Tales of the North – The Ordan Valley

This is a small regional module that details a home base in the Ordan valley and five short adventurers in this borderlands area. A small wilderness map is provided, about 12 miles by 12 miles, along with a wandering monster table for the valley. It’s suitably old school, with a variety of encounters that will quickly overwhelm a low level party: Owlbear, werewolves as outliers with bandits, orcs, and kobolds being more common. I don’t like humanoids on my tables, I like my monsters to we doing something while wandering, and I like stats provided with my wanderers. This table strikes out on all three fronts and just comes of as bland. A word of advice to all publishers: everything in the module should contribute to it.

The home base is a small farming community in the valley, complete with fortified inn, temple, mage tower, and “druid” grove, where druid is defined as “cleric who likes animals and nature and cant turn undead anymore.” The mage buys magic items and trains. The temple provides healing and trains. The fighters in the inn provide training, etc. Most of this really just feels like a logistical exercise in providing for all that a party may need. As a home base the inn is mostly forgettable. There are a few NPC’s in it however most of them are rather bland. One of two of them show promise: a potentially murderous bar-maid who tries for revenge if the party wipes out the valley bandits, or a Baron Harkonin-like trade who puts a price on the bandits head with a bit extra if the killings are extra gruesome. Those two are really the standouts with most of the rest of the NPC’s not even coming close to their level of flavor text. I like strongly flavored NPCs with hooks, especially in a home base, and I wish there was more in this one.

The five adventurers are nothing too special. There’s some orcs camped out in an abandoned temple. There’s a bandit camp. There’s some trog caves. There’s a druid trying to get all of the above groups to attack the humans. Finally, there’s a forgotten tomb. Most of the areas have some leads to one or more of the others: letters from one party to another, maps in scroll tubes, etc. Each setting has about 15 or so keyed encounters. There’s not really much to distinguish the various encounter areas, other than to say they are generally a jumble of monsters with lots of animated statues and wood golems present. These are going to be tough adventurers for a 1st level party, but I like that. A few things rubbed me the wrong way. Doors in the tomb that can only be opened with a certain key and NOT a knock spell. That smacks of a computer RPG fetch quest, which I LOATHE. There are a couple of other issues related to known and unknown passwords, which are very difficult to discover at these levels. One of the maps, an old temple with orcs in it, has the beginnings of some decent maps. One of the levels has three separate areas that don’t connect, reached through different ways. That’s a good thing and should drive a party NUTS. There is some information provided on organized responses to incursions, which I appreciate.

This module could use more detail & customization. I’d like the magic items that appear to be more unque. There’s a single example, a magic sword that’s a mageslayer. I’d like to see more like that, and even more customization of the magic items than that. There’s not many weird things to poke around or play with; oh, there’s a corridor with some evil goo on it, however I’d have liked to see more in the way of weird and strange things, both environmental and things for the characters to play with, like pools, statues, etc. As it is many of the keyed locations in the same dungeon feel a bit disconnected from each other.