Dead Mans Cove

[Messageboard Golem]

I realize that these instant adventures face limitations in space, but still if I spend money for a pre-generated adventure, there are certain things I want.
1) Art: The map is clear and readable. but no scale is provided. Other art is limited but is functional and reasonably good-looking.
2) Boxed-Text: You know what I mean, the graphic verbal descriptions that are supposed to imbue the proper mood for the players.
The text in this adventure is OK, but not award winning.
3) Role-playing: There is some at the beginning with the NPC that hires the adventurers, and the adventure itself could provide some roleplaying within the party.
4) Smart NPC's: By this I mean, are their motivations and actions reasonable, or has the writer had them do something stupid so that there will be an adventure? Actually, it all makes sense. The villains are overconfident, but I'll address that below.
5) Goodies: New items and/or monsters. One of each, which is fairly standard for this format. Both are worthwhile additions to almost any campaign.

Given, all of the above, you must be ready for me praise this adventure. Well. I'm not. The devil is in the details and a number of details have been ignored. There are a number of minor typos that a good editor should have found and exorcised. The adventure assumes that the players will follow a specific course of events. (The smart one, but who said the players will always be smart?) If they veer of the decreed path, the GM will have some work to do, and considering that there is almost a page reserved for notes means that they can't claim that lack of space was the problem. The amount of treasure is too much for the suggested character level. However, it is not out of line for the opposition. Either the treasure needs to be reduced, or the villains should not be as overconfident and the resulting character level increased. All in all I'd rate this a 3/5 except for one factor, the price. At a MSRP of $2.49, this is an excellent value, making this adventure rate a 4/5

 

[Messageboard Golem]

Cutthroats and cannons! When the shipping lanes he depends upon become infested with sharks, a powerful sea trader named Baldrick needs someone to deal with the problem... permanently. After several failed attempts to deal with the pirates on their home turf ­ the high seas ­ Baldrick decides that the best way to end the problem is to catch them off guard at their land base. This is a job for stalwart adventurers, for competent adventurers, but mostly... this is a job for adventurers who aren't afraid to get their hands dirty.

 

[trancejeremy]

This is one of those mini-adventures from AEG. It's got 8 or so pages folded over in half so it looks like the page count is 16. Still, for 8 pages, it's priced pretty much the same as an 32 page, $9.99 module. (They're normally $2.49 - I got this as part of a lot for around $1.20, used, including shipping)

Basically, the PCs are hired by a merchant to attack a pirate base. Not much of a plot. The module assumes they will agree. While this is a simple concept, quite a bit is spent on it, word wise, which makes me wonder if it was added as filler.

The PCs are assumed to immediately go to the secret pirate base (it seems the person who hired them knows the secret location). Once there, the PCs basically just attack the base.

A couple different options are described - attacking at night (the best) and attacking at daytime (the dumbest). There's really not much more than that. Once the pirates are dealt with (one way or the other), the PCs then have to deal with a Pirate ship returning to base. They are not supposed to fight it, but come up with another plan to have it crash (borrowed from the movie, The Fog).

Once that is dealt with, the PCs can explore the complex a bit further, finding some more treasure and something other than a pirate to kill (though not that different - undead pirates!).

This really is an awful adventure. There's little point to it, other than pure hack (not even hack & slash, since there's almost zero variety in opponents). It can also potentially be very difficult, as while the average party can take on the pirates a few at a time, if they fight them all at once (which is possible in the module, if you run it by the book), it would overwhelm them.

There's a monster, the 'Sunken Sailor', and a new magic item. It's overpowered. Essentially, it keeps away all undead, yet only costs 7000 gp.

The map is salvageable, though it's not exactly large. About half a page is actually left blank, supposedly for 'notes'.

So, to sum up, don't buy this! Not even for a dollar! I know it's cheap, even new, but you can buy used modules on ebay for $2-3, even good ones, sometimes. Save your money for something better!

 

[Messageboard Golem]

My playing experience with this tells me to give it a 5. Unfortunately, I added in 1/3rd of a lead-in and then impromptued the last 1/3rd of the adventure getting the players off of the island without running into the pirate ship that they failed to sink. I was also using it as a side adventure in the low-level Freeport trilogy (from Green Ronin), where it fits *perfectly!* To that end, it was actually an advantage to not have to work around too many plot-points to bring it into the game.

The treasure needs to be re-written as some of it is (unintentionally) too powerful while the rest of it isn't filled with nearly enough swashbuckly-piratish goodness. This is, however, a great place to introduce your characters to semi-cursed weapons... "A +1 Ghost Touch Rapier that makes you look like a Drow" seemed to fit quite well in the treasure stash.

You're paying $2.50 to get a rough outline of how to run an attack on a small pirate-infested beach. The maps are sketchy, the design and layout is sub-par and then there's the treasure. But when I'm only spending $2.50 for a side-adventure that fits so nicely in a campaign, I don't mind. I would have given it a 5, but I don't want to mislead anybody with the circumstances I was in.

(FYI: I altered the scenario such that the characters were dropped off on the far side of a jungle island infested with vermin, assassin vines and velicoraptors. They encountered an anthropomorphic aardvark (who helped them escape through a giant ant mound) and when fleeing the island, the merchant had paid Freeport Orcish pirate Scarbelly to pick them up -- I saw the players' eyes get as wide as saucers when that second pirate ship showed up... tee hee hee. Other than some problems with the drama queen rogue wanting to play a beautiful elven shipwreck victim in distress -- amoungst a gang of sexually disinfranchised pirates, What??? -- the almost insurmountable odds presented in my run of this provided for some great cinematic breath-holding moments. I loved it. But your mileage will likely vary.)

 

[Messageboard Golem]

So wait--this sub-par adventure, which you admit you had to heavily modify, and which does basically everything wrong (treasure, CR, maps) gets 4/5, but the Origins-award nominated RttToEE gets a 2?

Reading the two reviews, it sounds like your score comes largely from "how much fun my group had", but you haven't accounted for the fact that you poured tons of homebrew detail into this mini-adventure, and much less into 'Temple.

You're certainly entitled to your own opinion, but it doesn't look like you've thought through what the scores mean.