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Just ran this tonight. It's a very short adventure (we were done in 90 minutes), but it's long on charm.
The read-aloud text being done in near-perfect Seussian rhyme throughout put smiles on everyone's faces, and I told my players that if they could speak in rhyming couplets as well, I'd award them inspiration, which was great fun.
The adventure also does a good job of scaling well for all four tiers, although there's no consideration that, at a certain point, higher-level characters could just break out teleport and fireball and plane shift and zip through the adventure. I doubt most groups playing a Christmas adventure would do so, though.
The adventure isn't perfect, though. I had a literal rocket scientist in my group of seven players and the light puzzle stumped everyone. It should probably be a lot simpler than it was. (Figuring out that there are two intertwined patterns of lights and then spotting the break in one of the two patterns really requires play to stop cold for the sake of the puzzle, which isn't fun.) Luckily, my players hadn't killed the guards, just put them to sleep and were able to charm the answer out of them.
Similarly, the player handout map, while fun ("hey, look, the dungeon is shaped like a Christmas tree!") shows rooms the players shouldn't see ahead of time and doesn't show where the kobold guards, the lich or the tree are, which is presumably the reason a DM would want to share the map.
It would also be nice if Hoovale's inn had a name and we could get some appropriate Hoovian names for the various NPCs the players are likely to talk to at the beginning. Coming up with a name on the fly is hard in general, but if it needs to have a Seussian flavor, that's an especially tall order. (I reverted to just having the escaped kid be named Cindy Lou Hoo, because of course.)
Still, this was a very fun one-shot for a busy holiday season. I'll be running it again for another group during the holidays.
Well worth the modest price tag.
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Just ran this tonight. It's a very short adventure (we were done in 90 minutes), but it's long on charm.
The read-aloud text being done in near-perfect Seussian rhyme throughout put smiles on everyone's faces, and I told my players that if they could speak in rhyming couplets as well, I'd award them inspiration, which was great fun.
The adventure also does a good job of scaling well for all four tiers, although there's no consideration that, at a certain point, higher-level characters could just break out teleport and fireball and plane shift and zip through the adventure. I doubt most groups playing a Christmas adventure would do so, though.
The adventure isn't perfect, though. I had a literal rocket scientist in my group of seven players and the light puzzle stumped everyone. It should probably be a lot simpler than it was. (Figuring out that there are two intertwined patterns of lights and then spotting the break in one of the two patterns really requires play to stop cold for the sake of the puzzle, which isn't fun.) Luckily, my players hadn't killed the guards, just put them to sleep and were able to charm the answer out of them.
Similarly, the player handout map, while fun ("hey, look, the dungeon is shaped like a Christmas tree!") shows rooms the players shouldn't see ahead of time and doesn't show where the kobold guards, the lich or the tree are, which is presumably the reason a DM would want to share the map.
It would also be nice if Hoovale's inn had a name and we could get some appropriate Hoovian names for the various NPCs the players are likely to talk to at the beginning. Coming up with a name on the fly is hard in general, but if it needs to have a Seussian flavor, that's an especially tall order. (I reverted to just having the escaped kid be named Cindy Lou Hoo, because of course.)
Still, this was a very fun one-shot for a busy holiday season. I'll be running it again for another group during the holidays.
Well worth the modest price tag.
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I've been running Grizzled Adventurers for RPG sessions where I didn't have the time to do the sometimes hours-long prep needed to run other games.
I was already familiar with the wonderful Beyond the Wall and picked this up as a tongue-in-cheek look at the other end of the heroic journey.
While Beyond the Wall and Through Sunken Lands use playbooks allowing players to pick an archetype and then weave their characters together into a cohesive group, Grizzled Adventurers deconstructs Flatland Games' design a bit, making class just one more roll in the process. Almost everyone uses a single playbook that focuses on the characters' past together and the things the characters might be squabbling about, decades after they happen. (I allow my players to pick their class, as randomly determining it both sets up some parties for failure and sometimes sticks players with characters they won't enjoy.) You probably want at least three player characters to be created at a time, to get maximum value out of the tables.
Latecomers, who are rolled up seperately, have a seperate, even more simplified playbook. They also look like they might end up with higher stats, which is interesting. Maybe that's meant as a tradeoff for not having the fun of creating a character with the rest of the players.
Physical stats are much lower than they end up being in the other two games, which is supposed to represent missing fingers, bad shoulders, lost eyes and the like. None of my players have minded, but there's always a moment of shock when one realizes they're playing a warrior with a 7 Strength. (Stats in all of these games will be familiar to anyone who's played any edition of Dungeons & Dragons over the decades.)
Like the other two games, Grizzled Adventurers is a mix of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (saving throws versus type, a mix of rolling high and rolling low) and third edition (a single unified rolling system, a light skill system). I found play to be fast, only slowed by remembering which rolls were high and which rolls were low.
Where the game really shines is in its dungeon creation. The DM asks questions throughout the character creation process (which is unfortunately not represented on the character hand-outs, which would facilitate the questions being asked and players remembering their character developing answers), which are then used to help inspire the evening's dungeon.
A bunch of small Dyson Logos maps are provided in the book and a pair of treasures (one the MacGuffin driving the adventure, one a surprise) are randomly determined, along with two traps and then the DM picks two enemy types for the dungeons and selects encounters from each to drop in. In practice, the process has taken less than five minutes and has meant some very flavorful and satisfying dungeon adventures. This is aided by the monsters having a nice dose of creativity injected into what could otherwise be stale standard dungeon monsters. Swarms of goblins and skeletons turn standard monster fights into something much more visceral and scary and the demons and summoned creatures present in some dungeons are likewise creative (whoever came up with the rolling ball of claws demon needs to make a horror game).
I supplemented the tables in the book with online name generators for magic swords, dungeon names and necromancer names, and tossed various appropriate nouns into Google Translate to come up with creepy gods and goddesses for the characters to encounter shrines to underground.
The sessions I've run have taken less than three hours to resolve, including character creation at the beginning. We haven't yet run one of the optional return home epilogues from Travels and Travails, but that's planned for next time. I can also see a need, eventually, for the promised dungeon design guide to give us more options, but this is already a great game to have on hand for times when you want to play a dungeon crawler but don't have the time or energy to deal with either prepping something heavy or running something heavier.
This is not meant to be the one fantasy RPG to rule them all. It's designed for a small handful of adventure types -- dungeon crawls and overland travel to and from dungeon crawls -- but is excellent at those. (I could also see a supplement on running tavern brawls, which seems like it'd be very fitting for these characters.) But it would also work well with any OSR adventure or setting, if one wanted to do so. I plan on running my grizzled adventurers through the Dungeon of 1,000 Swords next time everyone is together and will likely be using the Monster Overhaul as my monster book for Grizzled Adventurers when I'm looking for critters beyond what this game offers. (If there was ever a crew that should have to deal with a grue, it's the Grizzled Adventurers.)
An enthusiastic A+ of a game.
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As with all the Arcane Library adventures (I own three of them), the layout of the adventure is exactly as advertised: amazing. You can definitely pick this up and run it without reading through it even once, and is designed for maximum usability at the table, especially if you're using a computer to DM.
The only thing I take issue with is this being a two to three hour adventure. I honestly can't imagine how this adventure would take this long -- it's essentially four encounter areas, and most of them push the group to keep going forward to outrun a slow-moving threat. Once in that room, there's a major final boss who is clearly such, so player characters will almost certainly go nova and use all their resources to bring it down. (Which is good, since it's pretty tough for second level characters.)
We finished the adventure in about 90 minutes.
That said, the adventure once again has plenty of creepy flavor. Since the character with the highest passive perception in my group was a druid, I described the black spots on an NPC's tongue as resembling a parasitic fungus, which was both good foreshadowing and which also ratcheted up the tension.
The only other quibble I have, other than the inaccurate length is the offered reward suggestion (a keep) is really good. I made it an overgrown keep in Golden Valley, which the player characters view as a mixed blessing, but it's a pretty major and potentially game-changing reward to drop in instead of something more traditional.
Overall, an excellent adventure, especially when you need a flavorful adventure to run on short notice.
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This is a product that either works for you or doesn't. If you find the notion of a squirrel-based PC race, squirrel stats, squirrel-inspired spells and feats (and magic items!) worthwhile, it's hard to over-recommend this product.
If you're a grump who doesn't find this product sounding the least bit appealing, well, may your DM inflict this on you anyway.<br><br><b>LIKED</b>: It's an insane value for the money. There's actually quite a number of good spells and feats here -- if you don't like the tone, rename them and you've still got solid spells and feats -- the familiar write-up for squirrels is great, the new race is balanced and more interesting than any WotC new race to date, and frankly, this is one of the best PDF purchases I've made to date, even ignoring the insanely low price for the material.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: My only real complaints are pretty simple:
1) There were a surprising numbers of lack-of-editing errors (calling the squirrel swarm a rat swarm, and grammatical errors like using "loose" for "lose" over and over again).
2) I want more. I'd have liked to have seen a full write-up for the squirrel god, and I would have liked a monster write-up of the new race, along with a picture.
But really, those are minor quibbles.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>
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This is a fairly minimalist product. While that's expected in presentation for a product costing so little, it's in the content that it's frustrating. The company's holiday series, for instance, clearly had more creative energies spent on them.<br><br><b>LIKED</b>: The little bit hinting at a background for the authors was nice, although it would have been nice to have a lot more of it.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: This is marginal utility. The purpose of this series is to provide books so a GM doesn't have to come up with them on the fly when a player insists on searching a bookcase, SURE that there's some goodies hidden there. Unfortunately, there's nothing here that I could not have thought of off the cuff, particularly the incredibly generic titles. I won't be buying any more of this series.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Acceptable<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Disappointed<br>
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Although it was popular at one time to bash WotC's choice in the setting search, this cross-section of submissions shows that it actually must have stood out from the pack pretty clearly. The submissions have more than a few gems mixed in, but the majority are incredibly generic, don't necessarily seem to understand that the proposals were for a campaign world instead of a novel, and are rife with copyright violations. (Naming your world after a character from Lord of the Rings is probably not going to work, nor impress the judges.)
Still, besides its historical value, there are quite a few submissions that can be culled as locations for a plane-hopping adventure. Hopefully some of the best will be made into commercial settings with some other company some day.<br><br><b>LIKED</b>: It was nice to see so many campaign world ideas in one place.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: No complaints.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>
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The PDF is a mix of fantasy libraries, books of interest to adventurers and a few new magic items. There's not a lot of content here, but what there is tends to be well-detailed.
That said, the PDF has a few ideas that seem like first-draft ideas that shouldn't have made the cut. Nice visuals aside, having a large library in a canal system, where books could fall into the water at a moment's notice, is just too silly to include, particularly as this hazard isn't even mentioned in the PDF. The other libraries are good, although few were as detailed as I might like, other than the druidic library in the branches of a great tree.
While this PDF is a start, the niche is not nearly filled, and it would be nice to see a product that goes into the subject in far more detail.<br><br><b>LIKED</b>: The books and magic items in the PDF are all quite well-designed, and the unseen servant-based ones were particularly good, and seem likely to be must-haves in any baseline D&D world's library.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: Even as a value-priced PDF, this was light on content. I would have liked more books, more magic items and even more (non-silly) libraries.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Acceptable<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>
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Ronin Arts is normally thought of as one of the top PDF publishers, but this collection of holidays pales in comparison to any of the Top Fashion Games bargain holiday collections, all of which are more colorful and more interesting than the dozen here, with little overlap. I'd recommend buying all three of the TFG ones first, before picking this one up.<br><br><b>LIKED</b>: There was a nice variety of holidays, from religious, to small town secular to national secular.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: None of these holidays were particularly imaginative or colorful, having even extremely generic names.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Acceptable<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>
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It's hard to imagine a more flavorful or imaginative PDF. Without a doubt, this is one of the top ones out there, giving a great deal of Halloween flair to a D&D game without importing too many real-world elements.
This one is going straight into my campaigns, without question.<br><br><b>LIKED</b>: Lots of flavor, a great template, a well-depicted holiday and great lore.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: Why are NPCs mentioned in both the introduction and the ad missing? Change the ad copy and the introduction or, better yet, show us King Crow and Old Man Wicker.
Heck, I could use a sequel to this all around, with more of everything.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Excellent<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>
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