It is already obvious that I am a huge
fan of D101 Games “Crypts & Things” line, given my love of
all things Howard. So it was with squeals of joy when I discovered
their newest adventure “Tomb of the Necromancers” by +Paul
Mitchener. Of course this lead to a bit of fun over here at Genius
Loci as I broke the release of the game about a month ago by accident
and then re-broke the release of the game (I believe within moments
of +Newt Newport announcement) last week.
On the real release of the adventure I
opted or the softcover for two reasons. One the price was right and I
had enough credit left from a previous contest I won to hedge off the
shipping costs. And two, well I felt guilty for accidentally
“breaking” the story on the accidentally release of the adventure
at the beginning of October.
The book came in the mail yesterday,
and although the UPS guy thought it would be funny to hid the package
in my daughter's jack-o-lantern, all was good!
The Book:
“Tomb of the Necromancers” weighs
in a 20 pages of adventure and a total of 25 pages (excluding covers)
of book. The quality is what I've come to expect from onebookshelf's
print on demand service, which is not bad. The formatting of the
print copy is the basic two-column set-up typical to this genre and
the type-set and printing is clear and very sharp. The book comes
with pieces of black and white ink full page art pieces and three
maps (region, village, dungeon) of average quality.
The break down of the various sections
is very good and the typical monster manual stat-blocks are used over
the traditional two line run down which I much prefer (but seldom use
myself).
The biggest problem in a technical
sense (and yeah this is the pot calling the kettle black) is the
overwhelming amount of spelling, editing and proofing mistakes. Only
one is really jarring and breaks the flow of reading the adventure.
As a whole though the mistakes do not distract enough to make the
adventure unreadable.
The Adventure:
“Tomb of the Necromancers” follows
the players as they are hired to explore a long forgotten and
entombed temple and recover an artifact from an ancient death cult.
This quest is complicated by the a rival (and national) group who
want the item for themselves as well as the employer who is a hell of
a lot more dubious than it may appear.
There are a lot of strings for the
Crypt Keeper (referee, dungeon master, etc) to keep a hold of with
this adventure as the few NPC available all have agendas that twist
and twine around the main narrative of the story. Not heavy handed or
complex strings, but enough to give a few good plot twists and a
pulpy feel to the entire thing (which is the point of C&T I like
to think).
Further the adventure really lends
itself to showing the brutality of a Swords & Sorcery setting,
with some sights and events within (both as set pieces and just
abilities of certain enemies) the game that really makes me go from
“F-ing yeah I love this!” to “I would not want to live there in
real life”.
Once in the main dungeon of the game
things a re a lot more straight forward. Explore, kill, loot, repeat.
However, there are some interesting pseudo-puzzles and some wonderful
chances at roleplaying in some of the areas of the dungeon as well as
some small, not quite described but hinted-upon, schemes by some of
the denizens of the dungeon.
The dungeon has no wandering monsters,
however, there is the chance to ad-hoc in a single patrol type listed
in the dungeon's introduction. The creatures in the dungeon are a
nice mix of old goodies and some really nifty new creatures (my
favorite being the windwraiths). The set-up of the
dungeon is nice
with a good amount of places to explore and the descriptions are
uniform and believable for an evil death god place of worship without
entering into the realm of death metal cover art.
The Grade:
Using the five star system used by
Onebookshelf I would give “Tomb of the Necromancers” a 4 out of
5. The nature of the adventure (typical explore, loot, kill) is
nicely offset by the number of roleplaying opportunities present
within the main dungeon. At the same time the “open world”
situation and the implications and politics being played out are
interesting, engaging and really set things up for a good short
campaign or a long running behind the scenes villain. Paul Mitchener
does a good job of painting the Ice Coast/Death Wind Steppe in broad
enough strokes that an average Crypt Keeper can come away with enough
ideas to fill his or her game for quite some time.
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