Finished the Texts of Thaan. I liked it overall and the presentation and atmosphere of the module is top notch, it really excels in its gothic horror aesthetic and the module author has really done their homework in regards to all things Ravenloft. Helping the atmosphere is the fact that it's one of the more visually appealing mods I've played - I'm guessing that's a mark of its age as a contemporary campaign and CEP 3.1, not to take anything away from the creator's great work in picking and curating the assets presented of course. The storyline is cool and the writing is good as well, even if the main quest follows the formula of "find X" mcguffins - it still got me invested in the plot and said mcguffins are pretty cool. You have to find several books of evil nature for a shady guy, who's supposed to help you return back home. The books in itself are implemented as usable items with interesting mechanics - upon using them, you get evil points and certain segments of the game make it incredibly hard not to use the second book you get, which offered an interesting dilemma both IC and OOC for my paladin character. Similar evil shifts you get from respawning(plus an xp penalty) and from raising your henchman, both of you being shifted to evil.
You have a pretty interesting companion in the face of Wynn - a Caliban bardess and an Ezrite zealot, whom you have a ton of opportunities to influence in regards to her alignment via dialogue. She often has something to say after a major milestone is reached in the main quest and commonly reacts to some of your decisions. There are two other more fleshed out characters for whom things go horribly south in a delightfully terrible Ravenloft-esque fashion, but I'll keep it spoilerfree.
A major flaw of the mod is its difficulty IMO. It is challenging alright, as it is advertised, but I found the mobs too overtuned for a lvl 1-6 adventure and it was seldom strategic in encounter design and more so a RNG fest. I love difficult encounters when they are fair and reasonable, but oftentimes this was not the case. A vast majority of the mobs stealth and ambush or spawn via triggers, removing or at the very best limiting severely your chance of managing their packs via classic low-level strategies of either taking them by surprise, bottlenecking them at a doorway or pulling them one-by-one. The fairly rare times when mobs don't spawn out of the blue, they are too condensed together for you to manage their numbers via the aforementioned ways. Some of the mobs themselves are fucking bullshit - you have petrifying gargoyles, fish that spam chain-lightning, squids that paralyze you and so on, the latter two reminding me that the underwater segments were pretty fucking disgusting - especially the second one where you have to fetch items underwater with limited air supply all the while undead and fish-people pop out of nowhere and sandwich you. There were also a few very beefed up undead(i think?) which destroy your held weapon on a failed Fortitude save for some fucking reason - thank fuck I played a pally and rarely failed a roll. Wynn, your henchman, is pathetically useless and has some serious brain damage, even compared to the usual one suffered by henchmen. She really enjoys taunting for some reason, which sometimes helped I guess, and also has the knack of completely ignoring my instructions for her to use whatever weapon I'd like her to use or to attack with ranged weapons - randomly deciding to go melee when she feels like it.
Things that slightly remedy the often unfair difficulty is the abundance of items and consumables you can get your hands on fairly easily and early. The itemization for gear is pretty interesting, a lot of items giving you feats and even +2 to ability stuff this early in a campaign. There's some boss battles thrown in and they're very cool thematically, but a sneak attacking dual-wielding baddie spraying you with chain lightning was too much.
A 7/10 module for me, all things considered. The minus points are mostly directed towards combat design, it has already been proven that you can make a challenging and strategic low level adventure without resorting to some of the BS present here. Key in making a difficult low lvl module enjoyable is shifting the focus to resource management and clever itemization rather than a pure numbers game and praying you don't get critted. Sadly, it was mostly the latter for Texts of Thaan, at least in my book.
