In The Belly Of The Beast cover

Pyramid Review

In The Belly Of The Beast (for d20)

Published by Atlas Games

Written by Mike Mearls

Illustrated by Helena Wickberg, David Interdonato, Chris Seaman, and Scott Reeves

32 pages; $8.95

In The Belly Of The Beast is the third entry in the Penumbra series of d20 scenarios from Atlas Games. It is designed for four to six characters of second through fourth levels, though it is specifically aimed at third level characters.

As per the previous two Penumbra adventures, In The Belly Of The Beast is a 32-page book. It is clearly laid out, with the Open Gaming License material plainly contained in grey boxes. The artwork is also attractive, in particular the tentacularly themed sidebars from Scott Reeves and the character pieces by David Interdonato. The thumbnail portraits of the adventure's NPCs are a little rough, but they do convey the personality of each rather well. Belly of the Beast also makes use of ProFantasy Software's Campaign Cartographer 2 to design its single map. As with the other Penumbra adventures, this map can be downloaded from the Atlas Games website.

Importantly, a quarter of this module is actually an eight-page pull-out special section. This includes not just the map, but also the adventure's single handout and details of the eleven important NPCs in the adventure, including their game stats, background and motivations. It is rounded out with a table to help run all of these NPCs though any combats that might occur during the final . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.



Article publication date: April 13, 2001

Copyright © 2001 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.