Today we are looking at Under the Shadow of Helfast Spire, a zine and regional adventure for Shadowdark by Robert “Bob World Builder” Mason. It’s for level 3ish PCs and features a 22-room dungeon along with a few classes, some monsters, magic items, etc etc. 

In the tradition of the Cursed Scrolls we start with a hexcrawl called The Vale, although this one’s lighter on hexes with only 10. At least they are all keyed and offer something interesting and gameable.  The hex keys (or Allen wrenches as they are often called) are pretty good if a bit brief. One highlight is the Vale River Bridge and its table of random treasures that are terribly interesting and creative, like “Corked dark bottle – Kif, fairy prince taken from Derboli Wood” and “Iron hand gong – bang to use echolocation for 1 round”. It’s the kind of stuff a GM wants their players to find because it will lead to some emergent, fun gameplay. 

Otherwise, the hexes make the most of their often single-paragraph length. There’s some kind of interesting, interactive situation in each one, and there’s a good amount of connections between them. There’s a lot of gameplay to be had before the party even gets to the dungeon. 

Rumors are a bit of a mixed bag – several of them lead to specific adventure locations but a few are vague and general enough to be useless. “With the warlord Meeshul slain at last, his surviving raiders have split into factions” isn’t nearly as useful as “The Vale River has stolen many treasures from merchants foolish enough to cross its ford.” But overall they will be decent enough to provide some direction to your players. 

Random encounter tables just point you to the tables in the core rules. Those are good tables, but it’s a wasted opportunity to use random encounters to build the world and introduce the factions, conflicts, local flora and fauna, etc. Maybe there was a page limit and these got the axe, but I can point to half a dozen pages that I’d personally cut in favor of having some nice bespoke encounters. The introduction, for example, is just trying to sell me on a book I already have, and the “Design Principles” are superfluous (yes we know you want us to have fun), for example. 

Once we reach the dungeon we are greeted by a side-elevation map rather than the typical overhead view. It’s also beautifully illustrated in the fashion of the classic DCC adventure maps. Looks great but it is a bit hard to read in a few places, with the connections between locations being a bit obscure. But all of the various entrances and exits are written into the room descriptions so it shouldn’t be too difficult to get a handle on.

The kickstarter page and design principles call this a “Jaquays-style” dungeon. That’s kind of like saying you play “Michael Jordan-style” basketball. No matter how good you are, you’re inviting some very unfavorable comparisons. For one thing, Jaquays’s most famous dungeons had 100+ keys and this one has 22 so it’s just not possible to have the same type of design. 

I think the relentless “Jaquaysing” (if you call it “Xandering” I’ll slap you in the mouth over the internet) sometimes hurts the dungeon design more than it helps. The dungeon is fairly small, and the multiplicity of pathways only allows the party to skip some of the interesting parts. For example, there’s a somewhat elaborate puzzle door in area 5 that leads to area 6. Or you can just climb through the ceiling in area 3 only 10 feet above. And it’s very, very likely that they will traverse area 3 before area 5. So the puzzle is kind of moot. It’s one thing to create two alternate paths that each has their own risks and benefits. But in this case there’s an obvious, easy way and a difficult, obscure way. 

That being said, there’s a good amount of variety here. Hazards like rooms filled with poisonous or flammable gas need to be dealt with. Rooms with overwhelming numbers of monsters will require very clever or very sneaky solutions. The abundance of traps will teach your players caution the hard way. And the verticality does provide some interesting traversal challenges.

Even considering that, most of the interactivity will come from dealing with the various denizens of the spire. They are varied and pretty damn cool – the predominant foes are the zombie-like Bitu-Men that cough blinding coal dust, and then we’ve got armor-melting lava slugs, swarming ghost eels, and the extremely formidable death guards that inflict this with each of their 2 attacks: “Necrosis. DC 15 CON or drop to 0 HP. Healing spells are DC 15 to cast on target while affected by necrosis.” So good luck with that. But my favorite is the intelligent Uldroon the Great Black Heron that taunts and hunts the party throughout the dungeon. As a special treat, all of the monsters have some kind of bespoke loot or an entire loot table. 

Regular readers will notice that I missed my usual “the setup” paragraph. Well you know how every single adventure you’ve ever read has a couple paragraphs at the start to explain what the hell is going on? This one doesn’t. It doesn’t really give us much information about the main villain and cover model Regolienn or the recent events in the region. We just get snippets here and there but it never just lays the entire situation out. All we really know is that a while ago some people from the village went to the spire to stop some kind of ritual but never returned. Then I find this:

What is Death at Helfast Spire, you ask? It’s a prequel adventure to this one, on sale for $6.66, for FUCKING DAGGERHEART. So not only do I have to buy another adventure, I have to buy one for a system I don’t even play?!

We were so close.

I might be overstating how important reading that adventure is but I’ll never know because I’m not buying it. But I did find a comment on the Arcane Library discord server that says something along the lines of “it all makes sense when you look up Death at Helfast Spire.” Inexcusable. You can write a whole paragraph describing sand (yes, really) but you can’t include a concise background for the GM?

As it is, the awesome Jim-Gillette-meets-Elvira-looking-lady on the cover is criminally underutilized. The party is likely to complete the dungeon without ever really knowing what she’s about. How could they if the GM doesn’t know? Also, the encounter with Regolienn has 28 total monster levels. It’s appropriate for a BBEG of her stature, but it doesn’t give the PCs much to do with her. If they choose combat, a level 3 party will probably get wiped. But they don’t really have much to talk about and no bargains to strike. The only real hook we have for the dungeon is to find out what happened to the defenders of the village that came to stop her, and they will probably have been found already. The text doesn’t really give us any ideas about what to do with this encounter. 

It’s a black mark on an otherwise well-crafted adventure. There’s a ton of creativity on display, the mechanics are solid and the vertical map is a wonderful change of pace. A solid effort that needs to be a little more complete to elevate it from good to great. 

On a scale of 2-12, Under the Shadow of Helfast Spire gets 8 stingbats. I’ll bump it up to 9 if they fix the issue with Death at Helfast Spire before the final release. 

More from Robert Mason:

Review: Delve