The Golden Voyage

By Jeff Simpson
Buddyscott Entertainment
B/X
Levels 4-6

The Steaming Sea, full of exotic adventure beckons! Ancient temples overflow with treasure, curses surface from the depths of time. Serve the most wealthy of all Sultans and win his favour by journeying on a Golden Voyage!

This 49 page island crawl has about 25 populated hexes and a few mini-dungeons as well as the main event: twentish rooms on two levels populated by an evil wizard whos captured the sultans daughter. It’s minimally keyed with a lot of fetch quests.

I wish I had a copy of Isle of Dread to compare this to. Instead of steaming jungles you are sailing the seas. You see, the sultans kid has been taken and you’re out sailing trying to find the island shes on. You wander about until you find the right one. Predictably … it’s on the far edge of the map. 🙂 Anyway, along the way you meet a host of people who all kind of want you to do something. “Hey man, go sprinkle some perfume on the idol in the nearby temple and I’ll give you this purple key.” Ok, not quite that bad; it’s actually a magic horn. But, there’s a lot of that going on. Sometimes you get something like “you see a giant birds nest on a mountain peak” and then a couple of hexes of description of the island while you try to get to it. Cause, I guess, that’s where you keep a princess? 

As that implies, a lot of this adventure appears somewhat disconnected from itself. You go some place, it’s unlikely that an evil wizard with skeletons lives there with a kidnapped chick, and you move on to the next place. The locations don’t really lead one to another, except in a few isolated cases. This does mimic the basic plot of, say, The Odyssey, but that is literature and this is a D&D adventure. Approaching it more like a hex crawl with a “oh yeah, if you find the princess then that would be cool also” would be a little more in line with what the adventure has going on. That’s not the hook, but that’s what the adventure is. 

I’m not exactly enamored with this. It’s not a terrible thing, but, also, it doesn’t really have much going for it. The descriptions are minimal. “A desiccated corpse stands perfectly still against the north wall.” or “This chapel to Set is kept by a spectre that takes the shape of a sha.” or “Storage: A storage room contains several boxes of bath salts” These tend to tell us what hte room is but not HOW the rooms is. Bedroom: This room is a bedroom. It has a bed. There is a minotaur.” That’s only a slight exaggeration of the adventure. Maybe add “it is crying” and you’ll have the completed room and/or hex. We don’t really have the situations that make up a good crawl, dungeon or hex, and certainly don’t have the descriptions that might make the locations come alive for the DM. 

The adventure opens with that “It’s up to the DM to bring the adventure to life” Gygax quote. My boundless optimism corrupted to cynicism knows no bounds. This is the realm of making excuses. We all have access to the monster tables. “Just roll on them and make an adventure!” does not an adventure make. And if we can accept that is not enough then we have accepted that some degree of effort is required … and thus our discussion can take us there. The purpose of the designer is to put things together for the DM to make their lives easier. At the table running it, from a pedestrian view, but, also, to inspire them to run it. To bring the rooms and encounters to life. To do things that get the players engaged in the adventure THROUGH the DM. This is the value we seem in a published adventure. This MUST be the value we seek, for everything else is already present in the random tables in the basic handbooks. 

If you’re an adventure writer you gotta figure this shit out man. I know you want a Fantastic Voyage, ala The Oddyssey. And that means you need some scope … which I think always means size. But that’s a lot of work and a lot of pages. You gotta really buckle down and figure out how to pack that scope in your page count and in to your number of encounters. How to make them more than minimal and capture the dynamism that all good adventures bring to the table. 

For remember: everything every published in the history of the world is now available to be run in the system of your choice. How does one compete with this? The effort is non-trivial.

This is free at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/447571/The-Golden-Voyage-DIGITAL-EDITION?1892600