The Wizards Amulet

[Zan Thrax]

Necromancer Games are meant to have a "1st edition feel", and this module certainly looks the part. The first of the 18 pages is a cover designed like the old modules from the early eighties. The rest of the module is laid out very nicely, in a standard two column format, with margin notes. The art consists of well done black and white ink drawings.

Unfortunately, appearance isn't all that matters for an adventure. While the story is a good one, with a creative background leading up to the events of the module itself, there are several glaring errors of both adventure design and Dungeon Mastery. The adventure is intended to be used with pre generated characters (available here in a .zip file), including a sorcerer around who the story revolves. While using pre-generated characters is not necessarily bad, they are best used to introduce new role players to a game, or for one-shot adventures in unusual settings. Neither of these works well with a story that is based on one character's background, leaving the others with little motivation. A second major design flaw is the use of two very hard battles, and no simple ones. Since the module is clearly aimed at rookie players (and to some extent, a rookie game master), such dangerous encounters, both of which punish poor strategy, are an excellent way to alienate the new players that are supposed to get hooked on the game.

There is one last problem, and it is the worst one. Throughout the adventure, the Dungeon Master is instructed to tell the players what their characters do or think. It also instructs the Dungeon Master to disallow the party from setting up camp in a farmhouse they come across. While this sort of dictatorial Dungeon Mastering may go unnoticed as such by the novice players the adventure is meant for, it will annoy anyone who has played any sort of role-playing game before, and may well turn new players off as well.

A veteran Dungeon Master can probably make something decent out of this, mainly by making Corian into an NPC and avoiding using the pre-written description boxes. However, the module is not meant for veterans, it is meant to be an introduction to the game, and it is not very good for doing that at all.

 

[MonsterMash]

The Wizards Amulet
By Clark Petersen and Bill Webb
Necromancer Games

Playtest Review

Warning - this review contains spoilers

The Wizards Amulet is a free downloadable adventure for 1st level characters from Necromancer Games. This was one of the first adventures available for 3e and contains rules advice assuming a lack of familiarity with this edition of the rules. It has been updated for 3.5 and this is the version I have reviewed here. There are also a set of pregenerated characters available for the module.

The module covers a journey by a novice Wizard and his companion adventurers towards a keep where a high level wizard, Eralion, used to live, before he met his fate while trying to become a lich. There must be a wizard in the party either as a PC or NPC, with the wizard having a secret...

The main wizard, Corian in the pregens, has an amulet and letter from Eralion, which will lead the party to the keep and into it past some magical protection. These are the hook for the adventure as Corian has a rival Vortigern, who wishes to recover the amulet and find the secrets of Eralions keep himself.

There are three or four encounters possible in the scenario, with not all involving combat and some opportunities for the players to role play as well as use their characters in combat situations. Rightly it is recommended for the party to have a couple of strong combat types included as well as the Wizard, and a Cleric and Rogue or Bard are also recommended to balance the party.

The encounters can be quite lethal depending on how they are handled, but it is rightly noted that the intelligent opponents will break off if they are clearly getting the worst of things or if more than a certain amount of damage is recieved. This does emphasise the need for the characters with good combat abilities.

When played through this scenario will generally take a party close to second level if using normal 3.5 experience and there are five or six PCs. I played in a group of five and unless the GM weakens some of the encounters this is probably a minimum size for an all first level party.

Positives

• Good support for a novice DM or newcomer to 3e rules
• Clear advice on how to modify the difficulty level
• A good intro for the Necromancer Games Crucible of Freya module
• Several hooks for an ongoing campaign, e.g. using Vortigern as a recurring enemy
• Free
• The encounters have at least some reason to happen, not just purely random occurences

Negatives

• Some tendencies towards railroading, especially in the boxed text
• Limited scope of adventure
• The encounters are tough for 1st level characters and could give a TPK

Overall
This is a good small adventure to kick off a campaign with, it has enough challenges to mean that its not too dull for experienced players, while having enough advice so that a novice DM or players would not get the party wiped out too readily. It really works best in conjunction with the Crucible of Freya module from Necromancer.
Overall I'd make it about a 3.5, but given a 3 on the rating as it is a little bit railroaded in some areas.