I got this 7€ pdf about two weeks ago and read mostly through it. I wouldn't call it a review, but here's my thoughts on it.

XP1: The Spider-God’s Bride and Other Tales of Sword & Sorcery by Morten Braten from Xoth.net has come up frequently during my search for material on how to run Sword & Sorcery style adventures and campaigns. People who mentioned it seem to generally regard it quite well, so I was willing to part with the 7€ and give it a chance.

It’s a 200 page black and white pdf file that contains 10 adventurers plus a 33 page section of new character options for Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition/Pathfinder. Even when I still used to run D&D or Pathfinder, I always prefered to play with the basic rules only and ignore all splatbooks and most setting-specific material, so I really can’t say how well this chapter compares to other OGL releases. I didn’t see anything that stood out and looked intriguing to me, though.

The real meat of the book are the 10 adventures, aimed at characters from 1st to 10th level. Each one starts with an interesting backstory and setup, but in the execution all of them seem to be primarily detailed descriptions of dungeons and some cities. Which frankly is not at all what I was hoping to get. The style seems to follow quite closely that of the old classic TSR modules, like the Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun or The Lost Caverns of the Tsojcanth and their ilk. Which I can’t find any use for either. Maybe the dungeon and city descriptions are actually quite decent for people who love such products, but I am not one of them.

I think a great part of my dissatisfaction with this book are the different ideas about what makes Sword & Sorcery that I and the author have. As I see it, the writer seems to confuse a desert setting with evil wizards with the style and structure that really defines the Sword & Sorcery genre. But even when you ignore this issue for a moment, I still think the adventures mostly make the same major mistake. Especially in the Sword & Sorcery genre, but in RPG adventures in general, I am a very strong proponent of the “Story now!” paradigm. In an RPG, the players are both the participants of the story and its audience. While running games is a great pastime in itself, the story that develops from the interaction between the players and the GM needs to be entertaining to the players. A mystery plot is of no use to the players if they only learn about the existance of a mystery at the very end, or they might never actually learn about it at all. I remember an adventure from Dragon Magazine about shapeshifting spiders impersonating people, which looked really cool until I reached the final page and there still wasn’t any reason why the PCs would ever find out about it. And this is a mistake most of the adventures in this book seem to make. There is always something going on, but to the players it will look like they are doing a completely normal dungeon crawl to retrieve an item, and only at the very end will an NPC reveal that they actually just helped some evil sorcerer with his grander plan. (Spoilers Ahead) Good example being eponymous The Spider-God’s Bride. All the PCs are doing the whole time is working as caravan guards or mansion guards for a foreign sage. At the very end the sage and his two kinsmen retreat to a secret basement, and while the PCs are distracted with a group of attackers at the gate the three are acting out the whole berayal and creation of a demon-spawn among themselves. When the PCs have disapatched the attackers and finally arrive at the scene, the survivors will tell them an elaborate lie about their betrayal of their master, which the PCs might actually believe and be on their way to another adventure. (Spoilers end here.)

This is just bad, and a problem that trouble all the adventures in this book. Is it a bad book with 10 bad adventures? I am a bit hesitant about making such a sweeping statement, as I can’t see any value in many of the most classic D&D modules, which still have a great number of huge fans. But what I can say is that I don’t like this book at all. At 7€ it wasn’t a big loss, but I didn’t actually get anything out of it. Except maybe the idea to create an actually good story about the spawn of a spider-god for my players one day.

http://spriggans-den.com/?p=210

Last edited by Yora (4/23/2014 9:41 am)