Lords of Darkness 3 - Alanya's Secret (V2.0)

This is one of my all time favourite mods.

I loved this Module. Absolutely one of the best if not the. The best use of shadowdancer/assassins of any I have played. He actually makes high level opponents which attack you like a human.  I love the story line, plot twists, right up there with the best of all time. Challenging and rewarding, masterpiece.

Another excellent Mod, and onwards to Part 4! :-)

Yes and yes

This is the vote for the whole saga. Comment under the 4th module.

some parts very predictable but not bad

A rating for the whole series. The comment will be under Part 4

Many thanks for sharing this most enjoyable series.

This was, by far, one of the best modules I have ever played! I love the history, the character, well done, congratulations to the creator of this module... it´s amazing ;)

It is not a bad module at all! I played to the end and was even interested in finishing the whole series... but unfortunately this one was already enough to remind how much I hate high level mods. I tried to play the final chapter but I could not go far... so I will post my final coments about this series here.

It is a great series of mods! I enjoyed it completely up to this chapter, where I started to loose interest.

Some of the posts here were complains about the excessive dialog... well I have only praise for any mod maker who can offer us good dialogues and talkative henchmen... what I complain about is a goblin house servant that is stronger than a fully trained army soldier and things like that... those are very usual in high level mods where the whole objective is turn into a constant fighting against ever stronger enemies...

Sorry, it is not my cup of tea.

But don't get me wrong... for those who like this sort of thing you can't go wrong with this module (and the next one for that matter)... I am a different kind of role player... so this is another one of those series that I will never finish. But I recommend it for anyone who likes high level and completely unfair fights... you will have a blast!

Oh, I just recommend you to have a very high spot skill or else take a few scrolls of True Seeing before going to the mountains... the final boss fight is impossible without it.

I have no words to describe this incredible adventure! I'm excited! Where to start praising? The story was amazing, the dialogues flawless, the battles incredibly balanced, the romance with Terence idyllic, the work it took to get this result is something I don't want to think about! Congratulations to the author. It is now one of the top 3 adventures I've played so far. I was never bored at any point in story and believe me it's a feat for me! It has to be played by everyone here!

Module Testing Tournement 2020

The combat picks up pace in the third part, due to the items granted at the end of part 2, and that made some repetitive encounters in bigger areas more bearable, although I think on average, areas were smaller in part 3, which I appreciated. The increased speed also made the hack-and-slash gameplay even more addictive. On the other hand, a lot of fights were easily won now and didn't require a lot of tactical thinking anymore. But there still were enough fights that did, and I'm really glad I had the foresight to stock up on potions and scrolls in part 2 when I had the chance (especially Lesser Restoration and Clarity proved useful). Part 3 has great variety in tilesets and opponents once again. It's a bit more linear than part 2, but I liked it about the same.

Highly polished, too, although there was one big oversight: At the end of the module, there is a dialogue that rewards you 5000 xp, and you can repeat that dialogue as often as you want and will always get the reward again. Thankfully I saved shortly before, so I could undo the unearned xp shower.

Oh, and there was one instance where I could not move on without finding a secret door, and my fighter who did not invest in Search at all, had to wait or walk around for quite a long time before the door finally appeared. IMO, anything relying on Search skills should never be part of an obligatory route, there are bound to be characters who are bad at it, and it's no fun to wait for a lucky roll.

(For reference concerning the combat, I played a pure fighter on D&D Hardcore difficulty.)

Really fun modules. My only suggestion for maybe the animals (bears, big cats) to not attack on sight. It feels a little icky to cut down animals that are endangered or harmless or both in the real world. I recall some modules where the animals are neutral unless provoked. 

I'm rating this one about the same as what I did the second one.

Okay so this module is where the start of the romance path or... not. In order to get the romance path, you've had to have agreed with her totally on everything up until this point... which as I mentioned in my raiting for part 2. That's not realistic. If you're just agreeing with someone and not willing to disagree with respecting their opinion, you're really not invested in the relationship. If the other person only wants a relationship with someone who agrees with them totally and tells them what they want to hear, they're not worth being in a relationship with.

If you don't romance Alanya, it leads to some really weird dialogue later.... like when Terrance gets noisy and asks about your relationship status with her. If you select the option that you're just good friends with her, you'll then be forced to say how you're willing to die for her like some stalker weirdo. Why can't I have some normal dialogue like cheer Terrance on if he's interested in Alyana?

Also up until this point in the module playing anything except a human has been fine. However once you get to the city of Arboril itself, you're going to find that there's a lot of racisim towards anything not totally human. Elves are outright hated, which mades playing a pure elf a bit weird in terms of dialogue. It isn't just the NPC that was rude to Alanya but not the player. As an elf (or even a half-elf), it should have been obvious that Alayna wasn't totally elven to the character. There should have been dialogue for these races where you say that you noticed that Alanya wasn't totally elven but thought it would have been rude to say something about it.

Lady Dorinara's monistary / secret lair was a bit weird. You have to go through the moutains to get then then once inside, you're constantly fighting all these non-monks. You go down to the basement, then the sewers, then Underdark-style cavern, then a lower cavern where you finally meet up with her to rescue Alanya and fight Dorinara.

This would have been fine if it was break into her house in a city where she maintains an air of respectibility, but Terrane made a comment much earlier that everyone would rather have a half-orc ruler than the current five lords and ladies. She's not pretending to be respectible to anyone, so there was no need for a secret base inside a secret base. Also since it is supposed to be a monistary of evil monks, there should have been mostly monk NPCs and a lot more monk loot.

Adding to what I said in my prior module review about how Alyana is going to get upset about killing some hostile cave people (in part 4), she claims to be a nature girl (even in this module) but has no issue with the slaughtering of animals. Nope. Not a single comment from her about it. There's even a location where animals that hate each other in modules are living in harmony with each other in this module, which is so unusal that Alyana doesn't have an issue putting an end to it by killing them all.

Great series, there weren't exacly many options to roleplay, but the story was tight, worldbuilding interesting and the romance sweet!