Books: Thunderspire Labyrinth

I've never read a 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure module before, so it was with high hopes that I picked up "Thunderspire Labyrinth," an adventure taking player-characters through 4th to 6th level. Typically, I like to come up with most of the content in my D&D campaign myself, but with the demands of law school and trial competitions pressing in, it's nice to have some help now and again. Supposedly, these published adventures speed up prep time by offering pre-statted encounters, preconstructed dungeons, and even a simple premade plotline.

From time immemorial, most D&D modules have been focused on two things - combat and dungeon exploration. These two activities are common in most D&D games, and published modules obviously have to appeal to a wide audience. For this reason, my approach to these adventure supplements is to steal anything that I find interesting, not to use them wholesale. I feel that dropping in an official adventure can lead to flavorless game sessions unless you're an extraordinary DM (a truly great DM can add pizzazz to even a straightforward dungeon crawl).

"Thunderspire Labyrinth" contains two adventure booklets, a fold-out battle map, and a folder to keep it all in. There are some 30 encounters, ranging from simple kick-in-the-door battles against goblins and orcs to more complicated shootouts involving evil wizards. It's all spread amongst four minidungeons - two of which are fairly vanilla, and two that are fantastical in the extreme (read: demonic pools of blood).

It looks fun, and I got some interesting ideas for encounters and dungeons, but I'm not sure it's worth the MSRP. For one thing, Wizards of the Coast took some shortcuts in its publishing - there's no back cover to the second adventure booklet, for some reason, and the lone battlemap doesn't display enough of any one dungeon to be useful. On the other hand, they do include some new monster stats (yay for duergar!) and the overall environments are handled well. I guess I just expected more from "Red Hand of Doom" alum Richard Baker.