Silver Darkness - Chapter One

It is an interesting mod, with nice writing and a catching story that hints to what could have been a fantastic campaign... but some of the design choices are a bit hard to understand and demand some patience to accept...

*SPOILERS*

It is a low level mod, which is understandable since it was just the first chapter of a much larger adventure... but it is really low level, that is: you start at level one and only gain one level as you play... almost at the end of the chapter. This was caused by the designer's decision not to reward killings with experience points... that could have been great if it was not for the fact that the mod is big and there isn't really a lot to do, it is just a simple quest to free some prisoners in a goblin infested mine. Actually, the whole adventure could be much shorter but the areas are large and travelling is time consuming. It takes a long time to get to the action and that would have been great if only you had something else to do instead of just moving your character through a long and mostly deserted road, where you are stopped three of four times to witness scripted conversations...

And then you arrive at the goblin cave... only to run through long corridors with just a few fights and some failed rescues (also scripted) that offer no reward whatsoever and lead you to a boss encounter that is rather predictable and that was also heavily scripted.

The forced pauses and scripted conversations could have been a nice way to develop the story, but since they are everywhere in the end they manage only to slow the progress, which was already an issue since it takes a long time for you to cross each one of the large areas.

As a matter of fact the conversations are all well written and Kaylessa is really a nice character, but there is no room to maneuver, no development and no relationship be it friendship, romance, hatred or anything... 

*SPOILERS END*

So why bother playing it? Well, it is a well crafted mod, the author could have made it better if he had been a bit more flexible or if he had accepted this as a prelude, thus avoiding the temptation to stretch things too much... but in the end you are left with a desire to know the rest of the tale, to see what would happen to your character in this adventure through the Silver Marches... and so I think the author succeeded. He might have done some things differently, but he accomplished what he intended.

A full stripper and with little gear to be found. Still, not a bad story and it moves along with good action and all seems to work. A good module!