A regional/dungeon adventure by David Maynard, level 1 For Throne of Chaos Aw yeah, we’re in unapproved fanfiction territory here boys. Summer at Durnholde Keep is the introductory/sample adventure for the extremely unauthorized Warcraft TTRPG hack Throne of Chaos by David Maynard. I remember looking at the rules a while ago and thinking they were fine, a more old-school take on the Blizzard game world than the hoary old 3.0 hack back in the day. This adventure accompanies the ruleset, as is only right a proper, and it’s got an admirably broad scope, using seventeen pages to detail a large region and a thirty-seven-room dungeon complex that, in classic Warcraft fashion, somehow connects three location miles(?) apart. It’s unapologetically riffing off B2: Keep on the Borderlands, but all Warcrafty. The plot, such as it is, is that Durnholde Keep up in Hillsbarad is being used to supply the vast armies of the Alliance in their ongoing war with the Horde, particularly with a nearby mine that has recently been taken over by gnolls. Lord Blackmore of the keep has generated the resultant yellow exclamation point for a quest, and as the players wander the zone, they’ll pick up numerous other quests on the grind to that coveted level 2 ding. Along the way they’ll hopefully cotton on to the fact that trolls are using a nearby Altar of Storms to enact a dire ritual and free their hero unit Zul’jin, who is being held within the keep. There’s another deeper subplot involving a necromancer in the lower dungeon level massing forces to assault the keep…there’s a 25-day honest-to-Elune time tracker with events on a schedule, which is quite a good idea. What I liked first of all is that timer, it shows that Maynard knows how a regional campaign is supposed to tick along, even though I would have personally accelerated the timetable, maybe with more portents. The region itself has some nice and interesting “hermit’s huts” to bump into, with a lot going on ripe for disruption, with a limited d6 random encounter table that has the wanderers all doing something. Likewise, the mine is juuuust big enough to breathe with some decent pathing and various factions, all with, rarity of rarities, an order of battle. Everything is dynamic and moving and, ironic considering the source material, not very video-gamey. A little table in the back listing all findable keys along with what they go to is always a good idea. This won’t surprise anyone, but what can be improved first is “make the map(s) bigger”, a little more flexibility would go a long way to making the maps really pop. The other problem is going to feel a little vague, but the whole thing managed to feel a little…dry. I’ve focused on the highlights, but one consequence of the size is that there’s a lot of boar-grinding in here. Oh really, we’re going to be encountering 1d6 wolves for the third time today? Okay I guess. Bigger encounter tables would mitigate this somewhat. There’s also an opportunity here given the source material to seed in more yellow exclamation points. The admirable scale is unfortunately leading to a slightly empty feeling in several locations. Despite that, the best use case for Summer at Durnholde Keep is still to play as it is. If you want to learn to play Warcraft as a TTRPG and for some insane reason you want to go Alliance as your start, then this will be your keep on the borderland. For all that I admire elements in the scenario, I’m having a difficult time seeing bits I’m driven to mine. Plus I’m Horde all the way, baby. Final Rating? ***/***** For generic good Warcraft times, hard to beat.
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This is part 5 of my review of Heroes of Adventure, a work of biography as much as a review of the system. I’ve chronicled one nameless man’s polished heartbreaker product, going through his style, his mathematics, his hero design, and finally his passion for procedural generation. Now to cap it off, I’m going to look through his Monsters Compendium, the requisite bestiary for this thing, before finishing with my conclusions. I’m certainly not going to trawl through every single monster, if you enjoy that content that’s a different podcast. First, I’ll make a note again about AI art. I’m sympathetic to the view of “death to all AI art products”, both in terms of paying artists, and in terms of having coherent illustrations with soul. What AI does excel at, though, is making horrible-looking nasty monsters. Zero artist budget that this book has, still every single monster has art, weird-handed and spiky. It adds definite color to what would otherwise be a rather dry monster manual. Since I know the author loves his modularity I was interested in seeing how he builds his monsters, and needless to say there are tables available. Monster subtypes (roll), descriptors (roll), five sizes (roll), threat levels (roll), and abilities (roll our first d100, neat), all good. The ability tags are detailed in a huge table and all make sense (poison, web, slow, lucky, regenerate, etc), the old d20 monster feats basically. Which is interesting, because what is completely ditched from the process is the highly regimented hit dice building for monsters…we have a little table that gives a default set of size/hp/AC/skill die (to-hit bonus)/damage for monsters level 1-7, but there’s no formula for how these are derived. Which makes me worry that it’s gut-based at a point, that’s tough for the home hacker. It’s a wonderful set of specialized tools you have here but you left out the general ones, like a screwdriver. An organizational note; humanoid NPCs creation was actually handled back in the Referee’s Guide including stats for leveled-up NPCs. Then we’re off to the monster listings. Format is tight, packing 164 monsters in this relatively slim 64-page booklet; most pages have four monsters per page, with each entry having its compact statblock, a short flavor blurb describing it, an AI-generated little illustration, and a 1d6 “Hooks” table that basically describes how a party is likely to come upon the critter(s). This format is good, the content is…a little uneven. Sometimes the hooks look useful, but at other times it is six different variations of “you bumble into this monster”. I do like that the statblocks include “HARVEST”, which are the monster bits that can be harvested for potions and spells, that’s grisly but cool. As usual, I first flip to the humble ogre (actually, I click the link…the PDFs all have linked tables of content, good show). It’s…a lot tougher than I’m used to, but still gives us a look at a bruiser-type enemy. Level six, with a towering damage resistance 3 (that’s going to more than double its HP), a nasty d12 attack bonus, and power attack, which gives it advantage on its damage rolls. The only thing it has got going against it is the “Slow” trait, which gives it disadvantage on initiative checks. Big tough fighter, that’ll be a hard fight until your heroes are near its level, but as ever it is charmable or able to be ensorcelled, just hope your first level mage’s d20+d4 beats the defensive d20+d12. Going through the lists, you have all the usuals…elementals, giants, dragons, ogres, goblins, gnomes, hags, kobolds, harpies, ghosts, ghouls, lizardmen, golems, animals, dire critters (giant animals), demon types, manticores, zombies, etc. Biggest notable omission is orc but beastmen are present and can fill the niche (art is basically Warcraft Orc). I am disappointed by only three dinosaurs available. There are a few cryptids in the mix too, no big surprise. There is an entry for bear and an entry for “mutant bear”, which is…weird. There are eight human types (Adventurer, Bandit, Commoner, etc) but given they’re just differentiated by the worn gear I’m not sure if the value there. Final note, there are some entries for structures, which is interesting. There aren’t a large number of “new” or nonstandard monsters, but looking at what is different:
Conclusion So with all these books wrapped up, what do I think about Heroes of Adventure? Well, first of all, I’m impressed with the thing as an individual accomplishment. The Nameless Designer put in a vast amount of effort in making some extremely professional-looking books for a notably complete TTRPG game system, all with full-color art, good layout, and a good grasp of the fundamentals of what is needed to use these 192 pages to run years-long campaigns. All of this is done using his own computer and some Midjourney cycles, which is darned impressive. Moreover, he’s not trying to grab a cash from all this, given this system and all the adventures he wrote for it too are completely free on itch.io, with Creative Commons licenses. It’s a singular creator’s gift to the world, offered just in the hope that it’ll be appreciated and shared, and I think that is extremely laudable. But besides all that Mrs. Lincoln, how about the play? I think, ultimately, the Heroes of Adventure Fantasy Adventure Game is…fine. Can I imagine playing it and having fun? Of course. Could I imagine running it for a year of progress over a 1-10 campaign, discovering a compelling emergent story with my friends? Yes, if I could find four others interested in the indie system. But unfortunately, a dark secret that all reviewers of TTRPG products must admit is that these games are one of the most inherently fun and enjoyable activities known to mankind. It's actually quite difficult to not have fun with a good group of friends, eating pretzels, drinking beer, and throwing dice. Heroes of Adventure is a perfectly cromulent game engine to use for this. Unfortunately, the question any new TTRPG system released in the year 2023 must answer is “why?” There are approximately infinity game systems available now, for every conceivable level of complexity, difficulty, or depth. There are all manner of action resolution systems, dice schemes, and running procedures. Every conceivable subsystem, hack, and minigame has been released, with prices varying from “here’s my Google drive link” to “Kickstarted for $2,000,000”. It’s a glutted market, even on the relatively small platforms like itch. Even the free aspect isn’t something to really tout anymore, in this day and age paying money for a TTRPG product means that the consumer either wants a physical product, or else is making the conscious choice to donate money to creators in the hobby. For goodness’ sake the internet bullied Hasbro Inc. into releasing D&D Creative Commons. There are a few innovations here, but I’m not fundamentally seeing any game experiences that can take place in Heroes of Adventure uniquely. I think anyone wanting to pick this up a run it will have a good time, but I wouldn’t say that it’s worth the effort of a 192-page dive, plus the immense inertial resistance that is overcoming “but why not 5E?” As an aside, the funny little term “semi-compatible with OSR” needs a moment of thought. Heroes of Adventure seems to tip more to “tradgames” (think D&D 3, Pathfinder, and other d20 derivatives) to me. Characters, while admirably fragile and not the optimization-pits that 3.P can be, are generally more mechanically distinctive than those in your favorite B/X clone. Even more than that, XP being designed to reward completing quests and adventures first of all is very different than “gold=XP” as the primary leveling and advancement mechanism. The focus on hexcrawling is great, but to be honest that’s more “imagining things while looking at Outdoor Survival” than actual old school play focus. Could you play Keep on the Borderland with this system pretty easily? Probably. But it’s not really what I’d call OSR. All that being said, maybe it is worth checking this out. I’d say it’s to support independent creators, but this guy doesn’t even allow donations, it’s not pay what you want. There are a couple subsystems that I really enjoyed here, most notably alchemy and religion ones…so there are some bits of value. Worth paying $49.99? No. But it’s free, and I admire the gumption here. Certainly, Heroes of Adventure should be held up to shame cash grabs like Shadowdark or glory hounds like Cairn where someone takes their rules hack and markets it to the high heavens, the professionalism and love that went into this is just embarrassing for those products. I do hope some groups out there are enjoying this well-crafted heartbreaker…I just hope for their sakes they won’t run into an ogre early on. A dungeon adventure by Sersa Victory, level 1 For Shadowdark RPG Dark Sun detected. It’s a Dark Sun adventure. Ignore what it says on the tin, the setting is literally Dark Sun with all the trademarks filed off…players are slaves of a Sorcerer-Queen who rules a city state in a desert world ravaged by a literal dark sun, metal is canonically rare, etc. Please ignore the fact that this eight-page ten-room dungeon could be reflavored effortlessly into any generic Shadowdark level 1 setting. It’s a fine flavor, at least. The plot is mostly ignorable, basically old temple is found, Sorcerer-Queen wants McGuffin from there, orders the party to go get the McGuffin. Furthering the railroad is a storygaming bit where the players are asked how they think their queen would reward success or punish failure, then the DM secretly chooses a low-level cleric buff and a mid-level wizard blast to bless or hit the player with if they succeed or fail on a luck token roll. The final bit of sadism is that the delve begins in media res with the PCs going down in a pit with a disintegrating solar storm behind them and a stern injunction that camping outside doesn’t work, while returning to the city empty-handed leads to the queen crucifying the entire party. I begin to realize with increasing distaste that the author has a bit too much…personal…identification with this Sorcerer-Queen character. Moving swiftly onward from that to what I liked, despite the unrelenting brutality that’s scaled way to high for first level, there are a few reasonably metal encounters on this one. A slimy naga critter that fights over a chasm, with a hint to a door-unlock riddle inside its translucent belly. A mini-colosseum with a golem that fights a Triceratops Ghoul, which has a +1 greataxe lodged in its frill. A fake idol that weeps Cloudkill. A corridor filled with disintegration mists that nevertheless allows glimpses of treasure room beyond. All these are decent. Then what can be improved? Unfortunately, sometimes an adventure in fact turns out to be less than the sum of its parts. The first issue, a common one in these itch.io adventures you’ll note, is one of scale. It’s a buried temple, come on, let’s just quintuple the scale here at least…the map’s cramped nature makes it all a lot more linear than it should be, it’s also more linear than it even looks alas. The brutality also wants a higher-level party, this should be a bigger space and a level 3-4 adventure, which of course would hurt the “you are all slaves being railroaded” premise…just have to jettison that, tragic. Although the module gets a point for having a random encounter table, it gets immediately deducted for being dull and half of the encounters being noninteractive. Bad module, no cookie. The magic items also are all pretty videogamey except for the one crown that lets you once in a lifetime kill a ruler, no save, magically on the next full moon. More of that, less of “power-up healing ball of light”. The best use case for this one is to say to the Whizzard “no, we shall not enter your magical realm” and instead just maybe steal the idea of an undead triceratops with an axe in its frill. The whole affair comes off as needlessly adversarial, much to the unpleasant glee of the designer. Final Rating? */***** With a vaguely sour feeling, we know that Shadowdark can produce better results than this. This is part 4 of my review of the Heroes of Adventure free indie heartbreaker, this time I’m focusing on the Referee’s Guide. Parts 1, 2, 3.1, and 3.2 are probably a good idea to read before tackling this one. So, the classic Dungeon Master’s Gu…er, Referee’s Guide is the second of the three 64-page core rulebooks for Heroes of Adventure, which is traditionally where the meat of the game content lies for a new system. The world-brain, the dungeon master, is the guy who is actually designing the game being played, the system is just the toolkit he’s using. So what’s in the toolbox? The Referee’s Guide here is organized…okay, going Rules-> Creating Heroes (rules for making new classes)-> Running Adventures-> Creating Adventures-> Campaign Play. I’d put the classmaking hack at the back myself, but otherwise, sure. The rules here are not fully sufficient, a DM does have to read up from the Players Hondbook as well, but it’s obviously the main focus is going to be on the designing and running side. Which is fair. Rules and the hero-hacking sections aren’t too much novel. There’s a little bit of interest in the reactions table/fate table presented to allow a lot of “I don’t know what to do, imma roll” moves on the DM’s part. The DM advice is solid if unoriginal, advocating for an even-handed relationship with the players that encourages “yes and” responses. The friendly improv advice is somewhat ominously offset at the end by the brutal wounds and wild magic tables, with lots of ways to nastily cripple a character. The hero class creation guidelines make a lot of sense, as mentioned back in part 3 the classes are basically just big buckets of feats, so the rules are “here’s your chassis, here’s the bucket, go have fun”. This is fine, but this isn’t the point of the book… …More surprisingly, the “Running Adventures” section doesn’t seem to be either. 10 of the 64 pages, so significant, but not dominant. Advice here is pretty solid again, with old-school wisdom like reaction tables, morale checks, ten-minute exploration turns, and weather tables…while there are also trad d20 bits like knowledge checks, social skill checks, crits, and advantage/disadvantage granted for plans (but not charming acting, good). I do like that Perception is not a skill used in searching, if a player is looking for a thing, the player will find the thing unless otherwise hidden. A big downtime activity table is present for time between adventures, which is nifty. Combat is theater of the mind, with “range bands” called out in the rules that are conveniently in 30ft increments so as not to render all D&D written everywhere for all of time irrelevant. The only part where I have an issue is the handwavy part in the “Rewards” section where there’s no actual guideline for wealth-by-level, just like in 5E. I understand without GP=XP (OSR) or magic item shops (3.P) there’s not a strict need for it, but fighters need to be able to afford plate armor and a golf bag full of weapons, and those aren’t free. I’m sure the sympathetic and positive DM that is the author gives out plenty of gold, but that’s a ton of homework to give out. There’s a difficulty is evaluating how easily the hypothetical literate-but-ignorant DM could use these rules to run a game from a place of pure tabla rasa innocence, completely unaware of the vast tradition of roleplaying accumulated over the last two-and-a-half generations. This huge floating cloud of tribal knowledge hangs over everything in a book like this…the theoretical Newbie DM might be missing something key that I, with my own years of experience running games, might also be missing. All this is advice, then, not instruction. Well-meaning advice though. It’s in Creating Adventures that the author’s passion lies, here in fully half of the book’s page content. He has a heart, nay, a mania for procedural generation. There are pages and pages of procedures and tables to make wilderness maps, settlements, rumors, quests, challenges, adventure sites, random encounters/NPCs, and loot/crafting resources. There are extensive procedures to use die-drop methods to make maps, to randomly generate the towns and dungeons found on it, and to fully populate them…it’s really not My Thing, but I am in awe of the sheer density of content here. Most DMs I know have their own default world, where they have vast and exhaustive (in every sense of the world) setting bibles that can generate infinite stories of varying quality, or else they play published standard settings. What we have here is something for the middling sort…a fresh-faced young DM with hope in his heart and an empty canvas in his head, who wants to put in the work to make his own world, but who is apparently afraid to plagiarize a seed from the vast corpus of preexisting worlds out there. The Microscope audience, in other words. This book is great for that kind of worldbuilding, and if the Heroes of Adventure’s default “Fallen Lands” setting is too generic for the enterprising world-maker, then the seeds and tables will support some decent flexing. Like Microscope, this is a separate game being presented here, but one I can certainly understand the appeal of. The final instructional section, Campaigns, starts as a bigger-scale continuation of the previous section, with random tables for filling hexes, opening up story/plot fronts, and designing factions, all well enough done…and then it takes a sharp left turn and over three pages outlines simple but functional rules for mass combat, business ownership, and domains. And they’re beautiful. High-level characters will inevitably be asking questions about all three subjects, and the DM equipped with these three little pages can answer. I wouldn’t make any of these a focus but I have already started using the business/property rules in my home West March game for the players who’ve built a smithy, stables, and in one case a tiny village. They’ve worked very well for the between-session investment that the gold-flush characters who’ve explored the world long for. Golf clap for the Nameless Designer. In the concluding couple pages there’s a small sample dungeon (Mezrak’s Foundry), which is frankly a necessity for any core rulebook. It’s…pretty decent. Two pages to describe a 12-room ancient dwarven foundry being used by deluded cultists to summon a chaos being they think is their god. There are factions (the cultists, their bored/deserting mercenaries, tricky chaos demons), a few map loops and secrets, tricky levers to play with, a random encounter table, and an actual order of battle. Enemies are all with stats in a tight little table. There’s also a vault with decent money and a magic warhammer, so that’s neat. I think this thing is possibly tuned a little brutally for a first-level party, my gut says it’s for a party of level 3’s. That feels like a wise choice, in this case. The audience for a sample adventure isn’t really a group of new players, it’s a new-to-the-system DM who wants to read through something to see how the system is expecting to be played. Decent adventure, good sample adventure. And with that, we’re through 2/3 of the core Heroes of Adventure rulebooks. The last part of this quixotic quest is the monster manual. After all, we’ve been working hard with the setup to play, but the probable majority of the time in this game will be the heroes trying to hit monsters… A dungeon adventure by Vance Atkins, for “Low to Mid-level” For OSE Ah, a nine-page tomb module using a Dyson Logos map, written for OSE? It’s like slipping on a comfy pair of old slippers. I didn’t recognize the author’s name at first, but he’s the author of the excellent Leicester's Ramble blog, which I’ve enjoyed perusing before. So, clearly knows what he’s doing here…it’s a free product, so uses public domain images, has a pretty normal format (single-column intro, double-column for keys), all standard. He uses eight pages to describe a twenty-room dungeon, with some decent enough geography and shape-interest. Twenty rooms is a nice size for one of these products, much more breathing room than the little 5-10 roomers I’m finding more often. The story is nothing new, but it is well told…paladin guy died defeating five necromancers, gets buried with them under a temple, temple is burnt down, now people are raiding the tomb and waking up the dead, oops. A meaty 12-entry rumor table is present to deliver the backstory and most importantly to tell the greedy players that there’s a legendary magic spear in there. The tomb itself has some decently gnarly traps and a variety of enemies, although it’s a little sparsely populated, the biggest threats being a nicely outfitted evil adventuring party and swirling smoke-ghosts who try to reach a different room to turn into a massive horror. Zero random attacking skeletons. Now what I liked here are almost all the individual details. The rival party is characterized, the traps are fine, and the map layout is taken advantage of consistently. The unique magical spear is pretty awesome and not in an obvious place, which is good. The “final bossfight” (not guaranteed to be final, could technically be the first fight) has the potential to be very frantic, but it doesn’t seem badly tuned for levels 3-5. I feel like this would be fun to play. What’s here, I like. Like not love. What can be improved here is “add more”. The biggest issue here is the Standard Tomb Problem of a static environment, which wandering monsters would help. If I were to run this, I’d have to add random encounters of other exploring adventurers, vermin, skeletons, or possibly more giant otters (there’s also giant otters btw). A bit more interconnectivity than the map defaults to and a few more deadly room inhabitants might not be a bad idea either. Finally, treasure in gold feels a little too light for “low to mid-levels” of a B/X derivative, while there’s a lot of magic to be retrieved. To each their own, but rarer magic and more encounters plus gold would do a lot to make this cool tomb really pop. Basically, it comes off as less deep, and less substantial, than it really could be. The sparse nature of this beast does mean that its best use case is probably as a long one-shot, or a site placed on a big hexmap. In fact, I’m going to be putting this in my current West Marches, so I guess that’s an endorsement. With effort you could have a longer usage of this place but that’s giving yourself probably more homework than you should. Final Rating? ***/***** Exactly perfect for its modest ambitions. This is part 2 of Part 3 of my review of the Heroes of Adventure freebie heartbreaker labour of love/AI art extravaganza/TTRPG system, where I focus on the latter half of the Player’s Handbook. Earlier parts focused on the system as a whole and the underlying math. When last we left our hero Dave he died in character creation. It’s assumed that eventually we’ll manage to make a character that survives a couple 1-in-6 chances to die embarrassingly, so now we need to outfit him. It’s a silver standard world out there, so let’s take our slightly tarnished coins to the shop… Chapter Four: Equipment Ah, the good old shopping list. I’ll look along the lists for notable omissions or inputs, but first a bit on items…heroes can carry 12 items, plus one per strength skill die. 6 items are available at a given time, while the rest are stowed, and coins are 500 per “item slot”. The biggest difference between HoA equipment and most systems is that these things break constantly, damaged on a critical failure (natural 1), utterly destroyed if damaged again while dinged. This 5% failure rate applies to magic items, too, where enchanted items get diminished once and then start to randomly lose features. There’s a possibility of fixing things but the dangers to equipment are real. The system also uses the pretty common “shields are shattered” rule to trade a shield for a single hit’s damage. Neat. Weapons and armour are a list that won’t surprise most, although Gygax would frown at the piddly three polearms available, need about ten more at least. Weapons and armor have special feature tags that make them special…the Heavy tag in particular imposes disadvantage on magic and dexterity checks, trying to prevent thieves and wizards in full plate. Fair. There are oil flasks Dwarven Bombs available, although at a steep 300sp price they won’t be ubiquitous. Rations, as a good benchmark, go for 5 silver pieces per 2 days, so a bomb will feed you for a third of a year. Healing potions do exist, although they’re pricy at 250sp…better healing options are the healer’s kit (d6 healing x5) or bandages (d4 at disadvantage healing). All these things are in the DM-fiat world of “not easily available in small settlements”, so only towns have Ye Olde Alchemyst’s Shoppe. Finally, under “items” we do have properties, animals, and hirelings. Sell-Swords are a remarkably cheap 10sp per turn plus expenses, which means wise players will have kill squads of mercs most of the time. I do like having a hunting hawk cost 25x more than a day of a mercenary risking life and limb. Generally, I noted no major omissions on the tables here, equipment is section is perfectly fine. Chapter Five: Crafting On the one hand, this section is only three pages for crafting and alchemy, so there’s some general hand-waving happening here. On the other hand, this system is pretty great considering that’s in in the player book. Basically there’s a long list of rando ingredients and materials that have a suggested crafting or potion use, and it becomes a game between player and DM to try and use the broad but useable guidelines to make the thing that the crafting player envisions. From long experience without huge mechanical benefits only about one player per dozen will be really into this system, but that one player will be really really into the system. I might actually port this crafting system into my own games I like it so much. Chapter Six: Magic Long-term players of D&D are leaning forward now, licking their chops. Here, more than anywhere else, is where a fantasy adventure game sets itself apart from others. Any game where wizards are protagonists, they will tend to dominate the tone and action, all the more so as they advance in levels. Wise system designers will hang all kinds of disadvantages on their wizards, knowing that they’re going to be so dominant as the story advances, and they’re right to do so. Still, without magic we’re all just playing d20 Modern here, which is an awful thing, so let’s dive in. Magic is cast using the magic skill, typically with a DC 10 or a roll-off against a stat being used as the target’s save. Critical effects are applied to this skill check too, so a natural 20 will automatically amplify the spell (adding more range/bigger die/etc) and a natural 1 will mean a roll on ye olde Wild Magic table. The are no spells-per-day slots or limits, but every spell cast costs one hit point, or 2/3 if the spell is amplified/even more amplifieder, and that hit point doesn’t get healed outside of sleep at night, so that’s the limit. Taking a school of magic opens up all 10 spells in that school to cast, but unless the magician is proficient with the spell its cast at disadvantage. Each level a caster gains two spells as proficiency per school, and once the caster is proficient with all spells in a school he gains access to a miracle, a very powerful spell that permanently reduces hp by 2 and is only cast once per six months. The school list:
Overall, the spells listed here are pretty complete and seem to be decently strong and varied, with no obvious overpowered stuff beyond the twice-a-year miracles. If anything, the spells feel like they’re tuned to be on the weaker side compared to the D&D norm, with the author clearly knowing his stuff. Magical healing is a touch parsimonious; nobody is going to be outhealing the boss damage here. I like the magic fine. Chapter Seven: The Gods Seems like a weird place to put fluff at first, but it’s actually a nifty little two-page religious spellcasting subsystem that gives a list of gods, how to impress them for “piety points”, and how to ask for their divine favors (a spell that is cast using a piety point). Only one favor can be asked for per day, and it’s a religion skill check to have a prayer successfully answered. Every character can interact with this system, and remember, this is the player-facing book. I love this subsystem and I think I’ll be stealing it. The Rest The book finishes with a couple pages of pregenerated heroes and a no-frills but very functional blank character sheet. As always with a players’ book, it’s not focused on the sale of “you should play this system”, it’s more “so your DM picked this to play, here’s how”. I think the Players Handbook does a good job on this task. No player in the history of the hobby has ever read an entire player handbook, of course, but there are good systems in here for the DM to swipe and staple on the foreheads of players interested in those mechanics. Organization and presentation are fine, length is decent, content is solid…good handbook here, Nameless Designer. Now of course we need to drill down to how the game gets run… A search and rescue adventure by Renasdoodles, level 1 For Mausritter A bit outside my usual interests this time. Under the Garden is a bucolic little kidnapping adventure written for Mausritter, although I am haunted by the note in the module that it can be used in other “sword and whiskers” games if the players are all playing mice. How vast of a genre are we talking about here? Are there edition wars? Dueling Discord communities? Do a bunch of hirsute grognards congregate in some village of Cornwall for the “Vermingaming Convention”, while Americans wear fake mouse ears in Kansas City for “Redwall Con”? I blanche at the thought. Anyway this is a 5-page adventure where you are a bunch of mice rescuing other mice who were kidnapped by rats to feed to a magical snake who the rats worship as a god. Yes, that is the plot that suggested itself, fully-formed, in all of our minds about two seconds after hearing the premise of Mausritter. But what matters for these things are the details. How developed is the mystery? How interesting is the setting and are the NPCs? How good is the map? Uh oh. Not very. Not at all. 404 file not found. It’s going to be short to list what I liked again. The boxed text is close to maxing out, but keeps itself to just three sentences in reasonably charming passages. Formatting is crisp and clear, looks nice. The list of NPCs gives all of them character and “things to play with”, although their personalities are a little trite. Finally and most admirably, the adventure offers multiple cases where the party can fail without completely wiping out, and seems to realize that there’s a good chance that canny players will go off the rails and be clever with solutions that might have partial successes. Thus what can be improved first is to give us more details that would support those players leaving the rails…all the adventure does now is say “let them”. I’m going to harp on this again but that’s where a physical map of the geography in which the adventure takes place really comes in handy, having that particular picture is worth a lot more than a thousand words when it comes to wandering time. The bulleted list of clues to be found in every scene isn’t a bad idea, but the actual descriptions of the physical spaces make delivery awkward. Having more quirks and interest to the characters of both the mouse-village and the rat-town, as well as to the NPCs, would be nice. What we have here is basically what you’d exactly expect from a standard mouse TTRPG level-1 adventure. And now I feel silly for the words I type. The best use case for Under the Garden is to use the adorable cover illustration multiple times in all your many long years of mouse-based-gaming. I suppose it’s also nice to have the Platonic Ideal of the Generic Mousegame Adventure. It’s been written, guys, we can feel free to advance further. I suggest instead a campaign based on the novel Salamandastron. Eulalia, good sirs. Final Rating? */***** But just pleasant enough to make me feel mean about it. This is part 3.1 of my review of the Heroes of Adventure free TTRPG system, this time I’m focusing on the Players’ Handbook. Parts 1 and 2 are found here and here. The Players’ Handbook is organized in the somewhat unusual sequence of Game Rules-> Setting/World Information-> Making a PC-> Equipment Lists-> Crafting/Alchemy-> Magic-> Setting Pantheon-> Example Characters/Sheets. Front-loading the rules makes sense in a player-facing document, as all DMs know that players have the attention spans of espresso-addicted hyperactive squirrels on a bender…they aren’t going to sit down and read a 64-page book in order. As a reviewer and a game-runner, though, I of course will be reading this thing one chapter at a time. Moving on then: Chapter One: Rules To begin, after several pages of colorful and somewhat wonky AI art in title pages, there’s a 1-page introduction that explains the basics of playing a TTRPG and sets the mood slightly. We get a few signals (“games of yesteryear” and “semi-compatible with OSR”) that the author knows his RPG history, and then we’re off to the rules. Significant variations from tradgames we note immediately are that distances are abstracted to “range bands” in terminology but that are still 30ft increments, that hitting zero HP is immediate death/rolling on a wounds table, and most significantly that XP is awarded primarily through completing quests. A little XP trickles in from overcoming monsters (not killing per se), exploring sites, and finding artefacts or treasures. This means that play will be structured along a mission format, wandering around into fresh zones looking for the yellow exclamation points…which will be somewhat at odds with the hexcrawl language up ahead. Most of the rules are pretty standard, though, as covered in part 1…again, this is a d20 system with checks against DCs as the primary mechanic. Attributes (Agility, Command, Fortitude, Senses, Strength, and Will) are far less impactful than in most systems but get used in standard ways, and there are a few things that OSR will definitely consider sins, like social interactions leaning on Command or Guile checks. Something I always check are the combat maneuvers/grapple rules…55 words here, very simple, undoubtedly insufficient for edge cases, but I’m not going to complain. It’s a perfectly functional system. The final bit of the chapter is an example of play that shows a scenario that’ll be unsurprising to anyone familiar with a d20 system. Chapter Two: Setting …and now for a sudden shift from crunch to fluff. This chapter concerns itself with the assumed setting of the Fallen Lands, a generic continent with a Standard Ancient Fallen Human Empire, the Dying Elf Race of the Woods (Wildfolk), the Stern Mountain Dwarves (Northmen), and a very normal set of factions (The Church, The Remnants, The Druids, etc). As generic as it all is at first, I do appreciate how blank the hexmap is…the game understands what’s special about a TTRPG campaign. It’s not about a weird or wild set of hooks, the stories that emerge are personal and special not because of the setting they’re in, but because it’s “us” who are in them. So generic, wish it sparked more creativity, but I don’t count that against it too much. Chapter Three: Heroes So at this point we’ve finally caught up to where the players flipped forward to about fifteen seconds after cracking the book, we’re now looking at races and classes to make the Player Characters. It’s not immediately intuitive in all ways but there are helpful examples of character creation sprinkled throughout the chapter. First, the prospective player picks a race (or rolls for it). Nonhumans have a limit to only 1 allowed per party...they’re generally much more powerful at the outset than humans, but take twice as much XP to level as humans. Options are:
This is a game built for the current year, so of course there are also rules for creating a character’s background, but more interestingly there’s also a fairly involved set of rolls in the backgrounds to have a history that gives benefits or detriments to the character at the outset, up to gaining a level or dying, in a nice nod to Traveler. Alright, let’s try this exercise and make ourselves a character, shall we?
A pointcrawl adventure by Petter Fornes, level - For Cairn Winter, grey and cold, dark and wet…miles of tramping, woolen socks damp in the thin pale light of day…all of these are perfectly encapsulated by the stirring work of Norwegian painter Theodor Kittelsen. Oh and so I guess also this Merry March in the Winter Wood, a little outdoor Cairn adventure that uses Kittelsen’s lovely art. I have to set aside my very positive associations with the art here to judge the adventure, proper. This 4-page adventure (counting front cover) describes a simple pointcrawl in a snowy woodland, ostensibly looking a lost prince…the quest bit is on the “back” fourth page, which was definitely A Choice. Pretty standard set of things to bumble into, like a hunting bear, a spooky owl, and mean old cold guys. The prince is transformed into a wolverine by a shaman and will attack upon immediately seeing, the only hint that he’s not a normal wolverine is that he’s got his crown as a collar and he doesn’t talk (unlike every other animal in the wood). There’s also a travelling snow king made out of snow who makes you snowy. Walking in a winter wonderland, then. WHAT I LIKED IS THAT ALL ANIMALS TALK, yes, please, more of this in TTRPG settings. I really like several of the individual encounters, in fact…a hag that accidentally knocked her own head off (is mad about it), a huge frozen waterfall with a magic bell incased within, the snow royals being just on walkabout and kind of not caring about anything. It’s got a strong fairytale vibe in some of these. Some thought was also given to how rough trekking through snowy woods in winter tends to be, and there are tough but fair mechanics to reflect it. The art, as I mentioned, is gorgeous public-domain stuff that communicates the mood very well. Thus, what can be improved is certainly achievable. First of all, the actual quest is a little…aimless. Not sure if it’s the starting spiel being tucked in the back like that, or the choice to jettison an overarching sequence of events, or the fact that the prince himself is a random wanderer, but it feels like there will be a lot of pointless flailing by the luckless Cairnians. Who, let us remember, don’t even level up. This aimlessness applies to a lot of the weaker encounters, too, where you just bump into them and maybe fight, maybe chat, and it’s just noise. A fine thing in a general wilderness zone but adventures designed to be one-shots require focus. All that said the best use case here is still as a one-shot. Ideally in a better system, but with a little fat-trimming you could definitely have a good time. Probably in a perfect world, you play this in a rough-hewn log cabin in the middle of wintertime in front of a roaring fire, quaffing spiced mulled wine. Hey, there are some decent encounters to be raided individually too. Final Rating? **/**** Good enough to be worth your time as a one-shot in a specific situation, but needs a little investment. |
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