Bleys of Glory: Mark of Amber Review Pt 2

Well, I keep forgetting to bring the maps for Mark of Amber with me, so this will be commentary on the individual room descriptions themselves. 

Chateau Sylaire is supposed to be the ancient mansion of a gazillion high level mages; there are seven mages of double-digit levels as NPCs, including two 20th-level mages...and more than a few other mid-level ones. Does Sylaire live up to this promised wackiness?

Well, no. It winds up feeling more like a traditional manor with a few "fun" rooms thrown in. The traditional manor bit could be a good idea; the dominant forces perhaps ought to be the wacky NPCs, with the surroundings playing straight man. Still, you can't help but want to see some goddamn fun house stuff - Chateau Sylaire would be the place to put it in!

We start out with the castle grounds, and a magical garden, tamed so it doesn't eat the guests. (What kind of mad wizards ARE these?) A few tame effects - Venus flytraps that give out prizes, ornate mini-palaces that "are sometimes used as places of trysting" (sex in my D&D?!?) but disappointingly never disappear back underground while occupied. Bah. One page of basic building description and bloat (barracks, stables, carriage house, gates and walls...) although the giant refuse heap has a rumor at least.

The ground floor is pretty boring. Tolerable elements: suits of armor with magen (think vat-spawn but not as awesome) inside, a fancy fountain mocking the guy who persecuted the d'Ambrevilles back in the day, a bunch of robes continually reenacting a long-forgotten ritual. The rest of the 10 pages is uninteresting, with room descriptions and a few boring (!) secret passages. (Oh, and magical HVAC units. Whee!)

The second floor has the Glory Windows, which show strange and vaguely prophetic illusions at sunrise. It's also got a flying carriage house, a room built for family members using fly spells to come in and dry off. Not exciting, but it fits the manse's intended tone really well so it gets a half point. Four pages

The dungeon has a trapped and staked vampire from not-Transylvania (meh), a flesh golem on a hamster wheel pumping water for the house (good!), a magic door to Clark Ashton Smith's Averoigne (hell yes!)...and some boring rooms after that. Golem construction and summoning otherplanar critters shouldn't be boring. At least the d'Ambrevilles have some zombie servants, because c'mon man, they're insane wizards, they should get something fun.

There's nothing egregiously bad in these, but there's nothing super-stand-out either. The best thing is the door to Averoigne, which thankfully never gets super-detailed and serves as a nice spur of mystery. But the standard I have these days is that the door and the hamster wheel ought to be the baseline, not the standouts.
The other thing here is that these set up a "normal" so that they can get turned into scary mode later in the module. That's fair enough, but c'mon. The combo of Zelazny Amberites and Clark Ashton Smith Averoigne deserves something grander and weirder, even as a baseline.

Mentioning that vat-spawn are like magen but cooler makes me start wanting to convert Chateau Sylaire into something more suitably crazy. It should have a veneer of the fancy French manor, and definitely some rooms that fit that purpose - but then the weirdness and eldritch weirdness lurking behind the scenes when you start to sneak around. 

No Corwin Around: Mark of Amber Review Pt 1

Zak recently asked for module review suggestions, and I chimed in with Mark of Amber, which was my first D&D purchase ever and therefore intrinsically interesting to all right-thinking folk. He unaccountably went with Red Hand of Doom instead (some nonsense about 'having a copy handy').

See how chirpy they are about the AUDIO CD?

But Mark of Amber cries out for a review. And since there's probably nobody else around, you guys get me stepping up to the plate!

Mark of Amber was released in 1995, solidly in the late TSR period. It is a tribute/sequel module to the great Castle Amber, but goes the 2e route of providing a lot more (extraneous?) narrative and detail. It also features an audio CD. Remember how I said this was late TSR? They wanted to embrace new ways of putting together modules, which in this case meant a CD with a shitload of terrible French accents and cutesy dialog. I thought it was great in like 6th grade...but it hasn't aged well. At least they had the sense to restrict the dialogue to NPCs, and instructed the VAs to ham it up - much better than the Karamiekos boxed set. If you find that CD...don't. Seriously. Employ some Call of Cthulhu tactics and melt that CD right down.

Jim Holloway did the art for Mark of Amber, and while I dig some of his black and white pieces, the color pieces don't hold up too well. I'll be taking some photos as I go through this, since there don't seem to be too many pieces of Mark of Amber interior art around on the 'net. 

Anyway, back to Mark of Amber. The basic module synopsis: Since the PCs appear to be the Chosen Ones of Prophecy, the servant of the dead archwizard-prince Etienne d'Ambreville, selects them to help guide Etienne back to life and teach him the lessons of how to love and frolic and BE HUMAN. Unfortunately, the archwizard has decided to do this while one of his malevolent younger brothers, Henri, has usurped the throne in disguise and is attempting to covertly shank all of their relatives. So the PCs have to juggle their Power of Friendship work with trying to solve/prevent the murder spree.

 The module is divided into three sections - a room listing for Château Sylaire (aka Castle Ambreville aka Castle Amber), the adventure itself, and an NPCs listing. Some of these are bloated as hell, and including bullshit proficiency lists is not helpful. (Goddammit TSR I will never need to know that Jean-Louis D'Ambreville has the Fire-building proficiency. Why did you guys even make that a full proficiency? Seriously that is starting to get into Mike Mornard's "Use Rope, Eat Food, and Take Shit" level of proficiency granularity.)

Anyway. Placing the mansion room descriptions first feels very weird; you're trying to figure out what is going on in this module and here are all the NPCs being mentioned offhandedly but you don't know why Camilla's relationship with Petit-Singe is or why Henri has imprisoned Richard or anything like that. On the other hand you get a big mansion full of wizardly nonsense to read about so that's pretty legit.

More later, when I actually have the module handy to go through!