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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Simon Collins" data-source="post: 2010141" data-attributes="member: 9860">This is not a playtest review.Beware! This review contains spoilers.Deadly Ice is a generic adventure from 0one Games, designed for PCs of levels 4-5, but with information on scaling the adventure for parties of different levels.Deadly Ice is a 5.74 MB .pdf file comprising 50 pages including 'covers'. It costs $6. The product makes good use of the bookmarking and thumbnail feature of the .pdf format. The fairly significant colour graphic at the top of each page may cause excess toner usage when printing. The layout is otherwise pleasing on the eye and clear in its defining of different types of information. The idiosynchratic art ranges from average to good, whilst the maps are up to 0one's usual excellent standards, though the internal maps do vary in scale between 5 and 10 ft. per grid square. The writing style is pretty basic and a little stilted, with regular grammatical errors, but is certainly better than some previous 0one releases.The PCs are engaged by a dwarf to bring a human liquor tester through the Frozen Orc Pass, a snowbound pass that is home to a tribe of fearsome orcs. A petty thief, who has angered the orcs by murdering their prince, is now being hunted by the orcs. He flees the orcs, ending up in the same inn as the liquor tester. Using a magical globe, he exchanges minds with the liquor tester, and flees the inn in his new body, hiding out in a trap-filled dungeon until the trouble passes. The PCs must solve the mystery of the mind-swap, save the liquor tester's mind (in the thief's body) from the orcs, and attempt to reunite his mind with his body by retrieving it from the dungeon.As usual with 0one adventures, the adventure is split into events and locations. The events are interchangeable to a certain degree and the two main locations could even be used independent of the adventure itself - the inn and the dungeon. The NPC section has background information and personality descriptions as well as stat blocks for ten NPCs with whom the PCs can interact with. There are also some new magical items (including the globe that can facilitate mindswapping) and some new monsters (including a snow troll and some skeletal dwarven undead with the cold subtype).The product ends with some nicely designed player handouts and some more superb maps. Note: Maps of the inn can be found in another 0one product, Battlemaps: Floorplans, Inn Vol. 1.Conclusion:On the positive side, the adventure seems easy to integrate into most standard fantasy campaigns with a little work. There is plenty of advice on scaling and integrating the adventure, and there are good opportunities for amending the adventure to suit PC actions and decisions. There are some problems with stat blocks - for example, one NPC (an elven Rog 3/Sor 1) has a Diplomacy skill of +14 (with a Cha of only 16 this should be max +10 with no feats), three feats (none of which include Skill Focus: Diplomacy, and the character should only have 2 feats), a Will save of +2 (should be +4, with a Wis of 12), and an alignment of TN (which I presume stands for True Neutral). Similar problems can be found with stat blocks of other NPCs.Also, the GM will have to fill some holes in the plotline (such as how the orcs know what the thief looks like - the NPC orc sorcerer has no spells to enable him to divine the thief's identity) and ignore the simplistic writing style. If she's prepared to make the effort to amend the errors, the adventure should be fun to run with several options both during and at the end of the adventure for allowing the PCs a fairly free reign in deciding the outcome.</blockquote>

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