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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Simon Collins" data-source="post: 2009710" data-attributes="member: 9860">Beware! This review contains major spoilers.This is not a playtest review.The Minotaur is an adventure from 0one Games designed for a single 6th-level paladin or a standard party of 3rd-level adventurers.The Minotaur is a 30-page 2.8 MB .pdf download consisting of the adventure itself and two larger room maps. It costs $5. Design, format and art quality are all fairly good, and the format's bookmark feature is used. Maps are, as usual from 0one, top notch. The writing quality would be quite good if not for the innumerable grammatical and spelling mistakes that litter the text. Its not quite as incomprehensible as Brotherhoods, but its still pretty awful.The adventure itself surrounds a series of recent kidnappings of children from a small village. The aggressor has been narrowed down to a minotaur who seems to reside in a nearby hillside lair. However, the minotaur has lived there for about 80 years previous to this and has never attacked the villages prior to these kidnappings. The PC(s) must investigate the hillside lair and stop the minotaur taking any more children from the village.There is a fairly complex backstory to the scenario that borrows much from Greek mythology but rehashes it in quite an innovative way. Inside the hilside lair, the PC(s) find that all is not as it seems. They have to deal with a mad alchemist, the minotaur itself, the spectre of the lair's creator and a number of other minor monsters that have made the hillside lair their home. During the course of the adventure, the PC(s) have the chance to roleplay with the villagers, the alchemist and the minotaur, and must use their skills to negotiate the minotaur's maze (there had to be one) and avoid the traps (both mundane and magical) that protect the minotaur's sanctuary. There are also plenty of combat opportunities too. The adventure holds a few plot twists, which should unsettle the players nicely, and provide some very grey moral ground.Each event and location in the adventure has notes for amending for use with a standard party where relevant, but it is primarily designed for a pre-generated 6th-level Paladin whose details can be found in the appendix.The appendix also contains an NPC-only prestige class, the Mad Alchemist, who uses potions instead of spells, with some rather nasty side effects. There is also a map of the underground complex that also shows the points where magic may affect the path the PC(s) choose through the minotaur's maze.Conclusion:Despite its claims to be a straight dungeon crawl, there is much more to this adventure than a hackfest - there _are_ roleplaying opportunities, traps, and a mystery. The only problem is that the roleplaying opportunities are not fleshed out as well as they could have been. Add to this the appalling grammar and spelling, and some mistakes in the stats (for example, the alchemist in the adventure is supposed to be a 3rd level wizard/3rd level mad alchemist, but one of the requirements for the Mad Alchemist PrC is Alchemy 8 ranks), and it doesn't quite make the grade. There's definitely potential in the adventure (despite the underselling by the publisher - very odd!!) but it would require a reasonable amount of work to really run smoothly.</blockquote>

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