By Steve Winter
Sasquatch Game Studios
5E, level 4-6
Premise: Rescue a barbarian prince from slavers.
What do we get here?
Over 14 pages we get an investigation and rescue adventure.
Usability/formatting
A lot of investigation adventures suffer from being a railroad as there are only so many ways the designer can conceive for you to solve the mystery and this adventure has some of that. Some of the clues are very heavy handed and the options for resolution are straight up flagged as certain death if the PCs don't go the way the writer wants.
I actually think it was a big mistake to not have the PCs go into the catacombs to rescue the barbarian prince, they actually sound like an interesting location that could have made a memorable end to the adventure. Just saying if they want to go in there being certain death is such a wet blanket.
The writing is on the wordy side for sure. Big paragraphs could be cut down and the large read out blocks are tiresome too.
I think you probably could hack this down and salvage something out of it if investigation adventures are your bag. Honestly the loose frame work and bullet points version would work a lot better as you have to keep things open handed given how players can be super unpredictable when investigating mysteries.
The only rewards or treasure on offer here are gold which is boring as can be.
Portability
Written for the Primeval Thule setting you can probably adapt this fairly easy to any setting with evil slavers in it as their city is where 90% of the adventure takes place.
Recommendation
Probably not for me, I think we can learn something from this and work up a better adventure though. Rescuing someone from a slaver city is classic stuff and if it was done right is great adventure fodder.
Available on drive thru as part of an anthology with two other adventures, three for $9 is not too bad honestly before we get into the quality of the adventures.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/171225/Primeval-Thule-5e-Adventure-Anthology
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