Danger in Deadwood

Danger stalks the land, and a powerful ruler has need of a group of adventurers to track down a hero who has been lost to the pages of history. A short trip into the wilderness to an old mining and milling town seems like a simple request, but there is more danger than meets the eye.

Danger in Deadwood is an adventure for 2nd-4th level characters.

Danger in Deadwood

Danger in Deadwood is an adventure for d20 system fantasy characters of levels 2-4. The adventure is an electronic download and is available at www.bastionpress.com.

A First Look

Danger in Deadwood is a 62 page PDF product available for $5.99. The file takes advantage of the bookmark feature of the PDF format, allowing the GM to quickly jump to different sections of the adventure as needed.

The document has a border pattern similar to briars. There is color art in the document, as well as a GMs and players maps of the hamlet of Deadwood. The art and cartography is by Todd Morasch, who also did the artwork for Bastion's Minions. As with his artwork there, his style is marked by creatures with uniformly emaciated appearance and distended joints, a style I find unappealing.

The font size is compact and the layout is attractive and readable.

A Deeper Look
(Warning: This section contains spoilers regarding the plots and secrets in the module.)

The module begins when the players are contacted and requested or compelled to perform a service for one Lord Fenrius. Fenrius states that a paladin by the name of Argus Yorehammer has information that can allow the kingdom to defeat its worst enemies and requests that the players go to the hamlet where he has retired, deliver his request, and escort him back.

The truth is that Fenrius and Argus are old rivals, and Fenrius seeks to do finally do his old foe in. He has hired the party to lure him out so he can assassinate him.

To do his bidding, Fenrius sends a skin devil assassin named Moloch to stalk the PCs and attempt to assassinate or capture Argus. A skin devil is a creature first described in Sword & Sorcery's Creature Collection. It is used here under the Open Game License. In its natural state the skin devil appears as a humanoid without skin. However, if it acquires the skin of another creature, it can take on the guise of that creature.

Argus lives in a hamlet called Deadwood. Deadwood has an unusual feature. The town hosts a small cadre of "deadwood golems" which are employed as laborers.

En route to the hamlet, the party will run into some problems. There are some wild beasts and some ice ghouls (another creature from Creature Collection) assailing some local woodsmen.

When they arrive in the hamlet, the party will find Argus, but find him suspicious of their motives and reluctant to accompany them back. While they are speaking, they are interrupted by Moloch in disguise as a local beggar. Unbeknownst to the party, Moloch poisons Argus with an innocuous touch in hopes to attack him later.

Moloch is almost successful in his assassination attempt. As the party are newcomers, this quickly leads the townsfolk and Argus to distrust them. The party must convince the commoners of their innocence and investigate the area to find out what is happening.

Unfortunately, the players aren't the only ones still active. Moloch is still around and is gunning for them and Argus. Over the next several scenes, Moloch tries to bring the hamlet's golems to bear on the PCs not once but twice, and also enlists the aid of a murdersprite (another Creature Collection creature) and the ice ghouls to wreak havok on the town. The players have to deal with these events and hope to stop Moloch somewhere along the line. In the meantime, Argus and the townfolk become even more leery of the party and just after Argus gives the players a lectures that would likely send them out of town, a stowstorm closes off the pass.

In addition to the adventure material, the appendices contains a description of the hamlet, NPCs, and new monsters and magic items.

Conclusion

The basic premise of the story is not a bad one. Putting the players on the spot with anxious locals while at the same time giving them a mystery to solve and a few combats should put the pressure on. The events are set up with an eye for setting a mood, so this could possibly be a very exciting game. Finally, they give you some good details to work with including enough NPC motives to guess how the story might evolve in the future.

That said, there where a few things I was uncomfortable with in this adventure.

First off, the conduct of several important encounters seemed awkward to me. In the encounter with the ice ghouls, the encounter notes have one woodsman wounded and beset by three ice ghouls and specifically states that if the ice ghouls knock a woodsman out, they will rip him apart. Then in a sidebar, it says that it is important that the woodsmen survive. It seemed odd to me to engineer an encounter to be very dangerous to the woodsmen and then caution the GM that he shouldn't kill the woodsman. It seems like the right thing to do is adjust the encounter details to make it likely the PCs will intervene in time.

Similarly, later the GM is warned to not let Argus die from the poison. This again is odd; it seems to me in both this and the prior case that if a certain outcome is desired, you should assign a result to the roll instead of gambling with the flow of the plot. Ironically, the next things that the players can do at that point is try to find Argus' assailant. Where the module was hesitant to arbitrarily rule on Argus' state, it now arbitrarily rules against the players' tracking attempts.

The one other thing that bothered me was the timing of the snowstorm that traps the players – it comes just as the players would likely bolt. This sticks out like a sore thumb as a plot device to keep the players on track, and as such might smack of railroading. As problematic as that sounds, you can make this seem much less contrived if you give an indication that the snowstorm is coming before the players ever learn of their predicament.

The structure of the events is somewhat linear. There are some points of flexibility, but really only a small amount of clues that the players can uncover at each step before the GM decides to unleash the next event.

Overall, the adventure is fairly well done, and the plot premise is fairly strong. Some of the above points might throw the GM off a little, but for the most part the statistics are done correctly and the timing of the events does support setting up a mood.

-Alan D. Kohler

Danger in deadwood is an adventure by Bastion Press that has been released in electronic format.
The pdf file has 62 pages that are divided as follows.

The first pages serve as an introduction to the adventure, they have a summary of the whole story, they introduce us the main characters that are going to be importan in the plot.
An aged paladin the PCs will be asked to seek and bring back to their country, the person who hires the PCs, which is an old foe of the paladin, and one assassin hired by him but that also has his own plans.
In this introductory part there's also some adventure hooks that can push the PCs to look for the paladin.

Then, the whole story is developed in twelve scenes, clearly labeled with the Encounter Level for each one. Together with the scenes and the flow of the story, we have the full description of Deadwood, a mountain hamlet where all the events detailed in the adventure will be happening.
The final pages contain three different Appendices that provide us with a lot of insightful information on all the inhabitants of the hamlet, with plenty of information, from ideas on how to set off the first encounter with these NPCs to suggestions to use these characters in your own campaign.
You also have a summary of the monsters in the adventure and some new magic items. In the end, there are a couple of maps of the hamlet, one for the players and the other one for the DM.

Merits: The main merit of this product is the story. As a DM you are asked to build a story apparently typical (NPC hires PCs to find someone) into something really complex. It will strongly appeal to those parties fond of talking and interacting with NPCs, because the generous information on the NPCs (one other merit of the adventure) provides the DM with all the things he needs to deal with them.
The background of the story is very well developed and the encounters are never put there at random. One other thing I've liked from the adventure is that it's not combat-oriented, something usually attached to d20 adventures.

Flaws: From my point of view, the main flaw of the adventure is that it strongly relies on the capacity of the DM building up a sensation in the players. During all the adventure, the weird events that go with the PCs, will make the inhabitants of the hamlet wary of them, an this unease is crucial in the whole plot.
If the DM is not able to deal with such a challenge, it can spoil the main attractive of this story. The other thing I strongly miss was a map of the Inn in Deadwood. It's thoroughly described in the text, but a map is necessary.

By Steve Creech, Exec. Chairman, d20 Magazine Rack

This review is for Danger in Deadwood by Bastion Press. Danger in Deadwood is written by Brannon Hollingsworth and Ken Marable. Brannon is the creative force behind the Planescape 3rd edition website Ps3e.com and is no stranger to the gaming business. The adventure is 64 pages and only available in pdf format from Bastion's website for $5.99.

The premise behind this story is a group of low level characters (2nd to 4th level) must travel to a remote hamlet and convince a retired paladin to journey back with them to meet with a high ranking lord. Easy enough right? Think you've heard this story before right? Wrong... There is layer upon layer of intrigue and suspense in this plot heavy drama. Here is a story that emphasizes role-play and using your brains rather than just a simple dungeon hack and slash. Now don't get me wrong, I like the occasional dungeon hack, but this is a refreshing change of pace. There is plenty of opportunity for combat, but it is more story driven than sword driven. One of the real strengths besides the story is the attention to detail. The entire town is laid out in such a way that it could be used in any campaign. Each building is described well, as are the NPCs that inhabit it. This alone makes the adventure worth the $5.99 price tag.

The negative aspects of this module are primarily technical in nature. The artwork is heavy, especially the borders for each page, and printing it out takes a toll on your ink cartridges. This has been one of the drawback's to pdf releases. Go heavy on the artwork and customers get upset when they print it out only to spend another $30.00 or so for a new cartridge. Another problem with the adventure is missing text in two separate pages, as though it were cut off at the end of the page. This is something that should easily be fixed, however. The final issue I have with the adventure has to do with the use of monsters that are mostly considered closed content and Product Identity of Sword & Sorcery. Sword & Sorcery was generous enough to grant permission to use these monsters for this adventure, but if it were not for the unique artwork of Todd Morasch, it would be hard to get a visual of what these creatures look like. Sword & Socery's policy concerning Open Content in their book Creature Collection is that only the stat blocks are Open Content. The name, and description of the monster are closed content and considered Product Identity. Obviously, this makes it extremely difficult to use their monsters in anything without seeking permission first.

Overall, Danger in Deadwood is a decent adventure for low level characters. It does stress brain power over brawn, but it is crafted in such a way to keep everyone involved in the action. Despite the negative comments, it is a good buy at $5.99 (especially if you run your game from a laptop or PC and never print it).

To see the graded evaluation of this product, go to The Critic's Corner at www.d20zines.com.

When I ran this for my players, they were so infuriated by the snowstorm railroad that we decided not to finish the adventure.