We Will Flounder in Foundries!

Another week, another quartet of questionable quests — one of which is mine! MINE! Bwahahahaha!
Feast of the Moon — NW-DCWHIKFXA by @XHRIT
But we start out this week with one of the new featured quests, Feast of the Moon. “You have been cordially invited to attend the annual Feast of the Moon celebration, by Lady Neverex of Neverwinter. Formal attire is requested.”
Formal attire was requested, but we just came in wearing our tired old armor. Didn’t even polish it. ‘Twas okay, they let us in, they even seemed to know us. We mingled with the guests a bit, did some dancing in the disco, chatted with Neverex herself, and then — and then the bad things started. We found ourselves in a deep cave system, overrun with kobolds. Kasul found a hilarious new way to die! Which is to go crazy backstabbing every monster, even the one I just shoved off a walkway into oblivion.
Oops.
Turns out that the worried partygoer we met was on to something — there was an evil plot afoot, and the only question I had was, why would you invite to your party the only people capable of stopping your evil plot?
Still, a well-constructed mission, had a story, the author can spell, which is unusual. This is the sort of mission you hope you’re getting when you sign up to play a Foundry.

Pool of the Dead — NW-DLTS5X6TO by @ADruvez
Pool of the Dead is more typical of the kind of quest we find. We chose it because it was by a new Foundry author, hoping for some play-throughs in order to take the quest out of review and into the general population, in which it has succeeded.
The thin plot has you scouring a tomb for holy water and bleach, after which you scour the tomb with the holy water and bleach, cleaning up the place. Along the way you fight some easy encounters.
Unanswered: How holy water has survived in the tomb for all these years. I guess that’s why it took so long to find. I suggested to Kasul that we command all the undead to do the cleaning for us; he rightly pointed out that the undead would have a problem handling holy water.
I dunno. It’s been in this tomb so long. How holy can it be anymore?
This mission looks like it took fifteen minutes to build. Needs work — a lot more work.

Restless Nights — NW-DB05XVVKV by @BrokenReality
If you’re going to do a hack-and-slash, it pays to put a little time into it and make it fun, as well. In @BrokenReality’s Restless Nights, you enter a crypt in order to defeat the evil Baron who rules the place. Good pacing, several boss battles and quite a lot of actually funny dialog made this a very enjoyable romp.
Some of the floor decorations bugged both us and the encounters; one boss was floating up in the air because of the bugged carpet. I’m surprised that wasn’t caught by testing. It was the only real flaw in an otherwise fun mission.

The Crypt of Befallen — NW-DKCFTXNUZ by @Tipa
My second Foundry! OMG! This one takes us back to EverQuest, to the dungeon that caused me more nightmares than — well, than any dungeon until the time I lost my corpse in Unrest. It’s also the dungeon where my real life daughter met her future real life husband. True story.
It’s a challenge to take a dungeon without any particular plot and shoe-horn one in; I built a new story around the Dagger of Marnek quest just to have some satisfying boss battles in there. And an excuse to have an epilogue in Lavastorm as a lead-in to my next dungeon, Najena’s Lair.
The locked doors are there. You will jump into the Well. You will pull for a group of adventurers. You will help a druid camp Gynok for the Paw of Opolla quest. You will find NPCs that you have no idea what they’re for. You will check Allakhazam to find out 🙂
Just like actual Befallen!
This Foundry is still in review as of this writing. It just needs a couple more plays to be released into the wild.
Hint, hint 🙂
No knowledge of EverQuest is required to play this Foundry, but if you HAVE been to the original, you should be able to find your way around pretty well.