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Trouble At Durbenford
Trouble at Durbenford is a large fantasy d20 adventure from Necromancer Games,
meant for levels 8th to 14th. It's a large adventure, running
about 220 pages.
It has a fairly complex background/plot. It seems that when
the world was young, it was ruled by this titan named Rynas.
Apparently the Greek mythos sort of Titan, sort of god-like.
Anyway, the evil people of the world didn't like this titan, so
they ended up fighting him, led by an Ogre who had Orcus's sword.
The battle was sort of a draw, with everyone getting killed and
the sword lost, or at least, out of the hands of the evil guys,
and into that of the good guys, the Celestials (or some do gooder
clerics.).
Rather than taking this super-evil artifact someplace and hide
it, it seems the Celestials simply decided to leave it where it
was, in the mountains near Durbenford, and put guards on it for
the rest of eternity. But fairly wussy guards.
This artifact provides about half the plot for Trouble With
Durbenford. The other half (or more like 3/4s) revolves an
indisdious plot by an evil (is there any other kind in D&D?)
Druid to drug people. It seems this drug makes people work
harder, but at the expense of their health and their will.
Durbenford gets about 20 pages devoted to itself. Though not
explaining why it's called "Durbenford", since while
there are "Durbens" (that's the name of the ruling
family), it seems to be nowhere near a "ford" or even a
river (or even a fjord, for that matter), just a very large lake.
Which is miles across, so not too easy to ford.
You get a very basic map (very computer looking, with cookie
cutter buildings) a few prominent NPCs, and keyed locations for
their houses. A few other locations are mentioned - a brothel, an
inn, and a shop. Maybe a dozen in total, including the locations
of the NPC's houses.
A couple minor villages also get detailed, with about 6 locations
mentioned in each . One is a nice village, the other is sort of
run down.
The Adventure:
"When some wild-eyed,
eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your
favorite head up against the barroom wall, looks you crooked in
the eye and asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that
big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack
Burton always says at a time like that: "Have ya paid your
dues, Jack?" "Yessir, the check is in the mail."
Anyway, the adventure basically consists of 4 parts: Retrieve the
evil artifact; Discover the evil Druid making the drug and kill
him; Fight the gang distributing the drug; Defeat the evil
villain behind both plots. The last two sort of run together a
bit.
Before the first part, though there's a handful of sort of
mini-adventures. One is solving the problems of 2 local farmers.
The most detailed involves an evil, almost Cthulhu style cult,
and a raid on its stronghold. Another deals with an imprisoned,
hidden, sleeping Chimera that may or may not get released
depending on the PCs actions (or inaction). These I liked. In
fact, I would have liked more of these, and less of the main
quest. (Or just a book full of these, no main quest at all).
The retrieval of the evil artifact consists of 3 dungeon levels
and not quite 30 pages, so this section is perhaps comparable to
the standard 32 page dungeon crawl module in length. It's sort of
a weird place, because you have all these evil critters and
Celestials living there. The Celestials to guard the evil
artifact to keep evil critters from getting it, and the evil
critters are just sort of chillin' (I actually have no idea why
they are there, other than simply squatting).
One level has a puzzle which really reminds me of something from
a computer game. They have to find the 3 parts of the magical
phrase, and then say it in the correct order. But if they say it
in the wrong order, it disappears form their memory, and they
have to go back and read each phrase again. Although this is
unlikely (since the phrase only makes sense one way), this is
potentially something that would really annoying players.
Once they get the evil artifact, the PCs are supposed to hand it
over to an NPC (one they haven't actually met). Many players
would find this somewhat troubling, I mean, why should they turn
over an incredibly evil artifact to someone they don't know, and
thus could in fact be evil himself (in fact, the PCs should
realize he's evil, as an evil minion gets sent to check up on
them). But that gets put on the backburner, as the PCs are then
expected to go fight the drug problem. Why? Because you the DM
force them to. (That's what it tells you to do.).
Getting to the root of the drug problem is fairly easy. There's
only 2 other villages in the area, and one of them is full of
drugged out peasants. So presumably the PCs will investigate that
one.
The investigation basically consists of talking to evil Druids
(one involved with the plot, one not), and presumably they learn
the whereabouts of the really evil Druid, the one making the
drug. So presumably they invade his lair and stop his drug lab.
(The old computer game "Wasteland" has something called
"Snake Squeezin's". This drug turns out to be similar
in manufacture, only it's Fey that are being
"squeezed".)
Once they off the Druid, they presumably go after the group
behind. This involves raiding their base in town, some rumbling
in the sewers of Durbenford, then moving on to their secret
hideout behind a waterfall.
Then they deal with the King, and go after the mastermind of all
the evil plots in the adventure. Pretty standard evil fortress,
though with some nice twists, flying half-fiend minotaurs and
skeletal cows. Moo yeah!
The rest of the book
"Terrific, a six-demon bag. Sensational."
Lastly, you get some appendices.
The most notable is one on new monsters, and monsters that have
been updated to 3.5 from 3.0 from the Tome of Horrors. Nothing
terribly exciting. Nilbogs (which I really hate), some daemons
and demodands (blah), the vegepygmies, and nothing else really
notable.
Also one smallish appendix on magic items. I liked one of the new
magic items, and instant mansion. Sort of like the instant
fortress, but it's an instant hovel. But inside the hovel is
really a mansion, thanks to the power of extradimensional magic.
The book's layout is okay, but nothing special. All the stats are
in an appendix in back, but instead of directing you to an exact
page number, it just says something like, "See the
appendix". Never mind the appendix is 25 pages of wall to
wall statblocks and thus not exactly easy to find the monster or
NPC in question. An exact page citation would have been much
better, but I guess that would have taken some effort after the
book was laid out (and the possibility of dreaded page XX
errors). This is exacerbated by the statblocks for the monsters
being lumped into the appendix with the new monsters.
The proofreading is generally good - I only noticed a couple of
typos and editing gaffes, notably one fairly major one which
gives the sentence the opposite meaning, but other than that, not
too bad.
The book features some artwork by Brian LeBlanc, who is in my
opinion, the best artist working in d20 these days, if not RPGs
in general. I love his stuff. Like most his other module work,
his illustrations in this revolve around the same adventuring
party actually experiencing the adventure. (In this case, a
Female Cleric, a Male Barbarian, Male Bard, an old geezer of a
Wizard/Sorcerer, and some sort of Rogue whose face is covered by
his cowl). It's not entirely his work, I guess his stuff is about
1/3, but the rest of the interior stuff is quite good.
The cover is of a somewhat constipated looking Celestial guarding
a room at the entrance to the dungeon where the evil artifact is
kept. Sort of eh. Not great, but not bad (other than the
celestial's facial expression). (Why they never get Brian LeBlanc
to do the cover, I dunno. Almost all the covers of Necromancer
Games stuff is unremarkable)
I would have liked to have seen portraits of more of the NPCs. Or
at least, portraits near the write-ups of the NPCs, or pictures
that are clearly labeled, since I do think some of pictures were
meant to be NPCs, but I wasn't sure which ones. In some cases,
the NPCs don't have much in the way of physical description (for
instance, one key NPC is described as "a slender half-orc of
unremarkable features"), so a picture to show the players
would have been nice. Otherwise I pretty much have to pull an
actor or actresses name randomly to describe them. "He looks
like Fess Parker".
Final Thoughts:
"You know what Jack Burton always says... what the
hell?
I have to say, I really didn't like this product much. It
wasn't terrible, but it wasn't all that good, either. I was
expecting a product of the same quality as the previous site
based adventures from Necromancer, like The Grey Citadel or the
Vault of Larin Karr, and it's simply not.
My trouble with Durbenford is essentially fourfold. First off,
it's not particularly generic, and thus I am unable to fit it
into my campaign world. I wish the back of the book blurb told
more about the actual plot, so I wouldn't have bought it.
Call me crazy, but I don't think "generic" adventures
should involve a large kingdom and the politics of it's ruler,
including lots of interaction with him. Generic adventures should
focus on a much smaller scale, because the smaller, the easier it
is to fit in. If you need kingdoms with troubled rulers and
rampaging armies and complicated mythologies, then you aren't
really generic anymore.
Secondly, it's way too linear. If not a railroad, maybe a slot
car. I mean, other than a couple of small side quests at the
beginning, there's basically only one route through the module.
Based on my past experiences with large Necromancer Games
modules, this is unusual - most of them were site based, and the
parties could generally either wander around, or if there was a
plotline they must follow, it was somewhat non-linear. They could
do a few things in any order, then go to the showdown.
In this, they have to do x, then y, then z. This would have made
a decent computer RPG scenario, but as a pen & paper one,
it's not to my taste, nor my players. Especially as it's for
fairly high levels, players expect their PCs to be more active as
opposed to reactive.
Thirdly, I would have liked Durbenford to have been fleshed out
more. I mean, 11 keyed locations in a city? Most of which are
homes? Guess who is going to have to flesh out the city - the DM,
ie, me. A random chart doesn't really cut it. I realize that this
would have taken space from something else, but why not rip out
the useless mythology that no one can possibly use? (Since
Necromancer Games hasn't released their own setting yet).
Forthly, there's a lot of little nitpicky stuff that doesn't make
sense to me. For instance, why would Celestials (or a plucky
group of clerics) put a horribly pervasive artifact (akin to a
radioactive waste dump, sans any sort of protection to keep the
radiation in), near a large town or pristine forest, full of cute
and fuzzy animals. Why not, say, in the middle of nowhere? A
desert, a great big mountain (ie, the Himalaya sort), an
uncharted island. Or why not ask the Celestials nicely to take it
out in space someplace. The possibilities are endless, just
about, given how big the D&D universe is. (Actually, this
whole thing is a bit confusing, because on the one hand, it says
a group of clerics hid the artifact there, but if so, then why
are there Celestials guarding it? AFAIK, they just don't stand
guard on eternity at the whim of clerics. So it must be some sort
of joint operation.)
The whole drug plot doesn't make much sense, either. If you
simply want harder workers, just use real zombies with the
animate dead spell, or constructs, or summoned beings, or any of
a number of things. It also says the drug is only used in out of
the way small villages in hamlets (which is itself pointless,
since they wouldn't really produce much in the way of goods to
begin with), but the only village in the game that uses is,
happens to be on the only navigable river in the area, and gets a
lot of ship and barge traffic. Wouldn't they notice that the
villagers are basically drugged to their eyeballs? Based on some
of my experiences in college, this is actually something people
do notice and comment on.
So, both plot points are basically unbelievable, I thought. Plus
there is minor stuff, for instance, there's a group of "Mire
Rangers" who do nothing but guard this swamp which is ruled
by a vampire Druid. Which is somewhat dubious to begin with,
since why should they? (They aren't even good alignment). But
they actually happen to be more powerful than the vampire Druid
they are guarding. They are 14th level (and there are 3 of them)
and the Vampire Druid has a challenge rating of 13. Now
admittedly, it wouldn't be an easy fight, but if they teamed up
with someone, mostly a cleric, it wouldn't be that tough. And did
I mention they ride giant bears? (Swamp bears, apparently.)
Plus, at the conclusion, the PCs are supposed to use
incriminating documents they find proving the King was behind the
whole drug scheme (or at least approved of it) to force him to
abdicate in favor of his non-evil son. But, why on earth would a
king do that? Why wouldn't he just simply order the PCs to be
seized and imprisoned? I mean, an evil king has an evil scheme.
How shocking! That's what evil kings do. In a monarchy, a king is
basically answerable to no one - if he really pisses people off,
his nobles will revolt, or maybe the people. (Not to mention, as
Dan Rather discovered, supposedly incriminating documents are
very easy to fake.) And another quibble, in this the King is
clearly evil in his actions, but his alignment is LN. To me,
forcibly drugging your peasants with a drug that basically turns
them into zombies, and kills them if they stop taking it, is not
really "neutral" behavior.
Still, one thing I liked was how the author generally took into
consideration that the PCs would have access to spells like speak
with the dead and raise dead, telling details that dead NPCs
would tell about and whether or not an NPC that dies would choose
to come back from the dead or not (and in many cases, if so,
giving stats for them).
I also liked the general tone of the module. Dark. Lots of nasty
things happening, fairly sordid, evil Druids all over the place,
squished leprechauns and satyrs. I just wish the execution were
better. (heh, of the module, not the leprechauns and satyrs).
So I really have conflicting thoughts about this. I liked some of
it - the tone, the writing itself is very good, I really liked
one village (the non-druggie one). But I also had a lot of
problems with it, too, as noted above. So I'm giving it a C-,
which is probably generous. Seems like
a nightmare to actually run, and not that much fun to actually
play in.
(If you have comments, questions, or complaints, better email
them to me, too, as well as posting here, since I can't read or
reply to the review comments in the new format here. The quotes
are from "Big
Trouble in Little China")
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