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Message: <blockquote data-quote="trancejeremy" data-source="post: 2010953" data-attributes="member: 924">Morrick MansionWhile it sounds like a 90s short lived syndicated television sitcom, Morrick Mansion is a fantasy d20 adventure from Necromancer Games. It's pretty much a setting based adventure, based around a cursed mansion, not unlike the classic old module for D&D, "Castle Amber". This is not as good (or as weird) as Castle Amber, but it's much less bare bones. It's got two basic parts. One is basically a role-playing aspect, which is set in a small village. The second part involves the exploration of the mansion itself, which is pretty much a dungeon crawl.The major NPCs in the town are well done, with varied and fairly fleshed out personalities and descriptions. The physical descriptions are very well done, making it a breeze to visualize NPCs. (This is one of those things I often have trouble with while DMings, coming up with descriptions of NPCs - when I have to make them up, they all look like Fess Parker. Or someone I know, and the women look like women I used to date.)The artwork is excellent. I've said it before, but it's worth repeating - I think Brian LeBlanc is the best artist working right now in the RPG field (d20 field at least). Necromancer games stuff is almost worth buying just for his artwork.The maps are good, but would have been more useful if they were in the back or someplace easily found. I had a lot of trouble finding the map of the mansion itself while using the module - it was in the middle in an inconspicious spot. It's also the sort of module I like, based around a small-ish town/village that can be dropped in your game world fairly easily. And afterwards, you can reuse it as a recurring location. So I give it a B+Spoilers (mostly nitpicky stuff that came up during gameplay):The plot is actually somewhat fairy tale like. A neighbor wasn't invited to a wedding, and wanted revenge (there were also apparently business reasons), so he cooks up a plot with a demon to curse Morrick Mansion. Actually, kind of reminded me of a Kedrigern novel. (A depressingly unpopular series by John Morrissey, about a grumpy old wizard who is an expert at removing and reversing curses.)I had a few logical problems with it, at least the background. It's low level module (levels 3 to 5), yet a really rich guy wants the PCs to investigate. If he's rich, why couldn't he have hired much better help 5 years ago, when this all started? A couple of Legend Lore spells would do wonders to solve some of the mystery. This depends on your campaign setting. I used it in my homebrew, which is a relatively standard D&D-ish world in terms of magic power. But it has a number of magical colleges (Redhurst, the one from Unhallowed Halls, plus a couple others), any of which could have been consulted by a rich guy if there was a curse. It seems to me that the Thieves' Guild in the town is a bit too powerful, in terms of the influence it wields. It's got a protection racket going, which generally doesn't work in small towns. Especially since there is more than adequate amount of police men and a very competent judge/magistrate. The town has 853 people. At least 62 of those people are police/guards, almost 8%. In North America, the ratio is generally around 7 or 8 per 1000 people. Yet this town has a uber-powerful thieves' guild. (By contrast, Freeport has 20 per 1000 people, and doesn't have a thieves' guild. Of course, they also have a supercop from "Nuvo Jorca". But I digress). It's hard to explain how some of these people survived for 5 years. Sure, the cleric had the create food & water spell, but what about the blind guy? The variation of monsters could have been better. There's both a cursed Tiger and a cursed Puma. Almost right next to each other. (No Pugers or Timas, though).It was sort of a pain keeping track of all the saving throws versus the curse itself. (Everytime they are bitten or clawed by a cursed critter, they have to save). It was sort of a pain for me, and most of my PCs had firearms, so melee combat was not that common (usually they killed the thing just before it reached them). I imagine it's worse for more traditional D&D games. This is actually an observation I read elsewhere, but is worth mentioning here - PCs will probably want to visit the house of the guy who had the curse put on the place. I said it was burned down shortly after the death of the guy, which solved that, but if you don't want to do something like that, you'll have to come up with his mansion as well. Anyway, it went pretty well. And I think the town itself (and the NPCs) has good long term potential (though you'll definitely want to tone down the Thieves' Guild). Like I said, a B+</blockquote>

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