Grasker has never been exactly "normal." Obsessed with the filth, decay, and corruption of the natural world, he has recently been exiled for violently defending the carrion pit that had been his home. Now withdrawn into the wilderness, he has slowly begun to transform the surrounding landscape into a perverted paradise of worms and rotting flesh. Can the PCs stop the corruption before it spreads through an entire forest?
A Compleat Encounter, scalable to any level, featuring a mad druid, his compost elemental servant, and a magical stone menhir.
• Written by James Jacobs
• Designed by Andrew Hou
• Sculpted by Dennis Mize
• Cartography by Corey Macourek
Paizo Publishing's GameMastery™ Line is designed to help GMs run interesting games quickly and efficiently.
Compleat Encounters provide everything you need to run a single encounter:
3 brilliantly sculpted, high-quality, 25mm-scale one-piece metal miniatures
Grove of the Mad Druid is another product in Paizo's short-lived "Compleat Encounters" line. Combining a short adventure, gridded encounter tiles, and metal miniatures, the line was an interesting and innovative idea that ultimately didn't succeed. I ran Grove of the Mad Druid as part of a homebrew "Roots of Golarion" ("The Magic Mirror") campaign, and for whatever reason, I liked it better than some of the others in the series I've played. As the name indicates, the adventure involves a druid (named Gaskar) whose devotion to the natural concept of rot has started causing problems in the area. There's not really much of an adventure hook (the PCs can either just stumble into his grove or be "hired by someone" to investigate). The encounter involves Gaskar himself, his condor animal companion, a "carrion golem" he's constructed, several traps, and a cool new spell called spiritual menhir (it allows a caster to hide while casting spells that emanate from a mobile menhir). Unlike some of the flip-cards of other products in the line, I found the ones with this set intuitive and actually pretty neat--the hollow tree and the collapsed compost heap were fun to reveal. The artwork of the carrion golem is awesome (I love the equivalent of "roadkill" integrated into its body) and the drawing of the menhir is fine (a bit generic, but that's understandable), though the art for Gasker needs work. The set I have didn't include the miniatures (either by design or because I purchased it second-hand), but from photos, the pattern from the artwork continues (carrion golem and menhir are cool, druid not so much).
Anyway, this is a "Compleat Encounter" that does live up to its name. It'd be easy for a GM to spice up a long overland trek through the forest with gradual but ominously increasing signs of decay that lead to the mad druid's grove. I've now played all but one of the products in the line, and Grove of the Mad Druid may be the best.
