Blood Royal

[Messageboard Golem]

Murder and rebellion, war and dark sorcery! Into a tableau of intrigue are thrust the heroes who must make their way through knotted mazes of wood and thistle to find a way to save or destroy a king. In the Detmold they find themselves called to Pelangard the castle of goodly King Pelan where they must unravel the tangled knots of treachery that threaten to destroy his realm. The module is designed for 4-6 characters of level 4-8 but may be scaled to accommodate lower level or higher level PCs as the referee deems fit. It is designed and compatible with the MaterMaze series from Dwarven Forge. Playable in the World of Erde.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

In this day and age of the new d20 system, I have found, that with a few exceptions, the "art" of putting together a good module seems to have been lost. If you are like me and long for the days of the old 1E modules that just jumped off the rack at you, then you should enjoy the recent release of Blood Royale by Troll Lord Games.

Let me get past the chunky stuff before I give you a quick review of the content.The module runs $10.95 for 48 pages with no adds whatsoever. The art within is definitly above average and outstanding in some areas, and gives the DM a good idea on how to describe the action while being eye candy as well. Margins are standard as is the font size. The maps could be a little better, but allow the DM more flexibilty (i.e. some of the maps just do not exist since they really do not need to, which in my opinion can be a plus in some situations, but more on that later) to adjust the adventure to his players. It is designed for 5-8 characters with levels from 5-8. This is not mentioned on the cover at all, front or back, so if your FLGS shrink wraps you would not know this. That is a little annoying but not that big of a deal.

The story centers around a King Pelan that has been stricken with a horrible wound that will not heal. The adventurer's find out about this, and depending on their alignment, will either help or hinder the the King and his men. They find out about an invading army of an evil prince that says he has a claim to the throne. While the forces of the king prepare to repel the invaders, the party can begin to investigate just what the heck is going on. The plot will slowly unveil itself, and is actually quite frought with twists and turns, and the party themselves may not know which side they are on. This is where the module really shines for me. There is no "set path" for the party to follow. They can pretty much do what they want. Most of the roads they decide to take will eventually lead them to source of the curse, and as long as luck and some roleplaying stick with them, they should be able to find themselves heroes at the end of the day.

I am being delibrately vague about the plot because I do not want to spoil it for anyone who may play the adventure. Suffice it to say, it involves treachery, a couple of warring sisters, the possibility of a bastard child, and one heck of an evil tome.

The stat blocks for the monsters and the NPC's are well done. There may be a couple of miscalculation errors, but they are easily spotted and fixed. Errors within stats always annoy me, and can usually detract a lot from the product for me, but the few I found were not that bad at all. To be frank, if the content of the adventure were not as good as it is, I would be more annoyed with the few typos that I did discover.

With that in mind, I simply have to say that this adventure is an outstanding piece of work. The quality of the maps and the few typos I did find keep me from giving it a perfect 5 score, which makes me wish that ENWorld had a 4.5 ability, or something like that, but unfortunatly I cannot, so I give it a 4. For the price (nobody sells modules for $11 anymore) you cannot go wrong.

Fort

 

[Plaag]

This is one of those little unknown modules that hopefully finds its way into peoples hands. The basis behind it isn't anything new, save a dying figure, though its mixture of fey and the mixture of dark, mysterious things helps to make this a great module.
Side note: Used this in the Ravenloft setting - along the Shadowrift and itworked out well.
As a read, since somethings the players may not see, but then not every module do they go and do everything, well it was the descriptions of the various pages of the Book of Rhyme. While I won't ruin this for people, the various descriptions are very good and had proven a spinoff from them, in my case a sort of necronomicon (sp?) book that my players thought was related to the book in this module.
The art in this book was awsome, this is a DM gem of course, since I rarely show off the pics during or even after play. The maps were not the best, but then again they are another gem for DMs, and were usable anyhow.
In short this is a great module, and more of these should be in print rather the the deluge of source books.

Blood Royal is a 48 page adventure module from Troll Lord Games. The book follows the standard rpg 2 column format with interesting borders and fantastic artwork. The maps are a little weak but when you take a closer look you find that the maps were designed incorporating the Dwarven Forge Mastermaze line of RPG products, making it an excellent adventure to use if you use Mastermaze materials in your campaign, owing to the fact that you can put the rooms together farily easily and are ready to play with little prep time if you have that stuff, which I sadly do not (only got so much money to spend on stuff).

The content is fairly well packed into this product offering a new monster, new magic items and opportunities to play through the module hack and slash style or by role playing with any of the numerous NPCs who each have their own agenda and machinations designed to either help or hinder the PCs. One thing I found interesting was the option to run a large scale combat between the forces of the bleeding king, and the forces of the Dark Fairy Queen Babashkamore. Although the product is placed in the Troll Lords home campaign world, a read of the introductory matierial indicates that it may be easily placed into any campaign setting which I did...see first post of review above.

A search of the Troll Lords message boards shows that the art credited in the title page is actually done by a great British artist named Scott Purdy. The look and trade dress of this book is different from previous Troll Lords books, adopting a much cleaner format.

ShaneG.

 

[Psion]

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[JoeGKushner]

Blood Royal is a 48 page adventure set in the world of Erde for 5-8 characters level 5th-8th. In the area known as the Detmold, a wounded king seeks new champions to overcome his ailment. The events that the party becomes enrolled with started years ago when the king spurned the advances of an evil fey whose child of that meeting now seeks to claim the kingdom for his own.

Powerful enough on its own with links to Arthurian myths, there are other elements apparent from the missing daughter who was swapped out with a changeling, to the wife repenting in the church until her daughter is found. The book uses a fair amount of investigative work that the players have to move through as well as some brief 'castle' crawling events.

The strength of the adventure is that after their meeting with the king, who they discover has lost a lot of men to the evil fey-son, the party isn't locked into one particular path. Sure, the king is wounded and needs to be healed by the same weapon that wounded him, but the party can't just go and attack their foe as he has a supernatural invulnerable state about him. They can investigate the forest, seek out further information from a few sources, or hunt down different evils and gather their own strength.

The pay-off comes in the latter part of the adventure when Kalkathis, the half-fey son of the king, no longer has his invulnerability and is unaware of it. It comes when the mother, Babashkamore, the Dark Fey Queen, no longer has all of her advantages and even her allies may turn on her. It comes from not just ending when the main evil is defeated, but allows the party to hunt down specific individuals to insure that they don't come back. A nice twist on the standard wait and prepare the defenses.

Because the adventure takes place over so many areas, not a lot of heavy detail is given to any particular place, allowing the GM to customize things a bit and add his own details. The lower the character's levels, the more characters that should be on hand and GM's should be prepared to beef up encounters if running 8 8th level characters as they may walk through the adventure.

Blood Royal has some issues with layout. There are times when the material is spaced when it doesn't need to be, breaking up a paragraph, and other times when the border cuts into the text. This happens most often with the sword hilt on the right side of the page. The editing also creeps in on the spelling sometimes with words like spartan being capitalized and other words running into one another. The maps, while workable, are wiggly and don't look up to industry standards. Some of the monsters made me wonder if some editing took place there too. For example, a hill giant is noted as being devastating because of his gauntlets of ogre power and his barbarian rage. Only problem is he's not a barbarian.

In terms of utility, because there are a lot of options the players can take, a flowchart to help the GM keep track of the action and help prod the players along the slower points would've been a fine thing to have a pushed this product up to a 4 star rating. While the links to Erde aren't overwhelming, the scope of the module, that of a king's quest and the future of that kingdom, may take some effort to convert. Finally, when the players are in the enemy's encampment, they find that several of the forces allied against them are former men of the king who've fallen to the half-fey's banner for a number of reasons, but there are no options of getting those characters, who may not be fully fallen, back on the king's side. For example, Sir Martes is young and full of vengence but serves because he was bested and healed by the same item that wounded the king while sir Vanier only stays with the half-fey because he's an opportunist who feels that his new master can't be beaten.

The book has some strong points going for it. The first is the art. I may not know my artists as well as some others, but I could swear that the majority of the work is done by Scott Purdy and a quick check of the Troll Lord site reveals this is so. I enjoy his work and find that the detail he gives the adventure lends it a greater visual appeal than most Troll Lord products I own. Another strength is the price for page utility, 48 b & w pages for $10.95. A third strong point is the reuse of OGL from Sword & Sorcery Studios for some monsters. I'm a big fan of introducing monsters of other books into a setting as it saves the GM a lot of time and helps make the modules have a more universal feel and in this case, would make it easier to use this in say the Scarred Lands campaign setting.

One way I can easily see players and GM's getting more utility out of this module is if they have the Faerie's sourcebook by Bastion Press as the party has the opportunity to battle evil fey creatures and ally themselves with numerous good ones, even doing quests for those of a more neutral bent to gain items for use latter on.

For those 3.0 holdovers looking for adventure, Casey Christofferson provides several nights of adventure with many potential spin-off adventures depending on the characters' actions.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

I agree with Alan. Why hasn't this review been deleted? It's fanboy crap!

 

[Messageboard Golem]

Sorry, but this review is unconvincing. I could name many modules that sell for $11.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

I found the older Erde adventures superior to this one, though I do love the art.
I just don't see adventurers playing the "waiting game" that this adventure calls for.
More detail in some of the areas would have been welcome. Quality is better than quantity.
I also agree that a flowchart would have made this adventure easier to keep track of.
It would have been a better adventure had there been info on how to get the king's men back.
I don't know why people think that 10.95 for 48 pages is a bargain. I've found plenty of good adventures that easily beat that ratio.
Getting utility out of a module by buying a $28.00 book is a bit pricey. I would rather purchase a module that has utility already within it - without having to buy a sourcebook, but thanks for the advice.
Personally, I'd wait for this to get rereleased as an updated to 3.5 PDF on RPGnow for $5.50, rather than pay double for an outdated adventure.

 

[TimWhite]

My group just finished attempting to play this scenario.

Let's just say that it was so bad that not only did our entire party die do to nothing but random die rolls, but the arbitrary nature of this scenario so enraged all of the players that it took hours of feather-smoothing to avoid having our gaming group break up over how bad it was.

Encounter after encounter was a cliche' filled doens't-matter-what-the-PC's-do-they-will-get-screwed-by-the-dice crap. Only halfway through this adventure, we just wanted to be DONE.

If there is anything to be learned from this scenario, it's that you NEED TO GIVE THE PLAYERS SOME CLUES AND A CHANCE TO USE THEM. Encounter after encounter of 50/50 choices that lead to player death makes no one happy, except a pureblood Gygaxian DM. Anyone who actually likes to play this game, as opposed to 'trying to win' will not like this scenario AT ALL.

It was nicely produced, and the maps we OK. It did feel fairly disorganized, and it was difficult to find bits and pieces of info.

The style of event was in a word, juvenile. Over and over, our group said 'huh?' and 'you have to be kidding, right?', and 'why in the world would my PC ever do this?'.

I can't de-recommend this heartily enough.

To go into detail:

1) There is no connection for the PCs to this kingdom, other than relying on the PCs good nature. The PCs never get a chance to really become sympathetic to the situation, nor do they gain any trust of their employers.

2) The 'fairy-tale' motif is cute, but quickly grows achingly cliche.

3) The 'random dungeon' in the middle is just a tossed-together collection of fairy-tale-ripoff puns that are pooly balanced, and seem designed to punish the players for just being there.

4) Many encounters require hours of endless skill checks, with failures that quickly kill PCs.

5) Very few encounters allow the PCs to use any strategy, or their abilities to solve them, instead relying on very special abilities, or very lucky rolls. Arbitrary.

6) There is no way for the PCs to leave and rest, to just plain quit.

On my top 10 worst scenarios of all time list.

Tim

 

[Frilf]

Then why not a 1 rating? You seem to think this product deserved it... I picked it up on PDF recently. I'll thumb through it soon. Thanks for the review! Got a good chuckle out of your comments.