The Drow War: A Review

I've always been a fan of adventure modules, I had a ton of them back in 1st edition days but I've managed to stay rather restrained in recent years. The other day I came across a super adventure. It spanned levels 1-10 in 256 pages, while books two and three went from 10-20 and from 20-30 respectively.

Now the title seemed rather cheesy. Drow War? How cliche can you get but I took a closer look at the first two books and I'm so glad I did. Drow War: Book 1: The gathering of the Light by Adrian Bott is great. The setting is supposed to be transferable but probably would not be worth the effort. The characters themselves are called the Starchosen and are sent by the forces of light to combat the rising darkness (the Drow) in a prophesied conflict that occurs every thousand years.

The adventures themselves are well written and interesting with a good variety of environments. Most adventures have multiple solutions and there is often so much to do that the heroes will have to pick which problems they wish to solve as they are often on a time limit and won't be able to do everything.

The adventure has two massive battle that the heroes will be able to take part in and influence the outcome. Each part of the adventure is influenced by what came before so the DM will have to keep decent notes to ensure that things run as they should.

A major part of the quest line was for each hero to recover their soul item. This is an item that each hero carries and it powers up as they do (usually a sword, shield or armor but rules for other items were present.)

There are a few problems with the book. I haven't tested the mass combat rules but I noticed the way that the command score was generated and I didn't like it. If the party lacks a fighter, your command score is going to be poor. Some of the maps were a bit confusing and I think at least one was missing. There were a few typos but nothing that could not be figured out.

Its almost half a decade old now and was written for 3.5 so to convert it to Pathfinder would require a bit of work. I think the effort would be worth it. There are lots of great ideas packed into this book and it might be fun to give a shot someday, although I think I'd actually prefer to run the second part which I may review later. I would have to find some way to give the players all of the background they'd be missing from the first book however...