The Mysterious Manor

 By Gabor Lux

First Hungarian d20 society

Advanced levels 2-4

 Premise: A crumbling manor has been taken over by humanoids under the pay of a pirate.

What do we get here?

 Appearing as the third adventure in the first issue of the Echoes from Fomalhaut zine this is a short adventure covering two above ground levels of a manor and one below ground level of cellars. There are roughly 23 keyed areas split over 3 maps.

 Usability/Formatting

 As this adventure comes from a zine designed for home printing you are not going to get fancy trade dress or layout, that being said you can make an easy to follow adventure in a very lo-fi set up as this product proves.

 The writing is concise and easy to follow. There is bolding to help you find what you need in the moment without having to sift though a whole paragraph.

  Continuing the running pet peeve of mine, you do not get the maps upfront. When we do get the maps they are simple drawings that are not scaled which may be a little annoying to those that run more tactical, gridded games but I think you can get by with them. It is definitely easy to tell where everything should be from these maps.

 There is a lack of explicit hooks provided for this adventure however I think that once you have read the adventure over once it contains enough implicit hooks that you should be able to easily find ways to get the characters interested in picking up the quest here. 

 Portability

 There are two kinds of generic. The bad kind of generic is something with no personality or flavour. Thankfully this adventure is the good kind of generic, one that does not make any big assumptions about the setting it might be put in. 

 From the writing we get more than enough information to have a scenario with some personality through the description of the occupying forces and a location with some history to it which is explored through the building and the cellars.

 You can easily file off the names and adapt this to your own setting or run as is with ease.

 The adventure leaves you with some threads you can follow up for subsequent adventures or you can even allow the players to set themselves up as the new rulers of the manor.

 Recommendation

 I already know where I would slot this into my own campaign world, it is exactly what I have been looking for in one adventure spot.

 In my opinion you get your money back on the price of this zine on the one adventure alone before we even get to the other content. This is a great example of how to do things simply and generically while retaining a high level of quality.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/241136/Echoes-From-Fomalhaut-01-Beware-the-Beekeeper