keep on the shadow fell

[awa]

I recently heard this listed as one of the worst adventures for fourth edition and since i love a good train wreck can some one tell me
1) whats it's about
2) why its so bad

thanks

[Felhammer]

From listening to the Penny Arcade/PVP podcasts, I'd say Keep on the Shadowfel is really difficult.

[originalginger]

Keep on the Shadowfell is a level 1-3 adventure that was released as an introduction to 4e way back in the editions early days. It assumes that the players are using the pre-generated characters that come with the adventure.

Dwarf Fighter - Halfling Rogue - Human Wizard - Half-Elf Cleric - Dragonborn Paladin. All these characters are okay, but since they are pre-gens, they are kind of bland and your options are severely limited.

The adventure benings with the PCs ambushed by a group of Kobolds while they are traveling trough the forest to the town of Winterhaven. (incidentally, I find this amusing because there is an actual city called Winterhaven about 2 hours drive from me that is indeed mostly surrounded by wooded area)

Anyhow, once the Kobolds are dealt with, and the PCs get the the city they are hired to take care of the rising kobold threat, and locate an explored who was investigating a nearby ruins and hasn't returned. From there, the adventure take the party through a series of encounters in the forest and then ruins with things like kobolds, hobgoblins, zombies, rats, humans, and the odd gelatinous cube.

The adventure areas are bland and feel disjointed and unrelated, going directly from obvious man made structures, to caverns, and back to structures with little explanation of how and why the locations were built that way. The encounters also feel unrelated and disjointed, with little logic behind why you run into what or who in the places that you do.

Ostensibly, the story is about the kobolds and goblins forming a cult that intends to open a rift to the Shadowfell with the point being for the players to discover the cult and thwart their plans. The story feels very tacked on and convoluted, as if it were created as a framework for the encounters they wanted, rather than a story they wanted to tell that had the encounters built around it.

Overall, it feels very gamey and more like a series of random encounters than a coherent adventure.

[Adoendithas]

There's a remix somewhere online that rewrites the plot and encounters of the H1, H2, and H3 adventures. I haven't used H1 or H3, but some parts of it really improved Thunderspire Labyrinth.

[Dralnu]

I ran it. originalginger already covered most of it. Just to add a couple things:

The monster's stats were horribly unbalanced. Most monsters had defenses comparable to some of the level 6 creatures I was running in a later module (Madness at Gardmore Abbey). They also hit like wet noodles, if they ever connected, that is. Battles were incredibly long yawnfests that lacked any danger or excitement.

The keep itself, where the meat of the module takes place, is a bland, lazily designed dungeon crawl. Just a long disjointed series of battles made worse due to the aforementioned crap monster stats.

[UndertakerSheep]

I am currently running Keep on the Shadowfell. It feels like the plot was written to take up 2 or 3 sessions, but then they added combat to make it closer to 10-15 sessions.

Long story short: it has a lot of combat. A lot of meaningless, unnecessary, "so why are those goblins here again?" combats.

I'm making it work for my group by making the plot more relevant (the end-boss has shown his face twice already, and they're not even in the Keep yet) and updating all the monsters to MM3/MV statistics. Every combat that is important to the plot (about 4 in the entire adventure) stays, every combat that is slightly important to the plot has every monster replaced by just one minion, and every combat that is unrelated to the plot goes out the door.

Next session my group will enter the Keep. They'll have several combats there, but I plan to throw out over 75% of them, if not more.