[This is not a play test review]
When Dire Kobold's Attack (WDKA) is the first adventure released from DireKobold.com using their "revolutionary" Xenogenic Publishing System (XPS). The adventure itself consists of a fairly generic 'monsters attack town - PC's help out' style adventure, used mainly to illustrate the features of the XPS. As such I consider this review to be more of a review of the XPS than the adventure it uses. The adventure contains frequent notes detailing how different sections are affected by the settings available to you to alter the adventure. This adventure can be altered to suit levels 1-7 and party sizes of 1-12 (although level 6+ in combination with party size 10+ is not advised according to the web-site) (On a side note from my testing level 1 + 1 PC probably wouldn't work too well either)
There is also two alternative forms of stat blocks for NPCs and monsters, personally I prefer the standard text one, but the table/block one might be preferred by other - again, the fact you can choose makes this a wonderful addition.
As well as the above the XPS allows you, the purchaser of the adventure to modify the adventure to meet your every needs, altering things such as number of players, level of PCs, level of magic items, trap potency (in terms of search DCs and disable DCs serperately) and much much more. You can modify and download as many versions of each adventure as you wish, altering it each time in a different way. For more details on the whole host of settings check out the advanced options form on the web-site:
Advanced Options Page. Your options are also displayed on the front page of the adventure.
The town of Wellfork is described, detailing 8 individual locations (again, the usual culprits; tavern, blacksmith, general store etc.) There are various notes in this section detailing how various options in the XPS affect NPC stats. Another of the many options comes into play here, the option to include images. If not included the map of the town will not be included, making navigation slightly harder, perhaps the option to download the map separately (as it does not change based on any settings) would be useful.
An NPC is listed for each location, along with fairly full personalities and backgrounds.
Then comes the adventure itself, which forms a fairly standard dungeon crawl. Again, without images the rather useful dungeon map is missing. I also felt that some of the creatures had fairly large sums of coin treasure (Lvl 1 4 PC adventure - single Wolf has 10pp+ of treasure even on 10% treasure setting! Maybe this is a bug in the system.)
The monsters are varied and interesting and appear to scale well using the system (even swapping out entire encounters for new ones as levels go up, e.g. wolf -> displacer beast at higher levels). Encounters vary from simple beasts lairs to hobgoblin guard rooms and some interesting twists on the lone sentry , Gimp and his swinging log trap, although again if higher levels are chosen then Gimp appears later in the adventure. Things appear to be very flexible in this using the XPS indeed.
To sum up - WDKA is a bog standard town/village with a bog standard dungeon crawl attached. However both of these have been attacked with some thought and care and appear to have a great amount of detail in them (NPCs or dungeon encounters could for example easily be transplanted into other adventures/campaigns). The adventure as a whole is incredibly generic, so could be slotted into any campaign.
The Xenogenic Publishing System does in fact seem to be a wonderful invention, allowing many, if not all of the aspects of the adventure to be tailored to whatever requirements you might have in terms of party size, level, magic levels and treasure levels. A lot obviously will depend on how much the folks at DireKobold allow their adventures to be customised but if this one is any guide there will be few people who are unhappy with the system.
All this and its free! Given that fact I have no choice but to award it a golly good 5!
Note: The adventures are being supplied using a subscription system, subscribe and you get the ability to generate as many adventures as you wish from those available, past and present. They promise an adventure a week after subscriptions are being charged for (its still in public beta I believe).
