First off, special note as to how much I like Fred Fields’ cover here. Nice Baxa stuff inside, too, and some real nice maps and architectural drawings!

This is Nightstorm (1991), the final part of the trilogy of Hollow World adventures. There was one other, and a couple Gazeteer-style sourcebooks (we’ll look at one of those tomorrow) and that’s basically it for Hollow World, which is a bummer!

Anyway, this installment brings us to Shahjapur, which is a stand-in for the Moghul empire. It follows the previous installments in being a sandbox punctuated by events. If this was a run of the mill scenario from the early 90s, it would culminate with a rigid railroad of events in which the players watch as someone else fights the final battle. Not so here! At the end of this epic, the PCs find themselves juiced to semi-Immortal levels, while their antagonist Thanatos suffers a bit of a drain. The result is that they’re on pretty even footing and get to duke it out directly. I can’t tell you how satisfying this is, even just on the level of reading it. I can’t think of another 90s-era D&D adventure that lets you punch the main villain in the face so thoroughly. It’s thrilling!