Product Description

Evil schemes are afoot in Cauldron, a metropolis of merchants built into the caldera of a long-dormant volcano. Driven by the dreams of an insane demon prince, bizarre cultists known as the Cagewrights scheme from ancient tunnels beneath the volcano, stoking it once more to terrible life. To prevent their agenda, your band of adventurers must brave haunted jungle ruins, slay mighty dragons, and bind themselves to a layer of the infinite Abyss. Will their swords and spells be enough to save the Shackled City? From new DBD publisher Paizo Publishing!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #777371 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-24
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 410 pages

Customer Reviews

Shackled City worth the investment
The Shackled City Adventure Path provides a complete campaign for the Dungeons and Dragons game taking player characters from 1st level through 20th level. This beautiful hard cover book contains 12 adventures that make it possible.

The adventures themselves are fairly strong, though some of the connections are a bit tenuous. Most DMs will want to modify the adventures in some ways, though the product is flexible enough to do that.

It includes some nice features, including a multi-page map book the DM can pull out and refer to conveniently. It also includes a poster map of the city of Cauldron (where most of the adventures occur) suitable for hanging. It has a pre-apocalyptic eruption on one side, and a post-eruption on the other.

The hardcover differs from the adventures published in Dungeon in that James Jacobs (An editor of Dungeon) has tried to rework some of the adventures so that they flow well together.

The only real failing is that the "bad guys" in the adventure are too successful at keeping a low profile. The final arc of the adventure is fighting a number of bad guys individually that the PCs have never even met.

This minor problem can be overcome simply by introducing some of the villians (if not their overall objective) earlier with some foreshadowing.

Great value in a great adventure
The price tag may look large for a "book", but only to those who haven't been following Dungeon. This single book (and it's a HUGE book) contains the adventures that were published one-to-an-issue in an 11-issue run of Dungeon magazine. To get those individual issues now would cost quite a bit more, and you would still need to go download plenty of suplemental material from Paizo's site.

The Age of Worms is the current onging path, and now there's talk about the possibility of these mega-adventures being turned into video games. This is probably more exitement than I've seen over "modules" for D&D since the 1980s. For new or returning DMs who are looking to set up a brand new game, this is a great way to go and will take months to complete, even if you game every week. If you're the type of DM who likes to hand-craft your adventures, consider picking this up and using sections or even just ideas. It's great material from some of the best in the business.

Shackled City ... Unchained Fun!
The Shackled City adventure path is a compilation update and expansion of the serial adventures that ran in Dungeon magazine over the last couple of years. It presents a detailed setting (the city of Cauldron and its surroundings) and an adventure that will genuinely take characters from 1st level up to 20th uncovering many mysteries along the way.

This is D&D at its best and I hope will become a classic that gets referenced along with the Temple of Elemental Evil and the GDQ series. If you run a D&D game and want a mega-adventure buy this now!