Falkrest Abbey

 By Andrea Tupac Mollica and Giuseppe Rotondo

Axian Spce

OSE levels 1-3

Premise: The forlorn Falkrest Abbey in the icy Lune Mountains is where the Queens and Kings of Yore used to be crowned and buried, along with their treasures. According to legends, the Fountain of St. Brynedd still pours its miraculous water somewhere inside. But what caused the fall of the blessed Abbey?

 What do we get here?

 Over 43 pages this adventure covers a 19 room dungeon.

 Usability/formatting

A lot of thought has been put into the formatting of this adventure. All monsters and treasure is listed upfront. Inspiration is taken from the OSE house style in terms of text formatting and repeating sections of the map through out. It is very easy to find what you are looking for, scan text and run this at the table. 

Some of the writing could be tweaked to be a bit more evocative and suck the players in. There just need to be a little more effort putting the flavour into the adventure after all the effort put into the formatting. We get precious little information on the saint the abbey is dedicated to when you would expect art, writings etc scattered through out the place. Too much of the focus of the history through location is on the royal function the abbey had which is not what I would expect reall.

 The now of the abbey works really well, it is just the past that should be hinted at through out is a little lacking. 

Portability

 No doubt part of the reason for leaving the history and details of the abbey a little on the short side is to aid with the portability of the adventure. Honestly though having details you can reflavour is a lot easier than having to put the stuff in from scratch yourself.

 Still you can fairly easily pick this adventure up and plop it down somewhere with a snowy mountain in your setting.

Recommendation

 For the low price of $1 and the whole adventure available in preview it is very hard to say not to this one. This is not the great adventure to slay all rivals but it is more than adequate to use at the table, especially with how easy the formatting makes that.

 Personally I do not care for the chess related stuff so I would probably rip that out and put some other themes in if I were to run this.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/409280/Falkrest-Abbey

There is one further thing I want to talk about here and that is the price. For the consumer an adventure with really good formatting and production values like this at $1 is fantastic. I have to wonder is this low pricing good for the hobby?

 When prices race to the bottom like this do we leave any space for writers and artists to get paid something that is worth their effort? Do we end up pushing out creators if they can not make any money? 

Answers on the back of post card, or in the comments please.