Chapter 6: Adventures
Question: What do these monsters have to do with the Ghostwalk Campaign Setting?
Answer: as far as I can tell, nothing
. But here they are anyway.
Probably as originally conceived, this chapter was mostly not supposed to be in this book. Ghostwalk was pitched as a setting, so I'd imagine that part of that pitch was a series of adventures set in that setting. When Ghostwalk got shelved and ultimately demoted to a stand alone book, the entire adventure path (such as it was) was condensed into this book. I don't actually think it's a full adventure path, and I'm not saying that because it fails to get you to 20th level. It's been a while since I calculated 3e experience points, but I'm pretty sure that seven encounters doesn't take you from 1st level to 4th. There are... gaps... in the adventures.
The chapter is 45 pages long (the table of contents claims 46 but is factually wrong about what page the glossary starts), and covers 7 adventures, targeting levels 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 12th level. Except... it doesn't even do that. Only the first two and the fourth are actual adventures. The others are “encounter sites.” The encounter sites don't even really seem to have anything to do with the setting, you fight giant spiders and manticores and minotaurs – things that the rest of the book can't even be fucked to write into the population demographics at all. So really there are only three adventures, and they are for 1st, 4th, and 6th level characters.
Actually, there some kind of neat ideas in the three adventures that actually exist. There's a theater company that is secretly run by evil undead who wear masks that let them appear as living beings. But the grand master plans are retarded. Having undead working to “destroy all the ghosts” doesn't make any sense. The adventures try to sell me on the undead and the Yuan-Ti as the big bads of the setting, but it just comes off as weird and pointless.
These adventures are highly telegraphic and seemingly unfinished. More than half of these are just set pieces that don't have beginnings or ends. I can't help thinking that most or all of this chapter was never intended to be included in this book. Probably some of these were never intended for the Ghostwalk campaign setting at all and were just things that were lying around. Which brings up how
thin this book is all around. Without this chapter that doesn't seem to fully belong, the whole book is less than 180 pages, which is chump change compared to a setting book like Forgotten Realms (320 pages), Eberron (288 pages), or even Kingdoms of Kalamar (272 pages). And to get it up to that page count they had to heap filler into every chapter. When you total up how many paragraphs are spent on the simple idea that they hadn't really created much space for the Barbarian class in the setting, it adds up to multiple pages. Multiple pages that could have been used to write up several additional countries or organizations and actually create some fucking play space for the class.
The bottom line here is that this setting really only has three main ideas, and neither of them are well developed. The thing where they did away with level loss for resurrection is good, and creates a different play dynamic. But even
that wasn't developed properly because to have the respawning work properly they needed a zero level ghost template which they didn't provide. The living and the dead thing is cool, but again it needed streamlined and functional ghosts and that just isn't happening here. Ghosts are a pile of weird non-sensical exceptions and make everyone sad. And of course, the city needed to be developed deeply enough to have things to do in it. As is, it's barely a line of shops that you can visit between trips to the local dungeon.
The book has some interesting anecdotes. There is a bit on “jumpers” (who are people that put away the money to get themselves raised and then kill themselves so they can check out being a ghost for a few days). There's a story about a woman who told her family that she'd give out the key to her treasure to the first person who met up with her in the city of the dead, prompting a cross country race as soon as she kicked it. And so on. Some of these stories are actually pretty good, and would have made a fine inclusion in a sidebar. With a little work, it could have been a neat little deal where they had “Stories of Manifest” that showed up every few pages in special boxed text. But interspersed with the main text, it's just jarring. You're supposed to tell me about the economy of a city that gets some unknown number of thousands of naked penniless immigrants who may not even speak the local language every day and you're taking valuable paragraphs that could be explaining what kind of amazingly advanced credit system makes all this work and instead you're telling a wholly unrelated story about some dude who died two hundred years ago. There are enough kind of cool little story ideas in here that I have no doubt that Monte was able to wow everyone at the pitch meeting. But the actual
setting gets essentially no development and those stories just get rammed into the main text body at random.
The adherence to white and black morality does this setting no favors at all. I don't think there are a lot of people who want to play in a setting about the living and the dead living side by side who simultaneously also demand that “undead are bad” be an ironclad rule of business. It just doesn't make sense. The humanocentricity of everything is just
bizarre when it's supposed to be sitting on the gate that every dead humanoid from everywhere has to walk through. Orcs and Goblins and stuff just don't even get written into the population dynamics, and that makes no sense. The segregation of the monster races actually feels squicky in this context. Apparently lizardfolk have to hide their forms behind
alter self masks to meet their ancestors. Half Orcs meet in secret tunnels to be allowed to bury their dead. There is a fucking
bounty on the scalps of Yuan-Ti, which you can collect without proving that the particular Yuan-Ti you killed were actually doing anything villainous before you stabbed them to death. The casual racism is so uncompromising that it actually makes my gut side with Team Evil here. It's seriously like reading segregation apologia from Southern Gentlemen, the point of view faction doesn't come off well. And I'm one hundred percent certain that this book isn't actually self-aware to notice that it's doing it – but their constant use of propaganda-words like “foul,” “taint,” and “corruption” don't actually make the bad guys seem bad – just on the other side from the one the authors want you to be on.
All in all, Ghostwalk is a failure. There are some good high concept ideas, some nice stories, but the meat of development is undone. The actual design of the setting is sketchily designed, with a lot of filler pieces and a format created to spread limited content over a larger amount of pages. Even within that context, they had to dump extra crap that frankly doesn't belong here at all into the book to make their page counts. Would Ghostwalk have been good if people had put in the extra work it needed? Maybe. It's hard to tell, because I would say this stuff isn't even a quarter finished. That SKR and Monte would say this thing was done says bad things about their work ethic and design skills.
-Username17
