The Allure of Poison – 5e D&D adventure review

By Erik Horvath
Self Published
5e
Level 5

Meet Navo Purebrew, a master distiller with a new way of distilling spirits. But when something of extraordinary quality is produced it is bound to draw in trouble. Navo could never have imagined that trouble would find him in the shape of a huge elemental spirit made up of his very own beverage. Visit the renovated chapel / bath house of Sharess, deity of indulgence, and help navo defeat this power-drunk creature alone.

This twenty page adventure describes a three level site with about twenty rooms. Mixed read-aloud and long DM text could be much better. Much. The designer is a reader of the blog, soon to be former reader, and asked for a review. It’s really that simple.

Genre warning: this ain’t my thing. Quest dude made friends with a genies, was given two water weird helpers, who in turn have a bunch of kua-toa buddies who show up? And dude lives in an abandoned temple to the god of hedonism, which he’s renovated back to perfect form? I don’t think my preference in this area impacts the review, but be aware.

There’s a magic ring of protection in this that is in the form of two arms hugging. That’s good.

You come across a drunk man on the side of the road. He says ice and water monsters have invaded his home. Could you please? There is no reward. I understand that, no matter what happens, the players are having this adventure tonight, but, still, just a bit more a pretext would have been nice. The outcome is the same, the party goes on the adventure, but I do prefer not pushing the suspension of disbelief this early in the adventure.

Many of my reviews concentrate on the read-aloud and DM text, and this review will be no different. There’s a basic usability issue that most DM text and read-aloud make up the primary cause of. The ability to quickly scan the adventure and find the information you’re looking for, at the table, is what theis scannability enables, when the DM text and read-aloud is done well. Further, the read-aloud generally touches both in interactivity and evocative scenes. Done well the adventure is joy and done poorly it comes off as bland. Using words, as this adventure does, like huge, and such. Unbearably strong smells, and looks of horror on peoples faces. These are boring words and descriptive text that features conclusions rather than descriptions. The read-aloud also has a touch of that overly flowery and conversational style that one associates with novels rather than adventure read-aloud.

DM text is similar. It tends to mix in background information and has a conversational style that adds little to the adventure. East is the seating area and west is the entrance room, just as the map shows. This room used to be … and this room held a battle between X and Y. Mixed in to the middle of all of this is a great sentence: Tiny ice shards cover the floor and blood is sprayed across the southern wall of the entrance area. More like that, please, and less background and trivia and needless padding. “This room shows signs of a battle” No, it doesn’t. It has those little ice shards and blood splatters.  “Before you stands …” No. 

A noisy room is hard to hard in advance. Brush that is meant to hide a wooden fence, and provide an actual in play obstacle, is not shown on the map and only buried in text. Bullets points are used … in the initial adventure  background information, where it’s not needed and paragraph form is ok. But then the rooms, where it would stand out, it’s not used. Weird. It’sd use in NPC information, the quest giver is good, but that’s essentially it.

Other than that, how was the play Mrs lincoln?

This is Pay What You Want at DMsGuild with a suggested price of $2. The preview is six pages and shows you the intro and a few of the encounters, so, good preview.

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/301688/The-Allure-of-Poison?1892600