N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God

 

By Douglas Niles

TSR

AD&D, levels 1-3

Premise: People are disappearing from the village of Orlane and those that come back are changed.

What do we get here?

  Over 32 pages we get a detailed village and a two level dungeon.

 Usability/formatting

 

  Designed as a module for new players this adventure has enough content to last several sessions. For the period things are fairly well formatted even if there is a lot of text to hack through at times. Mostly stuff is where you need it. You will have to do a little bit to add some evocative language to the descriptions.

 There are plenty of factions at play in the village as well as numerous ways to hook your players into the adventure via the differing NPCs in the village. A lot of adventures fall down on hooks and while they are not explicit here they are a lot of ways to get your players to Orlane to investigate.

 The creepy village filled with paranoid and corrupted locals is a classic set up. If I was going to run this I would probably tweak things a little, you do not want the players spending weeks of in game time investigating as the module suggests they might, a few days should be more than enough otherwise new players will get bored. 

 Having a powerful helper NPC in an adventure for new players is not setting a great example so I would look to scale back the involvement of the local hermit/wizard if possible. 

 When you finally get to the major dungeon of the adventure it is pretty well done, slightly below the quality of the Giants serious but still a good dungeon with loops and plenty to poke at. About the only real let down is that most of the magic items are pretty standard ones, nothing very spicy on offer here.

 To my eye some of the battles look like they might be a bit tough for inexperienced players so that is something to keep in mind if you are running for newbies.

 

Portability

  Finding a location to put an isolated village in most setting should be pretty easy. 

Recommendation

 I'd probably want to give the players a training wheels adventure to get them to level two then drop this one on them. The adventure is a classic for a reason and even if it needs a polish up is well worth considering breaking out.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17056/N1-Against-the-Cult-of-the-Reptile-God-1e