AL 6 – Playing the Game (DCC)
This funnel for 0-level DCC-characters clocks in at 13 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page SRD, leaving us with 11 pages of content, so let’s take a look, shall we?
This being an adventure-review, the following contains SPOILERS. Potential players may wish to jump to the conclusion.
All right, still here? So, how does this adventure begin? Well, each character has met an interesting, strange traveler from a far away land who challenges the PC for a game of Arbakampsi, an easy, tactical board-game first introduced in a Purple Duck Storeroom-installment. Upon agreeing, the unsuspecting heroes to be find themselves trapped upon the board – separated ad forced t play a variant of the very game from within. In order to triumph, they have to understand their own predicament. Now the interesting component here would be that each character voices his/her intended action and then, after all have spoken, the judge tells the results.
The respective rings of the colored board (which is btw. provided in this supplement) feature challenges – beyond combat with serpents of water and windpigs, each ring also sports a puzzle – and these are interesting – like showing a player a circular message for ONE second – the only way out; requiring the PCs to work together.
In the central ring, a series of questions tests the mind of the PCs further – success at these questions may net the PCs elemental lords as patrons and corresponding benefits, whereas failure has them confront deadly, weapon-destroying duplicates.
The elemental princes/princesses Grom, Splaasha and Krakaal are provided alongside rules for spell-burn for them and advice on scaling/adapting the module and properly playing the game can be found herein as well – quite a feat at this brevity!
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are very good, I noticed n significant glitches. Layout adheres to a printer-friendly two-column b/w-standard with nice b/w-artworks and a colored arbakampsi-board. The pdf comes fully bookmarked for your convenience.
Perry Fehr is best when creating odd societies and believable environments or when going utterly bonkers – this module is a fine example of the latter – this uncommon take on the classic trope is dauntingly different: With a focus on player-smarts above PC-luck, this is a surprisingly challenging, thinking man’s module and an uncommon, cool introduction to a given campaign, its potential for scaling further making this easily adapted to other systems and levels – since the scenario and the puzzles are the bulk of the module, this is an extremely versatile little gem. Uncommon, creative and fun, this pdf deserves a final rating of 5 stars.
You can get this nice module here on OBS and here on d20pfsrd.com’s shop.
Endzeitgeist out.
