Beware! This review contains major spoilers.
This is not a playtest review.
By Cult And Dagger is an adventure designed for 4-6 characters of 3rd level. It is the first adventure in the Dark Prophet series.
By Cult And Dagger is a 2.47 MB .pdf file. The artwork runs from poor to good, with much being average. Maps are poor, with problems of scale and clarity. The style of writing is fairly average, occasionally being a little simplistic, occasionally rising above its general tone. There are numerous spelling mistakes and grammatical errors which detract from the comprehension of the text, sometimes markedly. You get about 20 pages of adventure for your $5 making it pretty expensive for a .pdf download.
By Cult And Dagger is set in Dunham's Elemental Lands setting but is mostly generic enough to be transferred to another setting, with some amendments being necessary. Though designed to be part of a series, this adventure can be played standalone.
The plot centres around a group of evil cultists who are ravaging the area surrounding their base, an evil tower in a forest. The cult slaughters the priests of a good-aligned deity at a bridge, and kidnap a young boy for sacrificial purposes. The PCs discover the slaughter at the bridge, and follow the blatant tracks of the cultists to a nearby thorp which the cultists have also pillaged. After doing battle with the drunken cultists, they dicover the cult leaders and the boy have already moved on to the evil tower in the forest, the cults lair.
They travel to the tower where they must battle abyssal dire rats and a harpy to gain access to the cultists lair. Once inside, they must run a gamut of traps and a magical guardian, before facing off with the cult leaders in the inner sanctum.
There are two factors that raise the module above average:
* Each location has a section called 'Campaign Development' at the end, which gives advice on what might happen to the location due to the actions of the PCs in days, weeks or years to come. Some of these sections include some background information linking to possible future adventure ideas.
* The description of the behaviour of the cultists, and the cult leader in particular (he has a magical dagger that cuts the face off a victim which he then uses to disguise himself in order to infiltrate innocent communities), should really give the PCs a thirst for revenge. The cultists are really depraved, and Dunham have managed to capture the full horror of their actions in the module, using graphic descriptions without resorting to obscenity. This makes the theme of the adventure pretty mature (note: some of the content may be inappropriate for minors).
However, the module has a number of problems:
* The statistics in the module are by no means perfect, and any GM running this adventure is well advised to run through all the stats with a fine toothcomb. The main cult leader, a Ftr3/Clr2 is given a CR of 3, the new monster introduced has 'magical humanoid' as its type, and the Stat blocks do not conform to standard design, sometimes missing information altogether.
* As already stated, the editing is very poor with numerous mistakes.
* Some of the combats and the traps may be too much for a 3rd-level party. Several of the combats were EL 7 or more (though ELs are not given in the module) and the damage from the traps, especially when combined, looks fairly deadly.
* The feat 'god-touched' seems to be an important element of the adventure, but this feat is never defined statistically.
Conclusion
A straightforward but engaging plot with some good features and some excellent villains should have made this a good adventure. However, the poor use of the d20 rules and appalling editing really lets it down. In addition, it is expensive for what you're getting in terms of content amount. Consider this adventure worth getting if you're willing to put the time in to re-vamp the stats and integrate it in your own campaign. If you want something ready-to-run, shy away from it.
