A look at the new dungeon crawl compilation for D&D 5th edition. Yes, I get a bit nitpicky, and yes, I think I'm gonna take some hits for my criticisms, but I still love it.
Get it on Amazon [Affiliate Link]:
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Showing posts with label 5th Edition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 5th Edition. Show all posts
Thursday, April 6, 2017
Friday, March 10, 2017
Thursday, December 1, 2016
RPG Crawler Reviews: Tome of Beasts
My short video review of Tome of Beasts, from Kobold Press.
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Or as a pdf on RPG now [Affiliate Link]:
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/190499/Tome-of-Beasts-for-5th-Edition?affiliate_id=902296
Tuesday, November 29, 2016
Saturday, November 26, 2016
Review - Volo's Guide to Monsters
New video review up for Volo's Guide to Monsters.
Get it on Amazon [Affiliate Link]: http://amzn.to/2ftHCLB
Sunday, October 30, 2016
Review - Fifth Edition Foes
A quick review of Fifth Edition Foes, a monster book for D&D 5th edition from Necromancer Games:
Hello, this is the RPG Crawler, and welcome to another product review. This time I’ll be taking a look at something that’s been on the market for a while, indeed to the point where I had to order it from the Frog God Games website: Fifth Edition Foes, from Necromancer Games. Published in 2015 by Necromancer Games, it is available in both hardback and pdf formats, and is compatible with the fifth edition of the world’s most popular roleplaying game.
So for those who don’t know, Necromancer games was a company that rose during the third edition era, and published a lot of 3rd party content for the d20 systems, many of which had an old school 1st edition feel. This included a series of monster books called the Tome of Horrors, which included a fairly large number of of monsters during its four volume run, with a pathfinder translation available later. Among those monsters were many which were culled from the earliest days of dungeons and dragons, 1st edition and original, which were made available to Necromancer games through a special agreement beyond the normal OGL. I believe it’s this same agreement which allowed them to be used in variations throughout the cycle of the Tome of Horrors series, through 3rd and 3.5, and into Pathfinder. Even the monsters that were written just for Tome of Horrors had the same sort of look and feel that you’d expect monsters from an early edition product to have.
Now what does Tome of Horrors have to do with Fifth Edition Foes? Well, everything, since Fifth Edition Foes uses a number of the monsters from Tome of Horror, as well as creatures from the original first edition material, all translated to the fifth edition system. There’s over two hundred fifty creature types (some of which are subtypes of the same creature) spanning a variety of themes, from conversions of first edition classics such as the adherer, cave fisher, and vegepygmies,to creatures designed just for the tome of horrors series, like the arcanoplasm, the fear guard, and two types of ‘grue’.
So now that we know what Fifth Edition Foes is, let’s take a look at the technical details. Physically, the book is a good quality hardback, it seems a bit thicker than the official D&D monster manual. The binding is fair for moderate use. Pages are done in black and white, without a gloss finish, in a style reminiscent of older game books.
In terms of contents, there is a short foreward from Steve Winter, who was with TSR back in the classic era that some of the included monsters would’ve been from. The majority of the book is indeed the monster descriptions, with a few pages at the end devoted to lists of the monsters by type and by challenge rating, and then the legal information.
It should be noted that this book was compiled and released before the 5th edition SRD was released, therefore it operates off of the old 3rd edition one. As a result, some of the concepts like advantage and disadvantage, etc, that were included with 5th edition were not part of the earlier SRD and are referred to by alternate terminology in this book. For instance: Tactical Advantage vs. just normal ‘advantage’. It’s not a deal breaker by any means. Also of note is that the monster stat blocks are arranged more like you’d expect a pathfinder or 3rd edition monster to look like, rather than the 5th edition list methods. Again, it’s something that can be worked around, since all of the information is still there.
Since the vast majority, if not all of the creatures were released in the tome of horrors line of product, it is perhaps not as surprising as it should be that a lot of the interior art was reused. Most monsters have black and white illustrations done in a manner similar to older edition artwork from the 80s and early 90s, of varying quality. It was mostly pulled over from the tome of horrors releases, and fit into the new format.
I’m not going to go over the monsters individually, since with over two hundred fifty of them we could be here all day. As of this review, it is available on rpgnow as a pdf as well, and the preview allows access to the table of contents, so if you need a quick look to see if any of the monsters jump out at you, you can check it out there. I will say that there’s no split between normal animals and monsters, and there are a few normal animals scattered amongst the pages, just blended in with the rest of the monsters. I should also point out that I believe a few of these monsters were released in core d&d products since, though that number is relatively small. There’s a really good mix of different monster challenge ratings, with monsters available up to CR 20, but the vast majority of them in the CR1-4 range, which is appropriate for the new power layout in 5th edition. Likewise there’s a really good mix among the various monster types, with a slight edge given to the monstrosity type, and only a few giants listed.
The quality of the monsters themselves is, in my opinion, great, but your mileage may vary. They are geared toward an older edition feel, and as a result may be quite challenging for the equivalent challenge rating. There’s a good mix of interesting abilities present among them, that can make for a surprise for people used to the stuff from the core monster manual. There’s more than a few entries that’ll make older players go on a nostalgia trip once they recognize the creature in question.
From a dungeon master perspective, I think it’s well worth the price, especially the cheaper pdf version, for the sheer quantity of monsters available. Another consideration, however, is those who want to reuse monsters in their product. A large number of these monsters are ordinary ‘open game content’, albeit content from an earlier version of the license, and can be reused under the normal licensing restrictions in your products. There are, however, a number of others, taken from the earlier versions of dungeons and dragons, that follow special rules for reuse, including a reference to the original tome of horrors license. And you’ll have to include a special entry for each of those in your legal section. I haven’t really investigated mixing monsters from this ogl content with those from the 5th edition SRD, but it should be possible.
So my final thoughts: If you’re willing to accept that the majority of these are basically updates of monsters that were already printed, and keep an eye out for alternative wording due to the use of an older SRD, then this is a great addition to the library of a DM, especially one who likes older editions and games with a retro feel.The hardcover itself may be a bit iffy to track down, but I for one have already found it well worth the investment. Maybe we’ll see a new version using the modern SRD some day, or another volume with more similar creatures.
For now, I’ll leave it at that. This has been the rpg crawler with Necromancer Games’ Fifth Edition Foes. If you like what you’ve seen, remember to leave a like, comment if you have feedback, and subscribe for more RPG Content. Until next time, take care and good bye!
You can pick it up as a pdf from RPGNow [Affiliate Link]: http://www.rpgnow.com/product/195015/Fifth-Edition-Foes?affiliate_id=902296
Sunday, October 2, 2016
Review - Storm King's Thunder
Storm King’s Thunder
Wizards of the Coast
Released: Sept 6, 2016
List Price: $49.95 Product Page [Affiliate Link]: http://amzn.to/2dC2UXL
Hello, this is the RPG Crawler and welcome to another product review. This time I’ll be covering the Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition adventure ‘Storm King’s Thunder’. Released in late August, or early September for those who ordered it from places like Amazon, it is, as of this post, the latest of Wizards of the Coast’s adventure arcs, and actually only the second one I’ve purchased and read through, so please forgive the fact that, among the WotC stuff, I only really have the Curse of Strahd campaign to compare it to. The style of these large scale adventures means that they don’t quite line up with other products outside of the WotC range. This can be a little problematic in terms of contrasting elements with other existing products, but I’m going to give it a try.
So what is Storm King’s Thunder? I mean beyond the obvious answer of ‘An Adventure’. Storm King’s Thunder is a sweeping epic involving the player characters’ attempt to stave off a war between the Giants and the smaller races. It covers vast swaths of the Savage Frontier, an area of Faerun that has been covered in many past adventures, and includes some familiar cities. Indeed, although this adventure is stand alone, having access to prior adventures set on faerun, the sword coast adventurer’s guide, and other similar products can very much help a DM flesh out some of the more open areas of this adventure’s structure.
So let’s start with the technical details. Storm King’s Thunder is a hardcover with a suggested list price of $49.95, clocking in at 256 pages. It is designed to take characters from level 1 to slightly beyond level 10, and may be entered at 1st level, 5th level, or beyond depending on where in the adventure one picks up. It has suggested access points for parties that have started in one of the other forgotten realms adventures, and who wish to cross over into this one instead. Build quality is on par with other wotc 5th edition hardcovers I’ve purchased, perhaps a little better, in terms of how it’s held up to my initial handling during the reading for this review. The pages are the typical full colour spreads of other hardcovers in the adventure series, and the art is as wonderful as we’ve come to expect from the majority of the 5th edition products, although i will admit that the cover illustration, by Tyler Jacobson, didn’t really strike me as quite as evocative of the feel of the adventure as prior 5e adventure covers have been. That could be attributed to the complexity of the adventure over all, however.
As far as the writing goes, in terms of general quality, it’s adequate. One of my criticisms of the Curse of Strahd was that the mix of old and new sections sometimes made for inconsistent writing, and some of the segments were very sub par. In Storm King’s Thunder, I have to say that after reading it, it feels more cohesive as an adventure, despite the breadth of the content and the variations between the different adventure paths. While I wouldn’t qualify it as one of the all time greats by any stretch, I was rather pleased with the story pacing, the detail, and the descriptions throughout, as well as the variety of scenarios presented.
When I initially heard about this adventure, I was worried that the premise: a war between the giants and the rest of civilization, would make for some rather repetitive play. That is not the case at all, and there are a good mix of town sieges, dungeon crawls, general hack and slash, investigations, overland travel, and even a segment of courtly intrigue in the palace of the Storm Giants. The epic scope of the adventure really does give room for a number of play types. I did notice a handful of editorial errors, including one rather dramatic omission of an associated NPC’s name in the writeup of another NPC. I honestly would have to reread through the chapter to see if the nameless NPC referred to was even included, because I didn’t catch it on my first read through. Overall, however, there’s nothing that really detracts from enjoyment or ease of running the adventure.
Mechanically, character advancement is on a milestone basis, and while that’s not generally my favorite way of doing things, I can understand why it was followed in this particular adventure. Many times, the party will be facing challenges that may not necessarily need to be resolved through direct combat, often they will be accompanied by NPCs of greater or lesser ability, and even when there isn’t the trouble of NPCs, it’s possible that the characters may be facing large numbers of what might be called ‘xp rich’ targets. All of this kind of conspires to make it difficult for standard experience tracks to keep an even keel through the adventure. Thus the milestone method will probably make for a more satisfying progression for most groups. Similarly, giants tend to be ‘treasure rich’, and there are many times in the aventure where, rather than giving out specific items, the DM is expected to either select a fair number or roll on the random treasure tables to determine magic items in a particular hoard. Many giants often carry bags, which have additional treasure, both monetary and magical, which can quickly make a thrifty adventuring party extremely rich. I for one am glad that 5th edition doesn’t have, strictly speaking, the same magic item economy of some other recent editions, but I could still see adventurers ending up very rich indeed after all is said and done in this book.
Finally, let’s take a quick look at the adventure’s general structure. Keep in mind this is just an overview, I’ll get into the specific details afterward. The adventure starts with Annam the All-Father, head of the giant gods, shattering the Ordning that keeps all the various giant types in their place, as a reaction to the events described in the Rise of Tiamat series of adventures, which makes this not necessarily a direct sequel to said series, but definitely a related chain of events. Oddly enough, a lot about the reasoning behind the shattering of the Ordning and its eventual restoration is left deliberately vague, so that no matter how the campaign turns out, it can be restored, or remain broken… however the DM wants. Supposedly Annam was inspired by the idea that the dragons had nearly brought one of their gods into the mortal realms, and by comparison the Giants looked kind of complacent, but as I said, things beyond that are rather vague, so I like to picture it as Annam basically throwing a fit and flipping the table without any care for where the pieces land. Real mature, Annam. Honestly though, I had to look up to make sure that Annam was an actual god. And yes, yes he is. I checked Monster Mythology from 2nd edition days and he’s in there, so I guess he goes way way way back.
Anyway, back to the plot. With the Ordning sundered, suddenly giants everywhere all automatically realize that the Ordning is broke, that they don’t have to do what their superiors tell them to do, but they’re given no real indication of how to make a new Ordning and claim their new place in life. So they start going about their best guesses. Some, like the Cloud Giants and such, make great plans, while others like the Hill Giants are kinda stupid, and their plans reflect that. During this all, some mysterious new giant present at the Storm King’s court causes trouble. Someone assassinates the Storm Queen Neri, it looks like the humans have done it, The Storm King Hekaton loses his temper, goes to hunt down her killers, disappears, and leaves his youngest daughter and her sisters to vie for the throne in his absence. So you’ve got trouble in the court of the most powerful giants at the same time these lesser lords are starting to go about their own plans to claim a new place, and throughout it all the humans and demihumans are just ‘in the way’ or actively being attacked. Sucks to be small, right?
So from here on, we’ll go to a very general structure, since this is the part where serious spoilers might detract from the enjoyment of the adventure. In the first chapter, characters are brought up to level 5 through a choice of routes. They start facing the aftermath of a giant attack on the village of Nightstone, and from there are left free to travel to one of three other locations: Bryn Shander of Icewind Dale fame, Goldenfields, or Triboar. This kind of choice will happen again a few times through this adventure, making the product seem larger than it really is, while providing some solid replayability if the same DM wants to run it by the same group a few times. Regardless, in each of the three locations, they are faced with giants attacking a settlement, the number and quality varying depending on type, and are given several npcs to partially control during the town siege and its immediate aftermath. If said NPCs survive, each one then gives optional quests to the party, and these quests are WIDELY scattered across the savage frontier. It’s basically a reason to stir the characters into motion and send them chasing back and forth across the entirety of the savage frontier.
And this is where the adventure goes into sandbox territory. There’s many, many side quests and locations to visit, and the characters are expected to piece together the fact that all this stuff is going down with the giants, and if they don’t have the whole story by the end of this wandering ‘filler’ time, they meet a giant adventurer named Harshnag, who as much as tells them that they need to visit a giant temple, and escorts them to it. At this point it just struck me as a ‘power leveling move’ since this giant is mostly around to help with the fact that the characters are still seriously underpowered to fight giants at this point, but are expected to fight giants. So they mostly play the support team against big enemies, while Harshnag sits back and takes a breather when he thinks the adventurers can handle it themselves. And yeah, if I sound critical of that design, it’s because it strikes me as a somewhat ill advised design. It’s like giving the party a task to save the world and ‘Oh, by the way, Drizzt Do’urden’s gonna accompany you. Hope you don’t mind! He’ll try not to killsteal too much.’ How about not having a frost giant with magic armor and weapons show up in the first place? Or if he does, maybe have him accompany them for only a very, very short stint. Oh, true, it says that he accompanies them to the temple and that’s it, but come on! They could be halfway across the savage frontier. We could be talking about weeks worth of encounters here with this frost giant on hand. And he’ll be either be an ass by dominating the combat, or an ass by NOT doing it. I mean what’s he going to do, sit back and be like ‘nah, you guys got this’. Or ‘here, let me help you, little man’. I mean either way, it’s condescending as hell.
But anyway, Harshnag can be played well and still let the characters get their day in the sun, so to speak. He helps them enter this abandoned temple to Annam where they discover that they need to fetch an item from one of the evil giant lords. And then a damn dragon attacks. And because the dragon way outlevels the group at this point, he’s supposed to have this epic set piece battle with Harshnag while the characters escape. But honestly if you have a giant as a tank, more than a few groups are going to want to stick around and try to take the dragon on. So it actually goes into a lot of detail as to just how to make the adventurers want to leave, and ends with instructions on how to basically load them up on the train to the next destination if all else fails.
And that… is honestly the crux of my main problem with the adventure. There’s so much choice throughout it all, but because of this desire to throw a giant into it that the players can interact with, you get not only some of the worst writing in the adventure, but also some of the most forced decisions in all of the pages, and what should be this cool epic feel is in serious danger of feeling like the DM is handholding the party throughout this entire section. It’s the weakest section of the book, but not unsalvageable. It does bear mentioning, though. After the characters are forcibly removed from the temple, one way or another, they are given a choice of not three but five different giant lords that they can go after. Which means that they hve to find said giant lord, travel to their lair, and then storm it. There’s several tidbits that can be gleaned thus far that can point them in the right direction, but by and large this is a continuation of the prior miniquest section, punctuated by a single rather dangerous dungeon crawl, where the party might well be facing several giants.
Fortunately by now they will have several options for traveling, beyond the basic spells that any party might get as they ascend through the middling levels, there’s the possibility that they can learn how to ride griffons, or even receive their own airship and crew. So there is some interesting content to uncover there. They only actually have to fight one of the giant lords, before coming up with this teleportation conch that takes them to the court of the Storm Giants. This is where the adventure turns into a mess of intrigue, as the party tries to convince the current storm queen to accept their help in the face of a hostile court, navigate the intrigues of the giant lords present, all while the storm queen’s sisters and the advisor plot against them. At this point there’s two ways the party can go. They can convince the storm queen to let them find her father, and then set forth on another investigation of the savage frontier, which culminates in a rescue of the storm king Hekaton from a prison ship, and Hekaton will not immediately recognize them as saviors, so it’s possible they may have to engage in some diplomacy in the middle of a pitched battle… on a boat. If they decide instead to expose the advisor’s manipulations, or after they rescue the storm king from his prison, the advisor turns out to be a dragon, and flies off to her lair, leaving the party to then track down and assault a dragon in their lair, with or without the help of some giants.
The ending fight is suitably epic, and there’s no guarantee the party will live to see the end of it. In fact, many of the fights throughout this adventure are pretty high risk, and I’m actually pleasantly surprised by that fact. It’s entirely possible to really botch things and up the difficulty immensely if the party isn’t careful. And it’s this aspect that really lends a sort of oldschool feel to quite a bit of this adventure. As much as I criticized the ‘Giant Adventurer’ section in the middle, the ending really does ramp up into the epic fights one would expect of a war with the giants, and I think that is more than enough to redeem the weak middle section. Another thing I like is the fact that entire sections of this adventure can be taken out of the adventure itself and used as stand alone modules in another campaign entirely. Each of the evil giant forts is well designed and fleshed out, and could make its own dungeon. It’s somewhat reminiscent of the old ‘G’ series of adventures from AD&D 1st edition without being a simple rehash of them, and I can appreciate that.
One other major criticism I have of this adventure, however, is in the way that it is laid out with the various choices. Because there are parallel paths in two major sections where the characters only need to complete one of them, it’s entirely possible that a party can get through the adventure and only see about half of the content in the book. Now yes, this nonlinearity does offer the feeling of choice to the players, as well as a certain degree of replayability. But it could also mean that the players reach the end, then feel like they’ve gone through an adventure only half the size as the one that’s obviously in the DM’s hands. Sure, they could run it again with a different path, or they could do as is suggested in the back and just go back to the prior giant forts and steamroller them with their new levels and gear. But by then that’s just playing mop up rather than going on to bigger and better things. Or you know, another adventure entirely. Further, while the adventure ends at around 10th, maybe a couple levels after, what are you reasonably going to do after you’ve fought so many giants and kicked a wyrm’s butt with the help of a giant army? Anything on the mortal plane is going to feel just a little bland at that point, and at this point the sheer power that’s in the party’s hands will make it a bit of a challenge for the DM to decide ‘where to go from here’.
So there we have it. Decent writing, some pretty epic fights, marred mainly by an ‘NPC Hero Spotlight’ middle and the idea that a substantial bit of the content in the book won’t be used in any one playthrough. Is it worth purchasing? As I said, this is only the 2nd of the 5th edition adventures I’ve purchased, the first being Curse of Strahd because I was always a HUGE fan of Ravenloft. This one, I went into with no nostalgia goggles and looking at it as an entirely new product and I have to say that I, for one, was about as impressed with it as I was with the Curse of Strahd one. It certainly delivers on the epic premise, despite its flaws. But as for whether it’s worth it for your group? It’s going to depend a lot, quite frankly, on how well they can take being partially overshadowed by an NPC for at least a small part of the adventure. That’s the main part that I think will break some groups with low tolerance for such things. Everything else is pretty much gravy.
Released: Sept 6, 2016
List Price: $49.95 Product Page [Affiliate Link]: http://amzn.to/2dC2UXL
Hello, this is the RPG Crawler and welcome to another product review. This time I’ll be covering the Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition adventure ‘Storm King’s Thunder’. Released in late August, or early September for those who ordered it from places like Amazon, it is, as of this post, the latest of Wizards of the Coast’s adventure arcs, and actually only the second one I’ve purchased and read through, so please forgive the fact that, among the WotC stuff, I only really have the Curse of Strahd campaign to compare it to. The style of these large scale adventures means that they don’t quite line up with other products outside of the WotC range. This can be a little problematic in terms of contrasting elements with other existing products, but I’m going to give it a try.
So what is Storm King’s Thunder? I mean beyond the obvious answer of ‘An Adventure’. Storm King’s Thunder is a sweeping epic involving the player characters’ attempt to stave off a war between the Giants and the smaller races. It covers vast swaths of the Savage Frontier, an area of Faerun that has been covered in many past adventures, and includes some familiar cities. Indeed, although this adventure is stand alone, having access to prior adventures set on faerun, the sword coast adventurer’s guide, and other similar products can very much help a DM flesh out some of the more open areas of this adventure’s structure.
So let’s start with the technical details. Storm King’s Thunder is a hardcover with a suggested list price of $49.95, clocking in at 256 pages. It is designed to take characters from level 1 to slightly beyond level 10, and may be entered at 1st level, 5th level, or beyond depending on where in the adventure one picks up. It has suggested access points for parties that have started in one of the other forgotten realms adventures, and who wish to cross over into this one instead. Build quality is on par with other wotc 5th edition hardcovers I’ve purchased, perhaps a little better, in terms of how it’s held up to my initial handling during the reading for this review. The pages are the typical full colour spreads of other hardcovers in the adventure series, and the art is as wonderful as we’ve come to expect from the majority of the 5th edition products, although i will admit that the cover illustration, by Tyler Jacobson, didn’t really strike me as quite as evocative of the feel of the adventure as prior 5e adventure covers have been. That could be attributed to the complexity of the adventure over all, however.
As far as the writing goes, in terms of general quality, it’s adequate. One of my criticisms of the Curse of Strahd was that the mix of old and new sections sometimes made for inconsistent writing, and some of the segments were very sub par. In Storm King’s Thunder, I have to say that after reading it, it feels more cohesive as an adventure, despite the breadth of the content and the variations between the different adventure paths. While I wouldn’t qualify it as one of the all time greats by any stretch, I was rather pleased with the story pacing, the detail, and the descriptions throughout, as well as the variety of scenarios presented.
When I initially heard about this adventure, I was worried that the premise: a war between the giants and the rest of civilization, would make for some rather repetitive play. That is not the case at all, and there are a good mix of town sieges, dungeon crawls, general hack and slash, investigations, overland travel, and even a segment of courtly intrigue in the palace of the Storm Giants. The epic scope of the adventure really does give room for a number of play types. I did notice a handful of editorial errors, including one rather dramatic omission of an associated NPC’s name in the writeup of another NPC. I honestly would have to reread through the chapter to see if the nameless NPC referred to was even included, because I didn’t catch it on my first read through. Overall, however, there’s nothing that really detracts from enjoyment or ease of running the adventure.
Mechanically, character advancement is on a milestone basis, and while that’s not generally my favorite way of doing things, I can understand why it was followed in this particular adventure. Many times, the party will be facing challenges that may not necessarily need to be resolved through direct combat, often they will be accompanied by NPCs of greater or lesser ability, and even when there isn’t the trouble of NPCs, it’s possible that the characters may be facing large numbers of what might be called ‘xp rich’ targets. All of this kind of conspires to make it difficult for standard experience tracks to keep an even keel through the adventure. Thus the milestone method will probably make for a more satisfying progression for most groups. Similarly, giants tend to be ‘treasure rich’, and there are many times in the aventure where, rather than giving out specific items, the DM is expected to either select a fair number or roll on the random treasure tables to determine magic items in a particular hoard. Many giants often carry bags, which have additional treasure, both monetary and magical, which can quickly make a thrifty adventuring party extremely rich. I for one am glad that 5th edition doesn’t have, strictly speaking, the same magic item economy of some other recent editions, but I could still see adventurers ending up very rich indeed after all is said and done in this book.
Finally, let’s take a quick look at the adventure’s general structure. Keep in mind this is just an overview, I’ll get into the specific details afterward. The adventure starts with Annam the All-Father, head of the giant gods, shattering the Ordning that keeps all the various giant types in their place, as a reaction to the events described in the Rise of Tiamat series of adventures, which makes this not necessarily a direct sequel to said series, but definitely a related chain of events. Oddly enough, a lot about the reasoning behind the shattering of the Ordning and its eventual restoration is left deliberately vague, so that no matter how the campaign turns out, it can be restored, or remain broken… however the DM wants. Supposedly Annam was inspired by the idea that the dragons had nearly brought one of their gods into the mortal realms, and by comparison the Giants looked kind of complacent, but as I said, things beyond that are rather vague, so I like to picture it as Annam basically throwing a fit and flipping the table without any care for where the pieces land. Real mature, Annam. Honestly though, I had to look up to make sure that Annam was an actual god. And yes, yes he is. I checked Monster Mythology from 2nd edition days and he’s in there, so I guess he goes way way way back.
Anyway, back to the plot. With the Ordning sundered, suddenly giants everywhere all automatically realize that the Ordning is broke, that they don’t have to do what their superiors tell them to do, but they’re given no real indication of how to make a new Ordning and claim their new place in life. So they start going about their best guesses. Some, like the Cloud Giants and such, make great plans, while others like the Hill Giants are kinda stupid, and their plans reflect that. During this all, some mysterious new giant present at the Storm King’s court causes trouble. Someone assassinates the Storm Queen Neri, it looks like the humans have done it, The Storm King Hekaton loses his temper, goes to hunt down her killers, disappears, and leaves his youngest daughter and her sisters to vie for the throne in his absence. So you’ve got trouble in the court of the most powerful giants at the same time these lesser lords are starting to go about their own plans to claim a new place, and throughout it all the humans and demihumans are just ‘in the way’ or actively being attacked. Sucks to be small, right?
So from here on, we’ll go to a very general structure, since this is the part where serious spoilers might detract from the enjoyment of the adventure. In the first chapter, characters are brought up to level 5 through a choice of routes. They start facing the aftermath of a giant attack on the village of Nightstone, and from there are left free to travel to one of three other locations: Bryn Shander of Icewind Dale fame, Goldenfields, or Triboar. This kind of choice will happen again a few times through this adventure, making the product seem larger than it really is, while providing some solid replayability if the same DM wants to run it by the same group a few times. Regardless, in each of the three locations, they are faced with giants attacking a settlement, the number and quality varying depending on type, and are given several npcs to partially control during the town siege and its immediate aftermath. If said NPCs survive, each one then gives optional quests to the party, and these quests are WIDELY scattered across the savage frontier. It’s basically a reason to stir the characters into motion and send them chasing back and forth across the entirety of the savage frontier.
And this is where the adventure goes into sandbox territory. There’s many, many side quests and locations to visit, and the characters are expected to piece together the fact that all this stuff is going down with the giants, and if they don’t have the whole story by the end of this wandering ‘filler’ time, they meet a giant adventurer named Harshnag, who as much as tells them that they need to visit a giant temple, and escorts them to it. At this point it just struck me as a ‘power leveling move’ since this giant is mostly around to help with the fact that the characters are still seriously underpowered to fight giants at this point, but are expected to fight giants. So they mostly play the support team against big enemies, while Harshnag sits back and takes a breather when he thinks the adventurers can handle it themselves. And yeah, if I sound critical of that design, it’s because it strikes me as a somewhat ill advised design. It’s like giving the party a task to save the world and ‘Oh, by the way, Drizzt Do’urden’s gonna accompany you. Hope you don’t mind! He’ll try not to killsteal too much.’ How about not having a frost giant with magic armor and weapons show up in the first place? Or if he does, maybe have him accompany them for only a very, very short stint. Oh, true, it says that he accompanies them to the temple and that’s it, but come on! They could be halfway across the savage frontier. We could be talking about weeks worth of encounters here with this frost giant on hand. And he’ll be either be an ass by dominating the combat, or an ass by NOT doing it. I mean what’s he going to do, sit back and be like ‘nah, you guys got this’. Or ‘here, let me help you, little man’. I mean either way, it’s condescending as hell.
But anyway, Harshnag can be played well and still let the characters get their day in the sun, so to speak. He helps them enter this abandoned temple to Annam where they discover that they need to fetch an item from one of the evil giant lords. And then a damn dragon attacks. And because the dragon way outlevels the group at this point, he’s supposed to have this epic set piece battle with Harshnag while the characters escape. But honestly if you have a giant as a tank, more than a few groups are going to want to stick around and try to take the dragon on. So it actually goes into a lot of detail as to just how to make the adventurers want to leave, and ends with instructions on how to basically load them up on the train to the next destination if all else fails.
And that… is honestly the crux of my main problem with the adventure. There’s so much choice throughout it all, but because of this desire to throw a giant into it that the players can interact with, you get not only some of the worst writing in the adventure, but also some of the most forced decisions in all of the pages, and what should be this cool epic feel is in serious danger of feeling like the DM is handholding the party throughout this entire section. It’s the weakest section of the book, but not unsalvageable. It does bear mentioning, though. After the characters are forcibly removed from the temple, one way or another, they are given a choice of not three but five different giant lords that they can go after. Which means that they hve to find said giant lord, travel to their lair, and then storm it. There’s several tidbits that can be gleaned thus far that can point them in the right direction, but by and large this is a continuation of the prior miniquest section, punctuated by a single rather dangerous dungeon crawl, where the party might well be facing several giants.
Fortunately by now they will have several options for traveling, beyond the basic spells that any party might get as they ascend through the middling levels, there’s the possibility that they can learn how to ride griffons, or even receive their own airship and crew. So there is some interesting content to uncover there. They only actually have to fight one of the giant lords, before coming up with this teleportation conch that takes them to the court of the Storm Giants. This is where the adventure turns into a mess of intrigue, as the party tries to convince the current storm queen to accept their help in the face of a hostile court, navigate the intrigues of the giant lords present, all while the storm queen’s sisters and the advisor plot against them. At this point there’s two ways the party can go. They can convince the storm queen to let them find her father, and then set forth on another investigation of the savage frontier, which culminates in a rescue of the storm king Hekaton from a prison ship, and Hekaton will not immediately recognize them as saviors, so it’s possible they may have to engage in some diplomacy in the middle of a pitched battle… on a boat. If they decide instead to expose the advisor’s manipulations, or after they rescue the storm king from his prison, the advisor turns out to be a dragon, and flies off to her lair, leaving the party to then track down and assault a dragon in their lair, with or without the help of some giants.
The ending fight is suitably epic, and there’s no guarantee the party will live to see the end of it. In fact, many of the fights throughout this adventure are pretty high risk, and I’m actually pleasantly surprised by that fact. It’s entirely possible to really botch things and up the difficulty immensely if the party isn’t careful. And it’s this aspect that really lends a sort of oldschool feel to quite a bit of this adventure. As much as I criticized the ‘Giant Adventurer’ section in the middle, the ending really does ramp up into the epic fights one would expect of a war with the giants, and I think that is more than enough to redeem the weak middle section. Another thing I like is the fact that entire sections of this adventure can be taken out of the adventure itself and used as stand alone modules in another campaign entirely. Each of the evil giant forts is well designed and fleshed out, and could make its own dungeon. It’s somewhat reminiscent of the old ‘G’ series of adventures from AD&D 1st edition without being a simple rehash of them, and I can appreciate that.
One other major criticism I have of this adventure, however, is in the way that it is laid out with the various choices. Because there are parallel paths in two major sections where the characters only need to complete one of them, it’s entirely possible that a party can get through the adventure and only see about half of the content in the book. Now yes, this nonlinearity does offer the feeling of choice to the players, as well as a certain degree of replayability. But it could also mean that the players reach the end, then feel like they’ve gone through an adventure only half the size as the one that’s obviously in the DM’s hands. Sure, they could run it again with a different path, or they could do as is suggested in the back and just go back to the prior giant forts and steamroller them with their new levels and gear. But by then that’s just playing mop up rather than going on to bigger and better things. Or you know, another adventure entirely. Further, while the adventure ends at around 10th, maybe a couple levels after, what are you reasonably going to do after you’ve fought so many giants and kicked a wyrm’s butt with the help of a giant army? Anything on the mortal plane is going to feel just a little bland at that point, and at this point the sheer power that’s in the party’s hands will make it a bit of a challenge for the DM to decide ‘where to go from here’.
So there we have it. Decent writing, some pretty epic fights, marred mainly by an ‘NPC Hero Spotlight’ middle and the idea that a substantial bit of the content in the book won’t be used in any one playthrough. Is it worth purchasing? As I said, this is only the 2nd of the 5th edition adventures I’ve purchased, the first being Curse of Strahd because I was always a HUGE fan of Ravenloft. This one, I went into with no nostalgia goggles and looking at it as an entirely new product and I have to say that I, for one, was about as impressed with it as I was with the Curse of Strahd one. It certainly delivers on the epic premise, despite its flaws. But as for whether it’s worth it for your group? It’s going to depend a lot, quite frankly, on how well they can take being partially overshadowed by an NPC for at least a small part of the adventure. That’s the main part that I think will break some groups with low tolerance for such things. Everything else is pretty much gravy.
Monday, September 5, 2016
Review - Mezhdy Rek
Mezhdy Rek
Joseph Cadotte
Released: Aug 03, 2016
Price: $1.95 [PDF]
Product Page [Affiliate Link]: http://www.dmsguild.com/product/190160/Mezhdy-Rek?affiliate_id=902296
Hello, this is the RPG Crawler, and welcome to a quick review of Mezhdy Rek, by Joseph Cadotte. Mezhdy Rek is an independent, low-level adventure for Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition, available through the Dungeon Master’s Guild. I was sent a review copy of this particular product. However, it lists at only a $1.95 for the pdf currently, so we’ll see if meets that bar for quality. First, the technical details. The PDF is 57 pages, including a cover page, and the adventure itself is written for a group of characters of level 1-5, with enough variety in the content to be able to start and progress anywhere through that range.
The adventure site itself consists of a town, and there are 8 different main and mini quests included, at least three major factions to play against one another, opportunities for long term character investment in the town, and a scattering of statted NPCs and minor items.
The artwork within consists of flat line drawings done in a style reminiscent of oldschool adventure art, clean and crisp classic graph maps and a few full color versions of the town map itself. I want to say that it’s overall a bit better than I’d expect from a low budget third party production, but probably needs just a smidge more refinement before reaching that next tier of higher end releases. I feel like that’s going to be a recurring theme through this review. It’s way better than expected, the art is consistently produced and looks like it belongs in the same product, which is better than the usual patchwork you get in these first module type situations.
The maps do stand out a bit, and for instance might be best put through a filter to give them a similar feel to the line art, or at the very least have their key fonts adjusted to line up more clearly. As it stands, the maps are quite clear and legible, but could use a bit of polish. The layout is a pretty standard two column layout that flows around pictures, well done and consistent throughout. The writing quality is high, but is in dire need of a copy editor. I uncovered many usage and a few grammatical errors throughout, not enough to detract from the overall flow, but enough to be quite noticeable. Maybe it’s just the fact that I used to be a copy editor and tend to notice these things, at least in other people’s works.
Anyway, I normally wouldn’t note this quite so much, but when the quality of the writing otherwise is so high, and there’s clearly been so much time devoted to fleshing out the history of the town, the backstory its citizens and so forth, then I feel like glossing over this would be a disservice. Technically set in a little town in the Forgotten Realms, the adventure is generic enough to be moved into almost any standard fantasy campaign. And indeed, it might be a little too generic, because almost nothing in the adventure really ‘lines up’ from a history or locale perspective with the forgotten realms setting.
Oh, they give some suggestions as to where to put it, such as near Thay or Zakhara, which they call Al-Qadim. And that might work, but a lot of it sounds like the authors wrote the adventure, and then tried to shoehorn it into Faerun somewhere so that they could list it on the DM’s Guild instead of via the OGL. Although now that I’ve made the point of mentioning it, I’m not going to hold that too much against them, partly because the rules for release under the DMs Guild can get a little silly, and partly because a lot of the setting issues arise because of the inclusion of a detailed history of the town itself. There’s like four pages of history of the town, covering its founding as an outpost of some unnamed empire, its rise and fall throughout the ages, until it finally comes under the watchful eyes of the Smeet family. I appreciate this, truly, although I wonder just how many players will bother with it all.
Still, this inclusion does make sense, considering just how old one of the major NPCs is, and how much of a role she played in the town’s past. It’ll also allow characters with points in history to have something to draw on. The adventure itself takes place within the town and its surroundings, and rather than having some sort of nearby dungeon site to crawl through, most of the meat of the adventure is in the intrigues and interactions among the people themselves.
When the characters arrive, a new mayor has been appointed to replace a prior one who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and the local baron himself has only ascended after his mother died under similarly suspicious events. Throughout it all, gangs of smugglers have taken to the network of caves under the town, people and goods have been disappearing, and the local lizardfolk tribe is under growing threat from some outside force. Suffice to say that there is a LOT to do around town. In terms of factions in town, there is the corrupt mayor and the even more corrupt baron, the baron’s priest of Bane who may or may not be at odds with the baron himself, the local priestess of Lathander, and the sheriff she appointed, a pair of married bards whose competing casinos make them look like they’re more at odds than they think, and even the common folk are split over what industries to develop over the area, separating themselves into the ‘Fruits’ vs. the ‘Cows’. There’s even a local lizardfolk tribe, the Shhnn, who have a symbiotic relationship with the town and are seeking to better integrate themselves.
While this seems to pit almost every individual against another within town, it does provide a ripe area for DM improvisation and player interaction. For quests, the players can take several ways to approach them, and many have consequences depending on whether the party succeeds or fails, or even which side they decide to help. There’s even the possibility of helping the ‘villains’ of the scenario, which is an option I like seeing in a game. Further, as the characters solve certain quests, the attitude of townsfolk will change toward them, allowing them to obtain services they couldn’t before, or at a discount, and unlocking access to further quests and allies. The way that it is scaled throughout the adventure means that active characters will find their own status and regard in town going up slowly over time, rather than simply getting the town’s friendship at the end of everything.
The bulk of the quests are done in town, as I mentioned, and they present a good mix of combat, investigation, and intrigue. Furthermore, a lot of the quests have multiple approaches, so if your group is heavy on social characters, they can be accomplished in one way, whereas a combat heavy group can generally bull through them as well, albeit with much more in the way of collateral damage. The sandbox nature of the town means that the quests can be approached in almost any order, and although some are only ‘officially’ given once the characters have made a name for themselves, an observant party can already be making progress toward them from the very get go.
One thing I did note is that some quests do require you to go through the tunnels under the town, and while there’s not an official ‘map’ for most of these tunnels, the adventure provides a random generation key and encounter key so that characters who enjoy a dungeon crawl can traverse them with the DM generating the map on the fly. Further, the encounter key for the tunnels changes depending on the status of some quests, solving things like the disappearance of the prior mayor or dispersing the smuggling gangs will make traveling the tunnels safer.
There’s opportunities for the players to invest in the town’s industries, which may pay off years down the line depending on what the characters end up accomplishing in town, and there’s even an option for DMs to allow for local political involvement for the party, depending on how things go.
The need for more polish and the quirks in integrating the existing history into an existing setting notwithstanding, I think Mezhdy Rek is an outstanding adventure, especially for low level characters. The town itself is written to feel ‘alive’, the npcs are well developed and their interactions believable, and the adaptive plot points support a wide variety of playstyles. For the price it’s listed at, it’ll provide at least several sessions of play for your typical party, and then leave them with a solid base of operations from which to expand their adventures when all is said and done. I would genuinely like to see the nitpicks I had with it addressed, if only because I see a fair amount of potential here for future modules from the same team. I would definitely like to see how this author would handle a more classic site based adventure or a linked adventure path. Until next time, take care and good bye!
Price: $1.95 [PDF]
Product Page [Affiliate Link]: http://www.dmsguild.com/product/190160/Mezhdy-Rek?affiliate_id=902296
Hello, this is the RPG Crawler, and welcome to a quick review of Mezhdy Rek, by Joseph Cadotte. Mezhdy Rek is an independent, low-level adventure for Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition, available through the Dungeon Master’s Guild. I was sent a review copy of this particular product. However, it lists at only a $1.95 for the pdf currently, so we’ll see if meets that bar for quality. First, the technical details. The PDF is 57 pages, including a cover page, and the adventure itself is written for a group of characters of level 1-5, with enough variety in the content to be able to start and progress anywhere through that range.
The adventure site itself consists of a town, and there are 8 different main and mini quests included, at least three major factions to play against one another, opportunities for long term character investment in the town, and a scattering of statted NPCs and minor items.
The artwork within consists of flat line drawings done in a style reminiscent of oldschool adventure art, clean and crisp classic graph maps and a few full color versions of the town map itself. I want to say that it’s overall a bit better than I’d expect from a low budget third party production, but probably needs just a smidge more refinement before reaching that next tier of higher end releases. I feel like that’s going to be a recurring theme through this review. It’s way better than expected, the art is consistently produced and looks like it belongs in the same product, which is better than the usual patchwork you get in these first module type situations.
The maps do stand out a bit, and for instance might be best put through a filter to give them a similar feel to the line art, or at the very least have their key fonts adjusted to line up more clearly. As it stands, the maps are quite clear and legible, but could use a bit of polish. The layout is a pretty standard two column layout that flows around pictures, well done and consistent throughout. The writing quality is high, but is in dire need of a copy editor. I uncovered many usage and a few grammatical errors throughout, not enough to detract from the overall flow, but enough to be quite noticeable. Maybe it’s just the fact that I used to be a copy editor and tend to notice these things, at least in other people’s works.
Anyway, I normally wouldn’t note this quite so much, but when the quality of the writing otherwise is so high, and there’s clearly been so much time devoted to fleshing out the history of the town, the backstory its citizens and so forth, then I feel like glossing over this would be a disservice. Technically set in a little town in the Forgotten Realms, the adventure is generic enough to be moved into almost any standard fantasy campaign. And indeed, it might be a little too generic, because almost nothing in the adventure really ‘lines up’ from a history or locale perspective with the forgotten realms setting.
Oh, they give some suggestions as to where to put it, such as near Thay or Zakhara, which they call Al-Qadim. And that might work, but a lot of it sounds like the authors wrote the adventure, and then tried to shoehorn it into Faerun somewhere so that they could list it on the DM’s Guild instead of via the OGL. Although now that I’ve made the point of mentioning it, I’m not going to hold that too much against them, partly because the rules for release under the DMs Guild can get a little silly, and partly because a lot of the setting issues arise because of the inclusion of a detailed history of the town itself. There’s like four pages of history of the town, covering its founding as an outpost of some unnamed empire, its rise and fall throughout the ages, until it finally comes under the watchful eyes of the Smeet family. I appreciate this, truly, although I wonder just how many players will bother with it all.
Still, this inclusion does make sense, considering just how old one of the major NPCs is, and how much of a role she played in the town’s past. It’ll also allow characters with points in history to have something to draw on. The adventure itself takes place within the town and its surroundings, and rather than having some sort of nearby dungeon site to crawl through, most of the meat of the adventure is in the intrigues and interactions among the people themselves.
When the characters arrive, a new mayor has been appointed to replace a prior one who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and the local baron himself has only ascended after his mother died under similarly suspicious events. Throughout it all, gangs of smugglers have taken to the network of caves under the town, people and goods have been disappearing, and the local lizardfolk tribe is under growing threat from some outside force. Suffice to say that there is a LOT to do around town. In terms of factions in town, there is the corrupt mayor and the even more corrupt baron, the baron’s priest of Bane who may or may not be at odds with the baron himself, the local priestess of Lathander, and the sheriff she appointed, a pair of married bards whose competing casinos make them look like they’re more at odds than they think, and even the common folk are split over what industries to develop over the area, separating themselves into the ‘Fruits’ vs. the ‘Cows’. There’s even a local lizardfolk tribe, the Shhnn, who have a symbiotic relationship with the town and are seeking to better integrate themselves.
While this seems to pit almost every individual against another within town, it does provide a ripe area for DM improvisation and player interaction. For quests, the players can take several ways to approach them, and many have consequences depending on whether the party succeeds or fails, or even which side they decide to help. There’s even the possibility of helping the ‘villains’ of the scenario, which is an option I like seeing in a game. Further, as the characters solve certain quests, the attitude of townsfolk will change toward them, allowing them to obtain services they couldn’t before, or at a discount, and unlocking access to further quests and allies. The way that it is scaled throughout the adventure means that active characters will find their own status and regard in town going up slowly over time, rather than simply getting the town’s friendship at the end of everything.
The bulk of the quests are done in town, as I mentioned, and they present a good mix of combat, investigation, and intrigue. Furthermore, a lot of the quests have multiple approaches, so if your group is heavy on social characters, they can be accomplished in one way, whereas a combat heavy group can generally bull through them as well, albeit with much more in the way of collateral damage. The sandbox nature of the town means that the quests can be approached in almost any order, and although some are only ‘officially’ given once the characters have made a name for themselves, an observant party can already be making progress toward them from the very get go.
One thing I did note is that some quests do require you to go through the tunnels under the town, and while there’s not an official ‘map’ for most of these tunnels, the adventure provides a random generation key and encounter key so that characters who enjoy a dungeon crawl can traverse them with the DM generating the map on the fly. Further, the encounter key for the tunnels changes depending on the status of some quests, solving things like the disappearance of the prior mayor or dispersing the smuggling gangs will make traveling the tunnels safer.
There’s opportunities for the players to invest in the town’s industries, which may pay off years down the line depending on what the characters end up accomplishing in town, and there’s even an option for DMs to allow for local political involvement for the party, depending on how things go.
The need for more polish and the quirks in integrating the existing history into an existing setting notwithstanding, I think Mezhdy Rek is an outstanding adventure, especially for low level characters. The town itself is written to feel ‘alive’, the npcs are well developed and their interactions believable, and the adaptive plot points support a wide variety of playstyles. For the price it’s listed at, it’ll provide at least several sessions of play for your typical party, and then leave them with a solid base of operations from which to expand their adventures when all is said and done. I would genuinely like to see the nitpicks I had with it addressed, if only because I see a fair amount of potential here for future modules from the same team. I would definitely like to see how this author would handle a more classic site based adventure or a linked adventure path. Until next time, take care and good bye!
Saturday, April 23, 2016
Started a new D&D campaign
So, on Thursday, I started a new D&D campaign, adapting the Curse of Strahd adventure I've reviewed previously. I've taken liberties with some of the elements (for instance, writing a new intro) to adapt to my personal style, as well as make things flow more smoothly. It's the first time in years that I've run a full adventure over a non-text based medium, for all that I talk about how excellent it is to play D&D over the internet. As a result, many of my skills are incredibly rusty, but hopefully I'll get back into the swing of things.
However, I'd like to take a moment to talk about some of the technical and logistics problems that I encountered while setting this up and running it, not to bemoan their existence, but rather to address possible fixes, as well as marvel at how we finally did get this together.
First, some background: I don't have a lot of friends that play D&D who have a lot of free time anymore. As I am a relatively old man by Youtube standards (and getting ever older), most of my old players have moved on, and I've had to pick new ones up. And thus I have long turned to online solutions to set games up. I've been running a long running series of campaigns over IRC with a fairly steady core of players, but unfortunately about half of them won't do video chat or even voice chat, despite the various advantages thereof. So for years I've been running games either wholly over IRC, or occasionally through forums. Neither is conducive for getting much done.
Forums, by their nature, take a long time to play over. Their main strength: allowing people of vastly different schedules to interact, is also their main weakness. I could estimate maybe 1 or 2 rounds of posts a day in the fastest of the forum games I've played in, and many times somewhat slower, which means that your average combat could take a week or so to finish. If you have any miscommunication, or if someone asks for clarification on something, then it can easily kill a day just passing information back and forth to sort things out. Furthermore, this slow pace means that you're likely to lose members, either through disinterest or life events that can pop up over the sometimes months that it takes to run even one minor adventure.
With IRC and similar chat programs, interaction is theoretically only limited by reading and typing speed, but in practice it is much slower. People tend to AFK or not pay attention to the screen as much as they would be in a face to face game. If they are a slower typist with a lot to say, it can take a few minutes to type in something that could've been stated in seconds verbally. Because everyone who thinks ahead can have access to logs, sometimes players will rely more on logs of the chat than notes, and thus whenever they need to refer to some sort of specific mention, they might be paging back through MBs of text files, rather than just a page or two of relevant information. Further, you still have to rely on some sort of virtual tabletop if you want to share maps. It makes for a sometimes awkwardly slow play session.
So when I decided to run a campaign over video chat, I was quite excited. Here was a chance to finally get some D&D over the internet without having to wait for a day between posts, or for someone to decide to come back to the keyboard after an unannounced absence. Unfortunately, scheduling reared its ugly head, and thus it took me over a year and some change to actually get a D&D group together.
I pulled a few players in from my IRC based D&D/Pathfinder group, those who were willing to at least try video chat. The other two I drew from another chat channel I mod in, and whom I knew had video capability from past experience. And thus we set a day and actually managed to get everyone to show up for a game. The first game is always a real accomplishment.
Unfortunately, one of our players was sick when the day finally came. An unexpected roadblock, to be sure, but he was a real trooper. He agreed to play regardless of being ill, but did ask about not using his webcam so as not to look terrible. I readily agreed, so long as the audio worked fine. It did, and thus we were down one player's smiling face from the very beginning.
Then two of our players ran into technical and logistics problems. They are signing on from the same residence, but their place is currently undergoing remodeling, so they only had the one room to work from. Compounding this issue was the fact that one of them was on a laptop with no working webcam, so we were down another face. Fortunately the mic worked just fine. Unfortunately, the other player in the same room was using a built in mic rather than a headset mic or other directional mic. Thus, the problem of Echoing. It was horrible, Godawful really, but about halfway through the play session, we figured that we could just turn the mic off on one of them, and let the other broadcast both voices. With the lack of visual feedback, this meant that sometimes we kind of lost a voice, but it wasn't enough to present a real issue.
Just as we got started with play, the internet connection on the two sharing a mic and cam began to bomb. But by then we were ready to start, and I really, really didn't want to put the game off anymore. After a year plus of trying to get some sort of 5th edition game together, I was desperate. So we went ahead even with all the problems we were having. I was intending to get some overlays done, and drop the appropriate areas into it, but I didn't get them done in time, so everything you see in terms of overlay and graphics is done in post. And of course, the 'buzz' is back, because I ended up recording in OBS, which made for difficulties in cleaning up the audio.
Speaking of audio, the echo caused by the two players in the same room was only one issue. Roll20 tended to break up audio a lot when multiple people talk, and there doesn't appear to be anything that can be done to fix that, so in the future, we'll have to try to keep crosstalk to a minimum, or use another audio solution. The video seems just fine for now.
Also, because of my hectic week prior to this, I didn't get to refresh my memory with the actual Ravenloft content that I was likely to use, above and beyond the new intro I'd written. I hadn't initially expected to get to it, because I had grown so used to the pace that IRC and forum games run at that it didn't occur to me we'd actually get that far. I suppose that it's a testament both to how much faster the video/audio method is over plain text, as well as how focused our group was.
Of course, we have solutions incoming for almost all of the problems we encountered. First and foremost are things I can do on my end: better time management so that I can have time to prepare, taking my time with narrations to set a better mood, recording my own audio separately so I can clean the 'buzz'. The ill player should be up and running again next week in terms of a camera, and supposedly the player with no webcam now has one, and should be able to get it working.
For audio, I'm going to try to get one of those two players to get a headset, which should also cut down on their echo and crosstalk. Failing that, I'll have one of them mute their mic again, as I did in this particular session, which seemed to fix things. I'll also have my own audio recorded separately, and at the end of the day the only real problem (besides the variable mic qualities) will be the cut offs and dropouts during crosstalk. A few applications to use instead of Roll20.net's a/v service have been recommended to me, so I'll be trying those out in the future.
All in all, I'm rather pleased with how this session went. It'll be at least a week before I'll know the group's schedules to try to pick another day, but I'm optimistic that this will be a good, ongoing thing. And in the meantime, it's helping me identify problems and correct them, so perhaps I can run another campaign besides this one, if people are interested.
At the very least, it feels damn good to be in the DM's seat again. This feels so much closer to the tabletop setting than the IRC and forum games I've been relying on thus far.
However, I'd like to take a moment to talk about some of the technical and logistics problems that I encountered while setting this up and running it, not to bemoan their existence, but rather to address possible fixes, as well as marvel at how we finally did get this together.
First, some background: I don't have a lot of friends that play D&D who have a lot of free time anymore. As I am a relatively old man by Youtube standards (and getting ever older), most of my old players have moved on, and I've had to pick new ones up. And thus I have long turned to online solutions to set games up. I've been running a long running series of campaigns over IRC with a fairly steady core of players, but unfortunately about half of them won't do video chat or even voice chat, despite the various advantages thereof. So for years I've been running games either wholly over IRC, or occasionally through forums. Neither is conducive for getting much done.
Forums, by their nature, take a long time to play over. Their main strength: allowing people of vastly different schedules to interact, is also their main weakness. I could estimate maybe 1 or 2 rounds of posts a day in the fastest of the forum games I've played in, and many times somewhat slower, which means that your average combat could take a week or so to finish. If you have any miscommunication, or if someone asks for clarification on something, then it can easily kill a day just passing information back and forth to sort things out. Furthermore, this slow pace means that you're likely to lose members, either through disinterest or life events that can pop up over the sometimes months that it takes to run even one minor adventure.
With IRC and similar chat programs, interaction is theoretically only limited by reading and typing speed, but in practice it is much slower. People tend to AFK or not pay attention to the screen as much as they would be in a face to face game. If they are a slower typist with a lot to say, it can take a few minutes to type in something that could've been stated in seconds verbally. Because everyone who thinks ahead can have access to logs, sometimes players will rely more on logs of the chat than notes, and thus whenever they need to refer to some sort of specific mention, they might be paging back through MBs of text files, rather than just a page or two of relevant information. Further, you still have to rely on some sort of virtual tabletop if you want to share maps. It makes for a sometimes awkwardly slow play session.
So when I decided to run a campaign over video chat, I was quite excited. Here was a chance to finally get some D&D over the internet without having to wait for a day between posts, or for someone to decide to come back to the keyboard after an unannounced absence. Unfortunately, scheduling reared its ugly head, and thus it took me over a year and some change to actually get a D&D group together.
I pulled a few players in from my IRC based D&D/Pathfinder group, those who were willing to at least try video chat. The other two I drew from another chat channel I mod in, and whom I knew had video capability from past experience. And thus we set a day and actually managed to get everyone to show up for a game. The first game is always a real accomplishment.
Unfortunately, one of our players was sick when the day finally came. An unexpected roadblock, to be sure, but he was a real trooper. He agreed to play regardless of being ill, but did ask about not using his webcam so as not to look terrible. I readily agreed, so long as the audio worked fine. It did, and thus we were down one player's smiling face from the very beginning.
Then two of our players ran into technical and logistics problems. They are signing on from the same residence, but their place is currently undergoing remodeling, so they only had the one room to work from. Compounding this issue was the fact that one of them was on a laptop with no working webcam, so we were down another face. Fortunately the mic worked just fine. Unfortunately, the other player in the same room was using a built in mic rather than a headset mic or other directional mic. Thus, the problem of Echoing. It was horrible, Godawful really, but about halfway through the play session, we figured that we could just turn the mic off on one of them, and let the other broadcast both voices. With the lack of visual feedback, this meant that sometimes we kind of lost a voice, but it wasn't enough to present a real issue.
Just as we got started with play, the internet connection on the two sharing a mic and cam began to bomb. But by then we were ready to start, and I really, really didn't want to put the game off anymore. After a year plus of trying to get some sort of 5th edition game together, I was desperate. So we went ahead even with all the problems we were having. I was intending to get some overlays done, and drop the appropriate areas into it, but I didn't get them done in time, so everything you see in terms of overlay and graphics is done in post. And of course, the 'buzz' is back, because I ended up recording in OBS, which made for difficulties in cleaning up the audio.
Speaking of audio, the echo caused by the two players in the same room was only one issue. Roll20 tended to break up audio a lot when multiple people talk, and there doesn't appear to be anything that can be done to fix that, so in the future, we'll have to try to keep crosstalk to a minimum, or use another audio solution. The video seems just fine for now.
Also, because of my hectic week prior to this, I didn't get to refresh my memory with the actual Ravenloft content that I was likely to use, above and beyond the new intro I'd written. I hadn't initially expected to get to it, because I had grown so used to the pace that IRC and forum games run at that it didn't occur to me we'd actually get that far. I suppose that it's a testament both to how much faster the video/audio method is over plain text, as well as how focused our group was.
Of course, we have solutions incoming for almost all of the problems we encountered. First and foremost are things I can do on my end: better time management so that I can have time to prepare, taking my time with narrations to set a better mood, recording my own audio separately so I can clean the 'buzz'. The ill player should be up and running again next week in terms of a camera, and supposedly the player with no webcam now has one, and should be able to get it working.
For audio, I'm going to try to get one of those two players to get a headset, which should also cut down on their echo and crosstalk. Failing that, I'll have one of them mute their mic again, as I did in this particular session, which seemed to fix things. I'll also have my own audio recorded separately, and at the end of the day the only real problem (besides the variable mic qualities) will be the cut offs and dropouts during crosstalk. A few applications to use instead of Roll20.net's a/v service have been recommended to me, so I'll be trying those out in the future.
All in all, I'm rather pleased with how this session went. It'll be at least a week before I'll know the group's schedules to try to pick another day, but I'm optimistic that this will be a good, ongoing thing. And in the meantime, it's helping me identify problems and correct them, so perhaps I can run another campaign besides this one, if people are interested.
At the very least, it feels damn good to be in the DM's seat again. This feels so much closer to the tabletop setting than the IRC and forum games I've been relying on thus far.
Tuesday, April 19, 2016
Review - The Siege of Grimm Iron Peaks (DM's Guild)
Product: The Siege of Grimm Iron Peaks
Published: Feb 5, 2016
Author: Donald Thompson
Editor: Andrew O’Brien
DM’s Guild Link [Affiliate link]
First things first. I had thrown around the idea of reviewing some of the lower rated or rating-less content on the Dungeon Masters Guild as a feature on my Youtube channel. While I am not certain that this adventure merits that sort of treatment, I felt that it would be just fine for a blog entry, so here we are.
The Siege of Grimm Iron Peaks is a one-shot style adventure for 4-8 characters, designed to take 4-6 hours. It was released on Feb. 5th on the DM’s Guild site, and is currently a ‘pay what you want’ style release, meaning that it costs just as much as you care to spend on it. The pdf is just 31 pages, about 20 of which are pre-generated characters, one of which is a map, and one of which is a title page, leaving just 9 pages for adventure detail. As short as it is, it just doesn’t require any more than that. There are no detailed maps for combat encounters, as this adventure very much fits the old theater of the mind style.
The plot of the adventure is relatively straightforward, as befits a short one-shot adventure. The player characters are survivors of a war band, composed of various ‘evil’ races. While out on patrol around their mixed-tribe town, they are ambushed by adventurers. The adventure picks up just after the battle, where they are the presumed victors, though the rest of their war band was wiped out. Upon scavenging the bodies, they recover some miscellaneous gear and a map that details a settlement being built dangerously close to the PCs’ home. They are then left to push back the outsiders and basically ensure that settlement doesn’t take hold.
The content actually starts with some tips for DMing the adventure, most of which are pretty basic. Between that, and the pre-generated characters, this module seems ready for even a relatively novice DM to pick up and use for a night’s play. Indeed, since the characters are all of evil stock (of which only a few have been made proper playable races), these pre-made characters are pretty much required for proper enjoyment of the scenario. They are of varied classes, and there are two drow, two goblins, a bugbear, a gnoll, a hobgoblin, and a kobold. Which brings me to my first real problem with this adventure. What kind of town has that sort of varied group of evil races managing to live in close proximity without killing each other? That aside, I suppose there had to be some way to get multiple race types for people to choose from.
There’s a random encounter table, which has a series of basic encounters that all feel connected to the storyline. They can be run basically everywhere within the valley, and while an encounter chance is given, the rate you are expected to roll for them is left up to the DM, based on how much time they have to run that one shot adventure. It’s a good choice, in my opinion. Static encounters include an orcish village with rules on befriending them or coercing them into providing support, a gnomish tinker and trader, and the settlers’ buildings. The latter include a few options for how the player characters might deal with them, and a win condition for the adventure. The adventure itself is short and sweet, definitely suitable to run in a single night.
The hand drawn map included is not great, to put it bluntly, but it’s not supposed to be great. It is, after all, the in-character scribbles of some random adventuring band, updated by the random scribblings of some humanoids. The formatting is simple, with just enough variance to tell the separate sections from one another. It works for an adventure this short, but would need improvement for anything longer. Of more concern are the wording, punctuation, and grammatical errors throughout the adventure. Some errors are more grievous than others, and while the meaning can be understood from the context, it is distracting. It could all definitely use another editing pass.
That having been said, it is a pretty neat little concept, and I could definitely see busting this out when I’m short a person for my usual games, or just to try to break up the monotony of a campaign to avoid burnout. I could see a followup to this adventure being fun as well. While the quality is definitely far from professional level, it still might be worth a buck or two from the generous. Either way, I do recommend taking a look at this for a night of amusement and a break from playing the ‘good guys’ that is easy to just pick up and run.
Thursday, March 17, 2016
Curse of Strahd Review & Synopsis
Hello, this is the RPG Crawler, and welcome to a tabletop review of Curse of Strahd: the new horror adventure released by Wizards of the Coast based on the old AD&D I6: Ravenloft module and the AD&D 2nd edition Ravenloft material. If you intend to be a player in this module, I would urge you to stop reading this review, because while I have tried to remain vague on a lot of the specific details, you still might very well find quite a bit of it to spoil the experience for you.
I’m assuming that the rest of you are curious as to how this stacks up with the classic adventure it’s based off of, and whether it’s worth buying. Well, I can’t answer the last question for you, only for me, but let’s go over the content and I’ll tell you what I thought, and hopefully you’ll come out more informed.
Any time you want to remake a classic, you’re going to get a lot of people who will doubt your efforts or hate it just on principle. Having played the original, and the 2nd and 3.5 edition remakes, I have to say that this version really tries to capture and expand upon the feel of the original, and for the most part, it manages to do so. It incorporates just enough of the lore of the old Ravenloft setting to make oldschool players of that campaign world feel at home, yet doesn’t go so far as declaring an entire cluster of linked domains, and honestly? I feel that it’s better off for not doing so. Aside from the content itself, the adventure does make mention of some techniques to heighten and defuse the tension in your game, some of which are similar to what I covered in my Horror in Roleplaying video, as well as some I did not mention, and their inclusion is much appreciated.
Chapter 1 sets up the classic Strahd story. If you're familiar with I6, House of Strahd, or (to a lesser extent) Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, then you'll be familiar with the story in question. There are a few surprises here, which I'll leave off so as not to provide spoilers, but much like prior versions of the adventure, there are tips on how to roleplay Strahd and a card reading mechanic to determine the location of key story elements (which has been expanded to encompass the larger realm). There are more adventure hooks to get the characters involved, including the original Vistani messenger from the original I6, as well as threads leading from the Forgotten Realms setting (I really liked this one, but it may not be suitable for 1st level characters), Adventurer's League players, and a generic 'fogs sweep you into Ravenloft' style no-choice lead in.
Chapter 2 gives an overview of the people and the land, touching on the expanded areas of the domain. Now, while the town of Vallaki and the village of Krezk were both mentioned in prior materials, this book goes all out in fleshing them out (albeit later in the book). This chapter also covers such favorites as the mists of Barovia, how sunlight works, the alterations to magic -- not as restrictive as 2nd edition AD&D version but fairly flavorful. It touches on the people of Barovia and the unique qualities inherent to them, and how they treat nonhumans. The lore of the land and the Vistani are detailed here, as well as random encounters that occur while exploring the domain. Further, detailed descriptions of static encounters and common mechanics of features in the domain are listed here.
The map of Barovia is in this chapter, and after some examination appears to be a fleshed out and detailed subset of the northern part of the domain as previously described in Ravenloft supplements. The eastern part of the domain is that which was detailed in I6, and closely resembles the original maps, while slightly more liberties were taken with the maps from the Ravenloft boxed set. It does, however, fit the setting. Between the maps and the static overworld encounters detailed here, a DM should be relatively confident in allowing his players to explore the domain at their leisure.
Chapter 3 covers the Village of Barovia in depth. It does a good job of presenting the classic feel of the village from I6, sticking closer to it than to say, the zombie nightmare from Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. It includes all of the old quests from Barovia village, in addition to a few new ones to help connect the new adventures and areas so that PCs can make their way up from level 1. One of the newly added areas, Death House, is covered in Appendix B as a separate adventure in itself.
Chapter 4 covers Castle Ravenloft, which might seem like the last place characters will visit in this adventure, but might very well be returned to again and again over the course of the campaign. It includes random encounters, including new NPCs, as well as most of the old NPCs and locations from I6. In fact, if you or your players are familiar with the iconic floor plan of Castle Ravenloft, it is largely unchanged from previous releases. The maps have been cleaned up and detailed out a bit more, but appear nearly identical to prior versions of the adventure. A few npcs have been fleshed out or added, as stated above, to support the new range of levels. Of particular note is the artwork in this chapter, which can be very useful in setting the mood in a game session.
I will breeze over the rest of these chapters, since they contain a lot of new material, and would enter serious spoiler territory if I were to include too many details.
Chapter 5 fleshes out the town of Vallaki, which had been mentioned in previous sources, but I’m not entirely sure I’ve seen it filled out as much as it is here. It has random encounters, general information, NPCs and places fleshed out like Barovia village, except this is content that did not appear in I6 or House of Strahd. Being a larger town, there’s more relevant NPCs to interact with, and many form sort of mini adventures unto themselves, just waiting for the PCs to stumble across them. Overall, the town is very well written, and includes a Vistani camp and a few special events that can occur during the course of the PCs stay, ones which will undoubtedly leave their marks on the party’s memory.
Chapter 6 involves an adventure area, the windmill Old Bonegrinder. Its inhabitants can either be somewhat unwholesome allies or a challenge for PCs to overcome. Chapter 7, meanwhile, details the ruins of Argynvostholt, the former headquarters of a knightly order now fallen into ruin and corruption. While some quests might tend to indicate this could be treated as merely some dungeon crawl, it is a little more complex than that, resulting in a tragic place the players may want to redeem. Chapter 8 includes the village of Krezk and the Abbey of Saint Markovia, a place that is less fleshed out as a settlement and more as an adventure area, with a number of surprising twists that I honestly don’t want to reveal.
Chapter 9 and 10 are more adventure areas, a pass and a ruined settlement where quests or the characters’ own curiosity might take them. Chapter 11 is the former home of Rudolph van Richten, now rendered into another encounter area. 12 is a winery with troubles the characters may solve, 13 is both an expansive dungeon area, as well as ground zero for the story of Strahd’s transformation. It introduces a lot of lore that went long unmentioned. Finally, Chapter 14 and 15 cover more lairs for the allies of Strahd out in the wilds, adding dark druids and werewolves to the mix of things the PCs might have to face on their way to defeating the lord of the domain.
Finally, an epilogue gives details on what happens if various ending conditions are met: If Strahd wins, if he dies, and if he dies while certain other things are active. It also includes information on what happens thereafter, should other parties wish to brave the land of mists or the main party just want to continue onward. Overall, the adventure structure is very nonlinear, with several entry points and leads that might take characters crisscrossing across the haunted countryside. There is certainly an optimal way to progress through these adventure areas, but even then a great many of them are optional.
The book wraps up with a new character background, the Haunted One, as well as some gothic trinkets starting characters can take. An introductory adventure: ‘Death House’ allows characters to rise from first level to third, for a better chance at surviving the rigors of the land, while a further appendix updates many classic items from I6 to fifth edition format. There’s a section with monster stats for monsters and NPCs found in the adventure, including many classic Ravenloft creatures such as the Strahd Zombie, and finally graphics for the Tarokka deck, handouts for the players to receive during play, and fold out maps.
As far as the book itself, I have little to compare it to, since this is the first non-core 5th edition rulebook I’ve purchased. Overall, the quality of the book itself is on par with the core rulebooks, with similar bindings and trade dressing. The artwork is beautiful, evocative of the setting itself. The sheer amount of content over the original adventures it is based off of, combined with the more than adequate build quality definitely makes this a valued addition to my collection. Overall, I am extremely happy with my purchase. While I was uncertain whether the additional material was worth the price, if you manage to get it from Amazon or another retailer that shaves that 49.95 sticker price down a bit (I paid just over 31$ as a pre order, not sure if you can still get it for that anywhere), I’d say that it is well worth it. While there is a notable quality difference between some of the new material and the old material, it’s not bad by any means, and quite a bit of it is well integrated, expanding the backstory of Strahd and his ties to the land in a way that allows the players to experience, rather than simply be told about it.
I would have to say that, in my humble opinion, Curse of Strahd is the definitive version of the Ravenloft adventure, at least once you get into the meat of the accessory, and it is definitely something I am proud to have on my gaming shelf. I look forward to running this for various groups for years to come.
This has been my first review of a tabletop product, and I hope that it’s been informative. If you have any feedback on the review format itself, do let me know. If you’d prefer to see this in video format, I have a version of it on my Youtube channel, which I encourage you to check out. Until next time, take care!
Curse of Strahd
Wizards of the Coast
Released: March 15, 2016
Price: $49.95
Amazon Link [Affiliate Link]: http://amzn.to/2d6BvNa
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