Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gizzard" data-source="post: 2008690" data-attributes="member: 527">If this review seems short its because this board has eaten two more detailed reports! The review is from a players perspective; my group ran this module as a warmup to 3E. Onward, and a warning of SPOILERS below.The Setup: The module begins with a town.  The townsfolk are plagued by a group of bandits, they humbly beg your party to search the nearby forest and put an end to this problem.  You probably guessed as much from the modules title.The First Problem: The forest (supposedly) has many interesting encounters.  The modules plan is (supposedly, again) that the players will wander around in the forest, have some small adventures and then discover the Bandit Camp and there have a climactic battle.  Unfortunately, there are about 50 reasons inherent in the module design which will cause the average party to head directly for the Camp and thus short-circuit nearly the entire adventure.  Thats what happened to us; and as a result we probably got 5 hours of playtime out of this product.  If our luck here was a freak occurance I'd be more forgiving, but seriously, I dont see how most parties can *avoid* immediately discovering the location of the Camp.The Second Problem: Because of the aforementioned First Problem, we didnt get to do all of the encounters.  The ones we did do were inventive and strange, but also pretty disjoint.  They are so quirky that any given DM is going to want to tinker; our DM removed the Jelly encounter as "too cute" for example.  Really, its a matter of focus; because the non-bandit encouters dont have much theme or cohesion, therefore the module seems to lack focus.  I just noticed that Atlas also did "En Route", the feeling I got was that "Thieves in the Forest" is an unannounced prequel to that offering; it probably best to cut up the material for use in bits and pieces in another campaign rather than trying to play it out as a single rambling adventure.The Third Problem: A couple of the monsters are very difficult for low level parties to deal with.  The WereRat was mentioned in another review; we also had the problem of not finding the silver weapons before meeting him.  Our party had to burn the poor guy to death with flaming oil while the Sorcerer Dazed him over and over.  We had a Magic Weapon'd sword ready also which might have done the trick as well.  Anyway, there are plenty of ways to deal with the WereRat if you are expecting him but if you are not then he's the sort of surprise that can wipe out a party.  The Harpy is another problem.  The townsfolk were happy to tell us about her so we, again, were prepared.  But since she flies, she's almost impossible to kill.  As soon as she realized we were a threat to her she just flew away and there wasnt much we could do about it.  A flying monster and a monster immune to normal weapons are an odd choice for a 1st level adventure.Party Vote: Our group didnt hate this module, but we came away seriously unimpressed.  For contrast, we played Sunless Citadel right afterwards and enjoyed the heck out of that.  When we get together and chat about fun or memorable things that happened, its always about "Sunless Citadel" or "Forge of Fury", never "Thieves in the Forest".  And that pretty much sums it up; theres a lot of great material out there for starting your adventurers out, but "Thieves in the Forest" isnt it.  Pick Freeport or the Citadel or something else thats hot and enjoy yourselves.</blockquote>

Verification