"I fear you have gone beyond yourself, and here in Inzae your mistake may be your doom."
Vakhund is the first part in The
Death on the Treklant Trilogy of adventures from Troll Lord Games. The events of this adventure directly lead into the follow-up,
Dzeebogd, Under Dark and Misty Ground.
The Premise:
PCs become involved with the Meister Herbert Rothenheimer and his daughter as they are travelling in a trade caravan. The caravan comes under attack while it is temporarily stopped at Vakhund which is a small garrison as well as a tax collection point for travellers. In the fracas, Rothenheimer's daughter, Evanna, is kidnapped. It is up to the PCs to rescue her.
Vakhund is recommended for four to eight characters of first to second level. As my own group is not of the recommended levels, I had everyone roll up new characters for the purpose of this review. Vakhund is billed as being able to be used generically with most fantasy roleplaying games (read D&D) even though it was written to take use of the Sword & Sorcery rules that seems to be the "house system" for Troll Lord.
As an aside, I notice on the Troll Lord website that they have a d20 version out that prominently features the d20 logo. The review copy that I recieved from rpg.net is the earlier version without d20 stats. As I don't have the d20 version, I can't accurately comment about any changes made between the two. However, my group is using the D&D3e rules for running the adventure.
What follows is a playtest review of Vakhund and what happened with my gaming group when I ran it. Please bear in mind that the results are specific to my particular group and your results may be completely different.
What Ya Get:
Vakhund is a twenty-four page book with a unattached cover than doubles as a GM screen with a map of the surrounding area printed on the back of it.
Cost:
Vakhund: Into the Unknown will cost you $5.00 USD retail. The most recent version (the one with the d20 logo) will cost you $6.95.
Appearance:
Vakhund is servicable. There isn't a lot of flash to the adventure as far as layout and artwork goes. Most of the space in the game is taken up by text. The text appears to be an oversized fourteen point type which might upset some who feel that they are getting cheated on the page count. Art is very sparse as well although the two interior pieces by Jason Walton (I'm not counting the reproduction of the cover image on the credits page) are excellent. There is also three small crude maps in there as well. Again, nothing spectacular but workable. There is little appearance-wise that will make you feel like you were cheated out of your $5.
The Adventure:
SPOILER WARNING: I will be discussing the plot of the adventure in this review. I am going to try to remain vague about some of it as to not completely ruin everything. If you are planning on playing in this adventure or have reason to believe that your GM will be running it, you may want to stop reading now. Nobody likes to have their fun spoiled (most people don't anyway).
The first problem I ran into with Vakhund was that it recommends your party composition to contain at least two fighters and a cleric. It also recommends having a ranger or someone skilled in overland travel. As a GM, I don't like forcing my players to make anything to conform to an adventure so I disregarded this. In the final analysis, however, I feel lied to as well as warned ahead of time. Having a melee-centered party is essential and you'll damn well need that cleric for healing. However, saying that you'll need a ranger is pure bunk. Trails are blindly obvious or NPCs offer to guide you to your objectives. In fact, I question the levels stated for this adventure as the PCs are going to be horribly outnumbered with few capable NPCs able to provide assistance. Bear in mind that this could just be me as I didn't have the d20 stats version so I had to make things up on the fly.
My group's compostition came out with a monk, a fighter, a wizard, a bard and a cleric. All were first level characters. The first half of the adventure ran fine with everyone meeting up with the caravan and moving out. We even had a few amusing moments of roleplaying as the bard tried to woo Evanna and work around the disapproving protests and glares of Herbert. One of the nice things with the adventure is that the major NPCs all have brief personality descriptions which I found useful and seem to be lacking in many d20 products.
On the downside, however, you are immediately set upon by large amounts of geographical information for the After Winter Dark campaign setting. This is annoying especially if you have no intention of using their setting. All of it can be easily discarded, however, as there is little described that is of any importance.
The real problems begin when the party is stopped at Vakhund for a rest. There are five NPC soldiers there for defense. All except for the leader are level 0 fighters (Warriors). Unfortunately, the adventure calls for their leader (a level 4 fighter) to be slaughtered away from the tower as the suprise attack by the bandits happens. This is bad as the party will find themselves under a three-pronged attack by a group of twenty-six enemies who are primarily orcs, goblins and humans. Lord help the poor GM whos group is split up when the attack happens. Does the name "Custer" mean anything to you? This level on generic information may have worked okay under AD&D but presents substantial problems for the D&D3e rules. Needless to say, Evanna is captured during the attack and her father is mortally wounded so that he can offer the PCs a reward for rescuing her.
I ruled that the soldiers horses were tethered behind the tower so that my players could escape and leave the defenders to their own bloody fates after three of the party members were severely wounded/unconscious within the first three rounds of combat. At least they gamely agreed to try to rescue Evanna after licking their wounds. They follow the obvious trail left by the marauding bandits (which is made even more obvious when they encounter deserters who tell them where she was taken and one of them will even offer to guide them!).
They will be lead or find their way to a orc town where Evana may or may not be being held (this depends on if you plan on using Dzeebogd or not). Either way, they'll end up attacking a scaled lycanthropic orc shaman and his five zealot followers in a barrow where they are animating skeletons. Again, a lycanthrope based on the MM stats would rip apart a first-level party so I REALLY toned him down and it still didn't stop the wizard from dying and the monk knocked to minus seven hps. At this point, I let them rescue Evanna because I was getting tired of trying to shoehorn mechanics and because I don't think anyone was looking forward to having the adventure continue.
Overall Impression:
Skip it. If you see this one in stores and it doesn't have the d20 logo on it, save your five bucks. You could get it to work with D&D3e but not without more work than it is worth. The adventure itself isn't that great and is pretty straighforward. The d20 version might be wonderful for a low-level party but trying to do it from this version is terrible and counterproductive for the GMs valuable time.
MetalMan signing off.
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