By Thief of Whispers
Self published
Worlds Without Number levels 3-4
Premise: A tribal leader beset by grief at the loss of his son his holding a village in the grips of terror while he tries to blind a demon's spirit to his body.
What do we get here?
This is a hex crawl spanning 19 pages that has 13 locations for you to interactive culminating in a dungeon with 15 keyed locations.
Usability/formatting
Now I will start by saying this is perfectly usable in its current status and the formatting is decent, about average for a modern adventure. That being said with some fairly easy steps there are some major ways this adventure could be improved for dungeon masters looking to run it.
The same advise you will hear a lot of places applies here. Split the page into two columns then break down the information in the paragraphs into read alouds and bullet point expansions would make the information so much easier to scan and track. My own personal bugbear applies here too, stick the maps at the top of the section they apply to so you can orient yourself before reading what all the locations are.
Speaking of maps, the dungeon one is decent enough, the hex map is a bit hard to parse which is kind of unforgivable as there are many free options out there for knocking out hex maps easily.
In places there is a bit too much writing, things could definitely be cut back. With a good editing and formatting passes this could be really top notch. There is one place near the start where the adventure refers to “men and boys” defending the village, in this day and age I think we could probably make that “warriors and adolescents” to get the same message across while being a bit more inclusive.
Portability
You need a northern-ish/pseudo Scandinavian area to plop this adventure down in ideally although I suppose you could re-skin it fairly easily to a different type of forested set up with harsh weather like a rainforest maybe? Either way you should be able to slap this down in any setting fairly easily, there are not really many built in setting assumptions in the adventure.
Recommendation
So yes, you can run this easily and it is free I think well worth checking out. There is a decent amount of content spread over just 22 pages.
I would want to make a couple of changes before running this. Firstly I would tie in the antagonist's motivation to the village a big closer, there are a few different actors in the adventure opening up faction play a little but the village itself does not really exist as a faction which is a missed opportunity in my opinion.
Secondly knock up a decent rumour table for the village itself to give players some idea in what directions to start off in.
No comments:
Post a Comment