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I purchased this PDF adventure while looking for a good adventure for my group, which at the start of the adventure was on the edge of making it to fourth level. The adventure says it is for levels 2-4, so I figured my "high 3rd level" folks would do fine. And they did. It's probably a little high-powered for 2nd level characters, but your mileage may vary. The adventure itself is pretty long, and will probably take you 3 sessions to finish it off completely, unless you play real long sessions. Note: there are mild spoilers below, so players should not read any further.

In this adventure, the heroes are hired by an important person to track down a retired paladin who is living in a frontier village, Deadwood, in the Northern mountains. Pretty simple, right? Well, I think we all know how these seemingly simple things turn out, right? Right. On the way there, the party is attacked. It's a mild encounter that shouldn't cause any real trouble, but it helps set the mood that something isn't right. Once they arrive at town, the heroes get involved in another skirmish, this time helping out some villagers. This gets them in the good graces of the townsfolk, which soon gets them in touch with the paladin they're here to collect. Except he doesn't want to be collected. And then things turn ugly, as there is an evil operative in town trying to either off the paladin or destroy his reputation. This guy is tough and nasty, and has friends in the surrounding woods, and he makes life miserable for the players.

There is actually a lot of role-playing in this adventure, and I thought that it did a good job of balancing the "talk things through" side of RPG play, as well as including a lot of "I waste him with my crossbow!" to keep the bloodthirsters happy. That mainly comes at the end, though. In fact, if the players don't have some good diplomatic sense, then things can turn ugly quickly, as the villagers (and the paladin) really don't trust the heroes at all. If the Knights of the Dinner Table played this adventure, they would have offed everybody in the village about 2/3 of the way through. So if your players just want to whack things and take their stuff, steer clear of this one.

However, if your players can handle the heavy interaction, you can really build up tension before the big blow-up begins. First, the town is snowed in by a freak storm, then the monsters from the woods attack. Then the bad dude gets the local golems under his control and has them attack everybody. It's a crazy fight in the streets as villagers get killed, bad dudes get killed, good guys get killed, it's just crazy. A DM who is skilled at running these kinds of heavy action scenes with multiple things going on at the same time will have a blast with this part of the adventure. If staged properly, the final confrontation with the main bad guy can come off really well, too. It turned out OK when I ran it, but I think I short-changed the bad guy and didn't run him as smart as I should have. He was still a good challenge, but when someone has levels both in rogue and assassin, he should be played as devious as possible.

So, what did I like about this?
* The village description is really good, and the authors include lots of extra detail to make the place feel like a real village, and not just a plot device. Many of the NPCs have good-sized stat blocks given to them to help you role-play them. They even do this for a lot of characters that aren't important to the flow of the adventure. I actually like this, as if you don't use the character here you can always stick that character somewhere else in your world, which saves you time later on.
* Good balance of action and intrigue.
* Longer than your average adventure.

What didn't I like?
* Bad editing. There were a number of sentence fragments and missing words that made certain sections hard to read. And certain things are just flat out missing. For example, on page 42 there is a DM note. At the bottom, it says, and I quote, "Therefore, DMs should rule what happens to each of the golems that were under Moloch's control; one of four things can occur:1." That's all it has! It never tells you what the four things are. That's just lousy editing, in my book, and that should never happen.
* Many of the encounters use monsters from the first Creature Collection by Sword & Sorcery Studios. This isn't bad in and of itself, except that you're not always given the information you need. The main example that springs to mind is the murdersprite. The short description says that this bugger has a special poison attack, but doesn't tell you what it is. I had to look it up in my copy of the Creature Collection. Maybe this is just another editing snafu. If you've got the Creature Collection, though, it's a really minor inconvenience, as you can just look it up (like I did). I actually liked the fact that they were using these creatures, but they just didn't give enough detail to let someone without the source material play them right.
* There's almost no treasure to be had. You can thwack hordes of monsters, but there's no physical pay-off. The adventure even suggests that the players shouldn't get the goods off the main bad guy once they take care of him. That's pretty lame, and won't go over well with most players. I added some stuff (a payoff to escort somebody somewhere once the adventure was over), but it still seemed light.

Bottom line, I liked the adventure. The detailed NPCs were great, and some of them will become recurring characters in my campaign. The adventure itself was pretty good, and balanced along the roleplay vs. hack-n-slash axis. The lousy editing hurts it in my eye (thus the mediocre Style score), but I'm a perfectionist and don't easily forgive bad editing.

Danger in Deadwood
Danger in Deadwood Playtest Review by Aaron W. Thorne on 18/08/02 Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 4 (Meaty) A solid adventure mixing action and intrigue that's marred by bad editing. Product: Danger in Deadwood Author: Brannon Hollingsworth and Ken Marable Category: RPG Company/Publisher: Bastion Press Line: n/a Cost: 5.99 Page count: 62 Year published: 2002 ISBN: n/a SKU: n/a Comp copy?: no Playtest Review by Aaron W. Thorne on 18/08/02 Genre tags: Fantasy	I purchased this PDF adventure while looking for a good adventure for my group, which at the start of the adventure was on the edge of making it to fourth level. The adventure says it is for levels 2-4, so I figured my "high 3rd level" folks would do fine. And they did. It's probably a little high-powered for 2nd level characters, but your mileage may vary. The adventure itself is pretty long, and will probably take you 3 sessions to finish it off completely, unless you play real long sessions. Note: there are mild spoilers below, so players should not read any further. In this adventure, the heroes are hired by an important person to track down a retired paladin who is living in a frontier village, Deadwood, in the Northern mountains. Pretty simple, right? Well, I think we all know how these seemingly simple things turn out, right? Right. On the way there, the party is attacked. It's a mild encounter that shouldn't cause any real trouble, but it helps set the mood that something isn't right. Once they arrive at town, the heroes get involved in another skirmish, this time helping out some villagers. This gets them in the good graces of the townsfolk, which soon gets them in touch with the paladin they're here to collect. Except he doesn't want to be collected. And then things turn ugly, as there is an evil operative in town trying to either off the paladin or destroy his reputation. This guy is tough and nasty, and has friends in the surrounding woods, and he makes life miserable for the players. There is actually a lot of role-playing in this adventure, and I thought that it did a good job of balancing the "talk things through" side of RPG play, as well as including a lot of "I waste him with my crossbow!" to keep the bloodthirsters happy. That mainly comes at the end, though. In fact, if the players don't have some good diplomatic sense, then things can turn ugly quickly, as the villagers (and the paladin) really don't trust the heroes at all. If the Knights of the Dinner Table played this adventure, they would have offed everybody in the village about 2/3 of the way through. So if your players just want to whack things and take their stuff, steer clear of this one. However, if your players can handle the heavy interaction, you can really build up tension before the big blow-up begins. First, the town is snowed in by a freak storm, then the monsters from the woods attack. Then the bad dude gets the local golems under his control and has them attack everybody. It's a crazy fight in the streets as villagers get killed, bad dudes get killed, good guys get killed, it's just crazy. A DM who is skilled at running these kinds of heavy action scenes with multiple things going on at the same time will have a blast with this part of the adventure. If staged properly, the final confrontation with the main bad guy can come off really well, too. It turned out OK when I ran it, but I think I short-changed the bad guy and didn't run him as smart as I should have. He was still a good challenge, but when someone has levels both in rogue and assassin, he should be played as devious as possible. So, what did I like about this? * The village description is really good, and the authors include lots of extra detail to make the place feel like a real village, and not just a plot device. Many of the NPCs have good-sized stat blocks given to them to help you role-play them. They even do this for a lot of characters that aren't important to the flow of the adventure. I actually like this, as if you don't use the character here you can always stick that character somewhere else in your world, which saves you time later on. * Good balance of action and intrigue. * Longer than your average adventure. What didn't I like? * Bad editing. There were a number of sentence fragments and missing words that made certain sections hard to read. And certain things are just flat out missing. For example, on page 42 there is a DM note. At the bottom, it says, and I quote, "Therefore, DMs should rule what happens to each of the golems that were under Moloch's control; one of four things can occur:1." That's all it has! It never tells you what the four things are. That's just lousy editing, in my book, and that should never happen. * Many of the encounters use monsters from the first Creature Collection by Sword & Sorcery Studios. This isn't bad in and of itself, except that you're not always given the information you need. The main example that springs to mind is the murdersprite. The short description says that this bugger has a special poison attack, but doesn't tell you what it is. I had to look it up in my copy of the Creature Collection. Maybe this is just another editing snafu. If you've got the Creature Collection, though, it's a really minor inconvenience, as you can just look it up (like I did). I actually liked the fact that they were using these creatures, but they just didn't give enough detail to let someone without the source material play them right. * There's almost no treasure to be had. You can thwack hordes of monsters, but there's no physical pay-off. The adventure even suggests that the players shouldn't get the goods off the main bad guy once they take care of him. That's pretty lame, and won't go over well with most players. I added some stuff (a payoff to escort somebody somewhere once the adventure was over), but it still seemed light. Bottom line, I liked the adventure. The detailed NPCs were great, and some of them will become recurring characters in my campaign. The adventure itself was pretty good, and balanced along the roleplay vs. hack-n-slash axis. The lousy editing hurts it in my eye (thus the mediocre Style score), but I'm a perfectionist and don't easily forgive bad editing.

Danger in Deadwood