Introduction
I am not exactly familiar with Ronin Arts, to tell the truth. I chanced on this e-book while browsing RPGnet and buying Dark Sun materials. I was more sold out on the name and cover painting than anything else. Now, a bit of a rant here: Not only does the adventure have pretty much no description on RPGnow, but the cover art has absolutely no relevance to the material inside. I don't know whether I should be more ashamed because RPGs started putting naked women on their cover art to boost sales, or because it actually worked on me. Regardless, when I saw Ronin Arts asking for reviews of their products on RPGnet boards I was reminded of this PDF laying about on my hard drive, and I gave it a read. Behold, and here is the review.
An Evening's Entertainment is a collection of two Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition adventures for low level characters. The first adventure is a mystery/horror investigation of what appears to be the gory disappearance of the owners and patrons of an inn. The second adventure is a mystery investigation of a violent turn of events in a tavern. Now, the reader should be warned that further analysis of the adventures in this review will most definitely contain spoilers. If you are going to be playing in these adventures, I suggest you skip the Substance section and go onto Style and read on from there.
Substance
Before I start out on commenting on each adventure seperately, I have to say that I did not expect to find much substance in this work from the start. It spans 33 pages including the cover, table of contents and OGL small text, meaning there is only 30 pages of gaming material inside for not only one but two adventures. Granted, there are adventures out there that do an incredible job of things within few pages (Penumbra material like "Three Days to Kill" comes to my mind, for example) these things are rare to come by. That said, onto the text.
Adventure 1: The Sign of the Mushroom
The first of the two adventures, I am sorry to say, was quite a letdown for me. While it is, in essence, an interesting plot, it is definitely too short to actually be called an adventure. What you have here is something akin to those two page mini-adventures TSR used to publish in the Dungeon magazine. The plot spans only two locations: An inn and a cave, and only one combat encounter that happens about an hour or so into the game, at the end of which, the adventure is resolved and comes to an end.
Plot synopsis is simple. The group arrives at an inn, only to discover that it appears to have been hurriedly deserted. Further investigation suggests that the inn's inhabitants have been brutally murdered, and dragged off by somethings or someones that live in a cave by the mountain's cliff, next to which the inn has been built. Should the players follow the trail left by the murderers, they walk into a three room cave, two of which are empty, and the third has become the hive of a new type of vermin called the Skull Beetle. And then.. There's no then. The PCs run or fight off the monsters, and the adventure ends with a Monster Manual entry for the Skull Beetle. Now, not only is the adventure too short, but there is also no interaction with something living except for a pair of horses, and no significant investigation to do within the inn except for looking at a trail of blood leading towards the cave and saying "Oy, I wonder where they went?".
While the battered and destroyed inn can be used to create a good deal of suspense, with all the blood and gore, and with the players going through rooms to learn about other visitors and realizing they may share their unfortunate fate, the final battle is very anti-climactic. By the time the players find the source of the inn's demise, there is nothing left to save. Not only is there little motivation left to fight off the monsters, as everyone has surely already perished, but the monsters themselves are not exactly horrifying, looking like overgrown cockroaches. The reaction to such an attack would definitely be "Hell, I run." from most players as there is no moral issue involved with leaving a bunch of mangled corpses to rot instead of sticking their neck and putting up a fight.
Not only that, but the adventure claims it's for character levels 1-3, but the attacking creatures each have 13hp, +2/2-7dmg attacks, and the adventure suggests that you have four attackers per character in the combat. Excuse me as I say this, but if I ever dropped 24 of these creatures against a 6 character level 2 party, they would perish in no time. Granted, the players will know they are walking into a combat and will have readied themselves for it as best they can, but we are talking about levels 1-3 here - just how well can they prepare themselves is debatable. And if I lower the number of attackers to 12 to adjust, then it no longer looks like a hive, but just a bunch of beetles and loses its scariness.
There are some definitely redeemable ideas inside, though, such as recovering the inn owners' surviving baby and having to deal with how to go about keeping him secure through the adventure (which I would definitely use) and other plot hooks such as finding hidden documents among the belongings of a pair of merchants who were staying in the inn. As for the mystery and horror themes it tries to explore, it is a miss, mostly because the adventure is short. It's more of an encounter than an adventure, I have to say, and it doesn't last long enough to build enough suspense and horror, feels dull, and does not provide much investigation.
Adventure 2: The Hearty Draught
The second adventure is a welcome improvement, but still suffers from similar problems. The plot is more involving and interesting, and revolves around a wizard brewer who has started supplying local taverns with a new kind of ale that alters the patrons' moods. The PCs become involved in this plot by finding themselves in the middle of a bar brawl started by two local tailors. The adventure then assumes that the PCs will try to figure out just why there was a brawl in the first place. Should your players opt to investigate, then they have an interesting situation to confront.
After asking around in the town's taverns and the Hearty Draught, their investigation leads them to a brewery that has started to take over the business in the town. My major gripe here is that there isn't really a very interesting cast of characters to be interviewed during the investigation. The adventure could have easily been expanded to support a much more involving investigation, but as it is, the only two characters presented with actually something to tell the players are a bard and the brewer's apprentice. The rest of the investigation, the Game Master will have to improvise on his own - which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but doesn't do wonders for my idea
of the product.
Eventually the players discover that the new brewer is a wizard of sorts and is sealing contratcs through both negotiation and magic. This wizard called Carec who runs the brewery has no evil plots yet but he is experimenting with the technique to use it for more twisted purposes later on. This leads to a final confrontation with Carec which is a rather fair fight for a group of Level 3-5 heroes (Carec is Expert 4/Wizard 7) and it is possible to talk things out with him if you wish to.
Once again, can we say anti-climactic? There is little purpose, little sense of achievement and little reward for the characters in the adventure, to be honest. Once again, the ideas are fine, but the adventure is short and dull. There is a considerable amount of investigation involved, however, this part of the adventure is mostly left to the GM so you are on your own with that. The adventure ends with three low level wizard spells concerning alcoholic beverages and an item creation feat for creating magical alcoholic beverages.
Style
A Night's Entertainment comes as two PDF files, one in color and one in Black & White. Let's start out with the good: The art is beautiful. The quality of the art really awed me when I first checked the documents, and even in black and white, the art is top notch (even though sometimes rather irrelevant) - a big congratulations goes to Christopher Shy. The layout is very easy to read on screen and on paper, and the product is printed landscape instead of portrait. The editing is quite good - I did not catch any spelling or grammar mistakes. Detailed square maps of all locations (which aren't many, by the way) for use during miniature combat are included as well. The bad:; For some reason, modules like to include bits of text for GMs to read to their players when there is something that needs to be described instead of just describing it. Fortunately, these bits of text are usually placed in text boxes. Here, however, they are just inside the main text and you can't really tell where the passage you may want to read is - it is quite annoying. The ugly: The color version of the PDF has a very distracting and very annoying, and ridiculously ugly (especially considering the art quality) misty blue background. Just because of this background I never used the color version for neither printing nor viewing - publishers, please, pure white backgrounds!; If you'll have an image background at least make it look nice.
Conclusion
There isn't much left to say, really. An Evening's entertainment is a collection of two adventures that will probably last half an evening for the characters and a couple hours for the players, and not exactly very entertaining ones either. There are many much better and much more involving adventures out there. Even though this review was done upon request, I can not recommend the product to anyone except those who found either of the adventure ideas very inspiring. The art, layout, and editing, though, are first class, and it would have been perfect if the "read aloud" texts were boxed and the annoying background was removed. This is the second time I've handled a landscape RPG book (the first being the Heavy Gear storyline books) and I have to say I like it. Therefore, I give it a Substance rating of 2 and a Style rating of 4.
Substance: 2
Style: 4
Review Summary