Where Tomb of Horrors made us doubt Gygax’s chops as a designer, Against the Giants redeems him. Of the adventures in Tales From the Yawning Portal, and definitely among the old school adventures, Against the Giants is the best of the batch.
You can practically hear Gygax sulking and muttering under his breath, “I’ll show you, you bunch of ingrates.” This is the sort of “adventure” written by grade-schoolers who have talked the rest of the group into letting them DM with the intent of getting revenge for that one time the regular DM killed their favorite character. Embodying the worst sort of game design principles and without a doubt intended to screw over the players, it presents nothing of value to either players or Dungeon Masters except a guide to exactly the sort of encounter design to avoid. Tomb of Horrors, on the other hand, is offensively bad. Then, the drive of competition makes it somewhat more worthwhile and a good shared experience teams can compare notes on and laugh. Unless, of course, it is run as the actual competitive tournament it was meant to be. No real story is presented or advanced, it’s just something to do. While it can be interesting and entertaining, with the wrong group and wrong PCs, it’s just an annoyingly long trudge without much actually going on. Except that it is entirely player focused instead. The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan is the long, slow, tortuous counterpart to White Plume Mountain centered on the lengthy demise of a group of heroes. Taken in that light, it is the best of the S-series of Special modules from the early days of D&D in this book. It’s a beer-and-pretzels-like diversion in the gap between more well written adventures. White Plume Mountain is an amusing and, importantly, short romp not to be taken seriously by either the DM or players. But, like legends, they’ve grown in the telling, becoming exaggerated experiences and table stories that their original inspirations can’t possibly hope to live up to. Sure, many of the adventures are legendary.
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The bulk of adventures set there aren’t the best representatives of the setting and are so gimmicky and full of special circumstances outside the course of regular play they give one the impression Greyhawk adventures never took themselves seriously and the designers were more interested in killing PCs and annoying players than telling exciting, worthwhile stories. In the end, though, it is probably just as well not much more is made of Greyhawk here. Almost as if it is just there to give the volume a “cool” name and not much else. The tantalizing promise of adventure in Undermountain is never paid off and ultimately the whole Yawning Portal aspect feels loosely tacked on with no real purpose. It is a shame the Yawning Portal tavern and Undermountain don’t see more use and integration. By removing the non-Greyhawk adventures, room could be had to expand things. The majority of adventures are set there and it would have been easy enough to make this a sort of mini-setting book for the game by focusing on Greyhawk and fleshing out the world. In many ways, it is still a shame that the book, like its namesake tavern, is not focused on the Greyhawk setting itself. I’ve done what I believe to be the best I can in those regards.Īll that remains now is to consider Tales From the Yawning Portal as a whole and sum up my thoughts about it in the light of a thorough read through and critique. Whether I have been successful at those goals is up to the reader to determine. I attempted to do this by showing them at least one solid way to evaluate published adventures, determine the adventure’s suitability for their group of players, and adjust those adventures as necessary for play at their table. When I started the series, I took as my goals a desire to provide some help and support for new Dungeon Masters just beginning their forays in the world of Dungeons & Dragons. Over the course of the ten articles in this series, I’ve covered all seven of the adventures included in this book, some with detailed, room by room, commentary and others with a more traditional review-style approach. The time has come to put an end to Fiddleback vs.
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