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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2010188" data-attributes="member: 18387">By John Grigsby, Staff Reviewer d20 Magazine Rack Sizing Up the Target This month, Øone Games offers us Deadly Ice, a 48-page PDF downloadable adventure for four 4th- to 5th-level characters by Mario Barbati. This adventure is the latest in the Master Adventures line from Øone Games. First Blood Besides a complete adventure, you also receive four beautifully detailed player handouts, two battlemaps suitable for use with miniatures, five new monsters, three new magical items, and a detailed dwarven inn. The inn and its staff can easily be used in other settings or for further adventures, making this a valuable component. The plot is simple enough; the adventurers are hired to escort a man through Frozen Orc Pass to a dwarven citadel. It sounds easy, but events conspire to insure that this quest will be anything but a cakewalk. Though not essential, a dwarf or someone familiar with the language and culture would be helpful.The adventure offers puzzles to solve, as well as a good mix of combat and opportunities for role-playing. Notes are included for adapting the adventure to your own setting (including changing the terrain) and scaling the adventure for higher or lower-level characters. Text to be read aloud is set off by italics for easy reference and the major NPCs are given a section all their own, which makes it much simpler to find the one you need at a glance. The beautiful illustrations that accompany the NPC stat blocks make it easy to describe them to players. The adventure itself is well written, with clear, concise style that makes it easy to follow. Key events that occur during the course of the adventure are headed with bold, underlined text, telling the GM exactly when the event should occur. Stat blocks are given in the accepted format within the text of the adventure, which means no flipping between sections to find the vital statistics for an encounter. Critical Hits As is the usual with Øone Games, the maps are gorgeous, and in full color. The miniature battlemaps are a nice touch and will surely add to the enjoyment of those who use such props. Finally, the artwork that accompanies the adventure is vivid and functional and could be shown to players to help them better visualize NPCs and monsters. It was a shame (though understandable) that the PDF was locked so that artwork could not be copied and printed separately. A lot of effort has gone into this adventure to make it both challenging and fairly adaptable. Encounters within the dungeon make sense (no dragons in closets) and everything fits the ecology of the locale. Critical Misses Like previous Øone products, this will require a lot of ink to print out, especially given that the maps are in such beautiful full-color. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather them be such, but after printing and paper costs, it probably would have been cheaper for me to simply purchase a pre-printed work than to print it from the PDF. PDF is a wonderful creation (thanks, Adobe), but it will never replace the feel of a book in your hands. The adventure states that “sections to be read aloud are featured in italicized text” and this is true, to an extent. Unfortunately, it seems to be a sporadic occurrence. Certain rooms are given great flavor text; others are described for the DM, who is left to give their own description to the players. If you are going to add flavor text, be consistent! It should be given for all encounter areas, not just a few. Finally, we come to the battlemaps. I like battlemaps, really I do. I use miniatures in my games, and so it makes it easier and more exciting if the players can actually see their positions. However, the two battlemaps that are included are for locales that are of lesser importance. The encounter in the guardroom is much less involved and exciting than the encounter in the finale, for example, and I would rather have had a battlemap for the final battle than for a small skirmish. Coup de Grace Excellent artwork combines with good plot and writing to make this a worthwhile purchase, if you’re looking for an adventure that won’t take more than one or two sessions to complete. The adventure is scant on Open Game Content, with only the monsters being specifically designated as such. The story is quite original, I don’t recall ever having seen anything like it before and it’s sure to thrill (not to mention, chill; heh heh). D20 Compliance is good, with no glaring errors in this department and the adventure does have some replay value through the dwarven inn that can be used for further adventures. I didn’t give as high a rating as I otherwise might have on dollar value simply because the areas chosen for battlemaps are not where a lot of the action is most likely to take place and also because of the amount of ink that printing this is going to require.To see the graded evaluation of this product and to leave comments that the reviewer will respond to, go to Fast Tracks at <a href="http://www.d20zines.com/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=index&catid=&topic=4" target="_blank">www.d20zines.com.</a></blockquote>

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