In the Abyss: Planescape Adventure by Skip Williams

In the Abyss: Planescape Adventure Reviews

• 
  Juho Pohjalainen

  I appreciate leaving a bit of space for player characters to come up with solutions, not railroading them with obvious answers to how to get on board the ship and fight its defenses etc., appreciate that they're high level by now and have their own way of doing things. Some good imagery, too. I think all of that's worth a half star, struggle against all the usual trappings of adventures of the time.
• 
  Benjamin

  I'll cop to skimming this real quick, so when I say I wasn't into it, you should know that might be the result of my reading process or of the book itself.
  
  Because here's the book itself:
  
  * there's a bunch of background: the Doomguard faction helped build a ship of chaos for the chaos devils (tanar'ri), but the tanar'ri kept only to the letter of the deal: they let the Doomguard take a ship, but not keep it, as it has a tanar'ri brain driving it.
  
  OK, now, what's wrong with that setup? Is it the idea that the Doomguard helped build a ship, but don't know how it works? I can squint and deal with that. Is it that the chaos demons are doing that "aha, I'm holding to the deal but still tricking you" that's the hallmark of the law demons? Yeah, that feels funny, but it's fine enough, I guess. Is it that it's kind of boring? Yeah, there's some of that. Let's go on.
  
  * so the PCs are recruited by a law demon (in secret) to investigate this missing ship (his cover is that he's in insurance, which I like).
  
  As is typical of adventures of this time, there's talk about prodding the PCs into this, but of course if I were running this today, I would ask for the players to help snare their characters, e.g., "he's offering money, why do you need money so much right now?" But can't blame this 90s module for not being a 2010s module, so we go on.
  
  * the PCs travel to the Abyss and wander around, running into trouble here and there. Like: there's fortresses with demon security patrols; there's lakes of molten iron and monsters around them; there's cities full of demons too.
  
  Here's where I start to really squint suspiciously at this adventure. None of these scenes is written up as necessary, none of them add to the story, none of them give PCs clues to help forward the plot. These are more like random encounters that you might run into to show how dangerous the Abyss is. There's even a note in the intro about how to run this adventure without killing the whole party, but I maintain that the best way not to kill the whole party in combat is to skip the pointless combat -- or if you really like it, just run combat without an adventure tacked on.
  
  * Once the PCs find the ship of chaos, they have to take it over (like a dungeon crawl) or at least learn about it.
  
  I think what I'm responding so negatively to here might not be a negative of this adventure, but just a mismatch: this adventure has a strong push at the beginning (you have to take the job) and then the rest is just sort of a sandbox. How do you find the ship? That's up to you! What do you do when you're on it? That's up to you! Maybe the story is "PCs fight and finagle their way onto the ship to discover that it's a living thing and that's the information they need to bring back to their employer (so the mission has to be more tuned to 'find out what went wrong with this missing ship')."
  
  So I think what's rubbing me the wrong way here is that so much of this is open-ended, but some of it is rather pointed or strongly pushed through the setup. Also, so much of that open-endedness feels pretty repetitive. Like there's one scene where a trapped efreeti might befriend the PCs rather than fight them, but a lot of the other encounters are just "here's a lot of demons."