Welcome back to the Nexus column. I took off for vacation a couple of weeks ago and visited family and friends in Southern California and upon my return I was happily greeted by a big box of materials I had ordered for review, among them were gorgeous hard cover role playing adventure books produced by Paizo, the company which during the late 90s and early aughts had the license to produce print copies of the popular TSR magazines Dungeon and Dragon and which later branched off into their own game system “Pathfinder” which rivaled Dungeons and Dragons for role playing game supremacy and popularity.
I was at first confused by a book entitled “Pathfinder: Abomination Vaults.” Long time gamers are probably familiar with the Pathfinder system, especially if they played D&D third edition, as that game system is also colloquially known as D&D 3.75, and many in the table top gaming community considered it the spiritual successor to the 3.5 edition of the game.
This “adventure path” as the hardbound book length adventures book are called are pretty hefty, this one is 284 pages long and has the 5e tag at the top of its cover. It took me a minute to understand what I was holding in my hands, a book long adventure for a game master to run at his or her table, but not for Pathfinder, rather for D&D 5th edition. As the adventure is described by the game developers, it’s a “megadungeon” complete with multiple dungeon levels which players get to explore including hideous monsters, deadly traps, allies and other familiar elements which harkens back to this popular mode of gameplay from years gone by, totally repackaged for a new era.
In fact, this adventure is a complete fifth edition campaign taking players from first to 11th level. There are 10 levels of the dungeon to explore, so each level of the vaults corresponds to a level each player gains after completing it. The players advance to 11 at the conclusion, if they survive! This of course, is not a game mode exclusive to Paizo nor to Pathfinder, D&D’s officially printed adventures have done something similar in the path, most notably in a product like “Dungeon of the Mad Mage” released by Wizards of the Coast in 2018.
In the D&D book, Undermountain is the largest, deepest dungeon in the Forgotten Realms, and that adventure is designed to take players from fifth up to max level, for D&D that is level 20. It’s a bit of an odd duck, as there aren’t many multilevel dungeons for 5th edition. Odd for a game called “Dungeons and Dragons” but nevertheless, this one does exist. To be sure, it isn’t one of D&D’s most popular campaign books, most likely because it was intended to be a sequel to another campaign setting which took players through the first few levels. (Waterdeep Heist). In this respect, this book is unique in the sense that not only is it a multi-level dungeon crawl, it is also one of the few books which takes players through higher levels of the game. But most agree the sequel is not as good as the first part.
“Abomination Vaults” has no such tone shifts, nor is the path unclear in any way. it is easily laid out for ease of readability and also it has deep story hooks (no pun intended) to get players invested in the adventure. Boasting of a campaign timeline which details a rough history of significant events relevant to this adventure, lengthy campaign advice for game masters, and beautiful detailed artwork by numerous artists, not to mention a striking cover by Setiawan Lee, this book can sit proudly in any hobbyist and gamer’s shelf, until it’s game night. I for one hope Paizo makes more adventure path content for D&D 5th edition, especially if the material is of this high quality.
Ariel Carmona is the managing editor of the Record Bee. When he isn’t following up on county budget, council meetings and other hard news items of local interest, he is engaged in gaming hobbies such as table-top rpgs, mmos, Euro board gaming, and other geeky interests. You can listen to “The Nexus of Geek” show on KPFZ community radio 88.1 FM, Fridays at 4 p.m. PST.
