As 2015 begins, it’s a good opportunity to take stock of one’s projects and make sure that the New Year can be a fresh start. As it happens, while taking that end-of-year assessment, it’s come to light that an RPG product sent in during last year's summer months did not get its moment in the limelight with an EN World Review.
SagaRPG released its first product in the form of an adventure arc designed for use with Pathfinder. The Darkwood Adventure Arc proposes to present five modules, beginning with the first adventure book designed for four 5th Level characters in The Deft and The Deadly!
The Darkwood Adventure Arc: The Deft and The Deadly
The Deft and The Deadly is the first module of a five-part series called The Darkwood Adventure Arc by SagaRPG. This adventure module is designed to be used with Pathfinder RPG and is designed for use with four player-characters of around 5th Level. The Deft and The Deadly comes with a complete backstory for the adventure, as well as maps of the local town and encounter maps. The adventure module also has fully developed encounters with new creatures, information on local NPCs, a gazetteer of the region, a new dynamic faction system, and more.
Production Quality
The production quality of The Darkwood Adventure Arc: The Deft and The Deadly is generally pretty good, with only a couple rough patches of note in this first offering from SagaRPG. The writing of the adventure is fairly epic, and the authors do a fine job of weaving an intricate and backstory for the arc. The layout is good-looking and uses a stat block formats readily familiar to Pathfinder RPG gamers. Regretfully, the document was not well-optimized as a PDF, and it is clunky and sluggish to access while scrolling through page-by-page.
The PDF does have bookmarks and a table of contents, both of which are hotlinked to pages within the document. But again, the response time while paging through the document using those navigation tools was still a bit slow to respond. That temperamental nature of the PDF is a relatively minor issue, but can make reading and scanning through the document a bit tedious.
The artwork in The Darkwood Adventure Arc: The Deft and The Deadly is quite decent overall, with most of the images in full color rendering. The cover depicts the pre-generated heroes from later in the book in the midst of a street battle – pretty dramatic stuff. But given the length of the book, the amount of artwork was a bit sparse, however there were plenty of maps to relieve the wall of text feeling. That said, the maps for the region and the encounters are really quite spectacular and have a real “dungeon tile” style to them. The encounter maps come with grids and the starting locations of NPCs, presumably to be printed and used at the gaming table. There’s some darned good cartography in this adventure, and some of the encounter maps could doubtless be reused again and again in other adventures.
Welcome to Darkwood, mudder…
At first glance, The Darkwood Adventure Arc: The Deft and The Deadly might appear to be just another Third Party Press adventure module designed for use with Pathfinder RPG. But that first look can be deceiving and this first installment of The Darkwood Adventure Arc has quite a bit more than meets the eye.
First, the authors start off by relating the VERY involved and rather epic backstory – behind the scenes information about the nasty evil “something” that is precipitating events in the adventure arc. Of course, very little of the full backstory is revealed during this first part of the adventure arc so there is plenty of plot to be revealed and developed in the subsequent four books as they get released.
For the player-characters, the story opens with their arrival in the frontier mining town called Darkwood, a rough and tumble sort of town with all manner of folk living and working there. The heroes will be sized up fairly quickly by the denizens of the town and offered all manner of jobs (quests and side treks) as befitting adventuring travellers. This gives the adventure a really sand-boxy feeling to it, and the players will find that their actions on these quests have real world consequences.
The authors have designed a faction system, which will give the heroes a Coalition Affiliation Score (CAS) which fluctuates depending not only on which quests the heroes undertake but what actions they take while completing those quests. Positive CAS with the five different factions will garner discounts on purchases of goods and services, bonuses to Diplomacy checks, assistance and aide, and potentially special quests with lucrative rewards at maximum CAS. Negative CAS gets the opposite effects, and might even have members of a group gunning for the heroes on a regular basis.
The quests and encounters in the adventure arc are well-written, and each comes with a lovely encounter map (as previously mentioned). Each encounter discusses the general information and CR level, environmental conditions during the encounter, and tactics the enemies will take when facing the heroes. The encounters also contain notes on the aftermath from the combat, as well as a list of adjustments to the CAS score based upon the characters’ actions. Several of the quests and encounters have rumor tables and wandering monster tables to add additional details, as well as hints on how a GM might further expand the plot lines.
There is also some blurbs at the end of the encounter section dropping clues as to the plots of the modules further along in this series.
But in addition to the encounters and side quests, the authors also present additional useful information in a number of appendices – and the first details the town of Darkwood itself. There is a full-color map, a gazetteer of shops and residences, and full listings of the NPCs with their stat blocks. The write-up of each area in town also drops hint and hooks which an enterprising GM might develop further. There is another appendix for Bright Town – a Traveller camp outside of Darkwood which is just as well developed. Part of the adventure can lead the heroes into Bright Town, and interacting with the Traveller families there – these gypsies are also a faction by the way.
The authors present four pre-generated and very detailed characters which can be used for the adventure. There are short half-sheet versions and full-page versions of the character sheets, with hero portrait, and full biographies. The authors included a Pistolero/Rogue, a Wizard with a new Academy school (Academy of All Realms), a Cavalier, and a Druid.
There is a package of “new stuff” created for this adventure arc in the fourth appendix – this includes a new poison and disease, two new magic items, a monster template, and a new deity with two new domains. The fifth appendix contains the rules for the faction system and the charts for determining the reactions of the groups based up the CAS. And the sixth appendix contains six major NPCs and their stat blocks, along with detailed biographies and adventure hooks.
Finally, in the last appendix, the authors detail the nearby Worg Wood where the heroes will be sent from time to time from Darkwood. The map of the Worg Wood is rather nice and full of nifty details, along with a history of the locale and short gazetteer, including wandering monster tables. Also, there is a map of the larger geographical country nearby – Khaindala – and more gazetteer information about the history and points of interest, population, and major towns.
Overall Score: 6.9 out of 10.0
Conclusions
Overall, The Darkwood Adventure Arc: The Deft and The Deadly is a strong first release from SagaRPG, and this module holds a lot more content than just a bunch of encounters. There is some solid plot writing here, and by adding the additional information about the surrounding area, major NPCs, and the well-developed background, the authors have laid the foundation for a very in-depth adventure arc – should SagaRPG manage to release all five modules as planned.
And while the art was a little sparse, the maps more than made up for the illustration deficit. SagaRPG has some pretty talented cartographers based upon the showing in this adventure book, and it will be interesting if the world around the Worg Wood and Khaindala continues to expand into new maps as the series continues.
The Darkwood Adventure Arc: The Deft and The Deadly isn’t bargain priced, but it’s not out of scope given the amount of content in this first installment of the adventure arc. It’s worth noting that the second module in The Darkwood Adventure Arc – Barrow of the Cursespawn – is also available in PDF format from RPGNow.
Editorial Note: This Reviewer received a copy of the product in PDF format from which this review was written.
Grade Card (Ratings 0 to 10)
The Darkwood Adventure Arc: The Deft and The Deadly
- Written by: Nick Johnson and Lars Lundberg
- Illustrations: Raul Chavez (cover); (interior) Ovidiu Dascalu, Sergei Churbanov, Hillary Wilson, Raul Chavez, Raymond Gaustadnes, and Luke Daniels; (cartography) Lars Lundberg, Phill Lundberg, and Robert Schertz
- Publisher: SagaRPG
- Year: 2014
- Media: PDF (160 pages)
- Price: 19.99 PDF available from RPGNow
The Deft and The Deadly is the first module of a five-part series called The Darkwood Adventure Arc by SagaRPG. This adventure module is designed to be used with Pathfinder RPG and is designed for use with four player-characters of around 5th Level. The Deft and The Deadly comes with a complete backstory for the adventure, as well as maps of the local town and encounter maps. The adventure module also has fully developed encounters with new creatures, information on local NPCs, a gazetteer of the region, a new dynamic faction system, and more.
Production Quality
The production quality of The Darkwood Adventure Arc: The Deft and The Deadly is generally pretty good, with only a couple rough patches of note in this first offering from SagaRPG. The writing of the adventure is fairly epic, and the authors do a fine job of weaving an intricate and backstory for the arc. The layout is good-looking and uses a stat block formats readily familiar to Pathfinder RPG gamers. Regretfully, the document was not well-optimized as a PDF, and it is clunky and sluggish to access while scrolling through page-by-page.
The artwork in The Darkwood Adventure Arc: The Deft and The Deadly is quite decent overall, with most of the images in full color rendering. The cover depicts the pre-generated heroes from later in the book in the midst of a street battle – pretty dramatic stuff. But given the length of the book, the amount of artwork was a bit sparse, however there were plenty of maps to relieve the wall of text feeling. That said, the maps for the region and the encounters are really quite spectacular and have a real “dungeon tile” style to them. The encounter maps come with grids and the starting locations of NPCs, presumably to be printed and used at the gaming table. There’s some darned good cartography in this adventure, and some of the encounter maps could doubtless be reused again and again in other adventures.
Welcome to Darkwood, mudder…
At first glance, The Darkwood Adventure Arc: The Deft and The Deadly might appear to be just another Third Party Press adventure module designed for use with Pathfinder RPG. But that first look can be deceiving and this first installment of The Darkwood Adventure Arc has quite a bit more than meets the eye.
For the player-characters, the story opens with their arrival in the frontier mining town called Darkwood, a rough and tumble sort of town with all manner of folk living and working there. The heroes will be sized up fairly quickly by the denizens of the town and offered all manner of jobs (quests and side treks) as befitting adventuring travellers. This gives the adventure a really sand-boxy feeling to it, and the players will find that their actions on these quests have real world consequences.
The authors have designed a faction system, which will give the heroes a Coalition Affiliation Score (CAS) which fluctuates depending not only on which quests the heroes undertake but what actions they take while completing those quests. Positive CAS with the five different factions will garner discounts on purchases of goods and services, bonuses to Diplomacy checks, assistance and aide, and potentially special quests with lucrative rewards at maximum CAS. Negative CAS gets the opposite effects, and might even have members of a group gunning for the heroes on a regular basis.
There is also some blurbs at the end of the encounter section dropping clues as to the plots of the modules further along in this series.
But in addition to the encounters and side quests, the authors also present additional useful information in a number of appendices – and the first details the town of Darkwood itself. There is a full-color map, a gazetteer of shops and residences, and full listings of the NPCs with their stat blocks. The write-up of each area in town also drops hint and hooks which an enterprising GM might develop further. There is another appendix for Bright Town – a Traveller camp outside of Darkwood which is just as well developed. Part of the adventure can lead the heroes into Bright Town, and interacting with the Traveller families there – these gypsies are also a faction by the way.
The authors present four pre-generated and very detailed characters which can be used for the adventure. There are short half-sheet versions and full-page versions of the character sheets, with hero portrait, and full biographies. The authors included a Pistolero/Rogue, a Wizard with a new Academy school (Academy of All Realms), a Cavalier, and a Druid.
Finally, in the last appendix, the authors detail the nearby Worg Wood where the heroes will be sent from time to time from Darkwood. The map of the Worg Wood is rather nice and full of nifty details, along with a history of the locale and short gazetteer, including wandering monster tables. Also, there is a map of the larger geographical country nearby – Khaindala – and more gazetteer information about the history and points of interest, population, and major towns.
Overall Score: 6.9 out of 10.0
Conclusions
Overall, The Darkwood Adventure Arc: The Deft and The Deadly is a strong first release from SagaRPG, and this module holds a lot more content than just a bunch of encounters. There is some solid plot writing here, and by adding the additional information about the surrounding area, major NPCs, and the well-developed background, the authors have laid the foundation for a very in-depth adventure arc – should SagaRPG manage to release all five modules as planned.
And while the art was a little sparse, the maps more than made up for the illustration deficit. SagaRPG has some pretty talented cartographers based upon the showing in this adventure book, and it will be interesting if the world around the Worg Wood and Khaindala continues to expand into new maps as the series continues.
The Darkwood Adventure Arc: The Deft and The Deadly isn’t bargain priced, but it’s not out of scope given the amount of content in this first installment of the adventure arc. It’s worth noting that the second module in The Darkwood Adventure Arc – Barrow of the Cursespawn – is also available in PDF format from RPGNow.
Editorial Note: This Reviewer received a copy of the product in PDF format from which this review was written.
Grade Card (Ratings 0 to 10)
- Presentation: 6.5
- - Design: 7.5 (Solid writing; good layout; clunky unoptimized PDF)
- - Illustrations: 5.5 (Decent cover; nice interior illustrations; awesome maps!)
- Content: 7.75
- - Crunch: 7.5 (Great encounter design; cool new add ons; nifty faction system)
- - Fluff: 8.0 (Lots of good lore; great backstory; excellent information about the surrounding area)
- Value: 6.5 (Decent price for a good deal of contents)
