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| Thunderspire Labyrinth (Dungeons & Dragons, Adventure H2) | 
 enlarge | Authors: Richard Baker, Mike Mearls
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $12.49
You Save: $12.46 (50%)
New (29) Used (13) from $12.49
Avg. Customer Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 7547
Media: Paperback
Edition: 4th
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 96
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 10.9 x 9.2 x 0.3
ISBN: 0786948728
Dewey Decimal Number: 793
EAN: 9780786948727
ASIN: 0786948728
Publication Date: July 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Ex-Library. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More.
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| Customer Reviews:
 H2 = Hack N' Slash 2 August 8, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Too much fighting and not enough role-playing. This adventure is typical of the new 4E paradigm which is great if your under 13 but not so much for adults. Still better than H1 but that isn't saying much.
 An excellent adventure! August 8, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
An excellent adventure. Nice writting and and interesting history, first...shadowfell, and now...underdark?
I would have like this adventure more, if it had a better relationship with H1.
An interesting module, but poorly packaged August 5, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The basic module is fine. It is a continuation of the story from the module "Keep on the Shadowfell." The module looks to play well, and just like Keep, it contains 2 soft cover books and several maps. You can buy this and play it, and it feels pretty good.
The only complaint I have lies in the packaging. The picture you see is the cover of what I consider a "folder" that holds the 2 books and the maps. This folder is made of very thin cardboard, so thin that it easily bends and tears, leaving the meat of the product damaged. For the cost of these adventures, I feel they should have gone in one of two opposite directions - make a larger, single book with a pocket for the maps, or produced a small box to hold all the materials.
H2 has its flaws but is far superior to H1 July 25, 2008
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
Thunderspire Labyrinth is an epic adventure taking place in the deep mazes and caves below Thunderspire mountain. In other words this is an underdark type adventure and has many creatures such as duergar that you would find in the underdark. It is heavy on combat for the most part, but I feel this will be a major criticism of all 4e dnd modules. It seems like the way they are releasing their products is put just enough roleplaying material in there and give the players a series of encounters (some aren't combat) the dm uses to level them up or advance the story. If you look at most modules released by wizards of the coast they are also combat heavy with minor roleplaying stuff in there. This one does a better job of giving out the roleplaying info for the 7 pillared hall than H1 did for Winterhaven and there is more of it. In fact nearly the whole first booklet describes the hall and its citizens and gives a basic overview of the adventure. I can see tons of roleplaying possibilities with each of the citizens but they don't map all of these out. In other words a beginning dm may run the 7 pillared hall as a bland excursion in a bland city and bypass most of the roleplaying fluff. This is sad since the roleplaying info here is pretty good and each of the npcs motivations would make for good roleplaying encounters. This is a problem with wizards modules in general dating all the way back to 3rd edition. I don't see why this surprises everyone. However, that being said there are some really cool skill challenges as well. There is even a simple find the items to open the door puzzle as well.
The paper quality is much better than H1. Just compare the two. No ink smudging but as another reviewer said there is still no back to the 2nd adventure booklet. I have no clue what Wotc's reasoning is behind this. It doesn't make sense why they didn't add a back to the actual adventure, but I guess they have some kind of reasoning. There is only one map and I don't see the reason for the folder setup if you are only going to have only one map. Red Hand of Doom worked great as a book that the map could be removed from. There are some handouts but these have to be torn out of the adventure booklet or photocopied to be used. The Shattered Gates of Slaughtergarde had similar handouts but they weren't in the adventure books and were separate which makes much more sense.
SPOILERS Below
The overall adventure is actually quite good in my opinion. It far surpasses the bland storyline in H1. It deals with goblins,duergar, gnolls and even vecna (really cool skill challenge with this one). It gives numerous roleplaying opportunities if the dm uses them. The npcs are really fleshed out. I have always been a fan of mazes and underdark type campaigns and this one is actually pretty decent. Despite it's flaws I would recommend it to anyone who has played through H1 or just skipped H1 for that matter but wants to give a premade campaign in 4th a shot.
END SPOILERS
The main issue I had with it was the fact it could have been a whole lot better had they just packaged it with the handouts separate and added more maps as well as mapped out a few more roleplaying encounters. The campaign is pretty long but one would expect it to be when taking pcs from levels 3-6 which roughly equates to about 30 encounters plus roleplaying fluff. It should keep a gaming group busy for a while. I was pretty satisfied with the overall package and actually feel that it was well worth the price. However, this good campaign could have been great if only Wotc had put a little more effort in it.
Average hack and slash adventure, July 20, 2008
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
The other posters explained this in detail but I wanted to add a few items. H2 still comes in the folder form, probably printed before complaints about the first one arose. Compared to H1 this one has less maps, less role playing and less reason to participate (in my opinion).
The quality of the products is comparable. The paper is similar in quality as H1.
In the adventure book 1 there are some neat pictures of the rooms to help descriptions, some DM's will like this, I thought of it as filler. Book 1 also introduced some new monsters, which were valuable. 31 pages.
The second book is basically a series of combat encounters, maybe 2 skill challenges and a lot of trap-like challenges for the PC's. 64 pages vs 80 for H1: KotS. Your group may differ, but usually after the Pc's get caught in one trap the game slows to a crawl and becomes a tedious series of perception tests and thievery skill checks.
Pros: easy to run, many types of combat/trap encounters, new monsters
Cons: more work for the DM to include role playing opportunities, skill challenges, cost.
Even at the pre-order price, I feel I paid too much for so little material. The numerous H1 maps (while pre-released elsewhere) were helpful and useful outside of the module. The SINGLE double sided map in H2 is not really useful outside of the H2 adventure which is basically a dungeon crawl with lots of traps.
If you're looking for a great adventure for a good price, check out Red Hand of Doom. It would be worth the effort to take the time to modify the monsters in RHoD to 4th ed. and play it that way. The $25 list price for a module that is half of H1 is not worth it.
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