Cavern Crawls 44 Oceanic Grotto
6 pages - Cover, Publisher page, pages 3,5 & 6 Adventure content. Page 4 Keyed map.
There is very little wasted space on this product.
I needed a very quick one shot to run, to get my group up a level. The dungeon is aimed at Average Party Level 2 & 5 players. It looked like a fleshed out quest & map situation and as a result seemed like a perfect side trek without ruining main campaign [Storm Kings Thunder].
I had 4 players but level 6 so swapped out the monsters. I kept the art just switched out the stat blocks :).
The art is rich throughout, recall its 6 pages in total. Including the cover I saw 6 really nice pieces of art here. The cavern crawls series has templated border art too, which is also very nice. The attribution said it was Cody Rakai who did the art, it was beautiful throughout.
So the 6 pieces are as follows:
The cover - a composite of the dungeon map and a Sailor.
Page 3 - Has a top 1/4 atmospheric banner scene. It also has an image of Neptune's Sceptor one of the magic items.
Page 4 - Full A4 [letter sized] Keyed map image for the dm's, again nice and crisp image.
Page 5 - Ring of Water Walking taking up the bottom 1/4 of the page.
Page 6 - Decaying Merrow [Big bad of this mini dungeon] taking up a quarter in the bottom left corner.
Nice big pieces of art but no sense of "hiding a lack of content"
The adventure itself is pretty solid.
Page 3 - Introduction to the adventure inmcluding a preamble, a background, quest hook, Big Bad Evil Guy [BBEG] and magic items. The writing is solid but concise and [most importantly] without waffle. Of particular note though was in the BBEG section was some tips on roleplay. Not huge but a really nice touch. Maybe even written by someone who runs adventures.
Each room has read aloud descriptions, again pretty tight writing. The first room text is "You enter the serene grotto, its floor a tapestry of vivid green moss and small, flowering aquatic plants. The atmosphere is damp and earthy, with the moss acting as a natural carpet, softening steps and muffling sounds. Large rocks, shiny and smooth, ground down by the power of the tides, guide the way forward."
Like I say pretty solid.
There were 3 different ability checks, [often missed in one shots], that gave meaningful results.
There were four different combats, ramping up to harder each time. I particularly enjoy the scaling up as it meant my players came to the bad guys having used up a bunch of their resources. The fourth was the BBEG, which looked like he would be a great fight at CR3, [I changed mine out due to the party being over levelled for this dungeon]. It worked very well it easily slotted into a one session time line.
The cherry on the cake [for me anyway] was that the maps came as separate from the PDF. Which as a DM I appreciate enormously! You received 3 maps of the same image. 17 [1 inch] squares wide by 23 [1 inch] squares deep. 1 keyed for the GM. 1 gridded for table play and one ungridded [so you can add your own grid on your VTT of choice].
I really liked this adventure! It is a very hard to fault this one shot. It covered the three different pillars of Roleplay, Adventure and Combat. As it was so concise but not lacking detail, it meant I could pick it up and run with it 40 minutes before the session and half that time was coding it into my VTT.
I know I have gushed a bit on this review but I have been in D&D for many years [not quite 40] and this ranks up there for one shots to run.
Only negative from a dm perspective is that the main magic might need to be adjusted according to if the party are part of a main campaign [which mine were].
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