This is an adventure for Castles & Crusades, although it can be used with any pre-4E version of D&D.
This is a short wilderness based adventure with some strong opportunity for role-playing and culminating in a mini dungeoncrawl and site-based adventure. It has good wandering tables and factions. The dungeon is small with an uninteresting map but it built well.
This module is a continuation from module I1, although several hooks are presented to get the characters involved if it’s being used as a standalone. The most straight-forward hook is the sam as the continuation from I1: rescue a hostage being by humanoid bandits. There are several other hooks presented as well, and they tend to be a diverse lot: map the valley, find the bandits, investigate some ruins, etc. What’s nice about these hook is that they differ quite a bit from the core adventure of rescuing the hostage. This allows the party to stumble upon the core scenario, and the sub-plots, and then decide for themselves what they are going to do about it. Right some wrongs? Ignore it? Turn a tidy profit? In fact, I’d say this is one of the strong sandbox type adventures I’ve seen in the last few months. Most products railroad you. There is clearly a right way to play the module. This one does not; it simply presents an area with some things going on and provides a couple of hooks based on the setup to get the players involved in the action. That’s good design.
I1 had some serious issues with organization and verbosity. This product is almost completely different in that respect. I text is certainly not terse, however the extreme exposition that was in I1 is not present. In addition things are organized much better, although there does seem to be a certain style of presentation from this publisher that I have trouble with. The various section headings are not clear to me; or rather, I expect one thing when I see a section heading I get something completely different. Either it jumps ahead  when I think it should be providing more detail or it provides more detail when I think I’m reaching a major new section. That was a major issues for in I1 as well, and while it’s still present in this product it’s impact is not as great. There’s also a combined two page glossary and regional history at the end. Thank Pelor! I1 was hard to get in to because of the slavic/germanic proper names used. They add a LOT of character however you really need to pay attention to not get lost. The glossary helps a lot, and is not so brief to be useless or so long as to be boring. I really liked the regional history put in the end as well. It sort of frames the material as supplemental; I don’t have to slog through it to get to the core of the adventure but it’s there if I’m a n0Ob to the series or want more flavor. Well done.
The adventure starts with an overland portion. We get wandering monsters charts for two different type of region. These charts are expanded by the individual encounter listings for them, which spread out over three pages for each of the two charts. The various encounters range from animals, weird things, and humanoids. What’s interesting is that the vast majority of what the party encounters is NOT looking for a fight. The animals may be looking for an easy meal from a lone figure, or may be simple woodland animals who run off. The humanoids are treated as real living entities with their own goals rather than just an XP total with a sword. Most of the wandering monsters have at least one paragraph of text associated with them, and several have a column, that describes what they are doing and how they will react, etc. This sort of wandering chart has popped up in other modules form this publisher and I liked it then also. I like it when wandering monsters have a purpose in life, however I do tend to favor terse text over verbose, so I would have been happy with a “hunting rats” or “looking for straggler to pick off”, or “generally not in the mood to fight.” next to each encounter. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. 🙂
There are really only two fixed encounters in the wilderness. The first is a set of humanoid assassins who are camped out waiting for an opportunity to conduct a hit and finish their job. As such they are not immediately hostile to the party and there should be an opportunity for some interactions to occur and perhaps a deal or two to be struck. It’s really just a set up for the second encounter. The second encounter is with a small hill tower being occupied by goblins, with a small dungeon below it, some bandits visiting, prisoners locked up, and a coupe of other groups present as well. By my count that’s SEVEN different factions running around this small area. They all have their own agendas and trying to get something different done. Their agendas don’t necessarily conflict, but they are not exactly the same either. It reminds me of the set ups that designers usually try to put in their cities/ You know, the ones where they try to set up different factions and generally fail? Well this one doesn’t fail. Despite there being a great number of groups in the area their motivations are clear and presented well and easy to keep track of. We know why they are in the area, what they want, and how they are likely to react to certain  events. This is a perfect place to drop a group of troublemakers like the party.
As mentioned, a small hill tower is the site of the core adventure. The ruined tower is surrounded by a small palisade at it’s crown and, unknown to most of the factions, has a small dungeon underneath. There’s a group of humanoids in the “fort” which control it, another two sets of visiting bandit humanoid groups, the group of assassins nearby who want at the other group of humanoids hiding in the hidden dungeon, a pragmatic humanoid merchant, and the prisoners the PC’s are probably after. WHat’s great is that no group is immediately hostile to the party OR friendly to the party, not even the prisoners, for their own justified reasons. This gives the party a tremendous amount  of freedom to accomplish their objectives, whatever they may be.
The dungeon under the compound is unknown to most of the factions. The layout is pretty simple, a hub & spoke design where the party enters at the hub. The design, while not overly complex, is interesting and should provide ample opportunities for exploration. There are several environmental based traps that fit in well with the dungeons design and history. There are a few vermin about, and a couple of undead. The dungeon has a nice feel to it and several weird elements, including some interesting new non0-standard magic items. Most of the rooms don’t contain monster encounters, there is some unguarded treasure, and the entire place has a nice naturalistic feel to it while still retaining some classic fantasy elements and a few doses of the weird. There’s no wandering monsters for the dungeon, and the map is simple, however the designer was really on the right track here. It would make a great single-session dungeoncrawl, even though there’s only 30 or so keyed encounters.
What’s NOT present that was in I1 are the area and regional map. You’ll have these if you also have the I1 module, however it would have been nice to see something in this product also, especially since the sandbox like element is so strong. It has to be hard on the publisher; figuring out which information to repeat and which information to leave out. I do not envy them their task. This is a great little product that presents an adventuring site at a moment in time. What the party does with it is up to them.
This is available on DriveThru.
I like how the last several reviews begin with a short overall summary. Thanks!
Any chance you can add some kind of list to the blog showing all the modules you’ve reviewed, with clickable links to the reviews themselves? (I’m always asking for something!)