This adventure is 28 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page SRD, 1 page back cover, leaving 24 pages of adventure, so what's up with this Freeport adventure?

I only recently saw this particular Freeport adventure, as it somewhat has slipped beneath my radar in the 3.5-days of old. Wanting to complete my Freeport collection, I immediately bought it.

This being an adventure review, this contains SPOILERS. Potential players beware.

Set in a dastardly hot summer that has tempers across the city of adventures flare, Blood of Freeport is an unconventional adventure in both its premise and presentation: This adventure has the PCs stumble into a merchant feud between the (almost) equally depraved and hate-consumed Lotharian and Ischern merchant families, being recruited for either side (or serving as double agents) to give the family an edge in the current escalation of the conflict, which, among others, sees a double-cross involving mega-raptors as well as family-specific final encounters. While I did love this rather non-linear, open-ended approach as well as themes like a descent into alcoholism/lost honor etc., this adventure has several problems as well:

First of all, the formatting could have been better - not due to glitches, but due to the fact that the linear narrative structure has to juggle a lot of alternative situations for the PCs: Are they aligned with the Lotharians? The Ischerns? Double-agents? - All these opportunities are accosted for in a steady stream of text, making running this semi-spontaneous rather impossible, something that could have easily been accosted for by better formatting.

On a rules-side, this adventure unfortunately is also not exciting - the henchmen that provide the cannon-fodder throughout the adventure as well as the families per se are rather dull with regards to their crunch. The adventure also features no cartography, which is especially annoying as the finale(s) take place around the families' mansions and no maps are provided. Seeing that the adventure seeks to evoke a secret-agent/family-feud-theme, this lack makes running the espionage action rather hard. The adventure suggests handwaving the infiltration by forcing each PC to succeed on bluff-checks every day, which should pop out as a bad idea immediately to anyone. Furthermore, while the families are not necessarily despicable, I found a lack of champions/special bodyguards a bit disconcerting.

Conclusion: Editing and formatting are ok, while I did notice some glitches and the formatting could be better, it's not enough to qualify this as abysmal. Layout adheres to a no-frills b/w-2-column-standard and apart from the cover-artwork, the interior-artwork seems to have been reused from other/stock sources. The pdf has no bookmarks. This adventure has me gnashing my teeth for several reasons - first of all, I love the premise and the fact that such feuds/socially-driven adventures are rather rare. However, at the same time, the plethora of options leads to a dilution in quality and crunch-wise, the adventure also falls rather short of its own premise by abandoning an inner-family-strife plot-point altogether, handwaving the central exciting action (the espionage/double agent-story) in favor of dull combats with unnamed henchmen. The climax features a masque and the lack of cartography makes unfortunately for a confusing, hard to run finale. As written, this adventure needs A LOT of work. Additionally, I couldn't shake the feeling that this was supposed to be Freeport's Romeo & Juliet (The subtitle being "love & betrayal"), but was cut down to size, as the "love"-aspect is completely absent from any NPC's motivations. Had this adventure been expanded to the 60+ pages that would have been necessary to make it work and unique with all different options, this would have been an awesome adventure indeed. As written, though, it feels like a hastily cobbled together sketch of an adventure rather than a full-blown installment worthy of Freeport. Oh yeah, campaign-specific fluff is also mostly absent from this pdf apart from some generic nods towards local flavor. While this is in no way a bad sketch, it's also far away from realizing its potential. If you're willing to invest a lot of time, you might consider this a 3-star file. For all others, this is 1.5 stars, rounded up to 2.

Endzeitgeist out.

Freeport is one of the great settings for d20/OGL, and its swashbuckling, pirate nature appeals to many who like intrigue, fast-paced action, betrayal, high-seas, and all things pirate. Movies like Pirates of the Caribbean have done a lot to encourage the swashbuckling pirate RPG games and the Freeport setting, and Freeport as a setting has grown through the years to accommodate the appeal. In fact, I'd not really hesitate to call Freeport the quintessential pirate setting for d20/OGL, as it's been included in quite a number of other different worlds from other publishers. And Freeport is certainly not called the City of Adventure for nothing.

Blood of Freeport is the latest adventure from Adamant Entertainment in support of Green Ronin's Freeport setting. Written by Justin S. Bow, it's an event driven adventure for characters of 6th to 8th level and takes place entirely in Freeport. As such, the running of this adventure largely requires the Freeport setting material. The adventure sees the characters drawn into an adventure of love and betrayal where they get involved in the rivalry between two merchant families. This adventures is compatible with the revised d20 core rules.

Blood in Freeport is a 28 page event-based adventure. The product is well designed and laid out, with some good art and a lovely cover from A. Nemo. The writing is immersive, and the editing and mechanics generally good. There are no maps in the product at all, again highlighting the fact that the setting material for Freeport is required to run the adventure properly. It's possible to run this adventure in another setting or city similar to Freeport if the latter doesn't fit your campaign setting very well. All stat blocks are provided towards the end of the pdf, although I wish they'd detailed the personalities and backgrounds of important NPCs a little more to define them a little better than just providing a mechanical stat block. Overall, a well presented pdf.

This adventure sees the PCs get involved in the rivalry between two large and powerful merchant families in Freeport. The nature of their involvement is left largely to the PCs, which means that the course of the adventure is determined by how the PCs view the feud and what they believe they need to do about it, if anything. This implies that the actions of the PCs actually matter, and that the events of the adventure are not something beyond their control, but can be shaped or changed by their actions. This kind of dynamic approach in adventure writing makes for a fun and exciting adventuring. The PCs will have plenty of opportunity for both combat and roleplaying, and indeed over the course of the adventure and several in-game days, there will be amply opportunity to delve into the mysteries of the adventure. The combat encounters are challenging, largely because so many days lapse between events.

That said, spanning the adventure over so many days can make parts of it dull and boring, so it might be difficult to get the adventure flowing along at the right pace between events separated by days. The action events themselves are structured in that they eventually all lead up to a climatic ending, increasing the tension and the rivalry between the two families as time progresses. This creates a good amount of in-game tension, atmosphere, and indeed is likely to affect the entire city of Freeport. I quite like the idea that the entire city is watching events closely, and that the actions of the PCs will most likely be noted by other powerful families or Captains within Freeport. There is a sense that actions have consequence throughout the adventure, and that will keep the PCs on their toes.

The adventure is equally well suited to running as a one-off or as part of a larger campaign story. In fact if the build-up to the rivalry needs to be increased, it can be done through an entire campaign before this adventure is reached. This might make the families and people involved more meaningful to the PCs. As it is, I felt there wasn't enough information in the adventure to detail the NPCs, the merchant families, the histories of the families, etc. More depth in these areas would've gone a long way to making these NPCs come alive a little more and provide more richness to the adventure.

Those that wish to delve into the secret histories of powerful merchant families, get involve in spy activities in the pirate city, or merely enjoy the subterfuge and intrigue will find this adventure to their liking. I think DMs will need to do a little extra work to make this adventure flow together nicely so that it doesn't feel like the PCs are just hopping from one event to the other. It's a good adventure, though, and a refreshing break from dungeon crawling and combat intensive games that are quite frequent in the d20 market. It has something for every player and every character, a good background and story, and a few unexpected surprises. Good art, good writing, exciting scenes, lots of intrigue and politics, and overall a fun adventure.