JoeGKushner
Adventurer
So you’ve bought the Dragonmech campaign setting and are wondering what to do with it. It’s defiantly not your standard fantasy campaign and some of the material seems very high powered. How best to incorporate the elements that make Dragonmech unique? The simple answer is pick up Shardsfall Quest, an adventure for 1st level characters of the Dragonmech setting.
Written by Joseph Goodman with cover art by Niklas Janssen, cover art that has nothing to do with the interior, whose art is provided by Jeff Carlisle, Shardsfall Quest clocks in at 72 black and white pages for $15.99. Interior layout is similar to the core book, being three columns of text. Some of the nice added features are handouts and a Dragonmech specific character sheet to capture the unique elements of the game.
Shardsfall is broken into four chapters. In chapter one, the characters witness some lunar rain. In this particular rainfall, a large chunk of the lunar moon hits the ground. Large enough to contain part of a temple and allow the players a chance to do some dungeoncrawling and meet some of the unique creatures of the setting. After they finish their romping, they meet some members of the Confederacy who come barreling on in their mechs and take their players onwards to the next section.
Here, the characters board the city-mech Nedderpik and once there, they become involved with some of the unseen inhabitants who are trying to avoid detection while fighting off some metal eating insects. This allows the players an excellent chance to do some more dungeon romping, only this time, in a gear forest of the City-Mech, allowing them to meet the sentient golem Old Iron Arms, his cogling friends and the monsters that threaten to expose them.
The Confederacy has other work for the players though. They provide the characters with a mech and with instructions to go check out the other half of the lunar meteor that they were originally investigating. Seems that chunk though, fell in Legion territory and the players will have to discover what is causing the people to act strangely. Here the adventure pushes itself a little as pretty much, no matter what the characters do, they’re railroaded into the next chapter. See, at the end of their cleaning, a member of the Irontooth clan steals away with part of the treasure and the players are compelled to follow him.
Now it’s not a bad thing in and of itself despite it’s railroading for it leads the characters into the Irontooth clans and gives them a chance to engage in mech fighting, both being ambushed on the road, and straight combat where their pitting into jousting combat. Even this is a scripted, but I have no problem with such scripting when it fits the model of the campaign world and provides the GM with ideas on how the social structure of the campaign works.
As the adventure ends, the characters have a lot of options and depending on how they’re role played, either numerous friends and allies, or a hit list half the size of the Dragonmech core book.
Strangely enough, for a new adventure, the author has provided a lot of new game rules like new feats ranging from Pistol Rage, that adds your artificial part bonus to your temporary Strength bonus when ragings, to Spell Cleave, where you gain cleave with a spell that effects a single target. New mechs and monsters are also included, as well as the magic items, the lunar shards, themselves.
The adventure hits all the points it needs to and it doesn’t push the characters into a long dungeoncrawl where the only differences between the settings would be the monsters. By allowing the players to interact with the different factions and test their mechs in combat situations that shouldn’t be lethal, the author allows even standard characters that don’t take full advantage of the Dragonmech setting elements to thrive.
If you want to see how a Dragonmech adventure should start, Shadsfal Quest is almost a textbook example of what elements to include.
Written by Joseph Goodman with cover art by Niklas Janssen, cover art that has nothing to do with the interior, whose art is provided by Jeff Carlisle, Shardsfall Quest clocks in at 72 black and white pages for $15.99. Interior layout is similar to the core book, being three columns of text. Some of the nice added features are handouts and a Dragonmech specific character sheet to capture the unique elements of the game.
Shardsfall is broken into four chapters. In chapter one, the characters witness some lunar rain. In this particular rainfall, a large chunk of the lunar moon hits the ground. Large enough to contain part of a temple and allow the players a chance to do some dungeoncrawling and meet some of the unique creatures of the setting. After they finish their romping, they meet some members of the Confederacy who come barreling on in their mechs and take their players onwards to the next section.
Here, the characters board the city-mech Nedderpik and once there, they become involved with some of the unseen inhabitants who are trying to avoid detection while fighting off some metal eating insects. This allows the players an excellent chance to do some more dungeon romping, only this time, in a gear forest of the City-Mech, allowing them to meet the sentient golem Old Iron Arms, his cogling friends and the monsters that threaten to expose them.
The Confederacy has other work for the players though. They provide the characters with a mech and with instructions to go check out the other half of the lunar meteor that they were originally investigating. Seems that chunk though, fell in Legion territory and the players will have to discover what is causing the people to act strangely. Here the adventure pushes itself a little as pretty much, no matter what the characters do, they’re railroaded into the next chapter. See, at the end of their cleaning, a member of the Irontooth clan steals away with part of the treasure and the players are compelled to follow him.
Now it’s not a bad thing in and of itself despite it’s railroading for it leads the characters into the Irontooth clans and gives them a chance to engage in mech fighting, both being ambushed on the road, and straight combat where their pitting into jousting combat. Even this is a scripted, but I have no problem with such scripting when it fits the model of the campaign world and provides the GM with ideas on how the social structure of the campaign works.
As the adventure ends, the characters have a lot of options and depending on how they’re role played, either numerous friends and allies, or a hit list half the size of the Dragonmech core book.
Strangely enough, for a new adventure, the author has provided a lot of new game rules like new feats ranging from Pistol Rage, that adds your artificial part bonus to your temporary Strength bonus when ragings, to Spell Cleave, where you gain cleave with a spell that effects a single target. New mechs and monsters are also included, as well as the magic items, the lunar shards, themselves.
The adventure hits all the points it needs to and it doesn’t push the characters into a long dungeoncrawl where the only differences between the settings would be the monsters. By allowing the players to interact with the different factions and test their mechs in combat situations that shouldn’t be lethal, the author allows even standard characters that don’t take full advantage of the Dragonmech setting elements to thrive.
If you want to see how a Dragonmech adventure should start, Shadsfal Quest is almost a textbook example of what elements to include.
