The Dragon And The Eagle
Where the wild things might be
This is an entry for Ad&d 1e by Ghri Ziffe. Designed for 3-6 characters of second level, it describes an abandoned border fort, now taking over by a mid level magic-user and some kobold henchmen. It’s a competent adventure, with a few downsides in the usability department, plus a few major mechanical gripes. Let’s get into it.
So, this adventure site is pretty unique in one aspect. It describes a wilderness area meant to be tackled by low level characters. Instead some dank dungeon, it’s a border fort surrounded by a wall and a moat. The buildings inside are mostly just a single room, with a few of the more important buildings having multiple areas (like the camp headquarters and commander’s house). The place is fairly large, and players will spend a majority of their time here walking from place to place, thereby incurring checks on the wandering monster table. This table has a 25% chance of spawning an “appropriate wilderness encounter” which could be absolutely deadly for low level parties. Or nothing at all could happen, as is the nature of wandering monster checks. In between the walking though, there is actually quite a bit to do, starting with just getting into the interior of the camp. A thief climbing the walls and tossing a rope is probably the safest bet, but the gates can also be bypassed by Small, unarmored characters. Two of the gates have frog statues with removable gemstone eyes. One of these pairs of statues will animate and attack the players if touched. Lot’s of good stuff just getting into the place. There is also a smattering of ad&d weirdness, in the form of some magical ovens burning with differing colors of fire, all with strange effects. Finally the main antagonist here, Magnus the Merciless, is a properly threatening force. Though he’s only guarded by 15 Kobolds, which may be too few for motivated or smart parties. I do like him placing dead PC and Henchmen heads on spikes, which triggers a loyalty test on return trips after a failed expedition. All in all quite good. Treasure is everywhere, but usually well hidden or guarded.
Now, for the bad. First off, this thing is borderline unreadable. ASC is not an art contest, but it is a usability contest. Not being able to read the module easily either on a screen or printed out is a serious unforced flaw. One that I bring up because it absolutely affected where I placed this one over all.
Aesthetic concerns out of the way, lets talk about something more important, the mechanical issues. Low level wilderness sites are somewhat underrepresented, and I think this site can give us some clues as to why. First off, there is no order of battle at all. No guards watching for thieves coming over the walls, no patrol routes. All of that is abstracted out into the wandering monsters check. This works fine in a dungeon environment, but it makes a camp like this seem very desolate and empty. Along with that, some groups are going to met the world’s most attentive Kobolds and wizard, who jump the party immediately on entry. While other groups will not meet any resistance until they actually get to the building where Magnus and the Kobolds are located. Still other parties are going to get steamrolled by 300 orcs attacking the camp, and spend the next team sessions figuring out what the orcs wanted. This isn’t necessarily a bad outcome, depending on DM skill and campaign goals. 300 orcs attacking the camp could make some interesting alliances between Magnus and the players. But it’s too much sway for a single dice roll to have in my opinion, especially when so much else in this adventure hinges on the same roll. This site feels empty. It has about the same level of content as a small dungeon, but spread out in a weird way and stapled together with wandering encounters instead of coming together as a cohesive whole.
That said, you can’t really fix it without adding more stuff, and there isn’t much more you can add without making it too difficult for low level characters. Maybe a group of patrolling Kobolds (with a basic building path per each turn), or spread out the Kobolds out a bit, with orders to run to the main force as soon as they are found. Something to make it more reactive to what the players do. But, realistically I think I would have much rather seen this site at around level 4-6, with a level 8 wizard and an entire tribe of Kobolds using this site as a base to raid nearby towns, or conduct research with the ovens, or something other than just being there. As it stands, this adventure feels like a pre-show warmup to what should be a much bigger conflict, and not an adventure in its own right.
I don’t hate this site, as I said at the top I think it’s competent. You can absolutely use this to run a good night of gaming, but there are holes that an experienced DM will need to paper over.