Shackled City

I finished the second of my reading list books for 2023 (pretty good so far!) which is the Shackled City Adventure Path. I know that this was released as an all-in-one book that's 400+ pages long, but I didn't read that version; I read all of the original Dungeon Magazine adventures in order instead, and am counting it as a book. (It's a lot easier to get a hold of, for one thing. In fact, I already had most of the issues in a box up in a closet, and I just had to dig them out and find a few remaining missing issues.)

I'm not going to review everything I read; for one thing, I'm not a book review site, and for another thing, almost everything I'm reading has been in print for a long time, if not in fact now out of print. The Shackled City came out—what, seventeen or eighteen years ago? Some of the other fiction books I'll be reading are considerably older than that. But given that this is the first of the adventure path readings that I announced a few weeks ago that I'd be doing, I thought it pertinent to make some general comments. I expect that these comments will actually be relevant to all of the adventure paths as I read them. Here's a list of problems that need to be overcome, in my opinion, in order to have a successful run of these adventure paths. And by "successful" I mean one that I would enjoy. Obviously others have had success running them with other priorities where these problems may not, in fact, be problems for their group.

First, there is very little story, which is kind of funny given that many complain about the railroaded story nature of these adventure paths. If you take out the statblocks and the descriptions of the dungeon rooms and traps and monsters and treasure, etc. you could write all of the remaining content of the entire adventure path on just a couple of pages of text. While I don't necessarily have a problem with this per se; my own 5x5 Front project doesn't offer much more either, this is particularly a problem for this adventure path (and I expect the rest that I'll read) because of the following problems:

Second, the reasons to go do something are often very flimsy and contrived. This isn't terribly unusual, but in the case of my 5x5, I made considerable effort to not have many flimsy and contrived hooks, and as well, to give some thought to the fact that players will be less likely to act on hooks that are obviously flimsy and contrived, or to enjoy them if they do. In the case of Shackled City, if the PCs think the plot hook is too flimsy to follow, the adventure kind of has nowhere to go. More thought needs to be given to set-up and less to having mechanical, puzzle or trap features in the dungeon. Ultimately, nobody really cares that much about dungeon details. I especially don't care, and find them tedious, but nobody cares as much as they want you to care.

Third, loads of potentially interesting villains are introduced at... literally the moment that you roll initiative to kill them. What's the point of even having villains if that's all you're going to do with them? That's not a villain, that's a minion. Don't bother giving these characters names and personalities and a little bit of backstory (even if it's only a few sentences) if there's no chance that the PCs will actually discover it. Villains, to be memorable, need some build-up, some foreshadowing, and some role-playing opportunity; not to mention the need to be at least more recurring than a single forgettable encounter.

Fourth, the absurdity is off the charts. The idea of a bunch of monsters hanging around in a "dungeon" that's a literal death trap every few feet sitting around thinking evil thoughts and waiting for a player character to show up and kill them is just ridiculous. This is also in the height of the 3e mania for weirdness. It was bad enough to have some of the stranger monsters all sitting around, but here we had to give them all kinds of classes, templates, and other customizations to make them the most absurd creations you could imagine. And then dump them all in a blender without putting the lid on and thinking that the spray all over your ceiling is a compelling setting. I hadn't necessarily given a lot of thought to Gygaxian humanocentrism (one of the few things that he actually did lift, as he claims, from the sword & sorcery source material) at the time this was written, but reading this in retrospect years later, it seems really, really bad, and Gygax's preferences make much more sense.

Of course, I don't think that that aspect has necessarily changed. In fact, if anything, it's gotten worse. I've seen official artwork of rabbit people in wheelchairs adventuring in dungeons and equally bizarre concepts. It's like DEI, which was always just a front for hatred of normal, white, American, Western Civilizational behavior, has mutated into some kind of out of control cancer.

That said, you can see where it started, in part with just the desire to push the envelope and give us something novel. I was on that bandwagon myself for a little while, and "traditional" fantasy needed to be tweaked to be novel. So, I experimented with grimdark, steampunk(ish), Aragonese, Mars-like iterations of the setting as Dark•Heritage went through its various iterations. That's not the same kind of novelty as half-troll fiendish shadow dancer NPCs, or whatever other nonsense Shackled City served up, but was, at least in part, driven by the same ill-advised zeitgeist, which I got a bit swept up by myself. I now look back on that era—both my own efforts and others as well—as pretty cringy.

I wish there were more I could borrow from Shackled City other than the geographic concept of a town built on an old cinder cone. (Except mine is truly extinct; having the volcano erupt as an end game problem to deal with is both predictable and boring, I think—and kind of ironic given that WotC operates literally in the shadow of Mt. Rainier, which isn't even dormant, just quiet(ish) most of the time.) But the story was too flimsy and skeletal to offer much, the premise was pretty flimsy and predictable, and I have little interest in big stat blocks of weird characters or the tedious descriptions of dungeons full of traps and hazards. Luckily, I read the book fairly quickly because I skimmed over most of that, but it still reinforced to me exactly how tedious that is, how non-fun it is, and how little it resembles anything at all from any fantasy fiction. Ironically, even D&D fantasy fiction. 

UPDATE: Fifth, the leveling! OMG, y'all! It's absurd to think that this takes characters from levels 1-20. I know it takes way longer to play than to read (first-hand experience with several adventure paths, including Age of Worms from start to finish, our biggest campaign experience ever—albeit often unsatisfying in many ways.) But still; I feel like the leveling rate is too fast to be any fun at all. Let us enjoy our level before rushing us off to the next one! Another older school fetish that I've become enamored with is the very slow leveling speed expectations. I'd expect, honestly, to play a campaign the length of Shackled City and only advance a level or two. Now, obviously the campaign would have to look very different if you finish it at 3rd instead of 20th level. But that's not a bad thing. The rush to higher levels, which frankly hardly anyone enjoys playing in any edition of D&D, is a bug, not a feature.