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Message: <blockquote data-quote="trancejeremy" data-source="post: 2009075" data-attributes="member: 924">This is a 32 page adventure from Necromancer games, written by Mike Mearls. It's priced at $9.95, which is a pretty standard price for adventures of it's size, but suffers a bit from the fact that Necromancer puts out much larger adventures for slightly more money. On the front page is a password for additional web supplements, but when you go to the Necromancer web page, there are none.  So, price wise, it's not bad, but no bargain, either. I paid $4 for it, used.The outside margin is pretty big, but nothing obnoxious.  There's a good amount of artwork, and it's all excellent. Not in an ultra-realistic style, but very well done. Evocative and sets the mood. The kind of art that makes you think, "Wow, that's really nice looking", but it's not flashy. The maps are very clearly done. A bit on the artistic side, but just a bit. Very useable, not like the nearly unreadable stuff WOTC uses.On the face of it, it's a pretty simple adventure. The PCs are hired as escort for a caravan to a distant outpost/castle called Durgam's Folly. Everything is left very vague, so it's extremely easy to adapt to most worlds. I used it in the Soverign Stone setting with no problem.The adventure is broken up into 3 parts. The first two parts are pretty conventional. The last part is a bit of a surprise, though it is still pretty much a dungeon crawl. The first section, or act, as the module calls it, is the trip to Durgam's Folly. Besides the usual encounters and problems characters on a journey has to face, there's a lot of role-playing potential here.  The 3 main NPCs of this section are all given excellent descriptions, both physically and in terms of their personality. And all are illustrated (more than once, actually). This is really a big help.I'm not going to give away any major spoilers, but the only real problem in the first section is that huge difference in EL. Some parts are extremely easy, some are extremely hard.  However, as I ran this for PCs that were somewhat lower level than this module was aimed at, it was fairly simple to reduce the challenge of the higher ecounters (one was based just on high numbers of opponents, and one can be hidden from, basically)The second section deals with the PCs having to retake the outpost. It seems that it was conquered by ogres while the PCs were travelling there. This is actually relatively easy, because the ogres are not that organized. But there are a large number of them, and it's up to the GM to decide how the fight goes. Rather than a location by location assault, it just describes the locations and then tells you the total number of ogres and other enemies. It's up to the GM to handle it from there. Though several guidelines are given. Again, it's easy to scale for lower (or higher) level characters.The last section is a dungeon crawl. Once they capture the main areas of the outpost, they have to take back the dungeon area of it. This is really unexpected. Not that it's a dungeon crawl, but what the PCs fight. It seems that the head wizard of the fort liked to experiment with golems.  But his latest creation sort of backfired, in a horrible, horrible way. The end result is something out of a horror movie. There are a few fairly gorey illustrations that show the results.There are some hooks on how to extend the module, but nothing really great. There are some new monsters in the back, but all related to the monsters in the dungeon, which the players might be sick of.  So, this module probably doesn't have much use beyond the adventure itself.All in all, this is an excellent module. Has that nice combination of combat and roleplaying, and is also quite unexpected. Besides being readily useable for most fantasy settings, with just a little bit of tweaking it can be altered to use with Pinnacle's Weird War game. Just change the ogres to Nazis, and boom, it works great. Can probably also work in Dragonstar, or Fading Suns, or even Star Wars. Just make the fort a space station.The only downside is the nature of the encounter levels.  Most ELs range from 5 to 6. But there are a few that are much higher (10-12). The module is recommended for PCs from 5th to 8th level. Those that are 8th level will breeze through most of the adventure, with some stuggle towards the higher ones (though probably not that much). OTOH, at the other end, 5th level PCs will be able to handle most of the encounters, but as written, will be outmatched by a handful.  The latter was the case when I ran it, but it wasn't hard to reduce the difficulty of the hard fights (and thankfully, the EL of each encounter is given. Most, but not all, companies do that, but it's still worth mentioning, and very nice). I think it was a pretty solid A. Not A++, but very enjoyable and well done. On my budget, I would probably balk at full price, but if you have no problems paying $10 for a 32 page adventure, then this is definitely worth the money.</blockquote>

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