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Review of The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories
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The Smoking ruin is by far the longest adventure in the book, 75 pages to be exact, and is about the exploration of mysterious ruins, which contain eternally burning troll bodies. Due to abundance of singing and dancing containing encounters the adventure feels like a weird mixture between a musical and an RPG adventure. This kind of genre-blending experimentation is novel, but I found the musical style to hinder the immersion into the bronze age-like world of Glorantha and to be, frankly, annyoing, but I might be biased as I'm not a fan of musicals. What annoyed me even more was that the adventure is edited and/or written in way that made it very hard to read and that the text also contains numerous errors (for example the map and the description of the smoking ruin do not match). Another source of irritation was the fact the majority of the encounters in the adventure seem more-or-less pointless or elude to a thing that bears no relation to the plot of the adventure (and not in clever red-herring manner but in a way that made it seem like the author(s) wanted the adventure to be something more than what it is).
The other reviewer on this site (Anton S) commented on the "The Smoking ruin" adventure that its good if you are willing to invest time on it. In a way I can understand this point as maybe with some more work I could have had a better playing experience. However, the point remains that, I think, one of the points of ready-to-play adventures is that they save GM's time: with the Smoking Ruin I feel that if I'd used the same amount of time for designing a scenario of my own as I used for pouring through this adventure, I and my players would had a way more pleasant playing experience.
The other two adventures of the book "Urvanta's tower" and the "The Grove of the Green rock" are easy to ready as they are pretty straightforward combat-oriented adventures: they are not really anything worth writing home about. "The Grove of the Green Rock" is a fleshed out copy of an adventure from, if I remember correctly, "the Elder secrets" book and thus it continues the proud Rune Quest tradition of filling the books with material recycled from older publications.
The information about the Elder Wilds and the Lost valley is nicely presented and useful if ever you think of running a game set in this part of the Dragon Pass.
The Art in the book is well done and impressive.
All in all, "the Smoking ruin and other stories" seems to continue the trend of bad books with pretty pictures of the current iteration of Rune Quest.
