redrick
First Post
This is sort of a halfway review, as it's more about my personal experience running this adventure, and not really an attempt to be a review on some sort of broader objective merits. The problems I found with the adventure might very well be attributable entirely to my shortcomings as a GM. All the same, I thought it might be helpful to post my reactions to it.
The adventure in question is published by Necromancer Games as part of their Quests of Doom Volume 1. It is written by J. Collura.
Oh yeah, and here be all sorts of spoilers. So, if you don't want to spoil the adventure, please read no further.
.
.
.
First of all, I'm not a particularly experienced GM. Excluding my time playing Basic D&D and AD&D 2e as a kid (last session over 15 years ago), I've been GMing for less than a year and running a weekly game of 5e since whenever the PHB came out. We've been playing B/X D&D adventures that I updated to 5e.
The player characters had just completed Tom Moldvay's X2: Castle Amber. They were level 6. Since our campaign had started in a very vague setting that I front-loaded with a ton of inconsistencies, I decided to use Castle Amber to segue our characters into The Known World. When the adventure was completed and the curse on the Castle lifted, the players were deposited, along with the now ruined Castle, in the decaying outskirts of the New Averoigne region of Glantri. From this starting point, I hoped to shift to running short episodic adventures (2-3 sessions in length) in a semblance of a sandbox environment. QoD seemed perfect for this, and I decided to prepare Bad Moon Rising, as the french-themed town with a werewolf problem is easily transposed to New Averoigne. However, at the last minute, deciding that my players were burned out on investigating the Castle Amber mystery, I also prepared Noble Rot, which presented itself as a more straight up crawl and slash, without the need to question any NPCs. I placed the abandoned winery along the road from Castle Amber to Roulune, where the adventure Bad Moon Rising takes place. When the characters passed the decrepit building, they were given the option to either continue on to the town to speak to the locals and learn a little about the land, or investigate this abandoned farm and maybe find something to drink. The players chose the farm.
A rough summary of The Noble Rot. The adventure features an abandoned, overgrown winery. As players investigate, they might discover that the winery was taken over by an ooze-worshipping cult. As is the way with demonic cults, the whole thing turned in on itself, and now all that's left is an assortment of oozes, slimes and jellies. And a demon in the basement. There are no remaining NPCs and no need for any of the backstory to complete the adventure. There are some opportunities to get a leg up on the oozes, but they aren't necessary. The adventure is very atmospheric.
Presentation-wise, the adventure was fine. It was easy to read and understand what was going on, and I had no problem, after one read-through, keeping track of the whos and the whats and the whys.
The artwork, in my opinion, left a lot to be desired. Personally, my main interest in artwork is something that I can show to the players to help illustrate a moment in the adventure. It can be artwork that accompanies a significant encounter or event, a drawing of a notable NPC, or a drawing of a specific settings. I'll show these to the players when they reach that particular point as a way to give it a little oomph, and to take a little pressure off my poor descriptions. Unfortunately, neither of the two pieces for this adventure actually depict events or scenes experienced by the actual players. One shows a very generic undead hand holding a bottle of wine (except the villains are mostly oozes and have very poorly defined hands), and the other depicts a scene from the backstory which the characters can only learn about if they are able to decipher a diary, hidden behind a poison needle trap, written entirely in Abyssal. Nice atmosphere for a flashback scene (should a player actually decipher the journal), but otherwise not something that I would have a natural time to show my players. (As a comparison, look at the artwork for Bad Moon Rising, in the same volume. Every one of these images is a scene from the adventure, and if we do run that adventure, I will probably be showing these pieces to the players either after those scenes are completed as a sort of "this is what you just fought", or during them as a way to help improve the atmosphere.)
The maps are somewhat crude, but legible and usable. Nothing inspiring in them, but I didn't need anything that they didn't have.
One thing that was very frustrating to me is that there are several unkeyed rooms on the map, which are intended to be filled in by the DM, but are very easy to miss when reading through the adventure without a copy of the map sitting in front of you. I don't mind being asked to fill in my own content, but I showed up to our first session, having read through the whole adventure and done some prep to tie it into my campaign, and didn't realize that these unkeyed rooms were there. I felt a little like I'd bought a piece of furniture from Ikea and didn't realize until the third page of instructions that I was also supposed to pick up a special sized allen wrench at the hardware store. Personally, I also would have preferred at least a suggestion as to what a room is supposed to contain, even if it were just one sentence. I find it easier to change or expand details than to just make something up whole-cloth. When I'm given a corridor that leads to a series of unkeyed rooms in a house full of fairly detailed rooms, I'm likely to just brick off the corridor.
(Fortunately, my players decided to skip the outbuildings from the first section of the adventure, which gave me an encounter that I was able to quickly transpose into one of the unkeyed rooms. I made a second office for the other room and threw in some plot hooks to the larger campaign, plus the desk drawer with the journal and needle trap that they had missed in another room. My players decided to explore the cellar before going upstairs, which is where most of the unkeyed rooms are.)
As for the actual play of the adventure, my experience was mixed. The upper floors of the chateau are very heavy on atmosphere, with little hints of backstory that could be fun for player characters who like playing the deductive reasoning game. One of the things I appreciate is that each room contains some small unique item that is hidden in an interesting place. This makes it easy for me to convince the players that they really have seen all that they need to see in a room before moving on, and the hiding places are generally well thought out and give the option of either a mechanical search using investigation skills, or a more directed role-play search, with clues in the room description that encourage player characters to search certain areas. My players did not bother to find every piece of treasure, but I was glad to have it.
Where the adventure suffers is in its combat encounters. The first floor features 4 combat encounters, if you count the gargoyle on the front porch. Of these encounters, two are CR 2, one is CR 1/2 and one is a swarm of rats. A swarm of rats. There's a swarm of rats in the entrance to the kobold cave in B2: Keep on the Borderlands. It wasn't a challenge then, and it feels like a total waste in an adventure aimed at characters leveled 5th through 8. I put 2 rat swarms in there just in case, but my players decided to skip that room. The combat encounters we did face before getting to the cellar (2 living vines, the gargoyle, the gray ooze and the olive slime zombie troop transposed from an outbuilding) were all snooze-fests, with the sorcerer usually not even bothering to fire off any cantrips. Clearly, the adventure, in keeping with the 1e feel, is written with an idea of attrition, but the encounters are so minor that there really isn't much attrition to be had. As written, the chateau also feels like a totally reasonable place to spend the night. I pulled out every ooze, slime and goo creature I could find in the Monster Manual and the Fifth Edition Foes, and was prepared for a steady stream of things bubbling up through the floorboards, but my players stayed on their feet the whole time and didn't take the bait. (I was particularly looking forward to using the Grue Type 1 in honor of Zork.)
Another problem with an adventure that is almost entirely oozes is that, well, oozes are about as undynamic as you can get. The ooze is a bit of a gotcha monster that catches you off guard and has some rather nasty intrinsics, but doesn't really put up much of a fight. The olive slime zombies demonstrate this most of all — they are something like +2 or +3 to hit and do very little damage. When they die, they turn into a puddle of olive slime, which doesn't move and only attacks by dripping on unsuspecting adventurers beneath it. (Hard to do when you are a puddle on the ground.) However, if one of those olive slime zombies does manage to hit you, the slime will digest you over the course of a couple days, while magically convincing the character that everything is a-ok. Our fighter took a dose of this stuff from the 15th olive slime zombie he faced, so we'll see how it plays out over the next couple of sessions. I hope he's a good sport about it, and that the other characters notice before he turns into a great big pile of goo.
The final problem with the attrition model is that most of the encounters in this adventure are totally optional, and there is little benefit to exploring additional areas of the vineyard in the finale of the adventure. There is one room containing an item which will be of some use, but that room is on the way to to the final cavernous temple, and contains no combat encounter. Characters who take a completionist approach to this adventure will face a series of trivial encounters, find a few extra bottles of wine and maybe run out of resources, at which point the DM will either allow them to sleep in the cleared upper floors of the house unmolested, or terrorize them all through the night with a steady stream of grues, puddings, oozes, slimes and minor demons.
The final part of the adventure, in a cavern carved out beneath the formal cellar of the building, was actually a success. Characters finally face their first real threat — a supersized ochre jelly with 3 attacks, 20 foot reach, and the ability to rain acidic psuedopods down over most of the room from the shelter of a large basin, giving it 3/4 cover. This guy actually knocked the sorcerer unconscious when he foolishly stepped within 20 feet of the basin. This encounter was then followed by a series of "I'm-not-sure-I-want-to-step-in-that" rooms that my characters had a good time trying to navigate, lamenting the fact that our sorcerer didn't have a fly spell. The final monster, a giant ooze demon, was sufficiently terrifying, doing massive damage with multiple attacks and regenerating 10 hp a turn. That didn't keep him alive long enough to take a second turn, but that's how it goes with solo fights.
In conclusion. The adventure has some great atmosphere with a fun backstory that makes for an interesting exploration. The presentation is good and clearly written, but some of the omissions are frustrating, and it could do with some more useful artwork. The combat encounters left a lot to be desired, though the final act of the adventure is exciting. While the adventure bills itself for levels 5-8, my level 6 party of 4 (with a few +1 swords) found it to be a total cakewalk. It wasn't a bust, but it was a little disappointing.
Has anybody else run this adventure? What were your thoughts?
The adventure in question is published by Necromancer Games as part of their Quests of Doom Volume 1. It is written by J. Collura.
Oh yeah, and here be all sorts of spoilers. So, if you don't want to spoil the adventure, please read no further.
.
.
.
First of all, I'm not a particularly experienced GM. Excluding my time playing Basic D&D and AD&D 2e as a kid (last session over 15 years ago), I've been GMing for less than a year and running a weekly game of 5e since whenever the PHB came out. We've been playing B/X D&D adventures that I updated to 5e.
The player characters had just completed Tom Moldvay's X2: Castle Amber. They were level 6. Since our campaign had started in a very vague setting that I front-loaded with a ton of inconsistencies, I decided to use Castle Amber to segue our characters into The Known World. When the adventure was completed and the curse on the Castle lifted, the players were deposited, along with the now ruined Castle, in the decaying outskirts of the New Averoigne region of Glantri. From this starting point, I hoped to shift to running short episodic adventures (2-3 sessions in length) in a semblance of a sandbox environment. QoD seemed perfect for this, and I decided to prepare Bad Moon Rising, as the french-themed town with a werewolf problem is easily transposed to New Averoigne. However, at the last minute, deciding that my players were burned out on investigating the Castle Amber mystery, I also prepared Noble Rot, which presented itself as a more straight up crawl and slash, without the need to question any NPCs. I placed the abandoned winery along the road from Castle Amber to Roulune, where the adventure Bad Moon Rising takes place. When the characters passed the decrepit building, they were given the option to either continue on to the town to speak to the locals and learn a little about the land, or investigate this abandoned farm and maybe find something to drink. The players chose the farm.
A rough summary of The Noble Rot. The adventure features an abandoned, overgrown winery. As players investigate, they might discover that the winery was taken over by an ooze-worshipping cult. As is the way with demonic cults, the whole thing turned in on itself, and now all that's left is an assortment of oozes, slimes and jellies. And a demon in the basement. There are no remaining NPCs and no need for any of the backstory to complete the adventure. There are some opportunities to get a leg up on the oozes, but they aren't necessary. The adventure is very atmospheric.
Presentation-wise, the adventure was fine. It was easy to read and understand what was going on, and I had no problem, after one read-through, keeping track of the whos and the whats and the whys.
The artwork, in my opinion, left a lot to be desired. Personally, my main interest in artwork is something that I can show to the players to help illustrate a moment in the adventure. It can be artwork that accompanies a significant encounter or event, a drawing of a notable NPC, or a drawing of a specific settings. I'll show these to the players when they reach that particular point as a way to give it a little oomph, and to take a little pressure off my poor descriptions. Unfortunately, neither of the two pieces for this adventure actually depict events or scenes experienced by the actual players. One shows a very generic undead hand holding a bottle of wine (except the villains are mostly oozes and have very poorly defined hands), and the other depicts a scene from the backstory which the characters can only learn about if they are able to decipher a diary, hidden behind a poison needle trap, written entirely in Abyssal. Nice atmosphere for a flashback scene (should a player actually decipher the journal), but otherwise not something that I would have a natural time to show my players. (As a comparison, look at the artwork for Bad Moon Rising, in the same volume. Every one of these images is a scene from the adventure, and if we do run that adventure, I will probably be showing these pieces to the players either after those scenes are completed as a sort of "this is what you just fought", or during them as a way to help improve the atmosphere.)
The maps are somewhat crude, but legible and usable. Nothing inspiring in them, but I didn't need anything that they didn't have.
One thing that was very frustrating to me is that there are several unkeyed rooms on the map, which are intended to be filled in by the DM, but are very easy to miss when reading through the adventure without a copy of the map sitting in front of you. I don't mind being asked to fill in my own content, but I showed up to our first session, having read through the whole adventure and done some prep to tie it into my campaign, and didn't realize that these unkeyed rooms were there. I felt a little like I'd bought a piece of furniture from Ikea and didn't realize until the third page of instructions that I was also supposed to pick up a special sized allen wrench at the hardware store. Personally, I also would have preferred at least a suggestion as to what a room is supposed to contain, even if it were just one sentence. I find it easier to change or expand details than to just make something up whole-cloth. When I'm given a corridor that leads to a series of unkeyed rooms in a house full of fairly detailed rooms, I'm likely to just brick off the corridor.
(Fortunately, my players decided to skip the outbuildings from the first section of the adventure, which gave me an encounter that I was able to quickly transpose into one of the unkeyed rooms. I made a second office for the other room and threw in some plot hooks to the larger campaign, plus the desk drawer with the journal and needle trap that they had missed in another room. My players decided to explore the cellar before going upstairs, which is where most of the unkeyed rooms are.)
As for the actual play of the adventure, my experience was mixed. The upper floors of the chateau are very heavy on atmosphere, with little hints of backstory that could be fun for player characters who like playing the deductive reasoning game. One of the things I appreciate is that each room contains some small unique item that is hidden in an interesting place. This makes it easy for me to convince the players that they really have seen all that they need to see in a room before moving on, and the hiding places are generally well thought out and give the option of either a mechanical search using investigation skills, or a more directed role-play search, with clues in the room description that encourage player characters to search certain areas. My players did not bother to find every piece of treasure, but I was glad to have it.
Where the adventure suffers is in its combat encounters. The first floor features 4 combat encounters, if you count the gargoyle on the front porch. Of these encounters, two are CR 2, one is CR 1/2 and one is a swarm of rats. A swarm of rats. There's a swarm of rats in the entrance to the kobold cave in B2: Keep on the Borderlands. It wasn't a challenge then, and it feels like a total waste in an adventure aimed at characters leveled 5th through 8. I put 2 rat swarms in there just in case, but my players decided to skip that room. The combat encounters we did face before getting to the cellar (2 living vines, the gargoyle, the gray ooze and the olive slime zombie troop transposed from an outbuilding) were all snooze-fests, with the sorcerer usually not even bothering to fire off any cantrips. Clearly, the adventure, in keeping with the 1e feel, is written with an idea of attrition, but the encounters are so minor that there really isn't much attrition to be had. As written, the chateau also feels like a totally reasonable place to spend the night. I pulled out every ooze, slime and goo creature I could find in the Monster Manual and the Fifth Edition Foes, and was prepared for a steady stream of things bubbling up through the floorboards, but my players stayed on their feet the whole time and didn't take the bait. (I was particularly looking forward to using the Grue Type 1 in honor of Zork.)
Another problem with an adventure that is almost entirely oozes is that, well, oozes are about as undynamic as you can get. The ooze is a bit of a gotcha monster that catches you off guard and has some rather nasty intrinsics, but doesn't really put up much of a fight. The olive slime zombies demonstrate this most of all — they are something like +2 or +3 to hit and do very little damage. When they die, they turn into a puddle of olive slime, which doesn't move and only attacks by dripping on unsuspecting adventurers beneath it. (Hard to do when you are a puddle on the ground.) However, if one of those olive slime zombies does manage to hit you, the slime will digest you over the course of a couple days, while magically convincing the character that everything is a-ok. Our fighter took a dose of this stuff from the 15th olive slime zombie he faced, so we'll see how it plays out over the next couple of sessions. I hope he's a good sport about it, and that the other characters notice before he turns into a great big pile of goo.
The final problem with the attrition model is that most of the encounters in this adventure are totally optional, and there is little benefit to exploring additional areas of the vineyard in the finale of the adventure. There is one room containing an item which will be of some use, but that room is on the way to to the final cavernous temple, and contains no combat encounter. Characters who take a completionist approach to this adventure will face a series of trivial encounters, find a few extra bottles of wine and maybe run out of resources, at which point the DM will either allow them to sleep in the cleared upper floors of the house unmolested, or terrorize them all through the night with a steady stream of grues, puddings, oozes, slimes and minor demons.
The final part of the adventure, in a cavern carved out beneath the formal cellar of the building, was actually a success. Characters finally face their first real threat — a supersized ochre jelly with 3 attacks, 20 foot reach, and the ability to rain acidic psuedopods down over most of the room from the shelter of a large basin, giving it 3/4 cover. This guy actually knocked the sorcerer unconscious when he foolishly stepped within 20 feet of the basin. This encounter was then followed by a series of "I'm-not-sure-I-want-to-step-in-that" rooms that my characters had a good time trying to navigate, lamenting the fact that our sorcerer didn't have a fly spell. The final monster, a giant ooze demon, was sufficiently terrifying, doing massive damage with multiple attacks and regenerating 10 hp a turn. That didn't keep him alive long enough to take a second turn, but that's how it goes with solo fights.
In conclusion. The adventure has some great atmosphere with a fun backstory that makes for an interesting exploration. The presentation is good and clearly written, but some of the omissions are frustrating, and it could do with some more useful artwork. The combat encounters left a lot to be desired, though the final act of the adventure is exciting. While the adventure bills itself for levels 5-8, my level 6 party of 4 (with a few +1 swords) found it to be a total cakewalk. It wasn't a bust, but it was a little disappointing.
Has anybody else run this adventure? What were your thoughts?
