Reading a review of a module is not a good idea. That is, unless you are a
DM. Otherwise, I'm sure you know what will happen, which is exactly what will
happen: you will know what will happen.
"The Last Dance" is an adventure module published by Atlas Games for their Penumbra line. The story goes like this:
A terrible curse forces the victims of a tragedy to re-enact the night of their death for all time.
In a castle from the distant past, a prince tried to kill his elder sister.
His plan was to put poison in her drink and blame the murder on the orc delegation.
What's more, the sister in question was supposed to marry the orc chieftain's
son in order to create long lasting peace between humans and orcs. That fact
did not sit well with the prince, so he decided to remove what was between
the throne and him: his elder sister. To facilitate the murder, an allied
sorceress was supposed to use a powerful atrifact to enhance two spells; one
that would force the courtiers to dance and thus distract them, another to
stimulate their rage when they found out the princess was murdered. Everything
went wrong. The prince left the poisoned drink untended and the king ended
up drinking it. The sorceress failed to control the artifact and now, because
of mystical echoes, the assassination plays itself over and over again. The
PCs get trapped in the re-enactment and must prevent the assassination from
happening or be caught for eternity in the "Last Dance".
The PCs get trapped into a time loop on the dance floor. They have to figure out sequences of dance steps in order to move out of the time loop. After that, they travel around the castle and hopefully pick up hints and clues that will help them solve the mystery and prevent the king from drinking the poison. Because the original murder happened a thousand years ago, the language spoken by the castle's inhabitants is incomprehensible and characters will have to resort to pantomime or spells to communicate with them.
There are quite a few logical gaps in the unfolding of the story. The way the DM is supposed to sequence events in the time loop is inconsistent. For example, every time the PCs enter the dance floor, they have to go through the three dance sequences to find themselves further in time, after the crime was committed and everybody killed each other. If they don't follow the sequence, they suffer subdual damage. That's fine, but the last time the PCs enter the dance floor, it doesn't happen the same way and they can now move around the dance floor as long as they follow "legitimate" dance step sequences. While everybody in the castle has been dead for uncountable centuries and the PCs eventually end up in a point in the time-loop sequence when everybody has been killed, the last time they enter the ball room it is supposed to be tragic if they do not save the people this time around.
Basically, the concept is very original, specially the scene of the final fight when the PCs have to use dance steps to manœuvre around the battle. The problem is that to play this module either the DM assumes his players are absent-minded nincompoops or he is a master at pulling the wool over his player's eyes and hopes they don't notice the inconsistencies. If the DM does the work of ironing out the wrinkles, this module offers unusual roleplaying possibilities.
