The Judgement of Rad

Emanuele Betti
Self-Published
Basic D&D
Levels 3-5

Things not always go the way they are supposed to. It’s not uncommon that an adventure, especially in a long campaign, can be greatly derailed due to a player who has got no experience, does not think an action enough or just screws things up for the fun of it. Whenever this kind of things happen, the Master must find a way to fix the situation and give the characters a way out of their trouble, and a second chance to succeed.

This eighteen page adventure details a twenty room dungeon and is to be used at some point in the game when your characters are jailed. Decent interactivity in the dungeon is marred by bad read-aloud and writing style issues. Good concept poorly executed.

This is an english as a second language adventure, from the Italian I believe. There are some grammar and wording issues in it, but all of my commentary disregards this. The issues are not with the translation, I think.

I have a soft spot for “special use” adventure. Use this adventure when someone dies, or use this one when someone is in jail, like this adventure. Yeah, there are some level variability issues, but I think the concepts they present are an interesting genre of adventure that is not well explored. You pull this one out when the party is in jail for a serious offense.

The conceit is that there’s a legal loophole: the party can submit themselves to the Judgement of Rad. The relatives of the victims get to set a quest and the party, given one light source and one normal weapon each, must complete the quest. If they succeed then Rad has clearly indicated that the parties motives were pure. If they fail, well, they were just gonna be killed anyway so no great loss. In this instance the relatives send the party down to a dungeon/well that has a great jewel, to be obtained for the relatives, that will likely kill the party anyway, so a win-win for the kinfolk.

The dungeon proper has a cursed monster, with the (cursed) jewel in its chest that moves around in a preset course, it changing rooms when the party does, as a kind of monster hunt gimmick. It’s a decent idea, and, maybe could have been supported a bit better by noting its path on the map instead of in text in the adventure. You know how I love to leverage a map to overload information for the DM.

The undead in the dungeon, previously killed by the monster/jewel, try to rip the hearts out of characters and eat it when they down a party member, since they had their own hearts done so. That’s a good detail. Breaking up the “i hit you/you hit me” stuff in D&D is almost always a good thing and I wish more adventures would give their monsters a little more character.

The rooms, proper, have some decent interactivity. There’s a crude shrine that will summon a ghost if you pray at it. Some toads hide under a bridge, and there’s a dead body under the water you can dive for … with hidden loot! I don’t talk about it much, but this sort of interactivity is, I think, what makes a good D&D adventure good. The play athe table stuff and the evocative environments are key components that, for me, must each not suck too much. If they are ok, or good, then the D&D adventure can go forward. But the interactivity of the adventure is what’s going to turn a middling adventure in to a great one, providing elements for the party to interact with.

This adventure pays little attention to those first two points. There are multiple points in the adventure with page long read-alouds. That’s hard to handle. Room that say things like “The room seems empty” in the read aloud … and then the DM notes tells us it’s empty. Things should never SEEM or APPEAR TO BE, they just are. Those weasel words just pad out an adventure. In places the read-aloud jumps the gun. It tells you almost everything you need to know about the room. The body is dried out, its missing its heart, etc, etc. The read aloud, if used, should be the initial impression. When the players go examine the thing THEN the DM can follow up with “the body is dried out” or “the heart is missing.” This back and forth between the party and the DM is a critical part of the D&D experience and when you put everything in the read-aloud you negate that core experience. Let the players DO something. Again, interactivity, back and forth between the players and the DM.

The entire preamble is about the prison and justice system. This is mostly specific to Galantri and is the usual “held in lead lined cells” sort of thing. Just removing it all would have been better. It also adds two other prisoners to the party … for seemingly no reason. I thought they would betray the party, but, no, in a refreshing change of pace they are just NPC’s. I have NO idea why they are there … although I do admit a couple of desperate prisoners trying to glomp on to the parties potential release is a nice effect. They just need a little more personality.

The entire writing style could use more whitespace formatting, bullets, etc, to make wading through the DM text easier. As is, it’s just not worth it to me to wade through the text to get the adventure out of it.

This is free on Pandius. And thanks to Dreams/Mythic Fantasy for turning me on to the Pandius site!

http://pandius.com/AX01_The_Judgement_of_Rad.pdf