There are so many hooks that are used to convince a band of heroes into taking part in an adventure. Sometimes it is the lure of a powerful artifact, sometimes the lure of a dragon’s hoard, and sometimes it is out of a sense of fealty and honor to one’s king or queen or land. But possibly the strongest incentive to head into danger on an adventure is to rescue an innocent from the clutches of a profoundly evil foe.
Sure, the fair maiden held in the town by the evil baron or the princess kidnapped by the dragon and held for ransom are powerful images from fairy tales and legends, which make great fodder for heroic fantasy games. But to really galvanize heroes, putting an innocent child at risk by dark powers is a sure-fire way to grab the attention of every player at the table – particularly if you have gamer buddies with kids of their own!
Rocks Fall Games has released the first of an adventure series called The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child which does exactly that – ask heroes to rescue a child from an evil ruins, purported to be filled with strange foes. This Pathfinder RPG is designed to launch a series of adventures in the Awesfur setting, and pit the heroes against an unknown foe holding a child for some nefarious purpose!
The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child
The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child is an adventure for use with the Pathfinder RPG and is intended four or five third-level characters. While the adventure is set in a campaign setting called Awesfur, it is generic and can be adapted to other campaign settings. The adventure uses standard monsters from the Pathfinder Bestiary, as well as standard treasures and magic items.
Production Quality
The production quality of The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child is sub-par, with writing that is simplistic and uninspired, layout which is often muddled and confusing. Given that the font chosen for the product is one that appears in all caps (similar to the Diablo 3 font) with little difference in size between a capitalized and lower case letter, and a tendency of the author to write in run-on or incomplete sentences, it makes almost every attempt to read the adventure an almost painful chore. There are also no table of contents, no PDF bookmarks, and no real organization to the adventure.
While the “read-aloud” text is differentiated with text in bright red, there is no differentiation for combat encounters. The monster stat blocks appear the same as the normal text, including breaking the block up into paragraphs, which makes it not only difficult to read, but also difficult to pick out of the general content.
The map for the adventure is done in a retro-style, with basic line art on graph paper. While this has a certain nostalgic charm when found in a product with higher production quality, it has quite the opposite effect in a product like this.
There are no interior illustrations in The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child, other than blow-up sections of the graph paper map for use in encounters. The cover art of the product is not bad, but it bears absolutely no resemblance to any part of anything found in the adventure. At no point does an evil-countenanced elf wizard show up in the plot, drawing glowing runes from his ring adorned fingers. Other than that, it’s a fairly nice comic book style rendering of an elven wizard.
The Adventure
To put it frankly, The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child is an uninspired adventure, with a plot so simplistic and banal that even the most neophyte game master would reject. If you plan to play in this adventure, I’ll offer a SPOILER ALERT now to recommend you skip to the Conclusion and avoid reading further.
The plot of The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child revolves around the heroes being hired to locate a missing child last seen near the old scary ruins, which always seem to be situated just outside of town and are a haven for monsters and cultists of all kinds. A half-elf with the unlikely name of Diego Montalban – who also is described oddly as “swarthy” with a “long moustache” in what appears to be a disturbing bit of racial profiling – hires the adventurers out of the blue, offering them 100 gold to explore the ruins and find the child.
Of course, the only way to find out the whole plot development, what little exists, is to read through the entire adventure, because there is no plot synopsis or overview to give a game master any idea what’s actually going on. It jumps right into the adventure, with adventurers being hired in a bar.
Getting to the ruins is not discussed, being only a couple miles outside of town, and the heroes can storm right in and start exploring. The ruins are an old shrine to a good-aligned paladin-friendly deity, but is now desecrated. There are eighteen rooms to explore, each with its own read-aloud description, but only four encounters and no tricks or traps, which makes for a considerably large area to wander through without much going on.
Of the four monster encounters, there is some really poor monster ecology at work here. There are ghouls and a ghast sitting around in one room, just waiting for heroes to show up, and a few score of feet away are a pack of spiders, a mimic, and a bunch of hobgoblin cultists. There is no explanation that suggest that the spiders or ghouls pack are under control of the cult, which means that the hobgoblins are really just there as a potential snack at some point in the future. Thankfully, a group of adventurers have recently explored the ruin and fell victim to the monsters, and now have starring roles as corpses in various states of dismemberment for the heroes to find. The monster encounters are designed basically, ranging from CR 3 to CR5, which should really be a cake walk for a party of five 5th Level characters.
While there are some good descriptions of a dungeon setting in the adventure, there are quite a few downright peculiar things going on in The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child as well. For instance, in a closet in the ghoul room is the body of an elf female, still fully clothed, and a simple ragged tear on her throat as the only signs of violence. Her body falls out of the cupboard in an attempt at a scare scene found in almost any bad horror movie. Stranger still is the idea that ravenous ghouls and a ghast could use their bites and claws to kill so cleanly… and then stuffing a fresh body away for “later” propped up to fall out at the next adventurer to open the door?
In another scene, an orc warrior is found dead, her skull split open, and nothing in the area that killed her. While there is a statue of an angelic knight nearby, it’s just a statue, and there is no other hint as to what might have been there to brain her. I did read that there is a masterwork club laying across her lap, so I just inferred that she split her own skull with it out of deep instinctive need to escape one of the most boring dungeon she’s ever explored.
As for the hobgoblin cultists’ activities, there are few clues other than a scene of torture, where a half-elf was skinned alive, and a strange totem found in their presence. But they do plan to capture the child they found, and if the heroes wait longer than one day to rescue the kid, he’s found dead. Regretfully, there is no indication that such a timeline exists, so there is no real urgency for the heroes to move through the adventure quickly. Of course, whether they succeed or fail, the heroes still get a reward of 100 gold pieces, although they can get an additional 100gp and free drinks if they succeed to bring back the wayward child unharmed. But regardless of the outcome, I imagine that most players would boggle at their game master and wonder why he or she wasted their evening on such a boring and pointless adventure.
Overall Score: 1.75 out of 5.0
Conclusions
Sadly, an adventure like The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child demonstrates the pitfalls of the OGL – not everything put out by Third Party Publishers is high quality or even worth buying. Thankfully, there are some writers and publishers out there doing great OGL and GSL work, and I love highlighting them in my weekly column – but this product does not represent that segment of the industry. The plot is hardly cutting edge, and represents only the most basic concepts of heroic adventure. Almost any game master could pick four monsters from the Bestiary and wing an adventure for that night’s session that would be higher quality and make more sense than what’s found in The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child.
This doesn’t happen too often, but I honestly cannot recommend this product for any Pathfinder RPG player or game master. Even at half the price asked, it’s still too much money to spend on such a low-quality product, and I’d recommend spending the cash on something else.
So until next review… I wish you Happy Gaming!
Grade Card (Ratings 1 to 5)
Author’s Note: This Reviewer received a complimentary copy of the product in PDF format from which the review was written.
Sure, the fair maiden held in the town by the evil baron or the princess kidnapped by the dragon and held for ransom are powerful images from fairy tales and legends, which make great fodder for heroic fantasy games. But to really galvanize heroes, putting an innocent child at risk by dark powers is a sure-fire way to grab the attention of every player at the table – particularly if you have gamer buddies with kids of their own!
Rocks Fall Games has released the first of an adventure series called The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child which does exactly that – ask heroes to rescue a child from an evil ruins, purported to be filled with strange foes. This Pathfinder RPG is designed to launch a series of adventures in the Awesfur setting, and pit the heroes against an unknown foe holding a child for some nefarious purpose!The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child
- Author / Lead Design / Cartographer: Charles T. Marleau II
- Cover: Jose Ivan Negron
- Publisher: Rocks Fall Games
- Year: 2012
- Media: PDF (14 pages)
- Price: $2.49 (PDF $14.99 available from RPGNow)
The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child is an adventure for use with the Pathfinder RPG and is intended four or five third-level characters. While the adventure is set in a campaign setting called Awesfur, it is generic and can be adapted to other campaign settings. The adventure uses standard monsters from the Pathfinder Bestiary, as well as standard treasures and magic items.
Production Quality
The production quality of The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child is sub-par, with writing that is simplistic and uninspired, layout which is often muddled and confusing. Given that the font chosen for the product is one that appears in all caps (similar to the Diablo 3 font) with little difference in size between a capitalized and lower case letter, and a tendency of the author to write in run-on or incomplete sentences, it makes almost every attempt to read the adventure an almost painful chore. There are also no table of contents, no PDF bookmarks, and no real organization to the adventure.
While the “read-aloud” text is differentiated with text in bright red, there is no differentiation for combat encounters. The monster stat blocks appear the same as the normal text, including breaking the block up into paragraphs, which makes it not only difficult to read, but also difficult to pick out of the general content.
The map for the adventure is done in a retro-style, with basic line art on graph paper. While this has a certain nostalgic charm when found in a product with higher production quality, it has quite the opposite effect in a product like this.
There are no interior illustrations in The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child, other than blow-up sections of the graph paper map for use in encounters. The cover art of the product is not bad, but it bears absolutely no resemblance to any part of anything found in the adventure. At no point does an evil-countenanced elf wizard show up in the plot, drawing glowing runes from his ring adorned fingers. Other than that, it’s a fairly nice comic book style rendering of an elven wizard.
The Adventure
To put it frankly, The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child is an uninspired adventure, with a plot so simplistic and banal that even the most neophyte game master would reject. If you plan to play in this adventure, I’ll offer a SPOILER ALERT now to recommend you skip to the Conclusion and avoid reading further.
The plot of The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child revolves around the heroes being hired to locate a missing child last seen near the old scary ruins, which always seem to be situated just outside of town and are a haven for monsters and cultists of all kinds. A half-elf with the unlikely name of Diego Montalban – who also is described oddly as “swarthy” with a “long moustache” in what appears to be a disturbing bit of racial profiling – hires the adventurers out of the blue, offering them 100 gold to explore the ruins and find the child.
Of course, the only way to find out the whole plot development, what little exists, is to read through the entire adventure, because there is no plot synopsis or overview to give a game master any idea what’s actually going on. It jumps right into the adventure, with adventurers being hired in a bar.
Getting to the ruins is not discussed, being only a couple miles outside of town, and the heroes can storm right in and start exploring. The ruins are an old shrine to a good-aligned paladin-friendly deity, but is now desecrated. There are eighteen rooms to explore, each with its own read-aloud description, but only four encounters and no tricks or traps, which makes for a considerably large area to wander through without much going on.
Of the four monster encounters, there is some really poor monster ecology at work here. There are ghouls and a ghast sitting around in one room, just waiting for heroes to show up, and a few score of feet away are a pack of spiders, a mimic, and a bunch of hobgoblin cultists. There is no explanation that suggest that the spiders or ghouls pack are under control of the cult, which means that the hobgoblins are really just there as a potential snack at some point in the future. Thankfully, a group of adventurers have recently explored the ruin and fell victim to the monsters, and now have starring roles as corpses in various states of dismemberment for the heroes to find. The monster encounters are designed basically, ranging from CR 3 to CR5, which should really be a cake walk for a party of five 5th Level characters.
While there are some good descriptions of a dungeon setting in the adventure, there are quite a few downright peculiar things going on in The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child as well. For instance, in a closet in the ghoul room is the body of an elf female, still fully clothed, and a simple ragged tear on her throat as the only signs of violence. Her body falls out of the cupboard in an attempt at a scare scene found in almost any bad horror movie. Stranger still is the idea that ravenous ghouls and a ghast could use their bites and claws to kill so cleanly… and then stuffing a fresh body away for “later” propped up to fall out at the next adventurer to open the door?
In another scene, an orc warrior is found dead, her skull split open, and nothing in the area that killed her. While there is a statue of an angelic knight nearby, it’s just a statue, and there is no other hint as to what might have been there to brain her. I did read that there is a masterwork club laying across her lap, so I just inferred that she split her own skull with it out of deep instinctive need to escape one of the most boring dungeon she’s ever explored.
As for the hobgoblin cultists’ activities, there are few clues other than a scene of torture, where a half-elf was skinned alive, and a strange totem found in their presence. But they do plan to capture the child they found, and if the heroes wait longer than one day to rescue the kid, he’s found dead. Regretfully, there is no indication that such a timeline exists, so there is no real urgency for the heroes to move through the adventure quickly. Of course, whether they succeed or fail, the heroes still get a reward of 100 gold pieces, although they can get an additional 100gp and free drinks if they succeed to bring back the wayward child unharmed. But regardless of the outcome, I imagine that most players would boggle at their game master and wonder why he or she wasted their evening on such a boring and pointless adventure.
Overall Score: 1.75 out of 5.0
Conclusions
Sadly, an adventure like The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child demonstrates the pitfalls of the OGL – not everything put out by Third Party Publishers is high quality or even worth buying. Thankfully, there are some writers and publishers out there doing great OGL and GSL work, and I love highlighting them in my weekly column – but this product does not represent that segment of the industry. The plot is hardly cutting edge, and represents only the most basic concepts of heroic adventure. Almost any game master could pick four monsters from the Bestiary and wing an adventure for that night’s session that would be higher quality and make more sense than what’s found in The Dark Totem Part 1: The Missing Child.
This doesn’t happen too often, but I honestly cannot recommend this product for any Pathfinder RPG player or game master. Even at half the price asked, it’s still too much money to spend on such a low-quality product, and I’d recommend spending the cash on something else.
So until next review… I wish you Happy Gaming!
Grade Card (Ratings 1 to 5)
- Presentation: 2.0
- - Design: 2.0 (Weak design; mediocre writing; poor layout and font choice)
- - Illustrations: 2.0 (No interior illustrations; cover art decent but non-evocative of any content)
- Content: 2.25
- - Crunch: 2.0 (Stock monsters are used in basic encounters)
- - Fluff: 2.5 (There is a little fluff here, but most of it is routine dungeon delve material)
- Value: 1.0 (Even at the price, it seems far too much money to spend on a product I can’t recommend)
Author’s Note: This Reviewer received a complimentary copy of the product in PDF format from which the review was written.
