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The Tomb of Crossed Words $2.00
Publisher: Dungeon Masters Guild
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by Salvatore D. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 06/11/2017 00:31:37

Given that this adventure revolves entirely around puzzles and their solving, I will warn that this review contains SPOILERS and solutions to two of the puzzles.

With that out of the way, I was not impressed at all by this adventure. Many, many things are just outright confusing and unexplained, and some parts are just poorly designed.

The adventure starts fairly normal. The players are recruited by a man named Brother Connor who wishes for them to seek out and cleanse a temple. He doesn't know what has happened to it, but he is willing to offer up 1,000gp and whatever magical items or other loot is found within.

With that, should the players choose to accept, they are given a map and a poem and told to get to it.

Then comes the map, which was incredibly confusing to me as a GM. The map is laid out in an absolutely bizarre manner that I struggled to figure out at all.

Doors are marked by thin black lines, which was difficult to determine on a grid system; they legitimately just look like part of the grid, just made a tiny bit thicker. I didn't even realize that these were supposed to be doors until the passages below detailing each room mentioned that there were doors in these spots. Furthermore, the numbering system is just plain strange, with numbers being set off to the edges of rooms as if they were points of interests, rather than entire rooms. Shapes are randomly strewn about, such as a star that heavily reminded me of a magic circle instead being used to represent a desk, apparently.

Important details that SHOULD be on the map simply aren't. One puzzle, titled The Scroll Library, features three skeletons arranged in a pattern that the players need to solve. What pattern is it? Well, the adventure doesn't tell you. It literally states that players should find it "simple", but how is that supposed to be determined when there's no indication of where things go? The description gives a vague mention of where they are placed, but that's it; the map reveals nothing. I had to just guess, and in my case, it worked, thankfully, but I still have no idea if I situated them correctly.

Not that there is even any incentive to explore. While Brother Connor offers the players the ability to keep any magic items or loot that are found... there isn't any. Literally nothing. There is not a SINGLE piece of loot or even currency to be found in the dungeon. Nothing. I decided on a few items to set around the place as rewards for clever solutions to the puzzles, which the players enjoyed, but this is yet another thing that should have been included in the campaign; especially because the adventure hook promises them loot!

One of the puzzles was just way too obvious, and was laughable. In one hallway the players are presented with a number of magical busts. One of them hides the hidden passage they need to find to complete the dungeon. The "puzzle"? One of them has a skull instead of a stone head and you have to touch it. The players received the "clue", which was essentially "a skull", and immediately walked up and touched it. That was the puzzle. Yawn.

Even more frustrating, for an entirely puzzle based adventure, the final encounter... is a physical fight. My group was very disappointed to find out that after all these puzzles, the solution was simply to draw their weapons and beat something to death. It was extremely uneventful, and while the game of 20 Questions prior to the fight was fun, multiple PCs complained that it was a very boring way to end the dungeon.

Overall, this isn't a very well written adventure. It's confusing for GMs, and unrewarding for players. It was a fun module, but only because I rewrote half of it and added in loot. This is not a module you can just purchase and run as-is, which is fairly disappointing for a paid module.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
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The Tomb of Crossed Words
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