Death's Dark Shadow is a reprint of an old Flame title. As far as I can say little, if anything, has changed. This made me hope to get a fairly decent adventure. After reading it, I am however a little undecided. But one after the other.

First: The cover. I don't know what it should picture. To me it appears like two armoured ballet-dancers in the wood. The motive is just, well, strange. Maybe it is a question of taste and I just have the wrong taste for the cover picture. Maybe not.

The contents of the book reminded me a little bit of the old MERP-adventures. They only seemed to have produced mini-campaigns. These were generally set around a location and had loose connections with it each other. This seems to be what Sargent had in mind when planning the adventure. The subtitle is in fact "adventure pack" which suits the product much more.

The book starts with a fairly detailed description of the town of Kreutzhofen. This town lies in the far south west corner of the Empire. It is described as a relatively important trade town. Kreutzhofen has connections to Bretonnia via a mountain pass, to the Border Princes via the Winter's Teeth Pass and to Tilea via, now listen carefully, an underground river more than a day's travel long. To call the later rather unrealistic is to call water rather wet. Anyway, what is a little more surprising is that Kreutzhofen is said to be trade town. Then you would expect storehouses and merchants. Surprisingly more people in the village are old women that specialise in gossip than merchants, in fact there are as many demonologists and tomb robbers as there are merchants. I would have expected more merchants, people that have a warehouse in Kreutzhofen and not come every few months. But since there are almost no warehouses there is probably no room for merchants, which brings me to the question how Kreutzhofen can be a trade town.

The description itself is okay. Most houses are displayed with a map and every house of a description, although somewhat short. The people of Kreutzhofen may appear to be fairly cliché. A great number of the women are young and beautiful and most of them have affairs from which their husbands know nothing. Most of the rest are old and tell gossips. Of course you have a tomb robber, a demonologist, a usurer (the above mentioned merchant) who wants to take over the village and one of the beautiful women, a mad scientists, an incompetent militia captain, an artist's colony and a Tilea prince living under disguise. The description is okay, as said above, but the citizens of a town should be a little bit more average. When creating a town it is not really appropriate to make every citizen a possible adventure hook. It is more like a looking glass of warhammer careers.

The following pages include a description of the area around Kreutzhofen, which includes a small village, a farm and other locations. Again the description is not really bad, but too much was put into too little space. There are probably more strange things in and around Kreutzhofen than western Europe today. Short paragraphs on law and order, religion, trade and commerce and customs follow. The are okay. Especially the last one can be useful in making the town more vivid and give the players some memorable moments.

Kreutzhofen of course does not stand alone as a town. A great part of the book is filled with adventures. These are broken down into mini-adventures, adventure hooks and one larger adventure. To start with the mini-adventures, the emphasis is clearly on mini here. Most of them probably do not deserve the name adventure. They are merely encounters. Other are extremely short. For example in one adventure the PCs basically have to follow a barge of kidnappers in the underground river. There is little place for investigation before the chase begins. How long can you stretch such a chase before it becomes boring. Depending on the time the fight with kidnappers takes, I would estimate the time of the adventure of around twenty minutes to an hour. Other are a little longer and may fill a complete session. The adventure hooks are little better. Most of them are just too short to serve as a decent adventure. Of course there are exceptions and some are really nice. A complete adventure called "the curse of the Reichenbachs" follows. The start of the adventure is pretty nice. Unfortunately it is heavily influenced by Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, an idea already exploited in Death on the Reik. I was a little surprised to see it again in this book. If you drop that part it may really make a good adventure.

Another section of the book includes some extra locations. Basically these are adventure location as they all serve as climax points for an adventure. One of these locations makes little sense to me, as it is just a location. A tower with some monsters and some treasure. Two are set in dungeons, of which one adventure appears to be extremely deadly to me, unless a skeleton major hero, two earth elementals (size 5), two spectres, two wraiths and two wights sound like easy prey to you.

No matter what you think of the adventure, the biggest drawback in my view is that they have no real connection to the village. They could be set anywhere. It would have been great to see an adventure that is based on a local customs. Or the special location on three trade routes. However the adventure are standard adventure randomly set in Kreutzhofen. This is the difference between the MERP-mini-campaigns, that I really loved, and this adventure pack. The book can possibly best used before the Doomstones campaign, as Winter's Teeth Pass can be reached via Kreutzhofen. One or two short episodes can warm the players up, before they are send into the quest for the four stones.

It is a book that I will probably never pick out of the shelf again. It is not a book that has enraged me for the money I have spend, but it is not really interesting. The town is too overloaded with stereotypes and the adventure are just put together uninspired. Although I did not really like it, some descriptions and ideas are not bad. Therefore I gave it a Stun-factor of four, but see it with a big minus. (ls)