I find this adventure amusing and fun. It allows for good Role-playing while still satiating a bit of the roll-player in all of us. Grit is great and the bad man idea too. I used this to introduce some new players to third edition rules as recommended. It brought together a motley group of PCs and I developed a funny new campaign based off of the deceased cow and Richard. Before I rant about that though, I want to reiterate how fun this adventure is and how I think it's a good lesson for role-players to learn that sometimes patience and not acting immidiately is a virtue. :)

Now, I'll ramble about how I used it.

At the end Richard did turn out to be a necromancer. But let's talk a little about this cow. There's an amusing little tid bit that most don't know about our bovine victim. Tzaltos, a demon from the elemental plane of fire, had recently been banished to the plane where our adventurers are. Unfortuantely for Tzaltos, it was given a corporeal form and it didn't have much choice in the matter. Kess, the cow we were speaking of, was actually the corporeal incarnation of our friendly extra-planar fire demon, Tzaltos. Tzaltos found his first few attempts at using powers to be miserable failures seeing as how they all had some somatic and verbal components. Tzaltos' new verbal abilities ranged from Moo to Mooo and every time it lifted a leg it would fall over. So it was trapped in the form of a cow. When it was slaughtered by Richard, no deity laid claim to its soul and so it was trapped in a form of pergatory where all the souls of those Richard killed went. So far those souls consisted of Kess and ... that's it. (By the way, you've probably noticed at least a *few* inconcistencies in this story line. But it's meant to be silly. Just live with them)

Once the players confronted Richard he accidentally killed himself through a critical failure with one of his spells. This led to him being sent to his own pergatory, where he met Tzaltos. Tzaltos was now free to go back to the plane where he was once a cow but he still needed a corporeal form. Tzaltos decided to make Rich his new form. But Richard couldn't leave this stasis unless somebody did a few things first (in the real world). So, he pressured the players who killed him into doing it by inducing a nightmare while they were all asleep. It was a very neat sequence with blood, torture and whatnot. Now, Tzaltos takes Rich's form and goes back to the plane where the players are. Unfortunately for Tzaltos, Richard still has a vast control over his body.

The next thing you know, the players are being chased around by Richard/Tzaltos who now is Lvl 3 Necro / Lvl 9 Wizard and constantly gaining more power. :;shrug:: It's just a tad silly. But lots of fun.

el Pygmy