Raiders of the Hidden Temple (Shadowdark)
This free adventure by Kelsey Dionne was released in late 2024 and came out at the right time to fit it into our Gloaming Campaign. It can be found on the Arcane Library website if you subscribe to the newsletter.I seeded it into hex #1210, as a prequel to our grand final running castle Ravenloft. Strahd required them to bring the chalice from the temple to warrant a dinner invitation. Without covers etc this comes to eight pages of hissing snake content. The presentation and organisation was as always with Kelsey’s material impeccable, in terms of content a few things stood out. After 20 sessions in the Gloaming my players picked out a knack of Kelsey’s to name NPC’s Gor-something. Maybe a side effect of her own syllable NPC name generator. It got a good chuckle out of all of us, as I was using the same table for NPCs. The dungeon itself took us two short sessions to finish: things that stood out were the fun Indiana Jones trap, the great Vampirodile that they turned into a taxidermied weapon and the poison cobra hidden in the secret treasure chamber. However, other things were not so great: the whole Shanti story did not grab the players and the scheme of the Viperians to get the players to help fight the evil wizard Gorgoroth fell on deaf ears. Overall it seemed a bit strange for two opposing factions to still share such a small space. They proceeded to dodge both factions, get in and get the chalice and armor, and get out again. This was only possible due to a vacuum of somewhat empty rooms at the centre of the dungeon. From their perspective a pretty successful “raid” on the temple, but overall it was more of a mediocre adventure compared to our other adventures that I have partly detailed here on this blog. 6/10