Here’s the third full-length adventure from GRAmel for Beasts & Barbarians. It’s a 58 page PDF, part adventure and part setting expansion.
The adventure is in four parts; as ever, I’ll try to minimise spoilers, but it’s not giving much away to tell you that the PCs wake up in a strange place with no memory of how they got there, and their objectives are to figure out what happened to them and find their way home. My experience so far is that each part in one of these adventures takes about four hours for my group to get through, give or take, and since that’s how long our weekly session lasts, I’ll get about a month’s worth of adventuring out of Green World.
The adventure takes up about 30 pages, after which we get expansions to the Beasts & Barbarians setting. There are a dozen or so new beasts and NPCs, and a 14 page section on demons, those who worship them, and those who fight them. Amongst other things, this explains what the enigmatic Stylites are actually doing.
As ever with Umberto Pignatelli’s adventures, Green World makes full and clever use of classic Swords & Sorcery tropes; Conan would be right at home here. In this case, we have damsels in distress, vile creatures bent on consuming same, demon-worshipping savages, and a lost world.
Some foreshadowing is useful in running the adventure; I’d recommend doing that several sessions in advance.
It’s also worth noting that the B&B adventures played in sequence show a natural progression northwards and eastwards through the game setting, and that some of the smaller adventures fit into it. So far, I’d say the logical progression is: Death of a Tyrant, Citadel of the Winged Gods, The Skinner of Syranthia, Green World, The Carnival at Nal Sagath, Wolves in the Borderlands, and The Cliff Queen’s Court. Vengeance of the Branded Devils could come at the end of that arc, at a stretch, although it’s intended as the introductory scenario. If you start the heroes at Seasoned, as recommended, and award the usual two experience per session, they’d be well into Heroic by that point.
Rating: 5 out of 5. I was really started to feel jaded, and this series of adventures has perked me up nicely.
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