Modules with Asian settings are hard to come by, even in these hale days of open gaming, d20 mania. Good adventures in any setting are even harder to find.
The Jade Magi Sewer Crawl, despite its clumsy and off-putting title, may fit the bill for an oriental escapade. Those seeking a serious dungeon crawl may be both disappointed and pleasantly surprised.
The cover of
Jade Magi is nice, a common them with MonkeyGod releases, though the titling and logo placement detract from the image. Graphically the book is fine; the layout is readable and useable, even if the charts and borders are unattractive. Most of the illustrations inside the book have a cartoonish quality that actually fits well with the light-hearted approach the author takes with the adventure. Since a lot of action takes place inside the buildings of Blue Silk Village, more maps of town interiors would have been nice, but the cartography is acceptable.
The module tries to be heavy on character interaction with the NPCs of Blue Silk Village. It succeeds, but does so at the expense of other encounters; the module lacks balance. What I mean by this is about twenty-two of the module's seventy-two pages are encounters with monsters, or other adventurous fare. The rest are devoted to exposition or town encounters. Still, two of the NPCs that might interact with the heroes were left out of the final draft, which is surprising considering the amount of detail and pages devoted to the other residents of Blue Silk. The heroes of the story are rewarded for roleplaying and interacting with the indigenous folk. In fact, they're rewarded more for good roleplaying, than for simply treating the adventure as a dungeon hack, which is good.
The monstrous encounters provide a party of the level for which the adventure is designed rich experience awards. Those five 5th-level characters will certainly gain a level, should they succeed, and the treasure is adequate, should all of it be recovered. I would like to have seen the author include ad-hoc experience awards for the roleplaying interactions that the module requires, however. The outcome of many roleplaying and combat encounters depends so heavily on player ingenuity, that a reward, more than extra cash or mere survival, just seems in order.
Some of the monstrous encounters may be a bit overwhelming for adventurers on the low end of the level scale for this module. A few of these are made harder by misuse of
D&D rules, such as suggesting that multiple Small creatures can join together to bull rush as a Medium-size one. Rules to handle such situations are in the
Player's Handbook, so the module didn't need to offer worse alternatives. The choice to add a mysterious acidic quality to an animal's musk, and associate it with a smell that is not similar, seems ridiculous. Other creatures have their challenge rating improperly calculated, or abilities added to them (or subtracted) without a CR adjustment.
The worst things about
The Jade Magi Sewer Crawl are the writer's repetitiveness and his informal style of writing. In the module, we learn three times what a certain NPC (Captain Leng) knows, and what his motivations are for his actions, well before the encounter where those actions occur. Listing these things once, in the encounter to which they are specifically relevant, would have been enough. Lest you think me nit-picky, the module does so again and again, and the page count would have been
much lower if not for this. Colon's informal style is relaxing at times, but a bit too relaxed at others when he uses words or makes suggestions some readers may find vulgar. The author also uses expressions that break the atmosphere of an oriental and medieval setting, such as describing another character as "cue-ball bald" in read aloud text, or a really cheesy command word for a magic item. The identification of monsters using their game names, in lieu of description, is also annoying, but easily changed.
Another page and space waster is the (inconsistently named) "Player Tactics" or "Party Tactics" section of each encounter. In these segments, Colon goes into a two or three paragraph exposition on what the PCs might be able to do to handle the encounter. Unless the DM regularly hands out such advice to players, these sections are technically useless. They might find marginal use from DMs that like to gloat after an encounter has gone badly for a group or as an educational tool for inexperienced players.
The author points out in his foreword section that he wants a module he plays (and designs, ostensibly) to make sense. Monsters are in a place for a reason, they have realistic reactions and activities within their environment, and so on. Well,
Jade Magi succeeds in this quest, for the most part; it only fails in three ways. First of all, some of the monsters in the sewer would have invaded the village long before the PCs show up, despite Colon's attempts to show why they haven't. Secondly, banded together, some of the NPCs in the community could certainly handle the problems in the sewers (and are pointed out as a potential rescue team more than once). Finally, the protagonists only happen to show up in Blue Silk Village at the right time, the kind of serendipity that hardly makes a convincing plot hook, much less any "sense".
Despite Colon's admission in the introduction of the module that he's not highly educated in Chinese history and culture, his setting has verisimilitude, coherence, and character. Maybe ancient Chinese villages didn't have sewers, even when they were on rivers, but if you really care about such staunch realism,
Jade Magi won't please you anyway. The seeming of reality, or "real-enough" as the case may be, is broken only by the author's own foibles, such as the naming of two animals in the book with very occidental names. Even this can be forgiven, because the whole story reads like a humorous episode of
Slayers--kind of a wacky anime style that can be fun, if your players enjoy such things.
That brings me to an important point. If you're running a game with strong atmosphere and suspension of disbelief,
The Jade Magi Sewer Crawl needs some minor work, so the feel of the module isn't so comical. Like I've said, the adventure scenes and NPC interactions feel more like a cartoon than a serious story. If your group can handle a diversion from a grim or somber style,
Jade Magi will serve you just fine. If you play a silly or lighthearted campaign that favors many (humorous) interactions with local color, then
Jade Magi is a real winner.
On the serious side, though, I wanted more information on the Jade Magi themselves. While the scenario can be dropped into another oriental campaign setting, forgoing the need to describe the Dragon Empire, more information on the Jade Magi would have made continuing adventures surrounding the group easy. That material would certainly have added value to this book and could have readily been added at the same page count, with careful editing.
Regardless of everything I've said, good and bad,
Jade Magi is enjoyable as a story. Even though I'm a serious DM that favors dark over comical, I'd use this module to lighten the atmosphere for a while. I'd make some changes to tone down the shtick and comedy, of course, but I always make some change to prepared adventures. Most DMs do. Those new to running the game will find some inspiration on how to roleplay NPCs, even if they don't use all of the silly details found in the module.
The Jade Magi Sewer Crawl is worth the cover price, considering its competition. This remains true even if one dislikes the author's style (as I did), and realizes that the book's page count should really be somewhere around 48. Its not as dry as the modules released by Wizards of the Coast (32 pages, $9.95 each), but neither is it nearly as crisp.
Jade Magi has its uses even to the hard-edged DM, while a slapstick adjudicator has less labor ahead, but just as much entertainment. I doubt anyone will truly regret spending his or her adventure dollars on
The Jade Magi Sewer Crawl.
This review was originally written for
Gaming Frontiers on 10/02/02.
