Nature's Fury
Fiery Dragon is perhaps the prime example of a "d20 success story." Provided the opportunity of the OGL and d20 trademark licenses, they put together their own little company and started churning out their own adventures. While not unique in this respect, they did rise above many of their contemporaries to get recognized by the "big boys." They joined White Wolf publishing's Sword & Sorcery banner, a move that should give their products wider distribution and exposure.
Nature's Fury is the first product by Fiery Dragon Productions with the Sword & Sorcery logo on the cover, their fourth adventure product, and their second "double adventure." The included adventures are "Swords Through the Ice Gate," by Mike Mearls (continuing with his Lieber-esque naming theme, started with "Swords Against Deception" in FDP's To Stand on Hallowed Ground), and "The Crystal Tower," by James Bell. "Swords Through the Ice Gate" is designed for a party of 6th-level characters, and "The Crystal Tower" for a party of 5th-level characters.
A First Look
Unlike FDP's first double adventure, To Stand on Hallowed Ground, Nature's Fury does not use the "double cover" scheme. The front cover features attractive color art by Brian LeBlanc of some humans about to clash with some humanoid creatures (presumably bugbears, from the adventure by Mearls). Nature's Fury is a staple-bound, soft-cover book with 40 pages of material.
The interior is black-and-white, and most of the art is by Todd Secord, who has done the bulk of FDP's artwork to this point. I think his depictions of monsters are decent, but I really find his depictions of humans unappealing.
The adventure includes one page of cut-out color counters on cardstock. The art on the counters is by Claudio Pozas, and I find his art very appealing. His depictions of creatures on the counters are also duplicated in black-and-white in the appendices with the stat blocks of these creatures.
The cartography is decent. The maps are clear and the key is simple and readable.
The use of space is good. The text density is decent, and the inside front cover was used for challenge rating tables. Even higher text density is used for the stat blocks in the appendix and for the OGL.
"Swords Through the Ice Gate": A Deeper Look
(Warning: The following section contains spoilers to secrets in the adventure.)
The basic premise behind "Swords Through the Ice Gate" is that the players must track some abducted villagers through a gate to a world locked in ice. A good deal of exposition is devoted to describing how this world came to be. Ultimately, though, the author recognizes that you may have no interest in gates to other worlds and provides alternatives in case you wish to set the adventure in a cold region in your own game world, as well as a number of good plot hooks for involving the players.
The adventure is primarily site-based, but the main deviation from the typical dungeon crawl is that the players end up stepping into the middle of bugbear politics. A dragon trapped in the ice has convinced some bugbears to assist her in digging her free. The bugbears have kidnapped the humans to assist them in this task.
When the players first make it through the gate, a shaman that has fallen out of favor with the bulk of the bugbear tribe will try to manipulate the players into destroying his rivals. There are several potential paths from here. By helping the shaman to displace the current chieftain, the party can then use his influence to get what they need out of the bugbears. Fighting the bugbears and forcing the facts they need out of them will be much more difficult. Sneaking past them is virtually not an option, as the PCs will need to sneak out a significant portion of the human villagers that they are here to rescue.
Once they have the necessary information from the bugbears, they must go to the dragon's lair to free the remainder of the villagers. Chances are that they will not be able to do this without an encounter with the dragon or her allies.
For the most part, this is a typical site-based encounter with the exception of the political dealing. If the players are the sort that would not consider talking to bugbears so long as they have a sword to hack with, this adventure could be quite a challenge for them.
"The Crystal Tower": A Deeper Look
(Warning: The following section contains spoilers to secrets in the adventure.)
"The Crystal Tower" is also a cold-themed adventure. In this case, the object of the adventure is to retrieve an item from a legendary tower of a long dead wizard notorious for his defiance of the prevailing wizard's guild. His research was not all that productive, but he was well known for one thing: traps.
A second complication exists: the PCs are not the only ones interested in the crystal tower. When they arrive there, the explorations of a second band of adventures are already underway.
As with "Swords Through the Ice Gate," many ideas are provided for adapting the adventure to your own campaign world, and many variant plot hooks are provided to change the nature of the PCs' involvement in the adventure. Some of the suggestions for adapting the adventure to your own campaign are obvious (e.g., change the name of the city), but only a half of a page is devoted to it and the inclusion of adaptation notes is appreciated.
The tower is encased in a slowly melting iceberg, so time is of the essence in this adventure. Should the players take too long, the tower will melt its way loose of the iceberg and plummet to the bottom of the sea. By itself, this takes a long time. Should the PCs toss around too many fire-based spells while in the tower, however, they may be speeding their own demise!
The primary living opposition in the adventure is the other adventuring party and some of its hired brutes. As a default, they are placed in the adventure as static encounters, but suggestions are provided for running them as a more dynamic entity.
As promised, the tower is filled with a number of fiendish traps. Most of them are fairly sensible, and there are fairly logical outgrowths such as a means to raise and lower the security of the tower.
Conclusions
Both adventures are fairly strong. Though I did not find the concepts as interesting as the ones in FDP's previous double adventure To Stand on Hallowed Ground, they provide more than re-warmed kick-in-the-door action. Though this may throw some more simple-minded players who are accustomed to straightforward dungeon crawls a curve ball, it should be a refreshing
Another contrast with FDP's prior adventures is conversion notes. Though Mike Mearls already made a habit of including them, it was nice to see James Bell include them in his adventure as well.
I think that including the color counters by Claudio Pozas was a good idea. The double-cover thing was interesting, but ultimately of little value to the consumer. The counters, on the other hand, are attractive and give you something that you can use.
One of the things I find most fascinating about the module is that it seems like many of the elements that went into its making happened right in front of me. Claudio Pozas first came to my attention when Eric Noah started hosting his website, which was soon to be followed by the announcement that FDP had decided to hire him for his work. Soon thereafter, it was announced that White Wolf's d20 publishing arm, Sword & Sorcery, would be publishing FDP's material. This is the fruit of that labor.
Nature's Fury physically appears more polished than prior FDP products. Yet with this module they continue to deliver a solid package of useful and creative game material that I have praised in earlier reviews, with perhaps a little added refinement of additional care to make sure that their adventures are portable to your own game world.
There are many d20 vendors churning out adventures. But I definitely think FDP is one to keep your eye on.
Ratings:
Idea content: 4 - Nature's Fury is better than your typical dungeon crawl, with politics, role-playing opportunities, and good integration of ideas and plot hooks. Its premises and encounters, however, are not quite as creative as in To Stand on Hallowed Ground.
Ready to use material: 5 - Full stat blocks; good maps; good use of the rules, traps, and encounters; and no obvious deviations from the rules. The full-color counters are also a great feature and look better than ever!
Value for Money: 4 - Dense type, conservative use of ads, and OGL is in small type, taking less than a page. No obvious padding and a full-color counter insert for the price that gives an adequate page-per-dollar ratio.
Overall Substance rating: 4
Overall Style rating: 4
How I Rate D20 System Adventures
(standard blurb)
As far as I am concerned, canned adventures provide two primary points of value: ideas (adventure premises, interesting challenges, etc.) and ready to run game material (maps, useful and properly done encounter statistics, new creatures and items). The obvious third criteria is overall value for money, which includes page count for a given cost and use of space.
I use these three factors to determine holistically what "substance" rating I'll give the item on RPGnet. This is separate from the style consideration, which I use as stated on RPGnet.
-Alan D. Kohler
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