Dungeon Crawl Classics #58: The Forgotten Portal
Dungeon Crawl Classics #58: The Forgotten Portal is a third-party, non-GSL adventure published by Goodman Games for Dungeons & Dragons: Fourth Edition. It is designed for a group of 4th-6th level characters, drawing them to a town inhabited by a pseudo-Aztec people called the Xulmec. The town is plagued a high priest committed to endless bloody sacrifices, and the chieftain asks the PCs to investigate the secret inner recesses of their step-pyramid temple to see if the town can be freed of this tyranny.
I have to admit that when I first skimmed through this adventure I was rather discouraged by the look of it. The hooks into the adventure are uninspired, and it’s almost entirely linear (as all modern modules seem to be). Fights mostly feature solo opponents or homogeneous groups of monsters, and there are also several stand-alone traps; hardly the normal hallmarks of quality Fourth Edition encounters. As I dug into the text, though, it became clear that designer Chris Doyle had some tricks up his sleeve. While The Forgotten Portal is far from a perfect product, it delivers on the trashy (but fun) pulp adventure it promises. I would not recommend it to new DMs, but someone more experienced that wants a couple good evenings of action-adventure gaming should be able to find it here after some tinkering.
Though The Forgotten Portal is clearly intended for use with Dungeons & Dragons: Fourth Edition, it is released under the old OGL, not the 4e GSL. This means that it tiptoes around certain matters, but this doesn’t cause any problems. The stat blocks aren’t quite Fourth Edition standard, but they wouldn’t be in a black and white product anyway. They are close enough not to cause any headaches, aside from a slightly confusing icon used to mark monster’s melee attacks.
The copyediting is a bit shaky, but no worse than the industry norm. While the text was run through a spellchecker, there are a few cases where the wrong word is used (affect for effect, for instance). Also, I spotted one stat block error, although it is an innocuous one. A level 7 wandering monster is shown as being worth 175 XP instead of 300 XP. It looks like its XP value got copy-pasted from the other wandering monsters, which are level 4 creatures. I haven’t gone over the other stat blocks with a fine-toothed comb yet, but it would be a good idea to do so before running the adventure.
The early encounters, before the PCs are introduced to the Xulmec – whose apparently-genuine Nahuatl names do not trip lightly off my Canadian tongue – are the weakest of the module. While there are terrain features in these encounters, they tend to limit mobility, or let the monsters hide out of melee reach.
There is also this rather amusing bit of advice when it comes to getting the PCs to a key encounter that is off to one side of the main track the PCs follow:
It is important to the progression of the adventure that the PCs [explore the side passage]. The GM should carefully (without railroading) convince the PCs to explore this route.
I realize that the definition of railroading is controversial, but this says “railroad without railroading” to me.
There are a couple of other places where the adventure can’t move forward if the PCs don’t pursue the right course of action or make a trivially easy skill check (which is a pet peeve of mine that crops up in a lot of published adventures). Adventure designers: if the PCs need something to move forward, just give it to them. Don’t get cute and clever. No matter how rare it may be, leaving an edge case where things could fall apart is shoddy design, and it will crop up for some of the groups that play your adventure.
The list of encounters in the front of the book shows that eight of the seventeen combat encounters feature a solo opponent, and most of the others just feature a group of a single kind of monster, not the mixed groups typical of Fourth Edition encounter design. This is a formula for grinding fights. Fortunately the encounters in the latter part of The Forgotten Portal feature interesting environments, which will take the edge off somewhat, but I can’t help feeling this is a lost opportunity for some classic encounters.
In particular, the first few encounters in the temple have elements of a great fight, let down by some weak choices. If I run The Forgotten Portal for one of my groups, I will combine them into a single encounter, and change the monster mix to make it a more dynamic fight.
There are a couple of places where pit traps drop their victims into combat with monsters, leaving them alone and rather vulnerable for a round or two against some rather nasty opposition. I could see this leading to PCs that are dead before the cavalry arrives simply because no one could spot a trap.
I also should note parenthetically that the treatment of a couple skill challenges doesn’t even rise to the level of superficiality. They are described in a sentence, and aimed squarely at a single skill. Some of this may be constraint caused by the absence of GSL sanction, or it may be a lack of time to grapple with the nature of skill challenges when designing. Regardless, they are a blot on the design, and call out for development by the DM.
There are several player handouts at the end of the book that help convey some of the puzzles the players will face, along with a wilderness map and several dungeon maps. The maps are all computer-generated, and they do not work well in black and white. I must admit I like the clarity of the old, icon-based maps at the best of times, and using the Illustrator-generated maps that are in vogue now is an especially bad idea in a black and white book. They are muddy-looking, and you have to really focus on them to distinguish even the most basic features.
With one major exception, the rest of the layout is solid and professional, leveraging the qualities that Adobe’s Minion offers as a body font to cram a lot into a small space without hurting readability. The sans serif used in the stat blocks isn’t as efficient, but I’m not sure any sans could match Minion’s capabilities. The adventure also uses a more traditional format for describing locations, not indulging in the luxury of Wizards of the Coast’s Delve encounter spreads.
Unfortunately, Goodman’s D&D Fourth Edition modules all feature a page background graphic of a hand-drawn map. It muddies the otherwise professional design, giving the pages a dingy appearance, like it is covered in poorly erased pencil rubbings. Worse, it is a slap in the face of customers that buy the PDF with the intention of printing it out; this background image will waste a huge amount of printer ink. I suspect this is an intentional anti-piracy measure and an indirect way of supporting brick and mortar game stores. For gamers that only have access to Goodman products via PDF sellers – and especially in the case of the recent adventure Mists of Madness – this seems like the company thumbing its nose at legitimate customers. I hope they reconsider this in future products.
It’s easy to call out a list of flaws, but there is a lot of great stuff in The Forgotten Portal, too. I hesitate to say much, for fear of spoiling the adventure, but several encounters hearken back to old school imagination without succumbing to save-or-die effects and other gotcha elements. One major encounter features a victory condition that does not rely on slaughtering the opposition (although that remains a viable option).
There is also an element of faux mythology and legend that hits the mark. Often, myths made up for RPGs feel hollow or anachronistic, but the tales incorporated into this adventure hit the mark. They’re not all that original, combining elements from several sources, but getting the feel right in the telling is no mean feat.
There are also two new monsters at the end, each featuring two stat blocks. The brute suffers from the all too common boring brute syndrome, but the other, a skirmisher, is quite juicy.
Again, The Forgotten Portal is light pulp in its atmosphere, not the funhouse weirdness of Tomb of Horrors or Castle Amber. It takes inspiration from Indiana Jones and maybe old Judges’ Guild dungeons. It lets D&D be itself, to full effect. The only element that I miss – a problem created by the combination of system and format, I think – is room to meander or sidestep sections. Only a couple of small side branches separate this adventure from a purely linear structure.
In the hands of an experienced and confident DM who buys into the light action adventure premise, The Forgotten Portal will be a lot of fun. It still suffers a bit from Third Edition hangover, which is a shame, but the problems are not insurmountable. I would recommend it to any DM looking to run some light pulp action, especially on short notice. The necessary fixes should only require an evening’s work.
The interesting material that is present also leaves me looking forward to the next generation of Dungeon Crawl Classics. There’s a lot of wisdom about encounter and adventure design for Fourth Edition floating around RPG forums and blogs that didn’t emerge in time to inform the first wave of Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition adventures. Once the development cycle catches up, Goodman may well produce some adventures for the ages.
March 3rd, 2009 at 21:58
My group actually had a really great time playing this one. I loved that T-rex!