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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Deset Gled" data-source="post: 8559157" data-attributes="member: 7808">I'm doing my part to make sure you don't have to spend the $9.   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  While I think that it's odd Vince Florio would publish something like this knowing how bad it is (he is a former Ennie winner), I think he realizes that there's going to be at least a few people like me who will buy it out of sheer curiosity/masochism.  By getting his PDF out before NuTSR, he's going to snag most of those sales for himself.As for the adventure itself, it's very, very basic.  Keep in mind that it's for level 1-2, and not game specific.  It's 24 pages, but only about 15 of that is real content (including maps and art).  It's got custom maps of two towns and a three-room dungeon.  About 10 named locations in each town with a paragraph of expansion on each, a few NPCs, and a couple of side-adventure hooks.  Neither a railroad nor a sandbox, but closer to the former.  Overall, the module is written to assume the GM knows a lot of standard TTRPG mechanics (like HP and AC) without explanation, but also goes into super basic explanations of what a GM does.  "As the GM you control the game, you steer the pathway the players will venture on, and you are the monsters and townsfolk. You have a lot of power in the game, and it is suggested you use this power fairly."  You don't say?  It's a bizarre dichotomy.There are no unique monsters or encounters.  Almost everyone is human or dwarf with passing references to elves, orcs, goblins, and kobolds.  The only real unique thing at all is the Curse, which is spelled out in detail.  Very sparse details to other things.  For example, one side quest is "Pc’s investigate to nd out what happened to [murdered NPC]. If they can, they will report back to [other NPC] for a reward."  [Sic]  That's it.  No details about how to investigate, no details on what really happened, no details on the reward.Personally, I don't think it's worth running.  But I'm not a fair judge.  First, I'm not the biggest OSR fan, and I suspect a couple of my complaints might be with that style.  For example, the curse explicitly affects the PCs differently than NPCs; I don't like it, but it's in line with genuine early D&D adventures I've seen.  Second, I can't imaging actually using a non-specific adventure at 1st level.  IMX, those levels are used to have players get used to their abilities and game mechanics, so there's no point in using such a generic adventure. YMMV.There are multiple references to this being the starting point of a bigger adventure path planned by Vincent (inside and outside the module).  The adventure goes as far as outright stating that the Curse powers a crystal that the PCs cannot find; it's left to future modules.  I could see it potentially getting interesting as part of a larger story, but it has a long way to go.</blockquote>

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