Some Thoughts on Dark Waters

Dark Waters is a module for Ganesha Games' Four Against Darkness dungeon crawl game.

I purchased it when it first came out last year. I wanted to use it for a session with my wife, but she has somewhat soured on dungeon crawls in general. When I was trying to decide what to play for the 6 x 6 Challenge, I decided I would play some of the modules that have been lying around (figuratively, for I own PDF copies). I recently completed this module (the reports are on my Tales of the Templars blog - parts 1, 2, and 3) and wanted to share some thoughts about it.

First, a little about the module itself, It consists of 2 parts - a pre-generated adventure and a random adventure with new tables for determining enemies, treasure, etc. Your characters get to fight new foes, including corsairs and denizens of the briny deep. The second part of the adventure is an interesting twist - the dungeon is actually a sunken temple.

Overall, this module is an excellent value (especially for a cost of 2.50 USD). It provides a bunch of new foes, treasures, events, features, etc. I liked the underwater location; that was a pleasant twist. The dungeon itself was enjoyable. I found myself getting into the story (even though I tweaked it a bit to fit my fantasy world).

If you read my last game report, you'll see that I went back to 4 characters (I've been experimenting with a party of 2). For the second part, I decided to play 4AD fairly straight. I still abandoned looting and assumed that my 2 main characters carried a potion of healing each. I must say I am glad that I used 4 characters because the final boss was HARD. I had 2 characters down to 1 life point and the others were down to 2. If the boss didn't die when it did, I was going to lose someone. So if you play this, make sure you have lots of healing ready for the final confrontation.

Another interesting aspect was how short it was for me - only 6 rooms. This is quite unusual for 4AD; I usually end up with a dozen or more rooms in the random dungeon. I did a rough calculation of the odds and figure there was about a 5% chance of finding the main boss so quickly. In a way that was good; I don't think the party would have survived if they had to fight their way through more enemies. On the other hand, the party did not get to experience very many of the challenges that the authors prepared. I will have to dust off some of them for future adventures.

Anyway, if you like 4AD, I highly recommend this module.

6 x 6 Challenge Note:
Even though Dark Waters was one module, it essentially consisted of 2 separate dungeons. Therefore, I counted it as 2 games for the challenge.