This is a four-parts (actually 3, since the last chapter is merely a showdown against a big bad) mini-campaign aimed at beginner characters in DW, having them retrieve lost pieces of a crystal that can lift the curse put on a region by the main bad guy.
As usual, the production values are high, with a nice cover of a party of adventurers battling an undead creature, and this time, the pictures to text ratio is more to my liking
, even though the choice of B&W illos for Chapter 4 detracts from the greyscale ones used elsewhere in the book;
Contentwise, the mini-campaign can be played as linked adventures, with or without breaks in-between, and will find players exploring a dark forest, an ominous castle and a barren island. The first two areas are especially appealing to devious GMs (DW uses a staple of retro-gaming : traps
). As previously noted for the Sleeping Gods campaign, this is a dangerous quest to undertake and may quickly spell the doom of your party if they are charging ahead without thinking first, or if the GM throws them more than they can chew;
At this point one must come to realize that the world of DW is indeed a more perilous place than your average fantasy RPG. However, instead of being merely too tough, and therefore frustrating for players and GMs, i find that it's actually part of it's more "realistic" take on fantasy. Not that magic and bigger than life heroes aren't a part of its world, but rather that in the lands of Legend, dangers are more "real", usually fatal for non-heroes, and requiring thought instead of just relying on plenty of hit pts and healing potions to overcome them (which is not a bad thing really, when many games out there have much in common with videogames).
At the same time, opponents are not artificially downgraded because the adventure is low-level (in the forest, the party can stumble upon 2 dark riders and their hellhounds and a gargoyle, rank 3 and 5 creatures whereas PCs are rank 1 or 2), or boosted for the opposite reason, which goes to show that the world is indeed turning without the PCs being at the center, which is also a good thing
IMHO. Of course, this also means that the GM must always be prepared to block or deviate the players' path from an ill advised or bad choice that would lead, quite litterally to a dead end
Finally, considering that the last two parts of the campaign do not have the same scope as the first two (even if correct they are not as "interesting", the value for the money takes a bit of a hit but remains high nonetheless.
Linear Mode
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