The Whispering Woodwind is a d20 System adventure for four second level characters. It is set in the World of Revloc, Creative Mountain Games own campaign setting, but could easily be adapted for use in your personal campaign world. The player characters are hired to recover a valuable flute from an itinerant bard who has committed some serious crimes, and must track him wherever he has fled.
I like this adventure, although it has numerous flaws. The adventure is relatively short, and can be divided up into the following sections:
An introductory section where the basics of the adventure are explained and the PCs are hired.
The chase section, which details the pursuit of the bard by the PCs along the South Coast road. There are several encounters along the road, some incidental to the plot, and some important. Some of these encounters are placed here only to distract the characters, and to see if they can keep to their main objective: that of capturing the bard and recovering the flute. I found this quite a nice touch.
The final section details the discovery of where the bard has gone to ground, and the resolution of a few other matters that have arisen. Suffice to say that the flute may not be as easy to recover as the characters might expect!
The best thing about this adventure is the attention given to each of the many NPCs encountered along the way. I have rarely seen an adventure give so much attention to providing the referee with adequate role-playing notes. There are times when there is almost too much information given for what are relatively minor encounters. Based on what is given here, a good referee should be easily able to turn many of these NPCs into recurring characters that can interact with the player characters.
The actual adventure is in a low fantasy style. Almost all threats encountered by the characters are mundane in nature - bandits, wild animals and the like. There may be a problem with the difficulty of some encounters, especially those at the climax of the adventure; there just seem to be too many opponents for the PCs to defeat. When added to the possibility of ambush, the referee will probably need to adjust what occurs if the party is not to be defeated. However, as I have not yet refereed this adventure, I may be mistaken on that point. Role-playing is exceptionally important in this adventure, although combat and tracking skills would not go awry.
There are numerous lapses in writing style, grammar and spelling throughout the module that I found quite irritating. Many sections are excessively wordy. "Questions coming from the player characters are staid by the scribe recording names in the ledger as too early to be posed" is a typical example of such a lapse. This is actually a major problem because it caused me to miss a vital point in the adventure the first couple of times I read through it.
Although the NPCs are excellently described, the actual relation of the plot could occasionally do with some work. I found the suggested motivation for the PCs to take the quest to be quite weak, but there should be no problem in adapting it so it works better for your characters.
Another problem I have with the adventure is the way it is formatted. Quite simply, there are too many stat blocks. Many NPCs whose only purpose in the adventure is to be role-played with are given full combat stat blocks. They don't need them. I would have much preferred to see only brief descriptions of race, gender, class and level, as well as a couple of important skills. As well, some of the NPC descriptions are placed in a manner that detracts from the flow of the text - they are really in their own sidebars, but the formatting does not make this clear. Boxes around this material would have been appreciated.
It is worth mentioning the encounter with the Trundlefolk; a gypsy-like people in the World of Revloc. This encounter has absolutely no bearing on the plot, but is filled with interesting NPCs. Its description takes up about a quarter of the module. Full stat blocks are given for each of the Trundlefolk, despite it being extremely unlikely that the PCs will engage them in combat. In addition, the referee is advised that it might be worthwhile eliminating this encounter entirely! It just seems so out of place. On the other hand, you could easily create many adventures based on the material in this one encounter. This dichotomy illustrates much of what I feel about this adventure: great material, but not always in the right place.
It is wonderful to see an adventure with so much attention given to providing NPCs with proper motivations and good role-playing notes. I recommend it greatly to those with groups who enjoy interacting with NPCs. As a fantasy adventure, I am more cautious about my recommendation. There is good material here, but it may not be to everyone's taste, and some work may need to be done on balancing the adventure. I do look forward to seeing further adventures from Mark Clover and Creative Mountain Games, as there are indications here that they might some day produce something quite special.
The adventure is available as a pdf file from the Creative Mountain Games website: http://www.creativemountaingames.com/
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