Shattered Gates of Slaughtergarde

[Ignominia]

Hey Gang,

I've been thinking of picking up SGoS but have been reading some subpar reviews online.

I was wondering if anyone has played it and what their thoughts were?

[Big Fau]

Personally, it needs some work. It's got a lot of flavor mixed in, but very generic and very broad instead of deep. The actual dungeons themselves are virtual wars of attrition, but not that brutal to a prepared party (or even an optimized party).

The flavor behind the dungeons themselves makes no sense (how the hell did Mu-Tahn Laa's mountain create three entire dungeons, traps and all, in the time it took for his army to get rebuked?), let alone the encounters themselves (it switches from Goblins to Drow to Troglodytes/Gnolls rapidly, has a single random encounter with 4 White Dragonspawn and never even mentions them again, and several other oddities).

That said, it has excellent framework (despite being divided up amongst 4 books) and is really easy to rework so it leads into the RHoD (as numerous people have mentioned). If you rework the last two dungeons of it, the module also makes a good follow-up to Scourge of the Howling Horde and can be used to lead into an Elder Evil (Father Lymic or Zargyon the Returner [SP]). Making Muu-Tahn Laa into Father Lymic is a simple change, and all you'd need to do is find a way to fill in the gap between SGoS and the Elder Evil encounters to make it work.