Spoilers included.

Necromancer keeps putting out stuff I like. (For that matter, so do Fantasy Flight and Green Ronin, but I do have a soft spot for adventures, and so...) Chaos Rising, an adventure for 12th-level characters, is no exception. It's not perfect, but it's good. You won't regret purchasing it -- not by a long shot.

The setting of the adventure is a ruined dwarven castle atop a huge spire called the Devil's Finger. Long ago, the Faceless Lord (Jubilex, Joo-bil-ex, which is to say, not Juiblex, Joo-wee-blex, from D&D products, although the fact that many people say Joo-bil-ex anyway makes the whole thing more confusing) placed the amulet that contains his soul in a vault here, but then was inadvertently trapped himself. Two different groups of bad guys want to get in to free him, and the PCs arrive to stop them and get the amulet themselves. Except that one group of bad guys, serving Orcus, is actually attacking the dwarven castle 3,000 years in the past, when there were still dwarves there. So the PCs have to go back in time, or rather, to an alternate timeline, stop the bad guys, and get a key to help them in the present.

Confused yet? Yeah, trying to provide a synopsis of this adventure shows its major drawback. It's really complicated (and I hardly scratched the surface of all the stuff going on). There are multiple factions, working at three different periods of time, and the PCs have to deal with all of them. It's very imaginative, but as the DM you'll have to read the Introduction at least twice just to figure out what's supposed to be going on. Worse, the biggest blunder is that the author attempts to provide an option where the PCs' traveling to the past doesn't affect the present -- so they're not really traveling through time, but to a demiplane with an alternate spire and castle and whatnot. I call this a blunder because it makes a confusing setup far more complicated. If you're going to have a time travel adventure, just have a time travel adventure and try to deal with all the potential ramifications (which this adventure does, as a different option).

But I said this adventure was good, right? I gave it a rating of 6, which means I'd use it. Once you get you understand what's going on and figure out how to put it in your campaign, there's a lot of great stuff here. The adventure is organized in a way to help you deal with the complicated flow of events. There are sidebars explaining the differences between the dwarven castle of 3,000 years ago, 1,200 years ago, and the one today (because the PCs go to all three). I really like the premise of the adventure having effectively three different scenarios, all set in the same place, but all radically different because they take place in different times.

The NPCs in Chaos Rising are imaginative, well-described, and their actions are logical and well thought out. My favorites are the Brotherhood of Ooze, who wish to serve Jubilex. They are none too competent, but make for some interesting encounters.

The adventure also contains a new domain, slime, for Faceless Lord worshippers, a number of new magic items and spells (many of them oozy), a new prestige class (Brother of the Ooze), and two new monsters: the corrupted and a greater ooze demon. All these new mechanical bits seem pretty solid (actually, they seem pretty oozy, but you know what I mean).

Overall, the adventure's a fair bit of work, but you are well rewarded for the time you put in. And there's nothing wrong with offering a little bit of challenge for the DM, and creating something that takes a little brainpower to use. Most importantly, however, this is certainly an adventure your players will remember.

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