RC1 The Valley of Karaccia

 By Matthew Evans

Mithgarthr Entertainment

Rules Cyclopedia , levels 1-2

Premise: Responding to a flier promising payment for kobold heads, the party gathers in the town of Brink. From there, they set out on an expedition to the Crimson Caverns, a known kobold lair. After proving their mettle, the PCs will be hired by the Church of Erm to recover a needed artifact from Fallsbarrow.

What do we get here?

 Over 16 pages (with some extra for hand outs) we get a small area and a couple of multi level dungeons.

Usability/formatting

 Straight off the bat there the backstory section is just way over written. We need enough to get his going not two pages detailing every NPC and building in the starting village. The fact that there is a 10th level cleric sitting in the starting village is not great, he could easily solo everything in the region and be back in time for lunch which does not leave much room for the players now does it?

 Despite kicking off with a hex map of the region there is not actually much in the way of overland travel before you get to the first dungeon, the over land travel section only appears after the first dungeon and is just encounter tables.

 There is nothing doing in here in the way of evocative writing, you have to come up with descriptions on your own. What we do get is at least clear and well laid out short entries that are easy to read and contain the necessary monster stats.

 The first dungeon is fine, if incredibly bland. There are a few things your players can interact with and the monster actions are at least well thought out but no faction play on offer here. Treasure is possibly a bit high on the gold side and nothing unique on the magical side.

 When we get to the second dungeon via an unnecessarily complicated hook, it is much larger and better for exploration than the first. Much of what is on offer here is of a similar level of quality to the first dungeon however the magic items are slightly more flavourful. Again I think there may be way too much gold knocking about here, one room has a chest with 5000gp in it! Most of the monsters here are undead making them slightly less interesting from an RP stand point. This dungeon also contains a bit of an unnecessary diversion to a third, smaller, dungeon to pick up a key.

 The maps in the adventure are clear enough and amazingly put before all the keys! Nice to see someone actually doing this.

Portability

 Like many starter adventures you can plonk this down fairly easily in any campaign setting in a valley out of the way somewhere.

 Recommendation

 There are a lot of would be starter adventures out there and I am not sure this one does anything special or good. Yes with some work you could jazz it up/fix it, is that really what you are spending $4.99 for though? I think not.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/359427/RC1--The-Valley-of-Karaccia