Reviews for Black Spine

The average rating for Black Spine based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-27 00:00:00 Jolie Schoffelen This actually wasn't a bad adventure, even if it was a bit of a railroad. However, I had huge issues with the basic premise that dropped it by an entire star, and probably would have dropped it by a star and a half if Goodreads allowed for half-star ratings. I'll get to that in the end, though. First, the plot. The PCs--going by the pregenerated ones, the same group that went through Black Flames and Merchant House of Amketch--are hired by a representative of Tenpug's Band, the group of artisan ex-slaves detailed in Slave Tribes, to protect their secret camp. Apparently they're under attack by weirdly-organized bands of gith and need hardened murderhobos to train them to fight. So the PCs head out to their camp, navigate their tribal superstitions, deal with gith patrols, and then defend the Tenpug's Band against the gith tribes of the Hand, the Eye, and the Rune. The adventure suggests using BATTLESYSTEM for the battle, but then also tries to set things up so that the battle has a dramatic conclusion where Tenpug's Band is forced back into their fortress stronghold and the PCs have to use ancient artifacts from the days when Athas was green to win. Which is cool, but directly counter to using an impartial means of resolving the battle. Ugh. Anyway, after the battle, Tenpug's Band wants revenge and the PCs are probably curious where the gith got all the steel weapons they were using, so they form up a posse and pursue the gith across the sands toward their secret stronghold. On the way, the gith leader blasts the army with a psychic dream assault that the PCs have to stop, and then they reach the iron mine that the gith are holed up in. What's that, you say? You thought the book repeatedly emphasized that the only iron mine in the Tablelands was near Tyr, and that was the source of Kalak's power? That any other city-state controlling a source of iron would hugely upset the balance of power among the city-states? That this is a huge game changer? You're completely right, and I will devote as much space to the ramifications of this as Black Spine does. ... Moving on. Apparently, the iron mine was found by Nibenay, but they Dug Too Deep and opened up on to a gith nest, which slaughtered most of them and left others for dead, like the dwarf who, if saved, reveal that he heard the gith repeatedly refer to their attack as "The Reclamation." Ominous! The PCs fight their way through the mines and the breach and find an old city underground with an artifical sun, which the book reveals was an old stronghold of the githyanki when they tried to conquer Athas. However, it was abandoned after the githzerai detonated a psionic superweapon, reducing most of the githyanki on Athas to blithering idiocy...producing the modern gith! Black Spine also hints that the reason why psionics is so common on Athas might be that the major psionic predators that exist on most other worlds were wiped out by the weapon, leading the way for the development of the powers of the mind. Of course, none of this fits with the history of Athas in later products, but it is kind of neat. The city, called Yathazor, has several insane earth clerics who think the city was built by earth spirits and the gith are their descendants, so the PCs need to fight, sneak, or talk their way past them to get to the deeper tunnels and across a chasm to the combined gith/githyanki stronghold wherein lies the Nightmare Gate, which the githyanki plan to use to bring an army into Athas and conquer it again! There is a neat section here about the githyanki food sources. Specifically:These creatures, called morphs or biomorphs by the gith and githyanki, are half-animal and half-plant. As such, they feed by both photo-synthesis and caloric intake. They are almost certainly completely unlike anything the player characters have ever encountered before on Athas.I like the idea that Athas used to be a weird civilization with psychic technology better than the idea that it was just another D&D world until Rajaat screwed everything up, and biomorphs fit with the D&D-crossed-with-Gamma World feel I like from Dark Sun. Even if the name doesn't fit. Anyway, the PCs have to make their way to the Nightmare Gate, which misfires as they get near and sucks them in, dumping them into the Astral Plane and resulting in their capture. Of course, this is a Dark Sun adventure! The PCs have to be captured at some point. Also, they end up fighting in the arena. That's later, though. After they break out of their cell, they meet with a githzerai spy and she leads them to a nearby githzerai base, but is shocked to find it in ruins. At the base, they are briefed on the threat--a githyanki ruler called Trinth wants to conquer Athas and use the power base there to challenge the githyanki's lich-queen--and sent back. There they fight their way to the queen, get dropped into the arena in a scene reminiscent of a certain movie, and when they win, they face the queen again and have to kill her. After they do, the evil artifact she possessed offers them power and freedom and tries to take them over if that fails, but after they race back with it to the Nightmare Gate as the base is collapsing around them and jump through, the artifact explodes as it passes through the spaces between dimensions. The end. Okay, so that's all not that bad, right? What's the problem I have with Black Spine? Well...if planar travel is not only possible but easy, and all it takes is casting plane shift, then the resource scarcity makes no sense. One of the sorcerer-kings could take an afternoon, travel to some other plane, and come back with enough metal to outfit his entire army with new weapons and armor, and then go on to conquer the entire Tyr region. Why is gold so scarce when the sorcerer-kings exist and their cold war gives them a constant incentive to go get more money and use it to try to kill each other? Why doesn't anyone go to the Plane of Enormous Amounts of Water and bring some back? Sure, elemental clerics can do it and they don't seem to have much effect, but the sorcerer-kings don't have any limits on how much they'd bring back. A water cleric does one cubic foot per level, but Kalak would bring back 250-tun barrels if he could. So would all the others. And that isn't dealt with at all. Apparently plane shifting to Athas and back is really easy, because the githyanki can do it without breaking a sweat--though now that I think about it, I'm not sure why they even need the Nightmare Gate when they can plane shift innately--but if it is that easy and there are super-high-level wizards out there with every incentive to haul back tons of resources from other dimensions, why is Athas such a dump? Who knows. The book certainly doesn't tell you. So four stars for the adventure, and minus a star for destroying the entire basis of the Dark Sun campaign setting. I do like the backstory this hints it, but it needs more effort to integrate it into the rest of the world.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-02-22 00:00:00 Jacqueline Campbell not the whole set. ruleset and screen.