Bones of Contention

E.L. Thomas brings us an adventure for 4-5 characters of level 2-3, but can be scaled up to just over level 5 with the advice included at the beginning. It’s basically a zombie (actually both zombie and skeleton) apocalypse in a small village that works on a timer: the PCs arrive, skeletons start to overrun the village, and any villagers that die rise as zombies moments later.

It’s extremely well done: there are several non-combat opportunities to slow the tide but not enough to stem it. This ensures hordes of undead will rise, so players will have to make hard choices between combat, skill checks, investigation and roleplay, and then using all of that to solve the problem. The PCs can engage in destroying potential sources of new undead, uncovering a Mcguffin and using it to end the horde, and deal with commoners that become zombies. A really handy flowchart is included that provides triggers, summarizes the challenges (especially numbers of monsters), and tells you when to move on to the next bit.

The adventure notably features a plausible “everyone is infected” angle that doesn’t threaten the PCs unless you want it to, and have time for some initial roleplay scenes in which the characters might sample some of the local food — beware! There’s a good variety of undead: townsfolk become zombies, and otherwise the players are dealing with 5 wildly different types of skeletons. There are also about a half-dozen NPCs statted up, so if the hordes of undead overwhelm the PCs, it’s easy to hand them an NPC to run and keep the action going. It’s worth adding that NPCs have a useful set of activities to carry out during the conflict, and concise rules for helping each round or dying while they try. This part could benefit from a checklist, though, which is a noticeable miss after the useful flowchart mentioned earlier.

Bones of Contention map

Memorable Monsters: Trolls

E.L. Thomas writes this article about mixing up your trolls to surprise experienced players. It covers four troll mutations that stem from their regeneration ability (such as grafting armor over wounds, increasing their AC but reducing their Dexterity). It also provides six more involved rules tweaks to trolls, adding new actions or special traits from other monsters or class abilities that are thematic and easy to implement.

Sites & Settings: Drop in for a Pint

MK Reed brings us a tavern with a fun menu, but the highlight is the great NPCs and plot threads specifically designed to put players back on track in an adventure. They are presented as archetypal NPC types (though they are named individually, as well) that you drop into the game at a moment’s notice to provide setting lore, allow the PCs an opportunity to pick up a hireling, heal the party, give them a useful item or job lead, or provide a quick diversionary scene to break up combat. To illustrate this, some of the headers include: Locate a Person, Give Directions, Drop In Some Gear, Heal Up My Dudes, Drop Some Setting Lore. They are easily portable to any situation, and written in a way that you can easily setup a scene, help the players out, and move on with the adventure at hand.

Running the Game: Death and How to I’ve With It

Josh Trujillo writes about different ways to approach character death, handle its unexpected appearance, or even pre-plan it with your players for maximum effect.

Ghost Carnival

Anne Toole gives an adventure perfect for any Tier 1 characters. Vengeful ghosts take over a carnival and bring the carnies and PCs to a demiplane. The only escape is to succeed at carnival games: each success frees one carnie or PC, but each failure leads to psychic damage or attacks on the captured carnies themselves, keeping the PCs in line! Each challenge is varied and uses a good mix of skills, random odds via different sized dice rolls, and occasionally attacks and saves with conditions (like blinded). The ghosts themselves (a new monster called a mischievous haunt) are beatable but regenerate fully once destroyed unless the source of their ties to the demiplane is destroyed. The players can easily try a multi-pronged approach with some fighting, some searching for and destroying the ghosts’ source, and others handling the challenges. There’s not much advice for how the ghosts react to events outside of the specific carnival game challenges and no map, but given this is meant to be a fun diversion or one shot, it doesn’t suffer for it.

Adventure Craft: Quick & Simple Dungeons

E.L. Thomas takes inspiration from Sly Flourish’s Lazy DM books and presents this dead simple six step process to create an 8-room dungeon. It’s a highly functional process that provides a tight theme, varied challenges, potential friendly encounters, and a decent treasure haul. It requires you have the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual (or the D&D Basic Rules) handy, but does all the heavy lifting for you in terms of fitting the pieces together to create a fully developed session’s worth of adventure in 15-30 minutes. Aside from its obvious origins in Lazy DM advice, it also calls back to the Five-Room Dungeon concept, but with added focus of theme plus slightly more encounter variety. That’s helpful because you can then cut down what you create to make a smaller dungeon as needed, but have some extra stuff in case a session goes long or the players are very quick to plow through any of the challenges.

Conclusion

I remain a little annoyed by the monster stat block layout omitting horizontal lines to break up sections. Additionally, the text still doesn’t follow official Wizards of the Coast style guide assumptions like bolding monster names. That aside, the art and layout is always a joy in these books, and you can pick up the maps (and other stuff) for several adventures at Rolled & Told’s website. The fact that there are dozens of new monsters and NPCs, plus useful, functional columns that cover at-the-table friendly ideas, really makes this series shine, providing endless inspiration at any gaming table.

If I may be so bold as to make a suggestion to the Rolled & Told team: get the compiled book up on DriveThruRPG, and get the comics (and or compilation) up on DriveThruComics. That’s where the market for this OGL stuff largely is, and you deserve to be a bigger name in the game!

Anyway, I love this issue. 4 out of 5 stars!

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