SF2 – Burning Desires

This is the second adventure in the Splinters of Faith adventure path and is for a group of characters from 2-4 level. The overall quest is restore an object known as the Scepter of Faiths. Each step along the way the party visits the temple of different faith with adventure associated with it, and I assume there will be a couple of more at the end during the which the big bad wolf/Evil High Priest is confronted. The temple portion is associated with the adventure path however the associated adventure it independent of the the adventure path, allowing it to be dropped in as a one-shot.

The module is about 20 pages long and is designed for a party of 2-4th level characters. There’s a license and add in the page, which long with the credits and table of contents eat up five pages. That leaves us five pages for the description of the temple compound, 2.5 for the wilderness description and background, and six pages of keyed encounters.

What we have is a dwarven temple compound. It’s a circular fortress temple, and, being dwarves, they have a mystic forge. The forge is supposed to have four mystical magic items, one for each element, however two are missing. One has been missing for a very long time and one has just recently gone missing. The second one is instrumental for the adventure path, and is the basis for the wilderness adventure that composes the second half of the module. The temple is clearly well laid out, from the map design, however the temple is rather blandly described. The theft of the mystic flame, the second item, involves a couple of clues in the temple, but again, it’s a little tenuous and a little bland. Fortunately, this turns around in the wilderness adventure.

The second half is a journey through a swamp to find the thief and the mystic flame. The swamp calls for a wandering monster check every three hours. a d20 is rolled and a result of 1-13 indicates an encounter, with about three of those being rather benign. The party will cover about one swamp hex an hour on rafts, so about every three hexes there will be a wanderer roll, with abut 50-50 chance of encountering monsters. The swamp is also rather large, covering a full map page, meaning the party will spend a lot of time in the swamp and hit lots of wanderers. The map is sprinkled with encounters, some brief and some more in-depth. Notably, a keyed encounter is missing from the map, Giant Frogs, which is the only serious error. Also, notably, is that about of the dry land islands in the swamp are populated with crocodiles. 8 crocs on each of them. Each croc is 3 HD. Ouch! I hope the party knows when run! I don’t really have a problem with overpowering encounters, especially in OSR modules, in fact it’s probably a plus.

There are two areas detailed in a bit more depth. One is a sunken temple complex with some undead in it. It’s briefly described, but with a little GM imagination it could prove a creepy place to explore, even though it only has six or so rooms. The second are the mud-tunnels of the giant crayfish, where our evil bad guy is hanging out. I have to say, this fires my imagination. The encounters are not really evocative in either place, but the description are: “sunken temple” and “mud tunnels of the giant crayfish” are both great encounter descriptions.

This is a solid adventure, and the journey through the swamp is nice. With a little GM work to fire some additional details in the encounters then it could be upgraded to a great & memorable adventure.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/85082/Splinters-of-Faith-2-Swords-and-Wizardry-Edition?affiliate_id=1892600