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Matthew
2009-08-23, 05:36 PM
Picked this up a couple of months back and finally got round to reading it recently. I reviewed this with an eye towards using it with a lighter system, but since it was written for D20/3e I thought this review might also be useful to the folks on this forum that play D20/3e.

http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i226/Plle200/Reviews/GMG4600CoverLarge.jpg

JG1 Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor (http://www.goodman-games.com/4600preview.html)

Authors: Robert Bledsaw and Robert J. Conley.
Contents: 64 perfect bound black and white pages, 1 title page, 59 pages of adventure, 4 pages of appendices, and 1 open game license page.
Publisher: Goodman Games.
Product Code: GMG4600.
Retail Price: £10.75 or $15.99.

Overview

An adventure for 4-6 characters of levels 10-12, the Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor presents a five level dungeon combined with a small fortified settlement. The module was originally written and designed for use with first edition, being published by Judges' Guild in 1981 as the seventh instalment of their Judges Guild Member Subscription. It was adapted for use with third edition by Robert J. Conley, being published in 2004 by Goodman Games in cooperation with Eostros Games and Judges' Guild. The binding is clean, the cover stock and internal pages are durable, the printing clear, and the maps well rendered on full pages in black and white. The cover illustration by Stephan Poag evokes the early years of the hobby, and the interior illustrations by William McAusland are workmanlike and typical of the art direction Goodman Games uses for its Dungeon Crawl Classics line.

As one would expect, the default location for the fortress is the Wilderlands of High Fantasy, in this case several hundred miles south of the City-State of the Invincible Overlord, but it could reasonably easily be placed in some other swords & sorcery campaign setting. The back of the module suggests that the adventurers have been hired to track down a bandit leader named Cragen, and the text offers a number of other possible hooks to get the player characters involved, such as rescuing a missing elf maiden or seeking fabled treasures in the mysterious tombs of the Dragon Kings. The adventure is written in a fairly open manner so that there are significantly different levels of difficulty, depending on the objective of the party and how far they need to penetrate the dungeon as a result.

The outside world believes that the fortress of Badabaskor is the stronghold of an evil cult, but it has in fact been in the possession of brigands for at least two decades. There are several bands united under the leadership of Cragen, who styles himself duke but maintains the facade that the cult still controls Badabaskor. The bandits are in league with orcs, trolls, and worse, occupying the upper works and first two levels of the dungeon. The third level is the lair of an ancient red dragon, her mate, and her brood. These serve to divide the bandits from the remains of the evil cult, who have been living on create food and water spells for twenty years, and the tombs of the Dragon Kings. This set up feels a bit forced and is something of a strain on suspension of disbelief.

Nevertheless, the fortress is full of interesting details, factions within factions, and independent groups with their own agendas. There is a lot of room for negotiation, deception, and political intrigue, as long as the party does not simply try to take on the bandits in open battle or plough through the dungeon by force of arms. The author mentions that if the fortress is used as an evil town or base of operations it might be suitable for characters of levels 5-9, and that is probably a more reasonable power range if it is hoped that the party will rely on stealth and subtlety to complete their objectives. The adapted upper works are home to less than two hundred bandits, which is maybe a quarter to a fifth of the number in the original adventure. Since most are normal man types, it would not be beyond a strong party to sack the settlement.

Technicalities and Errors

There are rather a lot of editing errors and odd turns of phrase in Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor. Nothing that really harms playability, but it is a little irritating when sentences simply peter out, such as with the end of the description of the crown of the crystal mind on page 34. I similarly found disconcerting the occasional use of "role-play" in place of "negotiate", as though the former was a limited action, rather than the ongoing mode of play. That is pretty picky, though, and deadlines are what they are. There are occasional layout issues, such as the squeezing of the description of the town of Zothay onto page 61, but for the most part everything is given sufficient space and reads very easily.

It was somewhat disappointing that there were only four internal illustrations in addition to the maps, each taking up a quarter to a third of a page. This was doubly irritating when weighed against the number of repeated and overly large statistics blocks that plague third edition products. Indeed, it would be safe to say that maybe half of the page count of Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor is taken up by statistic blocks, which I understand was also distasteful to the author. Though this matters little for the purposes of running the adventure for first edition, it should probably be noted that the statistic blocks often do not correlate accurately with the text. For instance, the orcs in area 9 on page 26 are said to be armed with spears and shields, but are listed with great axes in their statistics block. Far more commonly, the text will indicate the presence of a different number of creatures to the statistics block, as with the hell hound(s) on pp. 27-28. Although this may completely undo my credentials, I also noticed that Angall of the Perpetual Void was listed s having the "two weapon fighting" feat tree, when in fact he should have been listed with "multi weapon fighting" (having four arms).

Conclusion

If I were going to run Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor then I would be inclined to make some significant changes. The dragons I would remove or reorder so that their lair was below the tombs of the dragon kings. I would then change the relationship between the bandits and the cult so that the former had been hired to serve the needs of the latter, but had since become difficult to control, if not outright defiant. As tensions reach boiling point the adventurers arrive and find themselves in a potentially Yojimbo sort of position. I would also have to take the number of classed characters in hand. I am told that Judges' Guild took something of "a class for everyone and for everyone a class" approach, but I find it somewhat unpalatable. Regardless, this adventure has a lot of potential and plenty of interesting detail. Conley's expansions on the original material do it no real damage and often add a new dimension. There is no "read aloud text" and brevity remains the rule outside of the statistic blocks. Indeed, Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor could make for some very memorable evenings of play.

ColdSepp
2009-08-23, 05:51 PM
Thanks for the review!

Starbuck_II
2009-08-23, 06:34 PM
How are the CR's?

Are they reasonably strong, a little underpowered, or about right?

Matthew
2009-08-23, 07:05 PM
Thanks for the review!

Glad to be of service.



How are the CR's?

Are they reasonably strong, a little underpowered, or about right?

Not sure. Most of the stuff in the upper works and on levels 1-2 is fairly easy going, with classed humanoids that are getting direct level to challenge ratings, with NPC classes having 1 less. So, an Orc Barbarian 3 is rated CR 3, a Human Warrior 3 is rated CR 2, and a Human Warrior 1 is rated CR 1. Then there are more questionable decisions like a Human Commoner 8 being rated CR 7. Example ECLs are things like [(1 Human Fighter 5 + 21 Human Fighters 3) = ECL 12], which is probably too high, and [(1 Orc Barbarian 5 + 4 Orc Barbarians 3) = ECL 6], which is probably not far off.

The ECL of the ancient red dragons come in at 34 and 40 (they aren't meant to be fought, of course), but those ratings are a bit on the high side. I suppose to some extent it depends whether you mean "by the book" CR ratings or "real" CR ratings. The math seems to be right for the most part, but it has been a while since I was calculating this stuff, so I am not the best judge. In reality, the CRs are probably going to be somewhat variable because they do not really take into account terrain or the disproportionate power of spell casters at high levels.

kjones
2009-08-23, 08:29 PM
Thanks for the review, it's always good to have a real gamer help to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Did you actually play this, or did you just read it? If you played it, what was the party?

Matthew
2009-08-24, 10:45 AM
Thanks for the review, it's always good to have a real gamer help to separate the wheat from the chaff.

My pleasure.



Did you actually play this, or did you just read it? If you played it, what was the party?

No, unfortunately I have not had the time to run it as yet. Probably I will expand the review once we have done that, but chances are we will not be using D20/3e to do it. I think, if I were to run it using D20 I would not be inclined to have a party with more than one cleric and wizard, but I think that is probably the received wisdom these days. :smallbiggrin:

kjones
2009-08-24, 02:39 PM
What system would you run it with, then? Just out of curiosity.

I ask because many modules seem to be written with a party of "meatshield fighter, skillmonkey rogue, healbot cleric, blaster wizard" in mind, and are ill equipped to deal with deviations from this mold. I played in one Goodman Games module as a 10th level beguiler, and managed to accidentally bypass a good half of the thing by way of a scroll of overland flight. (Message to module writers - it's a good idea to assume that a 10th level party has access to flight.)

This isn't to say that all modules should be written with munchkins in mind, or should be designed to deal with every contingency - merely that many of them seem written in ignorance of what mid- to high-level D&D characters are capable of doing.

Matthew
2009-08-24, 08:09 PM
What system would you run it with, then? Just out of curiosity.

If I was going to run it as written, probably Castles & Crusades; if I was going to take the time to convert all the statistic blocks, then probably some variation on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. If I had a group of experienced D20/3e players I would run it using that system for the novelty, but most of my players are pretty casual so much easier to use a lighter system.



I ask because many modules seem to be written with a party of "meatshield fighter, skillmonkey rogue, healbot cleric, blaster wizard" in mind, and are ill equipped to deal with deviations from this mold. I played in one Goodman Games module as a 10th level beguiler, and managed to accidentally bypass a good half of the thing by way of a scroll of overland flight. (Message to module writers - it's a good idea to assume that a 10th level party has access to flight.)

This isn't to say that all modules should be written with munchkins in mind, or should be designed to deal with every contingency - merely that many of them seem written in ignorance of what mid- to high-level D&D characters are capable of doing.

Yeah, this is a problem with many D20/3e adventures, but fortunately it is not something that Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor seems to suffer from, mainly because there are no real "choke points" and it is not set up as a linear Alpha to Omega style adventure. My chief concern would be with the dragons and multiple spell casters focusing on ability damage; the resources available to a party made up primarily of level 12 spell casters might significantly reduce the intended threat of the dragons.

That said, this is not an adventure that would suffer if the party was made up of tier 2 classes. Beguilers, Warblades, Truenamers, and so on would be fine. There is rather a lot of treasure to be had, though, and as I mentioned above the statistic blocks are a little shaky, so any game master will have to keep an eye on that. A group of 6 tier 2 classes of level 12 should find looting the tombs of the dragon kings reasonably challenging, though they will want to bypass the upper dungeon levels.

kjones
2009-08-24, 09:36 PM
...Beguilers, Warblades, Truenamers...

Did... did you just mention truenamers in the same breath as warblades with regards to power? :smalleek:

Matthew
2009-08-24, 10:30 PM
Did... did you just mention truenamers in the same breath as warblades with regards to power? :smalleek:

Are Truenamers tier 3? I am not that familiar with them. I thought all the classes in Tome of Magic were considered tier 2.

kjones
2009-08-24, 10:59 PM
From here (http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=1002.0):


And then there's the Truenamer, which is just broken (as in, the class was improperly made and doesn't function appropriately).

But this is thoroughly irrelevant... let's talk about the module some more! In a lot of modules that I've run, the world is entirely static. Does this module have provisions for if the players come in, clear out the first level, and then retreat for a few days before venturing forth?

Matthew
2009-08-25, 10:49 AM
From here (http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=1002.0):

That is interesting; for some reason I was under the impression that it was a much less formal three tier system.



But this is thoroughly irrelevant... let's talk about the module some more! In a lot of modules that I've run, the world is entirely static. Does this module have provisions for if the players come in, clear out the first level, and then retreat for a few days before venturing forth?

Good question. Being set in the Wilderlands of High Fantasy, Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor includes a close up map of the terrain hex in which it is situated, and more bands of brigands can be found in that area. However, the way the adventure is written, most of the encounter areas become "active" when the player characters enter them, which is somewhat at odds with what the text has to say about alerting the denizens. No real advice is provided for how the dungeon might react to a raid, or be restocked in the immediate aftermath, though it is not hard to imagine what might happen. There are things "going on" that once activated become time dependent, so for instance the dungeon will change if the adventurers encounter some of the cultists and then retire to rest up for a few days.

Clearing the dungeon level by level is possible, but it is probably the hardest way to deal with the adventure.