The Giants Skull

[Psion]

The Giant's Skull

Fiery Dragon is one of the more popular publishers of d20 adventures. They paved their way, in part, with double adventures such as To Stand on Hallowed Ground and Nature's Fury. The Giant's Skull puts a slightly different spin on this concept. Each adventure has the same essential goal: acquire an item known as the giant's skull; yet each time the players take on a different set of characters.

A First Look

The Giant's Skull is a 40-page, staple-bound, softcover book. It is priced at $9.95 US. This gives the adventure a price per page that is about average for supplements of this size and price range.

The cover has a color picture with a red backdrop. The cover is handsomely illustrated, with art by Kieran Yanner depicting a tribe of ogre's standing in front of the adventure's title item on the front. The back has a small picture by Cladio Pozas depicting a typical party of adventurers.

The interior is black and white, illustrated by Claudio Pozas. The art is attractive and pertinent, illustrating some possible places and scenarios the PCs can encounter in the adventure. Additionally, there is a color insert of cut-out counters, also by Claudio Pozas.

The font is slightly smaller than average, with average line spacing, giving the adventure a decent text density. If you add this to the price per page and the color insert, this make The Giant's Skull a fairly good value.

A Deeper Look

(Warning: This section contains spoilers to events and secrets in the adventures.)

As mentioned, The Giant's Skull consists of two adventures, both concerned with recovering the artifact named the giant's skull. The adventures are assumed to be sequential - one party gets the skull, the other party recovers it later. In one case, the characters play your standard party of humans, elves, dwarves, and the like; in the other adventure, the PCs are pre-generated ogres, included at the back of the product.

The two adventures are written to occur in either order. By default, the ogre adventure comes first, and then the adventure with the normal PCs. Notes are included describing how to handle the adventures in either order, including taking into account some of the ogre characters that may be slain. I personally think, however, that it would be the most fun to play in the order given: offer to play the ogre game on some off night when all of the players are not there, and then watch the surprise as the players discover that they have to undo the damage that their ogre characters did earlier.

The first adventure is "The Ogres Tale." The ogres are given a fairly straightforward motivation for the adventure. They are actually in a precarious position: there is a band of hill giants that have been extorting a tribute from the ogres. The leader of the ogres, an ogre mage, hopes to learn the secrets of an artifact called the giant's skull. After returning from what they hope will be their last tribute, the band of ogre characters find that their ray of hope has been stolen by humans. The ogres must pursue the indolent puny little humans to their keep and recover the artifact.

This will not be an easy task to be sure. The adventure itself is fairly straightforward. The keep is a basic site-based adventure, stocked with human characters that the ogres must overcome. Though straightforward, it does not promise to be easy. There are some high-level human characters, including paladins and clerics.

The ogres' adventure takes advantage of the "alert factor" system originally detailed in FDP's first double adventure, To Stand on Hallowed Ground. Using this system, the GM can track the state of alert in the keep. If they are disruptive, the ogre PCs may find that the state of alarm travels through the keep, making subsequent encounters more difficult as the enemy is better prepared or more alert.

Though the ogres are provided with a motive that is on the up-and-up, the author does not make the ogres out to be merely misunderstood. All of the ogre characters are evil and have methods and goals consistent with that alignment.

Six ogre characters are provided in the appendix for the first adventure: an ogre mage wizard, 2 ogre fighters, an ogre druid, and 2 ogre rogues. I was a little surprised that given the professed nature of ogres that none of the provided characters were barbarians.

Some of the characters have errors in their calculated statistics. For example, the ogre mage's saves are a little high. Fiery Dragon has provided revised downloadable character sheets on their website at www.fierydragon.com .

The second adventure is "The Hero's Tale." As mentioned, this adventure is assumed to occur second, but notes are provided in case you want to run it first. Notes are also provided to adapt the nature of the adventure for the results of the ogres' forays in the first adventure.

The adventure begins at the same keep that the orges raided or will soon raid. A number of hooks are provided to get the PCs to the keep in the first place. The PCs come to the keep and one way or another the giants skull is not there, but has been taken by a band of marauding ogres. The lord of the keep (quite possibly the recipient of a resurrection spell after the first adventure) enlists the PCs' aid to recover the giant's skull.

Taking on a tribe of ogres is a tough task, even for high (10th) level characters. Fortunately, a boy at the keep found a back way in that the players can use. As luck would have it, this back way is not trouble free, but inhabited by some very large bears.

The trek into the ogres' lair is likewise a fairly straightforward site-based adventure. There are some sights to see in the ogre lair (such as the dire fate of some former hostages), but overall it is again a fairly simple monster-bash. Unlike the first adventure, the ogres are assumed to be fairly unorganized and the alert factor system is not used.

Summary and Conclusions

Fiery Dragon still delivers one of the best adventure packages in the industry. As with their other recent adventures, The Giant's Skull includes some vital features such as adaptation notes and character motivations and nice extras such as full-color counters and the alert factor system.

The adventures, however, are in and of themselves fairly basic. The nature of the adventures is that most of their novelty is the unusual setup. If that is not much of a selling point for you - if you see little or no interest in playing ogres - this adventure may not be a good buy for you. Some GMs will doubtlessly find this a good one-shot and an interesting diversion from regular play that can interface well with their existing campaign. Yet a great many groups out there will pass this one by as they are purely campaign players and/or they have little interest in playing monsters or evil characters.

-Alan D. Kohler

 

[Messageboard Golem]

There are two sides to every story!

Turn the tables on standard fantasy adventures! Not only can the players portray the heroes who must retrieve a valuable artifact from the brutish ogres living nearby, but a second scenario can unfold where the players take on the parts of the ogres, attempting to punish the human raiders once and for all!

 

[Ron]

The Giant's Skull is an innovative adventure in two scenarios in which the players have the opportunity of turning sides, first taking roles of a party of Ogres and then their human enemies. Production values are good. The cover by Kieran Yanner is very good while Claudio Pozas' internal B&W illustrations range from fair to good. Pozas also contribute with some excellent color pieces in the back cover illustration and counters. Cartography, by Michael Johnstone, is utilitarian but clear. Layout is clear and easy to follow.

A few extra are included. As previously reported, there are useful color counters depicting the major characters and a few monsters. The module also includes a description of alert factor, a new d20 stat representing the NPCs overall awareness of danger in a dungeon or another closed social system. Finally there are single character sheets for all Ogres characters.

In both scenarios the parties, first of Ogres and then of humans, are trying to recover a minor artifact, the Giant's Skull, from their respective enemies. Although stats are provided, the Skull is nothing more of a plot device, as its extensive powers cannot be activated by any of the groups. The two scenarios can be played in any order, although that, if both successful the last party will achieve final victory claiming the Skull.

I play tested the first scenario. Although innovative, this scenario is nothing more than a dungeon crawl, which may be appropriated to an ogre party. However, a main problem is that the Ogres' leader, a first-level Wizard Ogre Mage is quite capable of completing the quest alone. His abilities of becoming invisible and assuming gaseous form would allow him to sneak the human fortress and take the Skull with him, while his high number of hit points would allow him to survive the most dangerous magical traps. During my play test his player asked me why he couldn't try it alone. Although I think he could succeed better than the party in a sneak operation I didn't wanted to spoil the fun from the other players and told him that he could foresee that the remaining ogres wouldn't wait him too much before starting to storm the castle's walls. As a good leader of his tribe he returned to command them in a better-conceived action plan.

The second scenario is less interesting, as it basic describes a routine dungeon craw at the ogres' lair. There are few surprises in this scenario and a combat oriented party should have no problems in completing it. Unlike its predecessor, there aren't any ready to play characters, the players should introduce their own tenth level ones.

Regardless of the original feature of playing both sides of a conflict, especially by allowing the players to role-play evil monster characters, both scenarios are quite mundane. Although dungeon crawls can be exciting, both scenarios aren't that difficult to be completed. A interesting feat to the DM is keep in control a party of ogres, I have to constantly remember some players that their characters are impulsive and not that smart, as they tried to get along with some clever tactics during the attack of the Citadel. Despite the shortcomings, my group of players and I had a lot of fun playing the first scenario, although it wasn't sufficient to keep interest to play the second one.

 

[Simon Collins]

Beware! This review contains major spoilers.
This is not a playtest review.

Price: $9.95
Page Count: 40
Price per page: About 24 cents per page
Designed for character levels: 5th Level Ogres, 10th Level PCs

External Art: A reasonably good piece of colour art showing a group of ogres, fronted by a glowing skull.

Additional Page Use: The back page contains an introduction and overview to the two adventures, as well as a small cartoonish colour picture of a group of PCs. The back inside page contains ads, the front inside cover has a challenge table (a summary of ELs, CRs and stats), and an Alert Factor Tracking Chart, where the GM can keep track of the inhabitants readiness for combat in response to how quiet the characters have been. The first page contains credits and contents. The OGL takes up one page within the module.

Internal Art: The internal black and white art is . There are also a set of square cardboard counters for the relevant monsters stapled to the centre of the module - the quality of the pictures depicting each monster is average to good.

Maps: The maps are basic, clear, scaled, and keyed to the adventures.

Page Layout: The text density is good and there is little white space. Margins are not large.

Writing Style: Both adventures are written in a clear and entertaining manner. I was unable to find any typos.

The Adventures:

In the first adventure, players get an opportunity to play Ogre characters who, on returning from a trip to bribe some giants, discover that a precious artifact has been stolen from their caves by a group of humans. The humans have now returned to their keep on the borderlands. The ogres are encouraged by their clanspeople (and the personality backgrounds of these pregenerated characters) to retrieve the artifact, the magical skull of the title, from the humans. They must attempt to enter the keep through force or stealth and the success of any attempts at stealth is measured by the aforementioned Alert Factor Tracking Chart. Each location has a note on factors which could affect the Alert Factor, bringing guards running, or rousing sleeping soldiers to action.

In the second adventure, players's standard PCs set off in search of the Giants Skull in the ogres' caves - this can be played either as a precursor or an aftermath to the 'first' adventure. Either way, they are sent by the lord of the keep to retrieve the artifact. Some background is given on the lord, a zealous humanoid-hating paladin, who is running into disfavour with his order due to his racist ways - indeed, a possible replacement has been sent to assess his fitness for duty, and to replace him as necessary.

The High Points: A good idea, to run the players through as the ogres bedevilled by a racist human lord who steals their skull, before playing their standard characters who are sent to retrieve it. Similar has been done in WotC's 2nd Edition Reverse Dungeon, but it still gives the players an interesting opportunity to view the situation from both sides. The Alert Factor system is a useful one and could be used more generically to measure the success of any attempt at stealth in other settings. The pre-generated Ogre characters are well-documented with interesting personalities, and the situation as a whole provides plenty of food for thought. Stats and game rule material seems particularly well-documented, with a good feel for combat and tactics, and traps.

The Low Points: There were a number of possibilities such as the ogres failing to retrieve the skull from the keep, or the PCs taking sides against the fanatical paladin that were not explored in enough detail and could potentially lead to the GM needing to do some extremely quick thinking on the fly to deal with these possibilities and where they might lead. Apart from the ogre characters, and perhaps the lord, there was a distinct lack of personality depth in the rest of the NPCs. The generic setting has its advantages in its easy integration but genericism often leads to blandness, and the setting suffered a little from this. The adventure focused on combat and tactics, and failed to explore and expand on the roleplaying possibilities it raised in its initial concept.

Conclusion: A great idea, which may run into some hard work for the GM unless his group is combat-orientated due to some possible gaps in the plot logic. Both adventures offer plenty of 1st-Edition style dungen adventuring and the useful Alert Factor System could be used in many other circumstances. The NPCs and the setting were weak, whilst the game rules and concept were strong. As has been mentioned already, not very suitable for campaign integration, better as a once-off.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

This adventures sounds pretty good, and you seem to like it well enough... so why stick it with the same score you gave AEG River of Blood?