This supplement can’t quite focus itself: As a sourcebook it tries to cover too much. As an adventure it doesn’t cover enough.

Originally Published March 14th, 2002

Slavers was published in 2000 as part of the effort by Wizards of the Coast to revive the Greyhawk line. As a supplement for the second edition of AD&D, it would require conversion before it could be used in a D&D3 campaign. This review assumes that this conversion is going to take place: In other words, the question “Is this worth taking the time to convert?” is going to be part of the final judgment of the product.

CONTENTS

Slavers bills itself as a sequel to the “Slavelords saga”. For those of you unfamiliar with AD&D history, the Slavelords saga encompasses the first edition A1-4 modules (A1: Slave Pits of the Undercity, A2: Secret of the Slavers Stockade, A3: Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords, and A4: In the Dungeon of the Slave Lords).

This is, in my opinion, the first mistake that Slavers makes. When Slavers came out, the original modules had not been available for more than a decade. Yet Slavers relies heavily on the DM’s knowledge of the previous adventures, and even (at some points) seems to assume that the players will at least have a passing knowledge of the importance of past events. (Slavers was not the only product in the renewed Greyhawk line which suffered from this problem. Return of the Eight, which I reviewed here, referenced products which had been out of date for nearly three decades.)

The second mistake Slavers makes is billing itself as a sequel, when it’s really more of a sourcebook. Of course, as a sourcebook it also seems confused as to its identity: The sourcebook seems to go wherever the sparsely plotted adventure takes it. So it’s sort of a sourcebook about the Pomarj; and kind of about Nyr Dyv; and somewhat about the lands of the Flanaess (but not all of them).

We’ll come back to that.

PLOT

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for Slavers. Players who may find themselves playing in this adventure should not read beyond this point.

The problem with the plot can basically be summed up with this quote from the book: “However, these sites and people have only vague links that tie them together into a grand adventure.”

“Vague links” and “grand adventure” do not really belong in the same sentence together.

Here, however, is roughly how the plot is constructed: The PCs are based out of the city of Dyvers. Slavers begin operating in the area, and players eventually hear rumors of slavers operating out of the Blackthorn Caverns. The outline tells us that: “Care should be taken so that the heroes don’t discover the precise location of the entrance to Blackthorn’s Caverns.” This prevents the heroes from doing logical things (like informing the authorities of the slaver’s stronghold). The outline also gives us several ideas about how to go about doing this… none of which actually work. The PCs are also supposed to lose at Blackthorn; and lose badly.

When the PCs return to Dyvers in defeat, they will witness the end of a slave raid by the Pirates of the Yellow Veil. “They can only stop a few of the raiders, and are too late to prevent the ship from setting sail and escaping.” (That’s great: Not only is the adventure vague, it’s railroaded.) Of course, the PCs’ friends are among those kidnapped by the Slavers.

And off they go: To the secret base in Nyr Dyv. To the Slavers’ Cove. To the slaver ship Eternal Sun. To more slaver bases. To more slaver bases. And still more slaver bases. And a few more slaver bases. And, eventually, the Big Slaver Base.

What the adventure lacks in epic structure, it makes worse through lack of imagination. The scenarios quickly boil down to a series of very short, very boring, practically identical raids. There is no sense of the epic here, and very few original ideas. Simply put, Slavers lacks greatness: The PCs never go anywhere with more than two dozen encounter keys (and most have a half dozen or less). An epic requires scope, and Slavers never finds it.

SOURCEBOOK

As a sourcebook, Slavers provides background material for Dyvers, North Woolly Bay, the Orcish Wild Coast, and the Pomarj.

The first problem here, as noted above, is that there doesn’t seem to be any particular rhyme or reason why these particular locations are covered in a sourcebook together: Other than the fact that the accompanying adventure outline supposedly carries the PCs through these locales.

This begins to create a cascading problem: The book appears to be more interested in being a sourcebook than an adventure, and the adventure suffers as a result – becoming little more than a rough outline of ideas. But as a sourcebook, it’s only definite use is in supplementing the adventure it’s busily undermining by trying to be a sourcebook.

The problem is made worse by the fact that the adventure (which, remember, is rendered into little more than an outline) warps the presentation of the sourcebook material. For example, in the section on Nyr Dyv you don’t get comprehensive coverage of Nyr Dyv – you get paltry coverage of Nyr Dyv, with some focused detail on a handful of locations which are only important for the adventure.

Once again, this creates a cascading problem: You don’t have enough of a general focus to provide a good general-purpose sourcebook. At the same time, you don’t have enough of a specific focus to provide a good sourcebook for the adventure.

CONCLUSION

Ultimately, Slavers can’t quite focus itself: As a sourcebook it tries to cover too much, too randomly. As an adventure it doesn’t cover enough.

As a result, I really can’t recommend this one to anybody who isn’t a compulsive collector of Greyhawk material. Fans of the original Slavers adventures might enjoy this book more than others; but, by the same token, there’s also a good chance that they’ll hate its flaws even more.

One mitigating note, however: Those willing to dig a bit will find a lot of juicy material here that can be pried out and used in other places. I, for example, used material from Slavers to help flush out and fill in the weaknesses I perceive in the original Slavers modules: Essentially combining the strengths of both the original and sequel, while excising the combined weaknesses, to give the raw material for a single epic adventure track.

Style: 4
Substance: 3

Author: Sean K. Reynolds and Chris Pramas
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 0-7869-1621-4
Product Code: TSR11621
Pages: 128

Around this time I was planning to run the Slavelords saga as a follow-up to the Freeport Trilogy. I wanted to expand the original tourney modules into a node-based campaign (although I wasn’t referring to it as node-based design yet) and I’d picked up Slavers in the hopes that I could use it to flesh out the original material. This, as you can see from the review, didn’t really pan out. I eventually just dumped the original A-series modules entirely and started designing my own Slave Lords campaign from scratch. Unfortunately, that group fell apart after running through the first couple slaver adventures and I ended up never finishing the campaign.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

A very crunchy, very useful supplement for D20. Like, Minions, Arms & Armor suffers from a price tag just a little too high for its content.

Review Originally Published March 13th, 2002

CONTENT

Arms & Armor is Bastion Press’ second D20 supplement. Like Minions, Bastion’s first offering, Arms & Armor is a 96-page soft-cover book featuring full-color printing on glossy pages. As the title would suggest, it focuses on weapons and armor: Simple, martial, exotic, magical, and more. There is also a short section on martial constructs: Golems and other constructs which are, essentially, forms of weapon and armor which “wield themselves” in one way or another.

GOOD STUFF

Arms & Armor is very, very crunchy, delivering exactly what it promises.

Weapons: Somewhere in the ballpark of 125 new weapons are introduced here – ranging from the mundane (claymore) to the unusual (combat hook) to the foreign (cicada wing sword) to the practical (brass knuckles) to the exotic (double-bladed sword). Combine that with roughly 70 new properties for magical weapons (my favorites are alterable weapons and pivoting arrows), roughly 50 new magical weapons (including class weapons and artifacts – my favorites are the silent dagger, which projects a 5-ft. field of silence around itself, and the arrow of seeing, which allows the user to see everything around the location where the arrow lands), and new rules and options for intelligent weapons.

Armor: Roughly 60 new types of armor are described here, approximately 70 new magical armor qualities, along with new extras and accessories for armor. Several dozen suits of magical armor are discussed, including class-based armor. Optional rules for armor (including the first published 3E system for armor as damage reduction) are also given. My favorites in this section include bone mail (chain mail made from bone), daggered plate (with daggers concealed as armor decoration), quick don armor (which cuts down the amount of time necessary to don the armor), phoenix armor (which will resurrect a character who dies in the armor once, destroying the armor in the process), and healing armor (which can be used to heal the character wearing it).

Other Stuff: Arms & Armor also includes rules for cleric domain rods, arcane school staves, racial masks, and martial constructs. The domain rods, school staves, and racial masks are all very useful. Martial constructs include amulet servitors (golems which collapse into small amulets of tightly wound metal when not in use), golem armor (your armor is alive), and the silver steeds (magical mounts). Several types of new material for weapon and armor construction are also covered.

Arms & Armor also manages to largely avoid a common pitfall of products like this: Weapons and armor so incredibly goofy that they make you want to burst out laughing. There are still some things which will likely make you wince (particularly if you value a high degree of realism in the non-magical weapons of your world), but nothing incredibly bizarre. And even if you really dislike the bizarre and exotic weapons of 3rd Edition, there’s more than enough here that you’ll happily be able to incorporate into your campaign.

BAD STUFF

I don’t like Todd Morasch’s artwork. I commented on this in my review of Minions, as well (Morasch serves as Lead Artist and Art Director on both books): It’s not that he does bad work. But he doesn’t do exceptional work, either. The term “mediocre” fits his work perfectly, I’m afraid.

Of course, that’s just my opinion: Feel free to glance through the book and form your own opinion. However, his work in Arms & Armor is objectively flawed insofar as his artwork just plain fails to match the text. For example, on the very first page of weapon descriptions he manages to draw the chained axe (described as “a double-bladed axe-head attached to a haft by a length of chain”) without a haft. His illustration of the basket-hilted broadsword, described on the same page, not only fails to possess a basket hilt, but appears to possess a double-blade for some unfathomable reason. And so forth.

It’s also regrettable that, despite space on the page, the decision was made to not illustrate all of the weapons described in the book. Almost all of the armor is also devoid of illustration.

In terms of design, I haven’t spotted anything horribly unbalancing after reading the book through and playtesting as many of the items as possible. There are, however, a couple of designs which will leave you scratching your head. For example, the axe-hammer is described like this:

An exotic weapon, the axe-hammer is a long hafted weapon with an axe blade on one side of the head and a blunt hammer on the other. Due to the strange balance of the weapon, axe or hammer wielders cannot use it proficiently; special training is required.

Which is all well and good. But the axe-hammer is statted up as a double weapon. Which doesn’t make sense. If there was an axe head on one end of the haft and a hammer head on the other, sure – that’s a double weapon. But as it stands, an axe-hammer should no more be a double weapon than a greataxe.

CONCLUSION

The only reservation I have in recommending Arms & Armor is the same reservation I had for Minions: The price. At $20 this would be a book which I would happily hype as perfect for every DM’s game shelf. At $24.95, however, I get a little bit choosier about 96 page sourcebooks.

My own mileage:

At the moment I am working on redesigning and repopulating the lower levels of Khundrukar (a dwarven city which serves as the setting for WotC’s Forge of Fury Adventure Path module). As a result, I’m looking for all sorts of nifty and unusual weapons to strew around the dungeon as treasure and/or set dressing. Thus, Arms & Armor is absolutely perfect.

So if you have a niche like this in your game you’re trying to fill, then Arms & Armor is going to fill it very well.

On the other hand, if you don’t have such a niche for the book (if it’s something you’d only dip into sparingly once or twice over the next few years, rather than seeing constant usage), then Arms & Armor will probably prove a little too pricey for you.

Style: 4
Substance: 4

Author: Greg Dent (Lead Designer)
Publisher: Bastion Press, Inc.
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 0-9714392-2-2
Product Code: BAS1001
Pages: 96

Bastion Press’ D20 System supplements were mechanically sloppy and often ugly, but as a GM I got an incredible amount of value out of them. They were often the first thing I would reach for when looking to add either depth or a touch of the exotic to an adventure. I believe this is the last of their books that I wrote a review for, but their entire product line still sits on my gaming shelf.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

The ultimate source of all miscreation and abomination. The gray mass quobbled and quivered, and swelled perpetually – and from within it, in manifold fission, were spawned anatomies that crept away on every side through the grotto. Here there were things like bodiless legs or arms that flailed in the slime, or heads that rolled, or floundering bellies with the fines of fishes; and all manner of things malformed and monstrous. And those that escaped not swiftly ashore when they fell from the pool of the Beast were devoured by mouths that gaped in the parent bulk.

A pool of grayish, horrid mass – a choking river of mud marled with obscene offal. A horrid protean mass of dark muck. Such is the form of Abhoth, the Source of All Filth and Lord of the Zaug.

THE CHILDREN OF ABHOTH: “And from the broken, turgid mass there is given life of dark bounty.”

Those Who Have Gazed Upon Filth (as the Parchments of Bido pronounce them), describe obscene monsters which crawl constantly from Abhoth’s gray mass. These warped and twisted progeny can assume many forms – from the half-functional to mammoth-like horrors. Abhoth’s tentacles and “many-formed limbs” are described as seizing many of these creations and dragging them back into the depths of its bulk. Of those that escape, a few are described as “attendants of the rivulets of muck”, while others wander into the “dark cracks of the world’s black heart”.

THE DARK MIND: The mind of Abhoth is a warped, twisted, and cynical thing. It gives forth great telepathic waves, and Those Who Have Gazed Upon Filth speak of their thoughts being filled with “black rivulets of nether birth” – twisted forms of mental energy that squalm forth from creature’s mind even as its twisted progeny rip their way out of the creature’s viscous body.

LORD OF THE ZAUG: Among those titles given to Abhoth, “Lord of the Zaug” is given often. It is even possible that Abhoth is responsible for their creation. Some, including the Xillian Fragments, even describe the zaug as being “infested with the filth of All Filth”.

THE RAT GOD: Among the ratmen, Abhoth is worshipped as the “Rat God”. But this is nothing more than a guise behind which Abhoth’s true form can be worshipped.

…. a loathsome, night-spawned flood of organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity. Seething, stewing, surging, bubbling like serpents’ slime is spread its dark mind and mass like a septic contagion.

– The Dasha Codex

UBBO-SATHLA: Even older texts speak of an entity known as Ubbo-Sathla, the Unbegotten Source. Like Abhoth, Ubbo-Sathla is described as a huge, protoplasmic mass resting in deep grottoes beneath the “frozen surface of man’s mind”. Some texts treat this as metaphor, others as literal truth. A few scholars have apparently tried to rectify the discrepancy between these descriptions and those which place Ubbo-Sathla in the “gray-litten crypts of Y’qaa” or “beneath the depths of four-coned Mithradeth”.

In some myths, Ubbo-Sathla is said to have “spawned all life”, yet “whatever her touch lay upon was blighted and no life could be seen in it again”. Other texts limit the extent of her creation to “all life which is dark”. Other speak of her as “the womb of all demon-kin”.

Still other prophecies, such as the Visions of Dezzerak’s Blood, say that Ubbo-Sathla shall one day “take back into her breast the life of all living things” – that all life will be reabsorbed into her mass.

The ultimate identity of Ubbo-Sathla, however, remains hopelessly confused. There are those who see Ubbo-Sathla and Abhoth as the same entity viewed in different epochs and under different names. But there are also other texts that refer to Ubbo-Sathla as the “Mother of All Filth” and Abhoth as the “Father of All Filth”, suggesting some foul and horrid mating between the two. Others describe them as siblings or even as schisms of the same being.

THE TABLETS: “About it, prone or tilted in the mire, there lay the mighty tablets of star-quarried stone that were writ with the inconceivable wisdom of the demon gods.” Ubbo-Sathla (and thus, perhaps, Abhoth) is also said to serve as “murky guardian” to tablets containing secrets of the Demon Gods – “lore lost to all mortal minds and kept in secret lest it be turned against them before the End of Days”.

Fuller records of these tablets (or even the tablets themselves) have been oft-sought by sorcerers and scholars, but none is known to have yet succeeded in acquiring them.

Horrible it was, if there had been aught to apprehend the horror. And loathsome, if there had been any to feel loathing.

DESIGN NOTES

Abhoth can be found extensively in Ptolus and The Night of Dissolution, but was originally created by Clark Ashton Smith. Ubbo-Sathla has been lifted from the short story of the same name, also by Clark Ashton Smith. The reference to “Dezzerak” is to an entity from The Book of Fiends (more on that later).

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Review Originally Published March 13th, 2002

Most of the buzz around Mystic Eye Games which has come my way has focused on their Nightmares & books or the The Hunt: Rise of Evil campaign setting. Not very much attention, it seems, has turned to their modules – such as The Pit of Loch-Durnan, an adventure for characters of 2nd to 4th level.

And maybe there’s a good reason for: The Pit of Loch-Durnan has a lot of problems. But we’ll come back to that. First, let’s take a quick peek at the plot.

PLOT

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for The Pit of Loch-Durnan. Players who may find themselves playing in this adventure should not read beyond this point.

At first glance, The Pit of Loch-Durnan appears to be a pretty straight forward, clichéd fantasy adventure: The PCs are approached by two villagers, who tell them that the village mine has been infested by goblins. “Won’t you please come save us?” they beg. The PCs come to the village, clean out the mine, and there is much rejoicing.

But things are a little more complicated than that: In point of fact, the village mine is not just infested with goblins. It is also infested with a very powerful, imprisoned demon who is attempting to escape. The demon has enslaved the entire population of the village and the PCs are actually falling victim to an elaborate trap designed to bring them under the demon’s control.

Abandoned in the titular pit (the village’s mine), the PCs must fight their way past undead minions, defeat goblin slaves, destroy the demon’s crystal, escape into the mansion of the twin brothers responsible for freeing the demon, defeat the brothers, and free the village.

Fun stuff.

BAD STUFF

Those who have followed my reviews over the years know that they tend to follow a common pattern: A synopsis of the content, a review of the good stuff, a review of the bad stuff, and then a conclusion.

In this case, however, I’m going to break from tradition by discussing the bad stuff first. Because there’s a lot of it.

The biggest and most glaring problem is apparent the instant you open this book up: The layout is atrocious. The illustrations are god-awful. The entire product reeks of amateurism from one end to the other. Radically different fonts are rammed up against each other; bold, italic, and underline text is rampantly overused; paragraph spacing is inconsistent at best, illegible at worst; and on and on and on. The only point of solace in the entire sorry mess is the front cover: If the entire product has been as good as the cover illustration there would have been spontaneous dancing in the streets when this module was released. (I may be exaggerating slightly there.)

I playtested this module. Before I playtested it, though, I sat down and revised it. Extensively.

Now, generally, I’m pretty leery of reviews that talk about how the reviewer would have written a product (rather than actually dealing with the actual product). In this case, though, I think it’s the easiest way to demonstrate everything that’s wrong with The Pit of Loch-Durnan:

1. First off, I stripped out all the silly and oddly jarring names which have been given to the NPCs in this module. Gormon? Warphit? Sheepo the Goblin? Tippi the Ghoul? On the plus side, they’re pronounceable (unlike so many bad fantasy names). On the down side, I felt like I had been teleported into some sort of bizarre Sesame Street of Horrors.

2. I provided a logical reason for why the demon in the Pit would want to bring adventurers to the town. (The more powerful the people it enslaves, the more powerful it can become. Therefore, it wants people as powerful as possible – but not so powerful it thinks it can’t defeat them.) I also provided an explanation for enslaving the PCs that involves dumping them in a pit and giving them a mission to kill the goblins… who are also slaves of the demon.

3. I pumped up the elements of betrayal in the townsfolk. This is a nice theme (as I discussed above), but if you run the adventure as written the PCs will literally never, ever know that the whole mission is a sham until after they’ve destroyed the demon. As a result, there is no mystery or build to the adventure: Just a yawn-fest of a dungeon crawl cliché, followed by an incomprehensible attack by the townsfolk. I honestly don’t understand why Doug Herring and Andrew Thompson tossed aside one of the best elements of the adventure.

4. I did this by having the PCs get fed a sleeping poison during the night. There was always the chance that they wouldn’t be affected by the poison (in which case they would be lowered into the pit normally, but would not be raised back up again) – but if they were affected by the poison, the villagers would strip them of all their possessions before dumping them into the pit. This added a survival element to the module, which also helped strengthen the “kill all the goblins plot”.

5. Barlan’s back story was given a degree of credibility and self-consistency. In the module as written there is absolutely no explanation of how Barlan knows any of the information he gives to the PCs.

6. The goblins are given a reason for being in the Pit. For some reason, the authors neglect to explain why the goblins are there; how they got there; etc. There is some sense that they have also been enslaved by the demon, just like the townsfolk, but its not clear how that happened, why, or what purpose they serve in the dungeon.

7. The reaction tables needed some tidying up to make them practical/useful for the final confrontation with the demon crystal. The module also neglects to take into consideration what the villagers are going to do at the end of the scenario.

Those are the major highlights. Basically, the common theme here is simple: There’s a lot of raw material here, but it’s like unmolded clay… you’re going to have to work it if you expect to have anything resembling a sculpture at the end of the day.

GOOD STUFF

The good stuff here is the raw material itself:

1. The maps. The pit itself is well thought out, with some strong encounters. I would’ve liked to see the goblins be a little more proactive, but I have yet to see a module take the simple step of providing a comprehensive analysis of how an actual colony of intelligent humanoids would react to an assault by an adventuring party.

2. The basic concept. Villagers hiring PCs to save the village, only to have it revealed that the whole scenario (the most basic cliché of adventure gaming) is an elaborate trap designed to enslave the PCs to the will of a demon. It’s necessary to seriously beat the adventure into shape in order to bring this out, but it’s there.

3. The characters. There are some really strong NPCs here – both antagonists and victims. There is a scene towards the end of the module that’s a classic: The PCs have rescued a family of villagers who were taken prisoner after they proved resistant to the demon crystal. Their five year old son was tortured to death before their eyes. As the PCs work their way through the mansion, their son suddenly appears! …a decayed and rotting zombie. The PCs need to physically restrain the father from going to his son’s corpse (which will tear out his throat if given half a chance).

The Pit of Loch-Durnan needs a lot of spit and polish… and patching… and reconstructive surgery. But it’s worth it if you’re willing to put the work into it.

CONCLUSION

The Pit of Loch-Durnan has a lot of problem. A lot of problems. But it’s salvageable. And there’s enough material to chew on here that, if you’re willing to put a little elbow grease into it, this can be a highly entertaining module for you and your group.

That being said: There are definitely better D20 modules on the market right now. Personally, I’m happy with The Pit of Loch-Durnan in large part because it slotted very nicely into one of the D&D campaigns I’m currently running. Despite the massive amount of revision I needed to do, I felt I got a decent bang for my buck.

Could Mystic Eye Games have done better? Oh, God, yes. By the same token, however, there’s enough of merit here that I really hope that Mystic Eye Games does do better in the future – because it would be a shame to see the value of some of the raw material I see here go to waste.

Style: 2
Substance: 2

Authors: Doug Herring, Andrew Thompson
Company: Mystic Eye Games
Price: $11.95
ISBN: 0-9708265-1-6
Production Code: MYG0002
Pages: 72

Revisiting this review, I’m forced to conclude that my effort to explain the adventure’s many, many failures by explaining everything I changed in trying to fix them doesn’t seem to work. Feels like you need to have already read the adventure for my laundry list to mean anything.

What I remember about The Pit of Loch-Durnan is that it’s quite likely the worst published adventure I’ve ever run. The conflict is that — after writing up 35 pages of revisions to fix the thing — we had a really fantastic time playing the adventure at the table. The deconstruction of the standard dungeon is such a cool concept that, if you pull it off (in exactly the way the published adventure doesn’t), you’ll get a really memorable experience.

Oddly, the bit about the really great looking cover causing “dancing in the streets” was sort of prophetic: The first wave of reviews absolutely raved about this adventure. It was even nominated for the Best Adventure ENnie Award in 2001 (the first  year of the Ennies) — a decision which made it rather difficult for me to take the Ennies seriously for many years. This was really quite inexplicable, and later reviews (my own among them) have generally been more accurate in their assessment.

My review was also a huge “scandal” when it came out. A number of different free RPG review sites had popped up in the wake of RPGNet, and I decided to start cross-posting my reviews at multiple sites. This include ENWorld and a defunct site called d20reviews.com. The “problem” was that these different sites used different rubrics. I forget the details at this point, but whereas RPGNet used Style & Substance, for example, you might have another site using X out of 5 Stars and another that included scores for Playability, Mechanics, and Graphics, or whatever. In cross-posting the review, I would also rate it according to the local rubric. This caused consternation because if I gave it 2/5 + 2/5 at RPGNet, then why had I given it 1 out of 5 stars somewhere else? The argument was that this should be a simple mathematical conversion. My position was (and remains) that if you’re scoring for different things, you should not expect those scores to equal each other across multiple criteria.

What was really driving the “scandal” was that Mystic Eye Games was furious that I had attempted to “tank” their review scores. They started by contacting me privately and demanding that I remove the reviews, otherwise they wouldn’t send me review copies in the future. When I refused, they went public with the “math” to claim that I was biased. They were successful in creating a kerfluffle and making me waste a bunch of time responding to a lot of nonsense. (Wouldn’t be the last time.)

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

The Blood that I shed do I devote to serve within the eternal Train of Souls.

The Eyes of Flesh do I sacrifice for the gift of that immortal Eye which shall view all destruction.

The Mortal Soul do I forsake to the void which shall be filled.

My voice I raise until it shall be heard in the Paean of Destruction. My deeds shall become those of the Titan. My life shall become One Aspect of the Thousand Eyes.

The scroll describes a series of defiling rites which prepare the faithful soul of an acolyte to perform a human sacrifice (also described in precise detail) which will bind them to a greater force of chaos, becoming an Aspect of the Many Eyes and housing a “shard of the sleeping titan” in their soul.

During this final ritual and oath-taking, the acolyte cuts out their own eyes. If their faith is rewarded, a third eye opens upon their forehead from which the power of the Destroyer can be made manifest.

The brothers of the Divided Eye believe that this Third Eye of the Destroyer binds them to the Eyes of Legion, and that when the “murder of craven eyes” has been “restored through mortal flesh” the “Many-Eyed Prelate of the Blooded Death shall awake”.

THE THIRD EYE OF THE DESTROYER

(Feat)

Prerequisite: Must sacrifice both eyes and perform the Oath of the Divided Eye.

Benefit: You a gain a third eye which gifts you with darkvision 60 ft. Once per day, you can open the inner eye of the destroyer allowing you to use chaos hammer, as per the spell.

Special: This feat can be taken more than once. Each time you take the feat, double the range of your darkvision and you daily uses of chaos hammer.

Some material on this page is covered by the Open Gaming License.

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