Fully usable with 0one's Black & White: White Wyvern Inn miniature scale tiles, The Spirit of the White Wyvern is made for a group of player characters of levels 4 to 5 inclusive. Whether your taste is for roleplay, investigation, or daring combat, experience the welcome at the White Wyvern Inn. With cheerful customers, exotic travelers, and a thing that goes bump every night, you’re certain of entertainment and mystery in this Pathfinder Roleplaying Game compatible adventure!
This adventure was specifically designed to be used with the tiles contained in 0one's Black & White: White Wyvern Inn product, but it can be easily played without them. Furthermore it can be inserted into any ongoing campaign with ease.
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This adventure is 34 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial/ToC, 1 page SRD, 1 page advertisement and 1 page back cover, leaving 29 pages of content for the adventure, so let's check it out!
I'll start with my usual disclaimer: This being an adventure-review, it contains SPOILERS. Players might wish to jump to the conclusion!
The "Spirit of the White Wyvern" takes place at aforementioned inn, located some place in your campaign setting, preferably at some trade route. As one would come to expect from 0onegames, the inn features a detailed, excellent map - but what takes place over the course of this adventure? Well, it turns out the inn is run by a former adventurer who managed to cross a powerful cabal of evildoers and is hiding here from them - thanks to the divination-thwarting property of the inn, he had managed to elude their grasp and hide an artifact from them.
Unfortunately, some time ago a traveling minstrel has been killed in the undisclosed vicinity of the inn and haunts the place ever since, becoming a kind of oddity and mascot that draws more attention and crowds than the proprietor would like. Thus, the PCs are recruited to put the harmless, benevolent and yet tortured spirit to rest. Over the course of their stay, the agents of the evil cabal have already infiltrated the inn and seeks to enlist the aid of the PCs as well. In the following sequence of events, kidnap attempts, lies and attacks by several humanoid strike-squads, the PCs will be hard-pressed to protect the inn and its staff and guests. In the end, the owner will probably have to relocate and the PCs will have a inn - with or without the spirit, for securing a large enough audience to finally show off his masterpiece to might just be a more taxing task than anticipated, but that's beyond the scope of this adventure. It should be noted that each and every character and creature gets his/her/its own statblock.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are actually very good, I only noticed one minor punctuation glitch, netting the adventure top-scores in this particular department. Layout adheres to an elegant 2-column b/w-standard and the artworks are b/w and absolutely top-notch as well. The pdf is extensively bookmarked. On to the content: I like the use of an actually interesting red herring to cover up what has been truly going on and how the structure of the adventure is interesting. I would have loved a map without a map key to print out for my players, though. I have but one central gripe with this module, though it weighs quite a lot, at least for me: As interesting as the cast of characters is, the conflict between two factions could have been more exciting. The antagonists have not the most intriguing agenda and feel like card box cut outs - while the generic nature of both organizations featured herein makes integration of them into any given campaign easy, the also feel extremely bland as a consequence.
I also would have loved the ultimate fate of the spirit to have an encounter/representation. While the adventure is not bad, it is also not one that blew me away. My players waltzed through it in one session, which is also something you should be aware of. I'm not sure why, but as I read it and when I dmed it, the only thing this adventure delivered for me personally was an overwhelming sense of "meh". An interesting build-up essentially goes nowhere, the potential of the neat characters is more or less squandered as the adventure devolves and becomes a slugfest, of which I've quite frankly seen better ones. The interesting components remain mostly un(-der)developed and the potential the whole set-up has remains bland in its execution of tropes I've seen and read done better. Thus, I consider this adventure to be 2.5 stars, rounded down to 2 for not being bad, but somewhat boring. Mechanically, there's nothing wrong here and if you're looking for a tavern-sourcebook, this might even be 4 stars for you. As an adventure, though, it fails in my opinion. My final verdict will thus be 3 stars.
As I look over any of 0one's mapsets, adventure ideas always begin to stir... so, here is the first in a line that takes some of their 'Black and White' line of game-ready tiles and battlemaps and presents you with an adventure tailored to that location.
The location in question is the White Wyvern Inn, situated with an eye to the travelling (and adventuring) community about a day's journey from anywhere... you pick a suitable place in your campaign world. The adventure is not just based in the inn, it is built around the very fabric of the place, and provides opportunities for those who wish to exercise their brains and their role-playing abilities, as well as their sword-arms.
The work begins with some extensive background, some of which can be explained to the characters as events unfold, some of which they might find out for themselves... and some of which they may never know, but which make for a rich experience as you use the whole to good effect as the game proceeds.
It is left to you to arrange for the characters to be in the White Wyvern Inn. Perhaps they're 'passing trade' or they may have been sent for deliberately... because the landlord has a bit of a problem. A ghost that haunts the taproom, playing the organ and entertaining the patrons, even acting as bouncer when people get a bit rowdy. But it has a disquieting habit of possessing someone mid-evening and declaiming a monologue in their voice, leaving them unharmed it is fair to say, but not everyone is happy about it and so the landlord has decided that the spook must go. Can the characters help?
Naturally, there's plenty else going on, even if the task of discovering how to ensure that the ghost goes to its rest was not enough. There's a whole cast of well-detailed characters each with their own distinct personality, agenda and set actions for the night - picking their way through what everyone is up to will provide plenty to keep your characters busy, never mind attending to their ghost-busting duties. Some may attack, some will try to enlist the characters' aid in their own schemes... and should you wish to make this an integral part of an ongoing campaign, rather than a one-night stand, much can be used to foreshadow further adventures.
The Inn itself naturally plays a starring role, and is described in loving detail, and referencing the original mapset if you have it. There's a decent-size map for the GM to work from, and if you like lots of floorplans and battlemaps to put in front of your players you can either get the original White Wyvern Inn set or don't buy this at all but get the Spirit of the White Wyvern Game Pack instead: adventure, maps, tokens and more.
After all this, background and maps and room descriptions and all, we actually reach the adventure itself. On page 8, there it is, the 'read aloud' text to introduce the characters to what you have in store for them - must be one of the longest introductions I've read in a long time! Once launched by their arrival, events move at a cracking pace with plenty of detail about what the NPCs are doing and how they will react to whatever the characters get up to. Everything is presented in two parts - there are the 'location' based events that will take place whenever the characters go to the stated location, and the 'timed' sequence of events that will take place at the appropriate time wherever the characters have got to... all melding together to create a vivid alternate reality that should come to life around your characters.
It's a cracking little location-based adventure with a lot crammed in, full of excitement. Drop this in somewhere suitable, tweak events a little to fit your own campaign, and it could become a momentous and memorable part of the story you and your players are creating together.