The Lost Vault of Tsathzar Rho

Overall score:

Whenever D&D players agree to play a pre-published adventure, they never know what they could getting themselves into. It could be an involved murder-mystery, participating in the epic battles of a vast war, a heroic mission to same the world, or just the inane ramblings a wannabe fantasy novelist who can’t seem to get any ideas without rolling dice. The Lost Vault of Tsathzar Rho by Michael Mearls claims to be a classic dungeon crawl adventure, and it looks like a dungeon crawl, and it feels like a dungeon crawl, so it must be a dungeon crawl, right?

Yes. There really are no pretensions in The Lost Vault of Tsathzar Rho. It is exactly what it claims to be as far as a dungeon crawl goes. The plot is minimal as the adventure jumps right into fighting monsters. The first fight starts as soon as the first couple of sentences of box text finish, and the fights just keep coming.

The players find themselves wandering through a group of caves that eventually lead into an ancient vault that holds strange abominations. Towards the end a minimal story of an ancient sorcerer who became corrupted by evil Lovecraft-like gods. But none of the story is particularly important, just enough is given to keep the characters moving to the next fight.

Surprisingly, this minimalist approach to plotting and adventure design is rather effective. It is easy to keep the players engaged in the game when the action isn’t hard to find. It also helps that the adventure has some intriguing traps and combat setups that add variety to the dungeon crawl experience.

Long-time players of the D&D game will find some great connections to older versions. The entire module is made to look like the early adventures that originated from the semi-professional illustrations to the layout and the blue maps on the inside of the cover. The adventure is designed to conjure up memories of original D&D, only updated to the 3.5 version of the rules. This brings into contrast how the game has changed.

The old adventure modules were designed to be lethal. I remember sending characters though the Caves of Chaos in Keep on the Borderland many times just hoping that this new character would survive somehow. There was a certain thrill of a bygone age where you could brag that your character managed complete various modules and survive.

Beyond the nostalgia, players that are more accustomed to newer RPG games and MMORPGs, might find The Lost Vault of Tsathzar Rho to be tedious. Bluntly, pen-and-paper adventures don’t play out as quickly video games. The module has a few encounters that are just repetitive. People used to newer RPGs might wonder what happened to the role-playing part of this RPG adventure. Also they may become frustrated with the lethal attitude that was so prominent in the early D&D adventures.

Beyond the generational diffrences, there are some other problems inherent to this adventure. Some are purely production problems where creatures have been built incorrectly, such as breaking some of the more obscure rules.

The general design sequence of the adventure doesn’t always stay synchronized with the layout; for example the event in room 7 starts when the characters enter room 2, but for some reason these two events are three or four pages apart in the module. Finally, it just becomes apparent that the module does not really feel up-to-date enough. Sure it uses classic monsters, but the player characters are likely to be newer base classes and strange monster races. It just illustrates that sometimes you can’t go back to how things were.

So for long-time gamers, playing The Lost Vault of Tsathzar Rho might be a great trip into the past. For players who don't remember the old days, the game might be a great taste of history, or it may just seem like using an horse-and-buggy when you could be using a Ferrari.

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Written by 42 on June 18th, 2007