roguerouge's page

This module is remarkable. The party starts out going through a carnival, complete with grannies with pies, candy apples, beer garden, ice maze, Test-Your-Strength... and then goes through it all again when the carnival goes real horror show. The fae-altered ice carving, "Lumber Yard of Tomorrow!", candy apples and pie eating contest had my player screaming! This is one of the few adventures that get the vengeful alien humor of the fae myths. Your players will respect them after this one.

The one change I'd make, however, is that the scary clown on the cover does not appear in the module. I changed the thinly-veiled DMPC carnival owner into the cover clown and made him an antagonist. My player is still trying to find a way to sell Clown Shoes of the Elvenkind!

This adventure features everything that you'd want to see in an urban adventure: an undercover mission, a heist, opportunities for player tomfoolery, ingenious fights, exploring, a dungeon crawl, and a seven course meal with live snakes.

Even better? It’s ridiculously easy to yoink this adventure for your homebrew campaign: just change the object of the heist. It should also be fairly easy to scale for higher levels.

The plot summary (spoilers ahoy): The PCs need to retrieve something from the mayor’s vault. Fortunately, the mayor’s both decadent and a patron of the arts. A theater is going to put on a new version of a dangerous play, in which the actors face real torments and monsters for the amusement of their social betters. If it’s a hit, the mayor’s sure to host a days-long cast party. All the PCs need to do is get cast by a Gordon Ramsey clone, survive a dress rehearsal in front of a derisive peanut gallery, and then stay in characters while they’re attacked by monsters and tortured by one of their own party. Woe to the wizard cast as the paladin!

Then, there’s the cast party, finding the vault and dealing with the monsters and traps inside. The vault makes this last section of the adventure no ordinary dungeon-crawl. It’s a demi-plane that features logically impossible features, such as looking up a staircase and seeing the back of your head, far away.

Also included is a play, so that if you want to have your players read lines, you can. It’s basically an inverted morality play, so its style is going to be pretty far away from David Mamet. Prepare your players for: characters who are representations of particular vices and virtues rather than people with motivations, characters who issue proclamations rather than dialogue, and a didactic tone to the script. It’s an inversion of an ancient popular form and perfectly fitting for a lawful evil DnD city generally, and Golarion in particular.

If you have a group of players more interested in high adventure, the script is pretty optional. You can run the theater sections easily without intensive role playing too.

Also included: several monsters (hit man devil, scalable death knight, high-CR angel, and bird swarm), four pre-gen characters, and some fiction of interest only to readers heavily invested in Golarion.

Basically, this adventure is a must-buy for its laughs, drama, and adventure.