Beware! This review contains major spoilers.
This is not a playtest review.
Price: $2.95
Page Count: 43
Price per page: About 7 cents per page
Designed for Character Level: 2nd
Format: 1.36 MB .pdf (Adobe Acrobat) file
External Artwork: Four poor (though amusing) drawings of orcs representing the four aspects of the "One Orc, Two Orc, Red Orc, Blue Orc" sub-title (the red orc is covered in blood and is saying 'Ouch!' whilst the blue orc is swimming whilst wearing a pair of swimming goggles).
Additional Page Use: The first page contains credits and contents, the last two pages have the OGL.
Internal Artwork: The black and white sketches range from poor to average, though there is one good piece of a new creature, the sahuagin-like Daquamoore.
Maps: The maps are fairly basic, the indoor ones computer-generated (clearly keyed and with direction, but with a 10-foot per square grid) and outdoor maps hand drawn using coloured pencils.
Page Layout: Text density is average, margins are huge, there are fairly regular chunks of white space. Different types of information are clearly marked.
Writing Style: The style is informal and naive, but with a sense of enthusiasm and energy. Editing is much improved compared to Amberdale 1.
The Adventure:
A ranger arrives in Amberdale, informing the Lord that the town is facing attack from two different orc hordes. Reinforcements from the nearest town do not arrive when they should do, so the PCs are sent off to discover where the soldiers have got to. After further investigation of one of the abandoned forts of the orcs, which reveals the involvement of a mysterious gnome rogue/sorcerer in the fate of the delayed soldiers, the PCs are sent on another mission by the Lord of Amberdale, to request help from a local goblin tribe in defending Amberdale from the orcs. In order to gain the goblin's help, the PCs must return a feather stolen from the goblin leader by an orc leader. The PCs must enter the cave lair of the orcish horde (currently under-strength as the horde has left to attack Amberdale) to retrieve the feather. The PCs discover further shapechanging as the orcish leader turns out to be a new creature (the daquamoore) who has remained in the orcish stronghold guarding his treasure. To get to him, the PCs must battle a variety of orcs, worgs, bugbears, water elementals, zombies, gricks and a displacer beast amongst others. The PCs can then return to the goblins, march with them to Amberdale and help save Amberdale from the orcs. Afterwards, they can enter into some roleplaying with the survivors to learn more of the battle and some of the items they have discovered during their adventures.
The Appendix has stats for the NPCs and creatures, and handouts for each of the magical items to be found within the adventure. These, together with some maps of the adventure sites, takes up 16 pages of the module.
The High Points: A huge improvement on Amberdale 1 with the opportunity for some 1st Edition-style hack'n'slash dungeon crawling. There are also some opportunities for roleplaying, investigation and skill use within the adventure though the focus is on combat.
There are tie-ins to past and possible future adventures to enable campaign seeds to be developed.
The Low Points: The plot hooks are weak and unoriginal, the writing style basic and the occupants of the orc caves environmentally illogical. Treasure seemed to be somewhat over-powerful as did the PCs opponents, whilst some of the CRs seemed to betray a limited understanding of d20 design rules.
Conclusion: For those who enjoy dungeon crawls and aren't concerned with monster placement, plot hooks or internal consistency, this could be deemed worthwhile since its so cheap. For myself, it was too shallow and illogical to be considered anything more than poor, though it is an improvement on PDabble Games' previous offering.
