Tarth Moorda is an adventure site for use in dungeons and dragons 3.5. Although the enhancement itself is free to download it is useless without the complete arcane sourcebook as it makes frequent use of the warmage class described within it.

It is important to note that the contents of this web enhancement are an adventure site not an adventure in itself the dm is expected to create an adventure for use in the site. However a basis is given for adventure creation in the form of mysterious killings that have the high warmaster highly concerned.

The bulk of the enhancement is the description of the fortress and what one would find in there and at this it does a good job it describes each building in the fortress and the rooms within those buildings however somewhat frustratingly sizes for the rooms are usually not given so one needs to check the sizes on the map (keep in mind the map is on a 10 feet per square scales rather then the usual 5 this is not a problem but it is important to remember it so you dont make things smaller then they should be. the encounters given for each area are adjusted depending on time of day which helps to add some life to the site which is needed when your players will most likely be doing investigation rather then combat.

The biggest problem with this section is that the locations of each area are not given in relation to each other which also requires constant checking of the map which can get disorienting as the way the cliffs are drawn makes them easy to mistake for descents rather then ascents. In addition it just makes no sense that every single student will be in the dining hall at the same time there needed to guard things i feel like they did that as an opportunity to give people the chance to try and take them all on at once (i should note the cr given for the encounter with every student and teacher seems way to fucking low)

While for the most part the content on the fortress itself is high quality where it really falls down is the npcs.

simply put the npc section is just not extensive enough i can understand the limited background detail on the npcs i would have liked more detail but what you get is pretty good for a free site (although when one considers that the map given in the enhancement already existed in the main book it is possible the site is content which had to be cut in which case the lack of detail in the background is a bit disappointing) (of course there is no background detail on the students but that would be just silly).

However the problem is it does not give stats for most of the people you will encounter it gives stats for the high warmaster, the evil spy, the students, the senior students and the (far to weak) hired guards. i can forgive not having stats for the npcs that are just experts (although the blacksmith also has a few fighter levels) the levels are enough the lack of stats for the warmasters though is simply unacceptable.

I can see why it happened though they backed themselves into a corner when they said each of the 6 warmasters had a speciality it meant they had to stat all six of them except for just 1 statblock for all of them so they just said 10th level warmages and were done with it which causes problems when one of them was said to have once been a fighter.

On the matter of the students i should address something that is one of the biggest weaknesses in the system. The lack of rules for apprentices it makes no sense that the students are level 1 warmages once they reach level 1 that means they have finished there training its made pretty clear that they leave once they are finished the senior students are previous students who have returned for future study after already having done some adventuring or war.

Finally it is worth looking at how well it will work as an adventure site.

The layout of the fort for the most part makes sense however it falls apart a little when you notice there's no outdoor training area they do do outdoor training however it seems they have to do it in the pathways as theres no large open area available which will make things hard for some of the larger spells.

The information that is given on the murders seems to indicate they expect the dm to make it a short and simple investigation which would explain the lack of detail on some matters if you try and run something more extended you will have to make quite a lot up.

It would be rather easy to take out the mysterious murders aspect of the site and just run whatever you want there which is a plus and there is of course always the option of running it as a simple attack on a fortress (they are followers of Heironeous so this can be a great adventure for a party that is in service of hextor).

However there is not enough loot info given theres an armoury but they never say how much is in said armoury and the artwork is apparently only of any value to those with an interest in the college which is a bit silly.

I should also point out that Tarth Moorda has limited water supplys if your players want to do something more sneaky they could sneak in and try to poison the water you could also have the spy do the same.

another sneaky adventure possibility is a temple raid one of the few things given an explicit value is a temple service in the altar and there are offerings to the other gods as well making this a great target for a temple raider of Olidammara  (complete divine page 67)

no cover given as the web enhancements have no cover