Blood In Ferelden is the first adventure supplement for the Dragon Age RPG. It provides three complete adventures for characters levels 1 to 5, as well as a few adventure ideas at the back. Like the main rulebooks it is a glossy paperback with some good quality black and white artwork throughout.
The adventures are well presented with plenty of notes on how to run them, with lots of background detail including maps and illustrations of NPC's. However, the adventures are not particularly original, and while some guidelines are provided for groups who want to do something unexpected the plots are fairly linear in progression. Most consist of moving from encounter A, to B, to C, with perhaps the option of skipping Encounter B.
The three adventures are designed for increasing levels of difficulty, all the way up to level five. However, if you use the rules as written the adventures are not long enough to provide enough experience points on their own to get characters to level five. If you wanted to run these adventures as a campaign you would still need to write several of your own to make the player characters high enough level to play all of the scenarios in this book.
The first adventure in the book "Amber Rage" clearly takes its inspiration from the movie "28 Days Later". Unfortunately though this is somewhat ruined by it being set on the borders of civilisation where the full effects of the plague are never really explored. A similar plague in the city of Denerim would have been much more impressive! It does however introduce an excellent motivation for the players as in my game all of the PC's ended up getting infected, so they were well motivated to help find a cure. The linear journey though did pose problems as regards pacing, with characters following a prescribed route from one encounter to the next with very little choice. I found myself taking some encounters out to speed things up. Altogether this was an enjoyable adventure but it did take some work to create the necessary atmosphere of horror.
The second adventure "Where Eagles Lair" is set once again on the fringes of Ferelden society with the characters heading into the mountains to find a lost girl. The snowy environment makes a nice background to events and there is an epic battle similar to Helm's Deep which really tests the PC's fighting skills. I did find that a lot of the adventure depended on being good at tracking which was unfortunate as the player characters in my game had about zero Perception. Fortunately one of them had a Mabari warhound they ended up using as a sniffer dog. This was a good adventure for those who enjoy a lot of combat, however my players clearly wanted more detail when it came to preperations for defence in the siege. The adventure presupposes the characters are just going to stand on a wall and fight but I was pleased when they made some more effort - building barricades and other defences.
"A Fragile Web" is the only adventure which is set in civilised Ferelden, in the city of Denerim. Unfortunately it is also the weakest of the three and as a result I did not run this adventure with my group. It describes a complicated backstory of intrigue and mystery and then has the player characters solve it very easily within a few hours of game time. There is little action in this adventure, although there are some difficult opponents. This should have been an opportunity for characters to use their non-combat abilities and roleplaying skills but its very weak plot makes it something of an anti-climax to this adventure supplement.
There are some further adventure outlines at the back of the book. None of them are very inspiring though and I did not feel they really added anything to the book.
I was dissapointed that the adventures in this book did not more directly involve the unique aspects of Dragon Age, with two of the adventures both involving barbarian tribes on the borders of Ferelden. I was hoping for more content involving the Blight, the Chantry, Templars and apostates or The Circle of Magi. These are the unique features that make Dragon Age so interesting, so it is a shame the writers here have chosen instead to ignore these and write adventures which could actually fit into any generic game world.
"Blood In Ferelden" is useful to anyone wanting a starting point for their Dragon Age campaigns but don't expect too much. More adventure supplements are promised but support material for this game seems few and far between. That said with a little work "Blood In Ferelden" can provide many hours of fun gameplay.
