As cool as Arden Vul is, I found the Long Stair very frustrating. It creates this weird barrier to even getting started that I didn't find fun or engaging. While it does do a great job of setting the scene, it also presents an oddly annoying and illogical start to the entire thing. A few things I noted on my first reading that baffled me, which you also noted:
1. Arden has to be spoken in Mithric? Is this a Heracles vs Hercules kind of thing? That's a pretty picky magic statue.
2.Speaking of the statue, if it's a magic elevator, why the hell is the hand stopping 100' off the valley floor? I feel like either there should have been a broken stair leading to the hand, or some kind of reason given why it's in such a weird position beyond making it a hassle for the players to get to.
3. Since this is the very first thing you're going to run in this entire module, besides the town if you want to actually start there instead of in media res, I feel like these 5 pages should have been polished to a mirror shine. The fact that the daytime table was split across two pages that require a page turn is such a basic layout sin that could have easily been correct with some more aggressive editing.
As cool as Arden Vul is, I found the Long Stair very frustrating. It creates this weird barrier to even getting started that I didn't find fun or engaging. While it does do a great job of setting the scene, it also presents an oddly annoying and illogical start to the entire thing. A few things I noted on my first reading that baffled me, which you also noted:
1. Arden has to be spoken in Mithric? Is this a Heracles vs Hercules kind of thing? That's a pretty picky magic statue.
2.Speaking of the statue, if it's a magic elevator, why the hell is the hand stopping 100' off the valley floor? I feel like either there should have been a broken stair leading to the hand, or some kind of reason given why it's in such a weird position beyond making it a hassle for the players to get to.
3. Since this is the very first thing you're going to run in this entire module, besides the town if you want to actually start there instead of in media res, I feel like these 5 pages should have been polished to a mirror shine. The fact that the daytime table was split across two pages that require a page turn is such a basic layout sin that could have easily been correct with some more aggressive editing.
Great read as always Beau!