Bad Moon Waning is a free adventure for Dungeons and Dragons version
3.5 (3.5e), suitable for 10th-level PCs. This is one of the free
adventures available every so often from the Wizards of the Coast
website at
their website. This review will
contain spoilers, and since this is an investigation module, the
spoilers take on additional importance.
Bad Moon Waning is an investigation module with a climactic fight at
the end with the Big Bad. It has a decidedly moral focus for a D&D
adventure. There is essentially no looting of dead bodies and only
one hoard, which the PCs are allowed to see but not plunder.
The focus for this adventure is much more on morality and what is the
right course of action. The town's priestess was recently found
murdered, with a bloodied wolf found over her body. Imagine the
villagers' surprise when this wolf transformed into their fellow
villager Trammil Nimman. He was promptly hanged and his body left as
a warning to other monsters. Now the village is in fear of
werewolves, and the adventurers are just the salvation needed. Why
did Trammil suddenly kill the priestess? Are there more werewolves
around? As the adventurers investigate, they can discover
a long-standing secret and probe the depths of greed and murder in a
blackguard's heart. They have to decide for themselves what to do,
and the answer may vary depending on the attitudes of the party and
the GM. The module even suggests several moral messages that the GM
can orient the module around.
Contents
The adventure provides a small village with a beautiful
three-dimensional map. A small manor house is also provided with a
floor plan. The inhabitants are detailed, though several of them have
a great secret. In addition, a new magic item is provided and
detailed below, Gnarlpaw's Fang. The maps are very
attractive, though it is a little difficult to understand the layout
of the village because it is not drawn to scale. The stats of the
inhabitants are all very minimal - the emphasis is on investigation,
not on fighting. The village is laid out reasonably, and the
inhabitants all seem to have reasonable occupations for a remote town,
except maybe for the alchemist, even near a forest.
I found the situation of the village and the position of the
inhabitants to be eminently reasonable. The village is remote, and a
fair number of the inhabitants live there precisely for its
remoteness. Their reactions and manners follow logically, and so does
the plot.
Choice of monsters
One annoying thing crops up in this module, and it seems to be
symptomatic of WOTC's design decisions when it comes to adventures.
The main enemy in this adventure is a human using a magical talisman,
Gnarlpaw's Fang. This transforms the user into Gnarlpaw, a
famed werewolf lord. No stats are provided however: you are supposed
to use the stats in the new 3e Monster Manual for the Werewolf Lord.
That's great, but if what if you are running this module in 3e and
don't have the new Monster Manual? You're out of luck, since this is
one of the few monsters not in the SRD. You are expected to buy the
new Monster Manual, and just to make sure, they will release
adventures with monsters that only appear there. In this case, it's
not that big a deal, since stats can be made up, but it is
unfortunate.
This kind of thing used to happen in Dungeon all the time.
"Well, we've released the Monstrous Compendium volume 3, so let's
feature the whipsting and raggamoffyns because they are in it. If you
want more information about these monsters, buy the book!" It got to
be that whenever a new monster book was released, you could expect a
couple of adventures that managed to stuff in as many new monsters as
possible, whether they made sense or not. It was pure advertising,
and meant that the quality of the adventures went down, because
including monsters from the newest and greatest release was the
dominant design decision.
Conclusion
I found the adventure engaging overall. The twist of having
good-aligned werewolves is something I have long favored in my own
campaigns, and it is refreshing to see this here. I liked the
attention to detail in the village, and felt that the plot was
reasonable and the characters behaved in logical ways. This is a
better example of the free adventures available from WOTC, and does
not suffer from the railroading issues that arose, for example, in
The Standing Stone.
Review Summary