By Kelsey Dionne
Arcane Library
5E 1st level
Premise: A ghost ship appears alongside the ship the players are on and they are invited aboard to solve a problem.
What do we get here?
This is a 23 page adventure that takes characters through a ghost ship which holds the afterlife for sailors. Once aboard the players find something is wrong with the afterlife for evil sailors which they need to go solve.
Side note neutral aligned sailors do not seem to get an afterlife, sucks for them.
Usability/Formatting
The adventure is written with the intention that you only need to read what is on the current page to be able to run a scene and I think it works fairly well in that regard. I would still recommend you give the whole thing a read before running it just to be on the safe side but for the most part you should be able to run on the fly.
There are some good options for roleplay as well as a decent amount of combat. The maps provided are of a high standard, I would have liked to have seen them a bit earlier in the PDF so I had them in mind to orientate myself before going through the encounters otherwise I have no complaints.
Portability
There is very little to tie this to any setting so you should be able to drop it into any existing world or run as is. The only real issues you have with plugging this into an existing campaign is that it requires your characters be on a ship so obviously if you are running a desert campaign or overland hex crawl you'll have to get imaginative if you simply have to include this in your campaign.
I'm not really a fan of the ratman NPC as presented, it does not fit my taste but would be a non issue to change.
Recommendation
There is a lot to like here but I am not sure I would want to run this as a level one campaign. Really what I want from a first level adventure is something to kick off a campaign and get the characters up to level two as soon as possible. A number of the hooks to lead into and follow on from this adventure also seem to imply characters with more history than you get at level one.
The world problem presented seems like it should require slightly more powerful characters, this is to do with the ruler of sailor hell being overthrown after all! What I would do is bump this up a few levels and then I think it runs a lot better as an adventure to slot into an existing campaign that is either sea based or has an ocean going interlude.
A good adventure but one I would want to tweak to run.
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