Chapter 7: The Taste of Fear
So this will be the last post for this OSSR, and we're already done with the overwhelming majority of the content.
Chapter 7 is a sample adventure. It's not a particularly complicated adventure and it contains few options. It's pretty railroad too, since if the PCs leave the designated adventure path the adventure basically ends. There's essentially two parts, an escort mission and a pursuit subsequent to the escort. The adventure takes place pretty much entirely in the Hinterlands, something of an oddity.
everyone hates escort missions
This is essentially an entirely wilderness adventure, and all encounters take place in the open, with the possible exception of the last one. The combats are straightforward, but several do allow for the possibility of retreat by both PCs and NPCs (and Zik-Trin enemies are actually capable of outrunning Thri-Kreen PCs). The fights mostly involve Kreen variant creatures.
Mostly the adventure functions as an opportunity for a lot of exposition to be dumped onto the PCs in service of a transition in the overall Dark Sun metaplot. The whole idea is that a massive earthquake made it possible for the Tohr-Kreen nations and Empire to access the Tyr Region, and the adventure is basically the PCs discovering that happened and encountering agents of the empire for the first time. One gets the sense that possible Tohr-Kreen invasion of the Tyr region was supposed to be a major contingent plot point in the post-Prism Pentad Dark Sun, but so far as I know nothing ever happened with that. The Dark Sun revised setting describes the Tohr-Kreen state in a cursory way at best, and no setting book describing it was ever produced (because TSR went bankrupt).
There are three sample Thri-Kreen with stat blocks provided at the end of the adventure. They’re nothing special, but 2e character options were a lot less complicated than 3.X and these are 5-6th level anyway.
Appendix
This is just a 3 page set for the 3 new monsters introduced in this book: Trin, Jalath’gak, and Zik-Trin’ak. The Trin are proto-Kreen that will grapple you and eat your face. The Zik-Trin’ak are uber-kreen warriors who leap onto you and rip your face off because of a massive strength bonus (+6!) to damage. Jalath’gak are flying bloodsuckers who aren’t quite so threatening but have a lot of attacks.
apparently available to Zik-Trin as a biomod
Conclusion
Looking at it, this book is a weird production. I do think it highlights the later years of 2e AD&D though. TSR was already well into the downward spiral towards bankruptcy, and books like this almost certainly didn't help. The book totally lacks awareness of how niche this concept is, and, critically, goes in the opposite direction of trying to give the Thri-Kreen mass market appeal.
I mean, the Thri-Kreen are certainly cool, and the design choices on display here: emphasizing the tauric body structure, the alien insect mindset, the funky social structure with its 'clutch-mind' and 'hunt-mind' concepts, these are all intriguing ideas that have a lot of potential, but they have pretty low playability. Also, they really don't fit a game that's about ruin-pillaging murderhobos. A Thri-Kreen PC doesn't fit the standard D&D adventurer model at all.
So instead we get this stylistic and sleek-looking book (I really like the art here, and the consistency of using one artist matters), about a quirky and unique insect race that is actually conceptualized with a lot of depth - especially for a non-hive insect species. It's far from problem free - the elf-eating bit is weakly produced and at least moderately squicky, and there's a strong 'noble savage' undercurrent to most of the material (which becomes stronger when the 'civilized' Tohr-Kreen are made into potential villains), but there is a vision to it. Unfortuntely it's not very playable; it's too far out there. The book is also chock-full of a lot of information that has minimal gaming value at best - like the pages and pages on the Thri-Kreen language.
Further, a lot of this fluff is way too specific to Dark Sun, which is so different from most other D&D settings that it makes it very hard to import this material elsewhere in case you want to use Thri-Kreen in your homebrew world or FR or even in Planescape. The lack of detail provided on the more settled Tohr-Kreen – who would actually do better at playing nice with others in alternate settings also doesn’t help. ‘Desert planets only’ is a pretty sucky restriction to have for a cool D&D concept.
This book represents the raw material for a kick-ass fantasy novel with the Thri-Kreen and the Trin, and the Tohr-Kreen and all of it (and if they'd put the Thri-Kreen into the SRD I'd probably try to write one myself), but it makes a very low-utility game supplement.
Then again - 2e Thri-Kreen were at least playable, and not saddled with a crippling LA the way the 3e incarnation was. Also, the 3e Thri-Kreen are stupid looking by comparison.
