BF1 Morgansfort

 

By Chris Gonnerman

Basic Fantasy

B/X 1st level

Premise: Having inherited the rulership of Morgansfort from his father the new lord has put out the call for adventurers to come help clear out some dungeons in the area.

What do we get here?

 Much in the vein of The Keep on the Boarderlands this is your classic starting adventure that gives you 76 pages containing a home base for your players and three different dungeon locations for them to get started on.

 There is a short gazetteer upfront that gives you info on the broad strokes of the game world plus an in depth break down of the starting fort. For my money there is a bit too much going on at the home base, the lord himself is too powerful with too many soldiers available to him to believably need some scrub adventurers to turn up and solve all his ills for him. That is a minor quibble which can be easily over looked though.

 My other minor quibble is that as a starter adventure and setting things are just a bit generic. For example the magic items are all a bit bland compared to what people in the OSR scene tend to prefer. Flavour does creep in as you get into the later dungeons which improves things a bit.

 I did cringe at a couple of points when reading through where the adventure leans on historic views of gender roles that we really just do not need when it comes to monster actions. It is something that could be easily cleaned up if the product gets a revision.

Usability/Formatting

 For the most part this is a perfectly serviceable product that you can run as is and I like that all the monster HP has been rolled for you as well as having nice little boxes for you to cross off as the monsters take damage. In general the text does a good job of leading new dungeon masters through how to run adventures for new players.

That being said it is really on the base line there, it could be improved in a number of ways that would make this really fly along. For a start I would have loved to have the dungeon maps up front of the descriptions rather than having to slog through all the room descriptions before you see the map that puts them in context. 

 I would also like to have seen a bit more care taken with some of the box text to give a more natural exploration of the rooms rather than giving most of the goods upfront. The paragraphs of information on rooms could also be broken down into bullet points with bolding for ease of use on the fly.

Portability

There is a lack of flavour that does make it easy to slot this into whatever world you wish to brew up even if does not exactly make this product enticing on its own merits.

 It should be easy enough to plop this down in most campaign worlds and give you a good way to kick off a new campaign.

Recommendation

 You can get this product literally for free on the basic fantasy site, along with a number of other useful products, so really there is little excuse not to check it out.

 I think this is a great little starter set, one that you could maybe tweak a bit to add some flavour too, but it will get you up and running with a campaign that fits suitably into the “kill monsters and take their stuff” feel of OSR gaming.

 Personally if I was running I would try and put some more flavour into things both by spicing up the magic items and adding in a bit more history into the dungeons to give the adventure some of the depth you would expect from say a Nectoric Gnome product like Winter's Daughter. I would also weaken up Morgansfort itself or even make one of the players the new heir to the castle to kick the campaign off.

https://www.basicfantasy.org/downloads.html (print versions available on Amazon and Lulu)