TWG 3.0: Mansion of Shadows

Mansion of Shadows

Overall score:

In designing a role playing adventure, the writer is always faced with determining how much role playing will be involved versus tactical combat. Some players really like to get into character and act out every aspect of the adventure. Others prefer to skip to the fights. Mansion of Shadows by Robert J. Schwab takes the more role player, less fighting approach.

In Mansion of Shadows, our brave adventurers must travel to the Kirsvald hills where they meet the Staufen family. The Staufen family rule over the Kirsvald and the village of Staufendorf. Though once a noble and benevolent family, the Staufens have fallen into the ways of corruption and sin. One member of the family is trying to atone for the family’s sins while protecting another family member from the taint of evil. The adventurers become entangled in the family’s nefarious plots to unleash an evil upon the world.

The premise for Mansions of Shadow is intriguing enough. The adventure is well-crafted with about everything the game master would want to know to run the module and then some. Lots of additional details are given in the adventure module that easily allow for a gaming group to create multiple adventures centered in and around the village of Staufendorf. The central mystery plot of the adventure will appeal to a lot of gamers by itself. The adventure module also offers new monsters, feats, new items, and other new game mechanics for players and game masters to use in games to come.

Sadly it is the attention to detail that in some ways ruins this module. There is so much information thrown at the game master that it can be difficult to sort out what is really essential to running the adventure. As a game master it becomes important to discriminate between details to determine what part of the adventure will be enjoyed most by the players and what parts should be minimized or skipped all together. Mansion of Shadows has so many characters and so few events that could happen that it become quite a chore for the game master to decide what should be presented. It would be impossible for a game master to sit down and run this adventure without hours of preparation. On top of that the game master needs to know the players and their characters fairly well in order to pull off parts of the adventure.

On top of the difficulty in preparation, a lot of game masters will struggle in running Mansion of Shadows. The adventure requires a lot of role playing. For a game master to truly do justice to all the characters, he or she would have to receive some formal training in the theatrical arts. There are a lot of characters to be played and many of them have intricate psychological characteristics and mannerisms that can only be conveyed through acting. This wouldn’t be such an issue if the plot of the adventure didn’t depend so much on the game master’s ability to convey certain character traits to the players. So many beginning and casual game masters are not going to want to tackle this module.

In the end, the preparation work to run Mansion of Shadows nearly defeats the purpose of using a pre-made adventure. With a well-prepared game master I would expect it to take around six hours to run through the adventure. With all the preparation needed to run the module, many game masters can create their own adventure that is more fully customized to their players.

Mansion of Shadows is 46 pages with black-and-white illustrations. It is published by Green Ronin Publishing using the D20 Open Game License. It is meant to be used with the Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 games system published by Wizards of the Coast.

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Written by 42 on December 11th, 2007