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BASICS
White Robes, Black Heart;
Enigma of the Arcanexus is a
110 page softbound D&D
supplement put out by Dark
Portal Games. It’s written
for their campaign setting of
Arekoz, but with only a few
name changes for the deities,
it’s easily adaptable to any
campaign setting. The series
of adventures it lays out is
supposed to be for characters
level 3-5, and a party size of
4-6 (the target party level
being about 5). They also
highly recommend that an
arcane spell-caster and a
rogue be included in the
party. Included in the book
are half a dozen new monsters, plus a new spell and even a new weapon.
They also introduce a new prestige class, but don’t give you the write up for it
since it’s apparently only for NPC’s.
In addition to getting the all the material included in the book, Dark Portal
Games sweetens the deal by offering several free goodies available on their
website. Things like the background and history of Arekoz, a full color map
of Arekoz and more. There are several places in the book where they refer
you to their web site where they say you can get free downloads of things like
maps and charts. But alas, all the URLs they give are wrong. With a little
work I found that the main page is now at darkportalgames.biz rather than
(.com) and then from there you can get to most of the other promised sites.
But even here I ran into a problem accessing the goodies specific to White
Robes, Black Heart. In the book they give you a user name and a password,
but these don’t seem to work. I emailed Dark Portal Games, but after six
weeks have yet to hear back from them so who knows what’s up with that.
Finally one of the best things about the book, are the dozen or so “player
handouts” provided in the back of the book. I have always considered player
handouts a great, and sometimes vital, addition to the game, and still wonder
why more “pre-fabs” don’t come with them. The book’s retail price is $14.95
USD.
INSIDE
There are five chapters in the book, with each chapter being a mini-adventure.
The first mini-adventure takes place in town with lots of opportunity for roleplaying,
while the other four mini-adventures require the party to visit a
remote site and do a little bit of dungeon crawling. Throughout the book there
are very in-depth histories, and storylines. These are all well done, and fun to
read, but I have to say that it might actually be overdone. I’m always a fan of
good fluff, but it just seems to me that there is more fluff than adventure in
this particular case.
There are also some good chuckles in the book (my favorite being a
benevolent ghoul with a pet zombie dog that likes to “play dead”) that add
some flavor to the adventure. At the end of each chapter there are ideas given
for side-line adventures that tie into the overall scheme. Some of these ideas
sounded pretty cool, but of course it’s left up to the GM to implement them as
desired.
The layout of the book is pretty good making it usable by GMs even with
limited experience, and the Table of Contents is detailed enough to help cut
down on the page flipping. For encounters, the book is a little varied in how
they give the stats for the monsters. Some of the monsters and NPC’s have
their write-ups given in what I call the “trash compactor” format inside the
mini-adventure where they are encountered (ugh). Some of the monster writeups
are given in the back of the book, in the standard Monster Manual format,
and only referred to in the encounter (good), and some are done both
43
ways (best). Most of the encounter levels of the significant encounters fall in
EL6 to EL8 range, with the final two encounters being a little tougher (EL9
and EL10). The real “got ya” though are some of the traps. There are some
places were I can see this easily becoming a party killer through no particular
fault of the PC’s. The first thing that struck me when I was reading this book
was “This is for third level characters?” I would have to recommend that
either you have a party larger than they recommend, or the PC’s had better be
a tough group (even then that might not help with some of the traps). Though
third level characters might be able to handle the initial stages of the
adventure, the GM had better get them up a couple levels before the end, or
else in all likelihood your players will be rolling up new characters. You just
gotta know that things can get nasty when on the very first page there is a
disclaimer saying that “it is not designed to kill parties”. Not a comment
designed to make you fell warm and fuzzy all over.
One thing I found a little odd when I first started this book was that it seemed
to have echoes of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series (like having a
group called “White Robes”, and a historical figure with the name of
“Kinslayer”). And then there is one trap/encounter that is reminiscent of the
chess game in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. After reading through
the entire book, I have decided that the similarities are in name only since
after you get past the names, the similarities mostly end, but it was enough for
me to initially raise an eyebrow.
The primary weakness of the book has to be the maps. Generally, the maps
are not nearly as detailed as they should be to fit their descriptions. It seemed I
spent an inordinate amount of time going back and forth between the maps
and descriptions trying to figure them out. There are also minor instances
where the map does not even match the write-up, or is missing annotations
discussed in the write-up. Prospective GMs will likely have to do their
homework and spend some time annotating and/or drawing their own maps to
help things run smoothly at game time.
VALUE
Overall, I give the book high marks for fluff (background, history, character
descriptions etc), organization (to include story flow and being GM friendly),
role-playing potential, and creativity. Medium marks for the adventure itself
(would be nice to have a little bit more steak to go with all that sizzle) and low
marks for maps. I would also give extra credit for the player handouts which
are far too rare in pre-fabs (don’t ask me why, seems like a no-brainer to me).
Although it’s not required to make the series of adventures in this book
usable, there is a prequel available that introduces the Arekoz campaign
setting, and presumably gets the characters up to a high enough level to tackle
this adventure. The authors also hint that a follow-on adventure is coming,
and will use some of the NPC’s introduced in White Robes, Black Heart;
Enigma of the Arcanexus. This along with what is available on their web site
(especially when they get it all running correctly), makes me think that a
starting GM running a campaign for the first time would be well set, and even
an experienced GM will find some good material here.