Gary Gygax's Hall of Many Panes (Lejendary Adventure) [Englisch] [Spiel]

Gary Gygax does a respectable job in an imaginative way to combine many small adventures into a very large campaign. We were able to get through some of the adventures in a single session, while some (pane 8 - Dungeon Delving) took several nights to complete. There's enough hack and slash, with problem solving throughout, to keep players involved. The presentation may be lacking, but a good GM needs only the basic story to keep the over 50 adventures moving along.

I was hesitant to buy this product after seeing previous reviews but got it at a good price and was extremely pleased. This material runs with both d20 system and the Lejendary Adventures system by Gary Gygax. It follows "old school" module design and in order to fit 50 adventures in one book some of the modules only consist of a light framework that need more development. Any game master with experience can creatively fill in holes. Numerous adventures place characters in situations where a bad decision could "wipe" the party. That said, the modules encourage old fashioned ROLE PLAYING which many popular systems today have moved away from. A bad dice role is not intended to wipe the party here. The Lejendary Adventure game system's genius is that a group with limited time to get together can play it and have fun. Your characters don't begin play too weak to enjoy playing them. You can participate in exciting encounters right from your first session. With these 50 adventures we can sit down and play through an extremely imaginative and creative story-telling adventure or two or three every time we get together. Every idea is pretty interesting and I found the players really got into some of the scenarios I hadn't expected. Some of the scenarios include the party being transformed into magical acorns, rescuing an Arabian prince, slaying a White Drake, a scavenger hunt hosted by the gods, a castle under siege, and a good old dungeon crawl. This is a great product for anyone who enjoys "Role Playing" more than "Roll Playing"

There's a school of roleplay where the module introduces you to an interesting and rich world full of various characters and adventures and allows you to immerse yourself into it and play it however you want. This isn't it.

This game is a test. Gary Gygax has opted to challenge you, either as a GM or as a player, to see if you are "good enough" to run his module. The game is full of a sort of smug condescention that if there's ever anything wrong with this disasterous product--that he wants to make sure you know its your fault. It's hard to know how to take that. Especially given how abrasive, irritating and generally impossible the various adventures are.

Generally each begins with disorientation as you appear in an unfamiliar world. The people there generally want you to explain yourself immediately or else kill you on the spot (which, generally they can without even resorting to in game combat) or want you to do something for them--usually along the way insulting you or making you the butt of rude jokes. If you refuse, of course, you're stuck in that dimension or killed by something unavoidable. If you show offense and attack the quest giver, well they just kill you.

The quest usually involves a string of random encounters without a break, set up to make you look foolish for having chosen to do them--but the alternative is either being lost forever or death. You choose to enter the snow cave to avoid freezing to death in the arctic cold, do you? Well hah! The ice breaks away into the ocean and you all die! This one is real. I'm not kidding.

Either that or you have to solve a puzzle in a way that wouldn't work and that you'd never think of--or die fighting an impossible monster. For example you're trapped on a tiny island in a jungle fighting a Jaws sized mega-crocadile with a couple of dozen normal crocodiles inbound, arriving two per round until you're dead. The water all around is full of crocodiles, and if you enter it--well they just eat you. The answer? Well you have to run across the crocodiles' backs don't you see until you're safely ashore. Of course you do.

Another example is an ice cave with a sleeping ice dragon in it. If you explore too much you find super slick icy ramps that lead to hundred foot pits of death. Silly you. The trick here is to use illusion spells (provided by magic items hidden in the illusion of yucky dead guys) to lure the ice dragon into thinking the PCs are stealing its treasure--then they run down a long icy hallway and the flying dragon is going so fast it totally doesn't notice that it's about to crash into a wall and fall into boiling lava. Yes there's boiling lava in this ice cave. Of course its hard to discover the lava cave or the illusion items without accidently running into either the dragon or the ice ramp deathtrap. Oh well.

A lot of whether you live or die is based on choosing the right option out of a list of near identical options by sheer luck. Sometimes a badguy challenges you to mortal combat and if you do you're easily outmanuvered and just killed. Sometimes the same exact thing happens and if you try not to fight, you're called a coward and just killed. Many times the hostile creature threatening to eat you is the one ally you need and you have to grovel and pursuade it to help you while it laughs at how dumb you are. Others just eat you. There really is no way to tell--and if you try to wiggle out of it by not going where the GM tells you to every step of the way, well you either get trapped forever or all die a cheap unsatisfying death for being "unheroic".

The adventures themselves are a smattering of bland ideas. Some are stereotyped (and a little crass) versions of real world cultures: Mongol, Arabian, Native American, Chinese. A couple are prison breaks. A couple are just brawls where you're tossed in among hostile skeletons, cavemen, golems or whatever. A few are pure "roleplaying"--in the sense that you're confronted by gods or other unbeatable foes so fighting does no good, so you must talk your way out while they find excuses to kill you (or at least make fun of you and tell you how dumb you are.) A fair number are sieges where the only way the group you're supposed to protect will ever survive is for you to sneak past enemy lines and get help. There's a few that are just odd, where you're transformed into a random thing: acorns in one case, or lions, or wisps of cloud.

You make it through enough of that and the god who armbarred you into all of this in the first place wins. Congratulations.

So that's what Hall of Many Panes is about. It's fifty-one mini universes like this inside a big tower and all of them are just like I said. There's very little in terms of story, mostly godly politics leading to you getting forced by the god of pranks into rescuing a demigod who's locked in one of these panes. No real decisions to make, you just go through the panes and eventually you find him, your group gets wiped, or you throw up your hands in frustration and go home.