Review: "The Howling Hills" by Charley Phipps

This is not the greatest module in the world.
This is a tribute.

Charley Phipps' The Howling Hills is a free adventure for AD&D First Edition and its clones.  The material could be used with other TSR or OSR rules without much conversion.  The scenario aims to challenge high level adventurers - no mean feat in any game - and also has to deal with the problem of very skilled players.

As I joked in the caption, this is a tribute module.  Phipps is a fan of Gary Gygax's famous Tomb of Horrors and intends his own work to expand that legendary adventure.  The Tomb is my usual example of a 5/5 module, so I can't fault him for taste!  But I'm not sure about the wisdom of trying to put out an expansion for Gygax's work.  Many gamers want nothing more to do with the place, while inviting comparisons to a famous work is somewhat risky.  I will do my best to be objective.

The Howling Hills is quite a lot shorter than the Tomb, at just 11 pages (including its cover and map).  There's very little art here but the pieces included are of a good quality and support the theme.  Phipps' map is excellent: rich in detail, easy to read, and bearing a strong resemblance to Gygax's.

That resemblance is important.  Phipps took up the suggestion in the Tomb of Horrors that Acerak's resting place might be in one of six locations and decided that at least one of these has a false tomb, commissioned by the lich to deter would-be looters.  (And for Acerak, killing is the best form of deterrence.)  The scenario information for the overland adventure is part narrative, part wandering monster table.  I'm not particularly expert on the world of Greyhawk, so some of the information just came across as evocative-sounding terms of art - but evocative terms are useful terms in a background.  It's possible that what Phipps has provided is of limited use to someone who knows Greyhawk better than me, but I felt that his presentation of the premise and background material was good.

Unfortunately, the meat of the adventure is largely unpalatable.  I subscribe to a reading of Gygax's Tomb as a place with its own logic (if not fairness) that can be unpicked by players familiar with the style.  Phipps' scenario doesn't have that same feeling.  The traps are deadly enough, but there's little presented that makes me think the players can think their way through all of this.  Indeed, section 8 gives a very concerning note that a save might be allowed to characters "taking precautions", implying that Phipps wants the raiders of The Howling Hills to ride their luck the whole way.  This is particularly troubling in a campaign that goes from Phipps' adventure to Gygax's, as The Howling Hills presents some similar situations to the Tomb of Horrors but with a very different logic.  (For those reading the scenario, consider what section 5 is telling the players to do when they get to the real Tomb!)

Lest anyone think that I'm just riding down Phipps for diverging from Gygax's model, I don't actually mind his heavier use of monsters and the sections that rely on a possible combat or negotiation are probably the strongest in the scenario.  I particularly appreciated the addition of two "DM Specials" written up by Allan Grohe, especially as they were drawn from Gygax's fiction,  Similarly, there is a fairly good haul on offer to characters lucky enough to get to it, and there are cues in the adventure for further expansion - the most obvious being to go on to the Tomb of Horrors.

Some of the free modules I review are good ideas with a substandard implementation and The Howling Hills definitely falls into this set.  My rating is 2/5, because I think the work does a very poor job of expanding on the Tomb of Horrors while being too derivative to be truly used independently.  With that said, it is functionally complete and a thoughtful reworking of the trap sections could produce good results.