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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sparky McDibben" data-source="post: 9168167" data-attributes="member: 7041430">The Scenario:The sleepy river town of Brandonsford is in a bit of a pickle. See, a while back, a family of dwarves moved in nearby and started mining, only to find a massive treasure pile. One of the brothers went mad with greed, killed his relations, and for this abominable act, was turned into a dragon. At roughly the same time, the local goblins fell under the control of Hogboon, a thoroughly nasty fey, who is trying to use them to take control of the woods (and having a rough time of it). The adventure spins these fairy-tale conflicts into a variety of side-plots, giving the players multiple tools for dealing with the dragon. There's an old witch in the woods who's not exactly evil but is too old to be much bothered with politeness, a man-eating giant, the tomb of a nearby dragonslayer (with a really good dungeon), trees that bleed wine, a leprachaun's gold, and much more. I also have to emphasize that this adventure gets across a lot in a little bit of effort. Every word feels whittled, somehow, like it was carved from a much larger piece of text to have a solidity on the page. The NPCs are active; the nixies demand, the love-lorn alchemist pleads, the ghost-dwarf cajoles, etc. The descriptions are economical and evocative: "The beast moves like a fat alligator, dragging its bloated belly across the ground..." At no point does anyone ever, say, show up and ask if you want to race some weird frogs (looking at you, Strixhaven). These creatures demand your attention. The author also does the illustrations, reasonably well in my estimation; they help give a sense of color to the characters. The entire adventure also demands that the players think about their actions. They could just go hacking away at the dragon, of course, but the scales on it are invulnerable (the adventure relays this to the PCs if they think to ask the lone survivor of the last dragon battle; only the scales are invulnerable, not the rest of it). You can drug the dragon, kill it, or lure it to the goblin's cave so it can fight them, and those are the just the obvious options. The entire thing is so well done, it's very much worth your time to pick up. But there are conventions that fall very much outside 5E play expectations. Certain 5E players will consider an invulnerable dragon to be in poor taste, and will probably accuse you of railroading. The idea that PCs can and will fail horribly is very much not expected in 5E. So let's dive into our next section: Mapping OSR Expectations to 5E Play!</blockquote>

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