Reviews Again, the never ending battle vs new stuff

 

Finally finished this

Advanced Adventures Compendium Four 💓💓💓💓
Not quite as good as some previous ones but still very good. Was on LuLu and I've enjoyed reading the series. The format is good and mostly tight. I do find occasional things mentioned in text like an X and just not on the map. Was half a room description once. A good variety of levels and locations to slip into a campaign. Lots of 1980 aesthetics but more coherant less rambling and easier to run often.  

The Lost Lair of Drecallis
A mid-tier adventure exploring a nice cave complex

The Palace Beyond
A mid-tier adventure featuring a weird planar puzzle dungeon. Map I find genuinely hard to look at and is very odd. The adventure and encounters are ok with lots of puzzles and pocket dimensions. It both repels me and attracts me 

The Halls of Lidless Shabbath
A high level adventure into a huge troll and monster-filled hole with hundreds of critters to murder and checklists. Has classic dungeon monsters, weird magic traps and puzzles and a huge treasure and a lich. Looks good but a bit of a meatgrinder

The Crocodile's Tear
Low-mid level adventure where you get to visit a desert kingdom to explore with a number of small tombs to explore. Easy to relocate into a specific setting

The Desert Shrine of the Sightless Sisters
Has a few Mesopotamian setting hat tips but really features a sisterhood of guardian warrior women protecting a complex of medusa and other monsters and a cool medusa mummy

Aerie of the Cloud Giant Strategos
A sequel to G123 giants series and quite a nice huge castle plan that looks abnormally historical in design. There is a whole giant Island (fairly well doe of the several of these I've seen and run and written. Frighteningly vast amounts of treasure

Under Ruined Onm
A mid-level adventure with a ruined city and some dungeons in the ruins. Might be able to mash up with another city with some more flavour or maps. 

White Dragon Run II
low-level sequel to the previous vol adventure and repeating some content. Other than that its a good couple of extra mini-dungeons in the area. You could put them anywhere

The Dark Tower of Arcma
A higher level adventurer with woodland and an impossible tower with internal space in a pocket dimension with failed lab experiments.

The Horror of Merehurst
For beginning characters on a lake with some mini-dungeons and nice maps. The ruin maps are very nice and almost feel like Gamma World in appearance. Has some good background lore and some good exploration and mysteries to solve. 

Out of The Abyss 💓💓💓💀
A D&D five under dark adventure id mostly heard bad things about and i saw for $20 on Amazon. On the surface its an escape the underdark semi-linear adventure where you get to see an increase of demons as you go. As far as the adventure and being driven by the Drow part was not so interesting to me. As a bunch of locations I can shove in an underdark game easily. You escape a slave pen with some underground weirdos. There is a nice spider webfilled cave to cross. Then a chapter on running underground travel, fungus, madness, and 20 weird terrains with own subtables to use for play again and again. There are some mini dungeons with factions already fighting in a hook horror lair and ooze temple a lost tomb. The next chapters are larger areas like a dark lake of kaotoa, a evil dwarf city and caves, a fungus forest, a dark gnome semi-occupied ruin and a stone giant colony. It has a lot of stuff but is possibly better as a sourcebook than an adventure. I really like the maps on the page corners even though I don't normally like full-colour maps. Lots of the demon stuff is in other books now but lots of statblocks for various underdark specialist peoples. Several long-winded lore dump sections were a bit long. There is a good section in a purple worm nest and a beholder lair and some modrons. The description of the drow city is ok. The climax of demons chapter is a bit of a mess and has demons not mentioned much before feature like orcus. Its a bit confusing and seems unpleasant to run. I can see why ppl dislike this book but it has good bits to steal. Im assuming its not going to be reprinted. 

A magic password is slang for a vagina which i thought odd.