For those of you who played The Village of the Day Before, what kind of favor did Ix asked the party for? I'm struggling at thingin of something that isn't completely game breaking.
Also, how can Ix enforce the pact? Does he make a magical contract so that the characters are forced to obey, or does he show up and attacks them if they refuse to honor the deal?
Non posso mettere il link, ma ormai sapete dove trovarlo.
Hi! I'm reaching the end of my current campaign (Dragonbane, vaguely OSR inspired and very much recommended btw) and I'm starting to think about what to run next. I'm looking for a good sandbox campaign created for any OSR system. Gods of the Forbidden North seems close to what I'm thinking, but honestly we don't need that much material to play. A smaller scale sandbox should be enough for my group.
My requirement is that I need a complete module, something that I can bring to the table and run as it is. I enjoy reading loredumps about the setting, I enjoy managing complex timelines and procedures, but I generally don't like when a module leaves blank spaces for the GM to fill with their own material.
I am a huge Dragonbane fan and The Secret of the Dragon Emperor is probably the best RPG module I've ever played. I can't overstate how disappointed I was when I read Path of Glory. It's very bad. So bad that I had to write this review, both to express my frustration and to help other Dragonbane players to decide if they actually want to buy it.
MAJOR SPOILERS INCOMING FOR BOTH THE SECRET OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR AND PATH OF GLORY, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED
Path of Glory is a rework of a campaign that was originally written in the 80s for Drakar och Demoner (Dragonbane's predecessor). It can work as a stand-alone campaign, but it is intended to be played as a sequel for The Secret of the Dragon Emperor (the campaign that is included in the Core Set).
The final goal of the campaign is to break the curse of the Dead Forest, which can be achieved by destroying an ancient artifact: the Heart of Darkness. Most of the campaign consists in the quest for the Heart. This is split in three chapters.
In the first chapter, the characters arrive at the Dead Forest. They are looking for the Gates of Power, the entrance of an ancient dwarven city in which the Hearth of Darkness has been hidden. They also need to retrieve the three keys that open the gates. This works similarly to the free exploration of the Dragon Emperor, but this time the McGuffins are already in the hands of different NPCs. So, rather than exploring adventure sites, the Dead Forest is more about interacting with a network of rival and allies all looking for the same thing.
When the characters eventually open the Gates of Power, they are tasked by the Immaculate Flame monk Tefalas with killing the wight Mogdath using a special dagger. Mogdath is the commander of the undead army that now controls the dwarven city, also looking for the Hearth of Darkness. This is the second chapter, which consists in a big dungeoncrawl. When the characters have completed Tefalas' quest and have discovered that the Hearth of Darkness isn't actually in the dwarven city, they will exit the dungeon on the opposite site, getting to the Eastern Lands.
The Eastern Lands are being ravaged by an army of undead led by Dakoth, the necromancer. He is also looking for the Heart of Darkness. The characters will meet Godvindel, the Archpriest of the Immaculate Flame, who tells them where to find the Hearth and how to destroy it. This final act of the campaign is handled as a mostly linear sequence of events in which the characters will eventually find the Heart of Darkness at the same time as Dakoth. After the big confrontation, there will be a few more incidents before they can return to the Dead Forest, destroy the Heart and lift the curse once and for all.
The curse was cast on the Dead Forest 800 years ago by the demon prince Sathmog, as his final act on this world before he was defeated and banished by Eledain. The curse has been spreading through the forest since then, and many claim that one they it will destroy the whole world. Now, I bet you're wondering what terrible things are happening because of this curse. Are you thinking of demons roaming through the forest? Of animals mutated in monstrous shapes, hungry for blood? Or maybe you're thinking of an incurable sickness that affects all the inhabitants of the forest and its surroundings? Zombies? Collective madness? Cultists performing esoteric rituals?
No, nothing like that. The curse of the Dead Forest has dried up the trees in a 30x75 km^(2) area. That's it. That's literally all the curse has been doing in 8 centuries. The worst part is that the forest that surrounds the dead part is lush, whimsical and full of life. Of the many NPCs that inhabit the forest, nobody expresses concern for what's happening.
The inadequacy of this hook is appalling. If the NPCs who live in the Dead Forest don't care about the curse, why would the characters risk their lives because of it? Why would the players care? I suspect that most players will forget about the curse by the end of the first chapter. Keep that in mind, because this will also have further consequences in the finale.
In the context of adventure design, a patron is a NPC that explicitly gives a task to the characters, often offering a reward in return. They are largely used in videogames and in modern D&D linear adventures, because they are the easiest way for the writers to tell the players what they're supposed to do. Since the patron acts as the GM's spokeperson, the players are expected to trust them, otherwise the story can't progress. Since this trust is forced on the players for meta reasons, the GM is also expected not to take advantage of the situation by using the patron to betray them. That's why in online discourse traitor NPCs are generally considered bad form: in this context, it makes sense.
The Secret of the Dragon Emperor is a patron-free campaign. The characters can gather information about their quest from a multitude of sources, including environmental clues and NPCs, but there isn't a single source that is essential for the story to progress. Because of this, the characters can handle their relationship with each NPC freely: they can trust them, they can ally with them or they can be hostile. The fact that the game doesn't require the players to blindly trust a patron creates a whole new level of player agency, compared to a patron-driven adventure. This also allows the GM to introduce a traitor NPC (Leanara) as a fun game element, not as a "gotcha" moment.
Now, I obviosuly prefer patron-free adventures, but patron-driven adventures are also ok if they are done right. Path of Glory is patron-free only for the first chapter, but for the second and third chapters to work the characters must ally with the Immaculate Flame Knights and blindly trust the two patrons, Tefalas and Godvindel. If, for some reason, they decide not to trust them, the game breaks. To make things worse, Path of Glory commits the highest sin of including several NPCs that will betray the characters: Ivil and Filundrus, Tuvinel, Stormhand and Ankh-Tah-Leh. It's very likely that after the first betrayal the players will start being skeptical and will likely not trust the patrons when they meet them.
The campaign often includes scenes which have a strict predetermined outcome and expects the GM do enforce it, either negating player agency or cheating. In one word: railroading. (If you use the term "railroading" with a different meaning, please accept this definition just in the context of this review.)
The second random encounter with Tefalas (p. 24) explicitly asks the GM to railroad:«If the encounter with Tefalas comes up again, the characters run into the monk just as the Knight in Black is about to attack him! Otherwise, they will be reunited with Tefalas at the beginning of the next adventure. You should therefore make sure that Tefalas does not die during this adventure». I guess that «play to find out» doesn't apply here, for some reason. Are we still playing Dragonbane...?
In other situations, even the module doesn't openly tell the GM to do it, railroading is the only possible way to resolve things if the players don't do exactly what the story expects them to do. For example, the whole third chapter hinges on the fact that the characters will exit the dwarven city from the eastern side. If they decide to go back through the Gates of Power, the GM will have to railroad. In the finale, the mallard assassin Ankh-Tah-Leh will try to steal the Heart of Darkness: if she succeeds, the ending will be «somewhat anticlimatic». How do you avoid it? You decide that Ankh-Tah-Leh's Sneaking roll fails or maybe you decide that the players' arrows hit. Either way, the choice is between an unsatisfactory ending for a major campaign and railroading, choose wisely!
One of the reasons why The Secret of the Dragon Emperor is such a great campaign is that all the scenarios are consistent with the rules of the game. Each adventure has a place to explore and a treasure to retrieve and presents some kind of challenge that can be approached in multiple ways. All of the adventures also have some kind of exploit that reward observant and creative players.
Path of Glory doesn't adhere to the design model of its predecessor and is unable to provide a decent alternative. The adventure sites in the first chapter, for example, are incredibly bland: they lack random encounters, enigmas, environmental hazards, everything that made the Dragon Emperor's adventure fun and creative. There's the Old Barrow that is basically a copy of Riddermound, if you remove the goblins, the spider, the weird visions, the locked doors and add more undead to fight. The Chasm of Caves (obvious reference to The Keep on the Borderlands) is just a series of rooms filled with hobgoblins that attack you on sight. The module even points out that you can't sneak around the sentinels, effectively making combat the only way to approach the dungeon.
There are a few attempts to enrich the campaign with different kinds of scenarios, but the results are laughable at best. In the third chapter the characters will have to defend the city of Stonemouth from the assault of the undead army. The module handles this situation with a three-phase scenario:
This is just lazy design. I've had larger scale battles during random encounters in the Dragon Emperor.
Another poorly designed encounter is the very final scene, where the characters have one last fight with Sathmog himself as they are about to destroy his Heart. This isn't even handled as an actual combat, because Sathmog doesn't have a statblock. The characters have to do a WIL check or they lose HP, the first one who succeeds destroys the Hearth. And what if they all fail? Nothing really, because Sathmog isn't actually strong enough to return. I can't comprehend why they chose to make the final battle so anticlimatic and low stakes.
The encounter with Karlak Sol-Tar is such a perfect summary of all the issues of Path of Glory that it deserves a whole section of the review to be analyzed in detail. Karlak is a Dragon Knight that comes from over the sea, where Eledain's empire never fell. He appears just after the fight with Dakoth, the necromancer.
The first issue is that the dragon Ash-Ark-Afar doesn't match the idea of dragons has it has been presented in the Dragonbane lore. Dragons should be ancient and powerful beings, the ancestral agents of order, worshipped as deities by Eledain's empire. Ash-Ark-Afar is just a mount: doesn't speak, doesn't have any kind of agency, just obeys its knight.
Second issue: the encounter itself is a textbook example of railroading via deus ex machina. If Dakoth defeats the characters «the dragon opens its huge mouth and obliterates the surprised necromancer with a single devastating avalanche of fire. Only the box containing the Heart of Darkness remains where he stood, smoking with heat but still intact».
Literally six lines after the module describes the Heart of Darkness being immune to fire, we have this:«Karlak Sol-Tar claims to know that the Heart of Darkness can be destroyed by dragon fire, and demands that it be handed over for immediate destruction». Maybe Karlak is just very stupid, or maybe the module forgot to tell us that the box (not the Heart itself) is fireproof. I'm afraid this is just a terrible editing mistake (third issue).
Fourth issue: why is Karlak asking the characters to hand him the Hearth, if they are on the floor dying after they have been defeated by Dakoth? Shouldn't he just take it?
Fifth issue: the module expects that the characters will refuse to hand the Hearth to Karlak, because, in order to lift the curse of the Dead Forest, they have to bring it to the Forest and destroy it there. You remember that the final goal of this whole thing was to revert the dry tree curse, right? I hope that your players will. Because if they don't remember the curse (likely), or if they remember but they are just happy to have stopped the necromancer's evil plan (very likely), or if they just trust Karlak because he's a Dragon Knight and he's obviously one of the good guys and also probably a patron (even more likely), the campaign breaks. The module doesn't tell us what happens if Ash-Ark-Afar breathes fire on the Hearth: if it is destroyed, it's just a lame ending for the campaign. If it isn't, the whole scene falls apart.
Path of Glory is a deeply flawed product. The campaign premise is weak, the overall structure is railroad-y, the scenarios aren't exciting, the lore is generic and sometimes inconsistent. However, the worst thing is that it doesn't feel like a Dragonbane module. To me, it seems more like a generic fantasy adventure that was hurriedly ported to the Dragonbane system, without actually taking in consideration the peculiarities of the game. Considering that it is a rework of an old Drakar och Demoner module, this is probably what happened.
You could appreciate it if you want to play a trad D&D campaign with a classic fantasy feel and a lighter ruleset and if you don't mind the railroading. But if you enjoyed The Secret of the Dragon Emperor, prepare to be deeply disappointed. This is not "more of the same".