems to be written for rangers. They are not presented in alphabetical order or anything because that would be too easy. The good old days of 2004 were before prestige class bloat got quite as bad as it did, and so these six prestige classes are presented in a mere seven and a half pages. Weirdly, none of them is "demigod" or "divine-blooded" or whatever. That seems like it would be a valuable addition for a setting like this.

The first is the Baru-Priest, a seer. You get in as a 7th level wizard or cleric, and it is five levels long with full spellcasting. In exchange for pumping ten ranks in Profession (Astrologer) and burning a feat to get Skill Focus (Profession (Astrologer)) (not even joking), you can

1. Cast augury by sacrificing an animal (up to three times a day)
2. Use guidance once per day as an Extraordinary ability
3. Use speak with dead on corpses of opposing alignment without giving them a saving throw
4. Cast geas once a day (actually level-appropriate!) and, as your capstone
5. Gain a special ability that is inferior in most respects to legend lore, and have every divination spell ever written on your spells known list

The fluff presents it as something only clerics do, but your legend lore-lite ability keys off of Intelligence, so if you're a wizard who really likes divination, I guess you could do worse than picking this up.

The next is the Ashipu-Priest, an exorcist. You get in as an 5th level cleric who is really good at stonecarving. You probably don't take this class, because you lose a caster level at level 1, getting in exchange a permanent true seeing effect that only works on demons. If you're doing a level 12 one-shot, though, this PrC might be worth it, though, because level 7 of it gives you the ability to craft these CR 12 golem things that normally require a creator of at least level 16. And that's kind of cool.

Next up is the Hierophant. There is of course already a prestige class called the Hierophant, but this is not it. This one is honestly kind of boss, though. You get in as a 10th level cleric of druid, and your schtick is that you worship an entire pantheon of gods. You lose your domain power, but you can prepare a domain spell from any domain by identifying a deity who has that domain and making a sacrifice to them. You can use scrolls, wands, and staves as a wizard of half your level (it's ambiguous whether this means "half the number of levels you have in the hierophant class" or "half your character level"). You're not going to be killing anyone with those wands, but I'm sure you can find some random utility spell or whatever. Your big-ish thing is that you can sacrifice a spell slot to get access to a spell of a level you don't yet have access to. This ability has, at best, a 45% chance of success; if it fails, the MC is instructed to fuck you over in some charmingly ironic way.

The prestige class for the ranger is called the Desert Lord, and it is shit. You don't even get full BAB, and one of your abilities lets you wear heavy armor in hot climates. Unfortunately, as we remember from Chapter 1, heavy armor does not exist in fantasy Mesopotamia. Another ability gives you, of all things, a permanent aura of detect vermin. It's at a caster level of "no one cares", though.

The first warrior-type prestige class is the Knight of Tiamat. It has no alignment restrictions, which is odd. You probably get in as a 7th level fighter, although to do so, you have to take Diehard and Toughness. You only get medium BAB as a knight of Tiamat, but, in exchange, you get blindsense, poison, fear, greater command, and stoneskin. The poison effect keys off of Constitution, so it has a (theoretically) non-shit DC, but it's not stated what fear and greater command use, so those might be useless if they need Charisma or something.

The last prestige class is the Temple Reaver, which is sort of an Ur-Priest for Conans. You come in at 10th level, and end up getting fast healing, smite faithful (exactly what it sounds like), greater dispel magic, greater spell immunity, and mordenkainen's game disjunction. That's not a bad deal. Your capstone is becoming an Outsider, which is maybe a "no john you are the demons" moment but whatever.

So this book has four prestige classes that you could conceivably take, one that you might take in specific circumstances, and one that you will never take. That is probably a better ratio than most WotC products, depressingly. Like three people ever bought this book, so the not-shit prestige classes have never been used outside of the author's home campaign, but an accomplishment is an accomplishment. The ashipu-priest and baru-priest have a reasonably unique flavor, but the Knight of Tiamat could easily be a Knight of Bane or a Knight of Hextor or whatever, and the temple reaver is completely setting-neutral.

Magic Tea Party Magic

Next up is an overview of divination, exorcism, and witchcraft (ie, sympathetic magic). There's nothing particularly novel here that you don't get in the descriptions of the baru-priest and ashipu-priest. The one exception is a Random Omen Table, which is great. You can use it to generate such omens as

1. If a two-headed woman urinates on a man, there will be pouring rains and floods.
2. If a purple dog falls from the ceiling, the city will be devastated.
3. If a winged mongoose has tears coming into its eyes, a man and his wife will be devstated.
4. If a cow gives birth and the creature has two heads, there will be a change in the throne. (This last one is appparently from an actual cuneiform tablet.)

I love this sort of thing. It's great for a sandbox game.

Feats

This book only has five feats, which is downright sparse. Two of them let you cast divinations by sacrificing animals. One is a metamagic feat to perform sympathetic magic. This lets you Touch-range spells over anyone on the same plane of existence as are you are, provided you have some of the target's hair, blood, etc. This would be cool. Except, of course, that Sympathetic Magic increases the spell level by three, which is a bit much. That means the earliest you're going to be using this feat is like level 9 or something, sadly.

Spells

Some of the spells here are kind of neat. They are not presented in alphabetical order, because that would be too simple. There's

1. mark of exile (clr 7 , drd 8): You draw it on a dude and forbid him from entering some area. If he ignores you, he just straight up dies without a save. The target can tell when they are within a hundred feet of the forbidden area.
2. scapegoat (clr 2, sor/wiz 3): Transfer a curse from its original target to someone else
3. namburru ritual (clr 5): A sort of contingency-type effect that lets you reroll a failed save or attack or whatever.
4. knotting the cord (sor/wiz 6): Deal 1 Con damage to the target each day until they die.

This is not a bad chapter. Braten could have improved it by emphasizing the connection to actual Mesopotamia. That could have involved more extensive rules for sacrifice, sort of like what ACKS did. A more thorough discussion on how to work divinations into a game fundamentally based on random chance could also be helpful.

The next chapter is only seven pages long, so let's do it too.

Chapter Three: Gods

We start with a list of gods. For the most part, this book uses the Babylonian names of deities instead of the Sumerian names. So we get Ea, Ishtar, and Tammuz instead of Enki, Inanna, and Dumuzid. This is a mixed bag: I think "Enki" is a much better name than "Ea" is, but "Ishtar" sounds a lot better than "Inanna" does. As usual, the references to alignment make me sad. Ishtar is Chaotic Good, but one of her aspects is a "heartless" destroyer who sends diseases to her enemies. Tiamat is Chaotic Evil, even though she has an order of well-trained regimented knights. These guys are based on actual mythology, so many have an appealing asymmetry in their domains. Ishtar gets both Love and War, and her worship features temple prostitutes. The Sun God is also a law-giver, and he carries a saw that he uses to "cut decisions". There is a vulture god whose worshippers present him with their dead. He summons vultures that consume the corpses, and this way no undead can be created from the remains.

After the main deities, there is a list of "lesser demons and mythological creatures". The descriptions here are more or less on the book-report level, so there's not a lot of usable material. For example, the apkallu are seven sages who serve the king in Akkadian mythology, and you've already forgotten what the beginning of this sentence said because no one cares. Gilgamesh is mentioned several times here, but he does not even get his own entry, which continues to bum me out.

Every setting needs its special snowflake way of handling resurrection, and Mesopotamia is no different. The main thing is a "conservation of death" rule, which is that someone can only be raised from the dead if another person agrees to take their place. (The other person does not have to be willing.) This rule is presumably based on the myth of Inanna's descent to the underworld. A dead person can try to escape the underworld themselves, but that would involve a lengthy solo adventure, and so it will probably never happen in most games.

The final piece of rules is a Personal Gods system. If you take the time to propitiate your patron god with sacrifices at least once a month, you get an additional benefit. Most of these benefits are on the upper end of what you would expect to get from a WotC feat. They are not particularly balanced amongst themselves: worshipping the sun god lets you wear heavy clothing and (nonexistent) heavy armor in the desert without penalty, but worshipping the god of magic lets you recover a spell slot once a day. There is nothing particularly Mesopotamian about a rule like this, but it's a nice bit to add to the game.

Up next: The actual adventure, part 1

[Antariuk]

Oh, I remember this one! think I got a copy at the SPIEL a few years ago which I sold afterwards, but I liked a few ideas (others not so much).

Regarding "Mesopotamians" vs "Sumerians", I would say that's the author being realistic. Mesopotamians is a collective term that could be applied to Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, or a number of smaller groups that lived in the area at one time or another, and it conveys what you are talking about without getting into historical hair-splitting that isn't interesting in the context of a d20 game.

Looking forward to the rest of the review!

[Blicero]

Chapter Four: Adventures in the Red Waste

This chapter is supposed to serve as an introduction to the adventure that forms the real meat of this book. Unfortunately, it begins instead by severely muddling the (already minimalist) timeline of this setting. We are told that the adventure portion of this book takes place centuries before the Great Flood. Unfortunately, the Great Flood is literally the first post-creation myth event described in Chapter 1. The bits of Mesopotamia that get any description at all (meaning Eridu, Babylon, Uruk, all those fun places) is not founded until long after the Great Flood. To further muddle matters, the adventure setup goes on to talk about how Babylon is currently ruled by the priests of Tiamat. Which is something that does agree with the setting as detailed in Chapter 1. The introductory paragraphs continue to talk about this "antediluvian" age, and they continue to namedrop all of its decidedly post-antediluvian features. This is really weird, more than anything. It's done casually and frequently enough that it doesn't feel like a mindless mistake on the part of the author. It's possible that the adventure was originally to intended to take place pre-Flood, but this means that there is nothing recognizably historical left. My headcanon is that this Mesopotamia is actually found in a dying earth where "the substance of reality no longer knows quite what it ought to be", to whip out some MJH like the pretentious wanker I am.

That confusion resolved, we finally get a level range for this adventure. The MC is recommended to not use most of this material until the PCs have gotten to level 5, and it is predicted they'll get to about level 10 or 11 by the end. That is a good length for an adventure, and it's right in the middle of 3E's best-designed levels. Five or six level-ups seems to be about what you can get through in two semesters of semiregular gaming. That is basically what Red Hand of Doom did, and that worked pretty well.

As I mentioned before, there's a pretty wide sweep of CRs here. You could run into something way out of your league without really trying to do so. This is good for building a sense of setting verisimilitude, of course, but it often leads to sudden PC deaths. And that can be problematic, because, even in 2004, making a decent 3E character could take quite some time. Your party is not even likely to have any redshirts handy, because 3E does not really do the hireling thing. And, of course D&D rules-wizards will hack through most of this stuff, because none of it is particularly well-optimized.

So if desired, the Red Waste can serve as a nonlinear overarching adventure. This chapter outlines how it might play it, and it is basically what you would expect. A big sandstorm unveils a formerly buried city, and the party shows up because money. They grind in the desert for a bit while making intermittent forays into the city. At some point, they learn about the requisite evil foozles. The minions of said foozles are trying to free their masters. It's up to the PCs to make them cut that shit out. Perfectly serviceable. Skipping to the end, I notice that these foozles are all CR 17 and 18. Which means it's time to start a new campaign if they do get out. (Actually, scratch that. The main foozle is a fighter 6 / cleric 7 with some custom vampire template applied on top of that. Another is a druid 5 / cleric 9 / hierophant 2. So it might almost be charitable to put these guys out of their misery.) I'm probably going to focus on the interesting parts of each individual location rather than discuss how things fit together. Mostly because that way I don't have to read the entire thing before talking about it.

Skimming through the outline, this adventure has a Cult of the Pit Worm, the Toad-God Tsathogga, the Ziggurat of the Ghoul Queen, an Arch-Necromancer, and Purple Obelisks. I'm down for all of that.

Adhering to the Jaquays tradition, we start with a rumor table. For those not in the know, a rumor table is a, well, table of rumors, and a random selection of them are generated for the PCs to know at the start of the adventure. Not all of them are true. This sort of thing is a splendid way of giving the party some initial base for their investigations.

Chapter Five: The Red Waste

This first chapter is just an overview of the desert itself. The dehydration and heat exhaustion rules from the DMG are meant to be in full effect here. This obviously makes traveling only by night a more attractive option, except that chance encounters at nighttime are more likely to be dangerous. Which is a decent tradeoff for the few levels until the party cleric can take care of everyone. (The author clearly wants you to raise the level of create water to make it less accessible, but he doesn't outright tell you to.)

We get a map that includes all of the individual locations you care about. The waste itself is placed in kind of a weird area within Mesopotamia. It's about 150 miles east of Babylon or any other population centers. Which means there's not much that can serve as your homebase except for this one small oasis. Combined with the general difficulty of travel in the desert, getting to and from the adventure area is going to be kind of an issue until you get your zombie chimera.

The rest of the chapter is a writeup of the two main nomad tribes. There's a sexist wizard-hating tribe of noble savages, and a metal tribe of evil necromancers who ride skeletal horses. The necromancers appear to be much more egalitarian than their rivals are: one of their leaders is the requisite hot sorceress. They are one of the groups working for a foozle. (Their foozle, an 18th level wizard, is decidedly not a joke.) The chieftain of the noble savages will give you a sidequest to find his missing son; the default path assumes that you'll do this so that they will guide you to the lost city. Having a guide makes you less likely to hit chance encounters, so that is not a bad deal. Despite his tribe's hatred of magic, the head shaman's random magic item is a ring of feather fall, which of course is an arcane-only spell. I'm not sure why people keep writing up tribes of wizard-hating barbarians. You can roll with it in Conan, but it doesn't even remotely fit into the assumptions of D&D. As is, there is no reason that the necromancers have not totally wiped out the barbarians.

The necromancers are a bit more interesting. Their writeup mentions a few reasons that a party might want to work with them instead of the barbarians, which is definitely appreciated. Their mook of choice is a human-ghoul hybrid called a yhakkor, which I guess is another case of "a wizard did it". This is an especially odd case of a wizard doing it, because the only thing yhakkor (yhakkors?) share with ghouls is some of the standard undead immunities. They don't have a paralyzing touch or ghoul fever, nor are they even undead. Instead, they have the troglodye's stench ability, filth fever, and a racial bonus to Listen checks. Also, the head wizard dude of this tribe may be into necrophilia:

[The head wizard] secretly desires the sorceress Yarima, but he has issues about his height and has so far satisfied himself with the company of ghouls and zombies.

I need to go learn about compressed sensing, so that's it for now.

Up next: a haunted battlefield, a hill with wyverns, and an oasis with LSD-laced water.

[Blicero]

Oh yeah, one other way that you can tell this is a pre-OSR product is the distinct lack of hexes in the overland maps. Somewhat surprisingly, there really aren't any special rules for moving through the desert. There really aren't enough features on the overland map to make navigating by landmark a particularly interesting or even viable task. I guess the MC can just call for that DC 15 Survival check each day, but that is hella boring. Most major locations are a day or two apart, so I guess you can just pick a random direction and hope that the MC is generous with telling you when you see something from a distance. If you can get a flying mount, then most of these issues go away, obviously. But the adventure does not seem to assume that you will.

Chapter Six: The Sea of Bones

As promised, this is a haunted battlefield. There's some decent descriptive prose about how it went down:

The desert sand ran red with blood as the warriors clashed, amid the clangor of bronze swords and the fire and smoke of burning supply trains. From silken pavillions safely withdrawn from the bloodshed, the abominable wizards of Yhakkoth summoned winged demons and rotting plagues to inflict upon the advancing enemy forces, while the bearded priests of Ibnath called upon the secret names of their numerous gods, imploring them to smite down the armies of the east.

It's not inconceivable that the PCs will come here with a guide; if they do, this text could just be what the guide tells them. This book really likes speak with dead; if your group shares those predilections, that is another potential source of purple prose.

There's a 25% chance hourly that a wild ankheg or whatever appears while you're here. (Weirdly, only the nighttime encounters are things you would expect to find at a haunted battlefield.) So if you're not doing 3E's default XP-for-monsters thing, then the PCs have a valid reason to get in and get out. Which makes for a decently setup area. If you can deal with the random encounters, there is a decent amount of stuff here to loot, along with a random system to determine which of it you find. The best is an artifact sword that has a backstory connection to the evil foozles. You might also run into the noble savage's missing son, although there's no real reason to suspect that you'd find him here without divinations or whatever. He's currently possessed by a malign spirit that you're supposed to exorcise, somehow. One of the cleric prestige classes (the one that loses you caster levels) gets an exorcism ability which presumably would work, but the text is otherwise sparse on suggested methods. He too is carrying around an artifact. This artifact breaks the campaign if you get it, because it lets you use gate. (It's a charge-restricted item, but you regain charges by killing things. And you are an adventurer.) Sidenote: If for some reason you wanted to destroy this artifact, you have to drop it on a surface smeared with the blood of at least nine infants. Hooray for random grimderp interludes?

Chapter Seven: Dragonclaw Rock

The "sea of bones" is a reasonably evocative name, but "dragonclaw rock" is just plain lazy. The titular dragons are actually wyverns (what a twist?). There's also a random minidungeon that has some giant ants in it; there is no reason to interact with them.

The main attraction of this area is an apathetic druid who is guarding a macguffin. She is level 10, and she apparently has left her nails uncut for long enough that she has turned into Lady Deathstrike. Her holy symbol is a lizard-skin that she fills with water during full moons. This is odd enough to be kind of interesting.

Chapter Eight: The Oasis of Purple Dreams

This is a much better name than either the sea of bones or dragonclaw rock, luckily. The random monster found here is a (mindless) vampiric cactus, another thing to chalk up to those wacky wizards. The water at this oasis causes (randomly determined) funky dreams, which is fine by me. Some of the dreams:

1. A night hag appears and tries to rape you. Hooray for more random grimderp interludes.
2. You have to solo-fight a variety of monsters, most of which are at least CR 10 and thus likely to kill you. Losing causes permanent Wisdom drain, winning gives you a 50% chance of learning another rumor (from the rumor table).
3. One lets you trade a point of Constitution for the ability to fly, both last only for the dream's duration. This dream tells you about a previously-unknown location on the map.

So this is, unfortunately, one of those random tables where you roll to see how badly you get fucked over. Older modules loved this shit.

Next time: Pit Worms and Ghoul Queens

[OgreBattle]

"Dare you enter the city that worshiped a thousand gods?" Thats every city in Japan and India.

[Mistborn]

Gilgamesh is mentioned several times here, but he does not even get his own entry

Mongrels

[Blicero]

@ogre: Yeah, simply having a bunch of gods does not make a city particularly unique except in generic eurofantasies. Looking forward to that chapter, nothing in this book really supports the idea of a thousand gods. You get like two dozen, most of which are pretty familiar. It would have been neat had it included something like Yoon-Suin's random deity generator, but whatever.

Chapter Nine: The Pit of Yhath

This is the chapter that describes pit worm. It's a decent hook: a meteorite (meteor?) fell to earth and made a big crater. Some evil crazy guys found the crater and discovered that the meteorite contained the egg of a half-fiend purple worm. Being crazy and evil, they worship it as a god and propitiate it with blood sacrifice.

Unfortunately, this area does not have a lot of connection to the rest of the adventure. The best the adventure can come up with is to have someone important be kidnapped by the worm-cult. There's no sense of factional interplay between the worm-cultists and the two tribes, which seems like a lost opportunity.

There's a nice incidental detail in the description of the worm's altar:

Victims who are to be sacrificed to the Worm-God are chained to the altar using the manacles. Curiously, the littered bones are predominantly hand- and armbones (this is due to the fact that the worm usually snatches a chained victim and swallows it whole, leaving only hands and lower arms chained to the manacles).

Most groups that make it here will probably be level 6 or 7 at least. The two standard enemies you are supposed to fight are level 2 barbarians and level 2 rogues. This makes the area kind of a joke, particularly because the standard encounter is only 1d3+1 of them. Also, the dungeon's design is really boring, being just a tree with three leaves (two of which are super short). This could have been a lot more labyrinthine and interesting., and I do not know why it was not.

The big boss is, unsurprisingly, the worm. It's CR 15 and pretty hardcore, except for its +4 Will save. So it's prime charm bait. The purple worm has laid an egg, which hatches if given blood. A hatchling grows to full size in only ten rounds. So you could easily finish this dungeon with two charmed worm-gods in tow, which is pretty boss.

Chapter Ten: The Ziggurat of the Ghoul Queen

Somewhat confusingly, the ghoul queen is not a ghoul. She is queen of the ghouls, but she is actually a vampire. Continuing the tradition of the last chapter, the vampire not-ghoul ghoul queen's lair is a small dungeon lacking any particularly interesting design features. Because this is a neo-old-school product, one of the results for this area's random encounter table is a gust of wind. The dungeon expects the characters to be threatened by groups of 1d6+6 ghouls; this will not happen at the levels you are expected to be here. And, being a ziggurat, it has a few traps. One of these is kind of clever, the other less so.

The clever one is a pit trap that, several rounds later, drops a massive slab (20d6 damage) into the pit. A reasonably easy (DC 15) Listen check reveals that the slab will fall. A trap like this has the potential for some good physical comedy, and it's also more interesting than a simple arrow trap or whatever. The less interesting trap is a piece of treasure that, when removed from its pedestal, shrouds the area in darkness and summons a wraith to start fucking your shit up. This could lead to a tense situation, or it could just feel really cheap. Also, annoyingly, the treasure in question is not even worth that much. The dungeon has a statue of a golden bull; this statue is apparently worth a mighty 100000 gold pieces. Because it has a price, it's obviously expected that the PCs will try and lug this thing back to town. Unfortunately, the statue has no weight or dimensions.

Chapter Eleven: The Horns of Sinmesh

The mines of Sinmesh (located in some mountains called the Horns of Sinmesh) are the closest thing this book has had to a proper dungeon so far. It's not a super big dungeon (only twenty main locations), but it has a few forking paths and other geographic features. It is filled with "degenerates" who "have begun to worship a
loathsome toad-being whose slimy idol they unearthed in the lightless caverns deep beneath the mines." Everything is improved by Tsathogga, so I am not complaining here. If you've been waiting all adventure for a chance to fight giant frogs, now you've got it.

This large natural cavern, dimly lit in shades of sickly green by phosphorescent fungi, is dominated by an obscene statue of a squat, bloated creature with lidless eyes, elongated limbs and the tip of an abhorrent, far-reaching tongue.

Aww yiss.

Tsathogga has inflicted a disease on the mine's inhabitants, and so the mine has been sealed off. Near the doors is a lengthy poem, which at the end contains the line

I have appointed a mark, follow the path of justice

If you saw that and thought "clearly you have to cast mark of justice to open the doors", then you have spent too much time dealing with bullshit D&D "puzzles". Otherwise, you will probably just hack down the doors; they have 180 hp but only hardness 10, so it's totally doable.

The mines are supposed to be one of the high-level areas for this area, and so in addition to requiring a higher-level spell to get into them, the first thing you'll fight here is a pair of clay golems. This is decent adventure design. A lower-level group might get here and decent to break through the doors. While doing so the MC can do the "are you sure you want to do this?" schtick, which, obviously, will make them continue. And so they finally smash down the doors, and then oh shit!, there're these massive golems waiting to fuck them up! Which will prompt a frantic retreat.

One of the golems can cast invisibility purge, which seems like an odd choice. By RAW, would a golem be capable of guessing when an invisible character is possibly nearby? I guess it could just be programmed to cast the spell whenever the doors open or whatever.

I think the piercer has to be one of the stupider D&D creatures ever made? Well, for whatever reason, one of the tunnels in the this mine has a bunch of piercers that will drop down on you when you walk under them. If survive the dread piercers, then you get to the furnace. In a slightly novel touch, the mine's furnace is run by a bunch of bound salamanders and a permanent gate to the plane of fire. If you kill the salamanders, you can use the gate to summon a bunch of thoqquas that will serve you for 18 rounds. Clever people could have fun with that.

Another decent area is a bridge over the chasm, at the bottom of which lurks a huge ankheg. If the PCs have not been stealthy in their approach, the frog-worshippers launch an ambush here. So that could be fun.

You'll eventually get to the frog-cultists. Encounters with them are reasonably open-ended. There are a shit-tonne of them (around 200), so it would be difficult to murderize them all. And the writeup suggests that killing their leader-dude might make them inclined to abolish the worship of Tsathogga, which disincentivizes a mass slaughter-fest. The head leader-dude is a cleric 5 / barbarian 3, so he'll go down like a chump.

If you make it to the end, you find a "fantastic" amount of treasure. Weirdly, a specific amount is not given; the MC is just instructed to construct a suitable "treasure mound". Which is kind of what this adventure is supposed to do for you, but eh. Acquiring this treasure will require you killing a bunch of giant frogs, and possibly a slaad or two (written here as "sla'ad" because yay apostrophes).

Next time: The actual city of a thousand gods, and more (arguably peak) giant frog

[tussock]

I think the piercer has to be one of the stupider D&D creatures ever made?

They're from a time of descriptive dungeoneering. There was clues everywhere and you had to listen carefully and follow tenuous leads with experimental questioning of the DM. To promote listening a lot of the clues were monsters, so there's chest monsters and ceiling monsters and wall monsters and pillar monsters and stalactite monsters.

But those monsters, you can 10' pole your way past them if you're paying attention and into the whole descriptive thing. If that tunnel is a purple worm, the DM will note the floor is damp here or something, and you either follow up on that like a good player or you get eaten. Piercers are the 1st-level version, they get surprise, attack once, and die, and the game subtly trains you to pay attention when the DM is describing shit.

As the rot grub trains you to not carefully explore every pile of shit for no reason, and the ear seeker to stop wasting so much time on every door. As being a 1st level Wizard trained you to not cast spells all the time and let the Fighters do a bit too.

[Blicero]

Chapter Twelve: The Ruins of Ibnath

Ibnath is the lost ruined city that the module nominally centers itself around. It is, as far as I can, completely fictional. This continues the whole "the adventure part of this book has nothing to do with the Mesopotamia part of this book" trend. I find this to be kind of an odd design decision. The author could very easily have picked the name of some random Sumerian city that modern historians know very little about and used that instead. Ibnath's only defining characteristics appear to be that "it has a big ziggurat" and "it had a bunch of gods". Cities satisfying those characteristics include every city in the region. It's not even "the first city of men" or anything special like that, since the oldest city in existence is explicitly Eridu. Ibnath is also a very small, occupying a roughly 800 ft by 800 ft square. Which is just kind of sad; if you're going to focus your module around a ruined city, you should make it fucking massive.

This chapter's first encounter area has jackalweres, and they are described as being "therianthropes". Both of these facts make me very sad. Luckily, the book doesn't try to foist this term on us while claiming that the term "lycanthrope" should only apply to werewolves. Instead, we are told that a therianthrope is an animal who can turn into a person. Also, therianthropy is not contagious. This is how wolfweres worked in BG2, so I am assuming this is not an invention of this book. Instead, it's a fossil forcibly brought back to life. The proposed use of these werejackals is to have them shadow the PCs as they traverse the city, attacking at the worst moment. That sounds like it could be neat, save for the fact that the jackalweres only have +6 to Hide and Move Silently. So they are only going to be hiding from a group of level 7 and 8 characters by MC fiat.

Continuing the other trend of random grimderp interludes, we learn that the jackalweres have kidnapped a bunch of human women, and they intend to use them to breed a bunch more jackalweres. something something dogrape something something

Next up is a pack of another random undead: gholles. The gholle seems to be a CR 8 Large ghoul. Cursory research suggests that the gholle is a Gary Gygax special, created in his twilight years. You can tell that it's a Gygax monster because its entry in the bestiary reads

These vile things often dwell in packs, often including ghulaz (q.v.) and/or once-human ghouls.

I do not know what a ghulaz is, that word is mentioned nowhere else in this book so I will never learn.

Luckily, the mines of Sinmesh did not contain the last of Giant Frog. This city's flavor is found in the Temple of a Thousand Gods, and it is called the froghemoth. I cannot tell if that word is stupid or brilliant; I want to lean toward brilliant. The module doesn't really try to justify the presence of the froghemoth, it just mutters about how maybe it was a "degenerate" frog that grew to Huge size. Anyway, it's an aberration with a shittonne of HD, so you can't just SoD it.

the apotheosis of giant frog abandons some of its frogginess

Skipping ahead to the monsters section, I notice that there a huge number of giant frogs in this book. In addition to the aforementioned froghemoth, there is a normal Giant Frog, a Giant Dire Frog, a Killer Frog (which is apparently humanoid-ish in shape despite still being an Animal), an Abyssal Dire Frog, and a Poisonous Frog.

Also in the temple area is a shoutout to the (honestly kind of average) Clark Ashton Smith story "Ubbo-Sathla". You find a crystal, and using this crystal triggers a cutscene where the MC summarizes Ubbo-Sathla to you. There's no suggestion of interactivity or anything, which seems like a missed opportunity. You don't even learn anything relevant to the adventure. The temple is surrounded by a big garden. A playtester group must have set this garden on fire, because the MC is instructed to TPK any group that tries to do this by jumping them with masses of shambling mounds.

The rest of this chapter is mostly taken up by a description of the main foozle's palace. He doesn't actually chill here because magic forbids him from entering the city; overcoming this effect is his primary goal. After he was driven out, the other powerful NPCs put the palace and its inhabitants into a stasis. The stasis is broken if anyone enters the palace from outside, and the awoken inhabitants do not realize that any time has passed. If they leave the palace, the accumulated time passes and they crumble into dust. Of the NPCs in the palace, most are just servants and stuff and are not automatically hostile to intruders. So there's a decent potential for a variety of interactions there, particularly with the broken stasis thing. I'm not sure necessarily why the big NPCs felt the need to stasis the entire palace. Some of the people in it are visiting foreign dignitaries who presumably have no connection to the bad guy. The upshot of this is a bunch of factional interplay waiting to be happened upon, I'm willing to accept the illogic. Other than the NPCs, there's not that much of interest in the palace. There are rooms, they have monsters, you know the drill.

The last few pages detail the resurrection of the necromancer guy who was once the head of the necromancer nomads. This guy is a level 18 wizard, making him the one NPC in this book who does not have shitty multiclass build. So if he gets resurrected, it's basically game over. At some point late the campaign, the nomads are supposed to show up here and start their big ritual. Interestingly, whether or not the ritual succeeds is left up to chance, and modified by things like the use of blood sacrifice and a few artifacts. So the MC can do the Indiana Jones thing where the necromancers and the PCs are both after said artifacts and it's a race. It takes a certain type of group to wager the outcome of the entire campaign on a single d20 roll, but I can see the appeal.

Next time: more stuff about the temple

[Blicero]

Chapter Thirteen: Temple of a Thousand Gods

We open with a decent bit of pulpy prose:

Not only was the worship of foreign gods tolerated in the city of Ibnath, but a grand temple was built there to worship all known gods within its incense-shrouded walls. Thus, the swollen brass idols of the great gods Tiamat, Anu, Marduk and Ishtar were worshipped side by side with such weird and unfathomable deities as Ub-Xathla, Nhakhramat of the Emerald Flame, Yaazotsh the charnel god, the mother-goddess Shupnikkurat, and Kthan the Faceless God.
Temple servants and priests who were less than human served some of these strange and alien gods, and their rites were sinister and abominable. Yet Ibnath was a city ruled by priests, and the Hierophants turned a blind eye to such activities as long as they were confined to dark and subterranean shrines, far from the eyes of the common people.

Obviously, this passage makes a mockery of the D&D alignment system (chaotic evil Tiamat gets worshipped side by side with lawful good Marduk, and priests of both chill with priests of Cthulhu? what?). But that is not particularly new ground, either for this book or for D&D products in general.

But yeah. This chapter describes the city's big temple, which functions as another dungeon. As you would expect, bad things live in its depths, and they need to be face-stabbed. Its first room contains the dozen statues of the main gods. (Weirdly, despte being mentioned in the introduction, Ub-Xathla is not one of them.) Religion DCs are given to identify each statue, and the highest DC is only 20. The gods that are basically Cthulhu are are talked about as being forgotten entities, but I am not sure how much claim you have to being forgotten if a random Religion 101 student has like a one-in-ten chance of recognizing your statue. Surprisingly, none of the statues is actually a golem or a trap or whatever. But there's also no reason to interact with any of them other than to have the MC spew background details at you. It would have been totally in genre to have some of the statues come alive and each have a weakness or strength based on their god. And obviously you could get statues or competing gods to fight each other.

This dungeon is the biggest detailed so far, having two floors with twenty or twenty-five rooms each. Unfortunately, that's still way too small. A temple like this is crying out to be a massive borgesian complex with way more stuff than the PCs could ever even hope to see. At the very least, it should have had the scope of the House Absolute. But it does not, and that saddens me.

There are some decent rooms in this dungeon. Some of them are:

1. a room dedicated to the god of healing, in which cast cure spells are maximized
2. an actual monster closet: a 10 ft x 10 ft room with four ghasts in it
3. a stone serpent that appears to have a compartment hidden in its mouth. Obviously, sticking your hand in to check is a Bad Idea.
4. a trap that plane shifts the target to a random outer plane. This is despite the fact that an earlier chapter claimed that Mesopotamian campaigns have only the Underworld and the Upperworld as other planes.
5. a petrified sorceress who can become an ally
6. a succubess who has just been sitting and posing as a priestess of Ishtar for the hundreds of years Ibnath has been abadoned
7. doppelgangers that attempt to infiltrate the party
8. a trap that infects the party with the Scarecrow's fear gas
9. a tiny demiplane containing a single bebileth
10. two friendly demon faces who who just want to talk
11. a small room with seven bodaks in it. There is no indication that you're about to walk into this. The bodak death save DC is only 15, but with so many, someone is going to roll a 1. If you beat them, you get a staff of power

There have definitely been less interesting dungeons written. You have the usual thing where all these deadly monsters are just assumed to waiting in their small featureless rooms in a tiny space, but that's always been a D&D issue.

[Blicero]

One thing I have noticed in the adventure bits of this book is that Morten Braten really likes monstrous scorpions, and he finds monstrous centipedes and monstrous spiders only slightly less appealing. I have never seen vermin used all that much in games I've played in or run, but I can maybe see a pulp-y sword & sorcery appeal to this sort of monster. And I guess this makes the repel vermin aura in the shitty ranger prestige class slightly more explicable. It's still not a super useful ability, though, as the caster level for the aura is your prestige class level plus one.

Chapter Fourteen: The Ziggurat

This is actually the last chapter of the adventure. After this is just the monsters. So this chapter details another annoyingly small dungeon in Ibnath. It's where the hierophants of Ibnath hang out. As we remember from the PrC writeup, hierophants are priests who worship a bunch of gods at once, including those of opposing alignments. Which I guess explains how priests of Marduk and Tiamat are allowed to hang out with each other in the temple from the last chapter. But the intro here emphasizes that hierophants still hate aberrations and undead. This is kind of odd because some of the gods from the temple in the last chapter were basically Cthulhu, and the temple design totally implied that Cthulhu's priests would be standing right next to not-Cthulhu's priests.

The design of this dungeon is decent; it is not super ornate but it uses verticality in relatively interesting ways. There's not a whole lot of fighting to be done in it, nor are there that many traps. One of the traps does instantly transport you to an alien planet that is likely to kill you really quickly and whether or not you are allowed to escape is explicitly left up to MC fiat. So there's that. Another room has a reskinned deck of many things, in case you didn't realize that this was the Very Definitely Final Dungeon. But the main draw is a bunch of stasis'd high-level NPCs (the hierophants).

The proposed outline for this adventure suggests that the party un-stasis these NPCs, but it doesn't really say why they would do that. This chapter is similarly sparse regarding motivation. It sez that, if the hierophants are un-stasis'd, then they will reward the PCs with riches and shit. But I'm not sure that, as a player, I would expect good things to happen if I woke up a bunch of crazy high-level priests from their centuries-long sleep. And I suspect I am not alone in this, particularly if I am playing in an old-school game like this. But supposing that they do get woken up, the book presents a variety of ways their presences could alter the remainder of the campaign.

But that is really the book. There are more monsters in the Bestiary section than I have mentioned, but none of the remainders are of particular note.

Concluding Thoughts

I posit that proper nouns are not sufficient to convey setting. This should not be an uncontroversial claim. Unfortunately, this module thinks that they are. The early chapters do present ways in which a Mesopotamian campaign be could different from a standard desert fantasy setting: the city-state as the dominant type of civilization, conservation of death, the societal focus on divination and exorcism, cities populated by demonic sorcerers, etc. All of which could be super neat, and none of which are utilized to any real extent in the sandbox area. "Blue-bearded priests of Tiamat" is a brilliant and extremely evocative phrase, and it is never built upon. You cannot read this and deem it anything other than a tragedy.

So this book definitely fails as a setting sourcebook. But if you accept that the module chapters just take place in that standard fantasy desert setting, then I think you have a worthwhile standard fantasy desert adventure on your hands. Reviewing or analyzing adventures is always kind of a pointless endeavor because so much of how a published adventure actually plays out is dependent on the specifics of your group and party and shit. But my guess is that what is contained here would be sufficient to drive a pretty compelling sandbox game. It handily beats anything that WotC ever put out, excepting things like the Sunless Citadel and the Red Hand of Doom. So that is something. And the writing manages to not be shitty or super bloated for the most part. Props to Morten Braten for that.

[Red_Rob]

Interesting review. The whole Babylonian / Mesopotamian thing has the potential to make a great RPG setting (Conan is one of the Ur-texts for RPG's after all) but it never seems to come together.

The Froghemoth by the way is another old school classic that walks that thin line between stupid and awesome that is the Owlbear's claim to fame.

I don't quite get the adventure setup, is there a plot or is it just a sandbox? Or something in between? A plot in a sandbox?

[Blicero]

It's mostly just a sandbox centered around exploring/looting Ibnath. But you have two or three factions that are trying to do things throughout the sandbox. So an MC could make a plot out of the factional interactions if they so wished.

First we have the fighter 6 / cleric 7 vampire foozle. He used to be the kingpriest of Ibnath, but he got kicked out when the hierophants realized he was a vampire. He wants to break the spells preventing his return into the city, remobilize his dudes, and take over the area. There are a few MacGuffins scattered around that he needs to retrieve to do this. The module sporadically suggests doing the "a mysterious NPC asks you to do X, Y, and Z but when you do that he reveals that he is EVIL" thing with him. He's set up as the BBEG, but, as written, he never really does anything except sit ominously in his hidden lair.

Then you have the tribe of necromancers who want to resurrect their leader. They also need a few MacGuffins to do this; one of the MacGuffins they want is the MacGuffin the vampire wants.

If the PCs end up waking up the hierophants, then that adds a third faction into the mix. The module suggests that the hierophants might task the PCs with taking down the other two factions if they have not done so already. So if the campaign lasts long enough to introduce the hierophants,

So there's a scattering of plot elements. Presumably, as a group wanders through the area, the necromancers and the vampire will be doing their thing and trying to accomplish their goals. But whether or not they are at all successful in that is left totally up to the discretion of the MC.

[icyshadowlord]

I actually read a book all about day to day life in Ancient Mesopotamia.

Hopefully this book will give me some ideas on how to build one part of my own setting.