CM8: The Endless Stair

CM8: The Endless Stair is what happens when you let Ed Greenwood loose on some other setting, here Mystara. Greenwood delivers a humdrum adventure, encrusted with heaps o' lore; and by the end breaks the whole setting with overpowered magic. That's what happens. That is what always happens.

This article contains spoilers! You have been warned.

CM8 is Companion Set so for levels 15-20. It comes in four parts. The first details "Daelzun's Rest", yet another inn-and-tavern. Then comes a wilderness area, a big forest around the Lost Axe Lake. The third chapter features the Tomb of the Cheiromar, which points the way to the fourth chapter and its Stair.

Although the adventure is linear, the lore around it is anything but. And it's disorganised as fuck, so we'll do our best to sort it: The region was the base for Baron Elktazar the Axe Lord, three centuries prior. The Axe Lord had a "magist", Phelzaron the Long-Lived. (Greenwood's not kidding - your party might get to meet this guy, now in dragon form.) Phelzaron trained the Cheiromar and his buddy Halazar. The Cheiromar in his turn went on to train four apprentices. Lathkoon and Zelazel are the two you have to worry about.

The Stair, when you get there, holds an artifact: the Seat of Power. This is ridiculously overpowered even by Companion standards, even by Mystaran standards. If anybody owns it, he's basically God.

About the best you can say about this nonsense is that when Greenwood strips a party member naked this time (and teleports her at "some random location somewhere on the Prime Material Plane"), it is because that character had done a passwall on the walls of a transdimensional dungeon. We cannot say that is not deserved and, compared to Warhammer 40000, she's getting off lightly.