The Firemaker (PFRPG)

4.00/5 (based on 2 ratings)
The Firemaker (PFRPG)

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The Firemaker (PFRPG)

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A Pathfinder Roleplaying Game adventure for 4-6 characters of level 1.

Goblins have been raiding the crops and livestock of “Pig’s Trotter” for the last few weeks now. Nobody knows where they’ve come from or what they’re doing here but local farmers are sufficiently displeased with their activities to have offered a 200gp reward to have them stopped.

Sounds like a nice little job for a neophyte group of adventurers out for their first taste of fame and glory. “I mean it’s just a Goblin-Bash, right? What could possibly go wrong …”

Four Dollar Dungeons are standalone adventures designed to be logical, entertaining, challenging and balanced, and easily integrated into any campaign world.

Each adventure has enough material to last two to three playing sessions and enough experience to raise four characters of the appropriate level up by one extra level. Treasure is commensurate with the encounter challenges faced. Scaling information is included for adventuring parties of five or six.

Although "The Firemaker" begins in a small village, most of the action takes place underground.

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4.00/5 (based on 2 ratings)

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Bring a 10-foot pole. And be prepared.

4/5

The Firebringer is an adventure for 1st level characters, providing enough treasure and XP to bring a party of 4 characters to 2nd level by the conclusion. It is based around an old abandoned dwarven mithral mine, since overrun by goblinoids (amongst other things), set near the village of Pig's Trotter (heh).

I was lucky enough to be sent a review copy for 4DD, and was warned that it is a) their weakest work, and b) quite tough.

If this is their weakest work, I'm looking forward to seeing more, and this thing is deadly as all hell.

When playing this module, I had to take some liberties with the setting - I'd already run an introductory session for my players and was hemming and hawing about how to move a plotline along, when the review copy of this module fell into my possession, and it was a godsend. I needed goblins. It has goblins. I needed the goblins to have a home. They have a home. I needed them to have a reason to be out raiding. They have a reason to be out raiding. So far, so good.

On the downside, I have only 3 players (plus a plucky half-elf teenager NPC), and the intro session was set in the wilderness, some miles from any settlement.

So, I set about making the few minor adapatations I needed to this adventure to squeeze it in to my setup, and set my players loose.

The Good
A complete adventure, with an extraordinary amount of detail, background, and flavour. Every creature has a reason for being their, and different relationships with the other creatures present. Every room has a reason to exist, and the little touches like statues of the individual dwarves who founded the mine being scattered around the 4-level complex were delightful (and yes, my players did pick up on the keyhole/hidden key thing).

XP/Treasure table. This addition was perhaps my favourite part (and I really liked a lot of things in this adventure): near the beginning is a room-by-room breakdown of the dungeon, with the XP award for defeating the challenge, and the treasure awarded, with values, so you can easily see what there is. There's also guidance on the table for increasing the treasure if you have a larger party.

Zombie dragon! My favourite creature in this whole thing, which my players avoided like the plague (they made good stealth checks, it sucks at perception) is the zombie white dragon. I was really looking forward to describing it drunkenly flopping down in front of them, gobs of flesh hanging from its bones, as it lazily shambles towards them. But they ran away. Ah, well. Other notable creatures include the half-wit half-ogre with mommy issues, the mommy ogre with everyone issues, and the insanely arrogant ifrit sorcerer. Love them all, love the little touches that make them incredibly easy to play and turn them all into real characters. Bang-up job writing engaging NPCs for the GM, even if the players learn nothing at all about them.

Maps! Maps, maps, maps, maps, maps. I love maps. They're one of my biggest weaknesses (or at least one of the things that makes my bank account go "ah, there are maps, so that's why I'm empty again") as an RP collector. Give me a good map to purchase, and I will devour. This adventure comes not only with the maps in the adventure pdf (which are beautiful), but blown up image files of each of those maps (in all their delightfully attractive cartographed glory) and simplified versions (without all the cool drop-shadows and shading, and whatnot), and unlabelled versions of each of those, too! Utterly perfect for the GM running the adventure online a VTT - upload, fit, line up the squares, and bosh, you're ready. Brilliant.

The Bad
Hot DAMN this thing is tough! My players aren't really old-school, so never struggled through The Saga of the Shadow Lord in BECMI like I did back in the day, and some of the design concepts in this adventure are... problematic for players whose GM has been a bit hand-holdy. First, while there's guidance on making this adventure scale to groups larger than 4 PCs, there's nothing in it about how to adjust for smaller groups. Second (and I know this is going to seem a bit weird at first) the lowest encounter CR in the whole thing is 1. In fact, of the thirteen encounters, exactly 4 of them are CR 1. All the rest are 2 or higher, topping out at a whopping CR 4 in one case. In case that didn't sink in: less than 33% of the encounters presented in this adventure are CR-appropriate, the rest are higher. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing, in itself, since the PCs can typically roll all over anything you put them up against, but I had an under-sized party to begin with, and this exacerbated the deadliness of those encounters a fair bit. I even went so far as judiciously modifying a few bits and pieces here and there to make it less deadly (like that pit trap. I love that pit trap. It's hilarious. And way too deadly, even if it practically hits the players over the head with the obvious stick. Players will screw up and fall down it. Trust me. They will).

Room number which, what, where, huh? Nitpick time! The room numbering on the maps goes haywire at level 3. The text has a room with no number right at the start of the level, and then the next room picks up the numbering again with no break, but the maps are numbered in full, so you have to subtract 1 from the map's room number to make sure you're reading the right room in the text. Phew! That one threw me for a loop for a bit.

Read-alou-ooh-adventure-details. I'm not a fan of read-aloud text most of the time, because it's almost always too much. "This ancient room is designed in the Targorn period of architecture, with buttressed ceilings of sandstone run-through with so-called bloodstains - red streaks of iron-rich silt. The walls are covered in tapestries depicting historical battles from ages past, and your eye is caught by a particularly attractive needlework scene on a stand of the star-crossed lovers Wandero and Julia from a famous stage tragedy. On the floor is..." Bleurgh. This adventure manages to go to the other extreme by not including any read-aloud text at all, but falls down because the GM-details are mixed in with the room descriptions. Several times I found myself reading a small passage verbatim because the description was actually what I want from read-aloud text, only to have to catch myself before I revealed some secret that only the GM should know. I'd love to see those frankly elegant and perfect room descriptions cordoned off as read-aloud, with the GM-guidance text swiftly following on.

The Conclusion
I got this adventure with mere days to spare before my game session, and I was able to read it through, upload what I needed, change what I needed to fit into my existing plot, and other than a few concessions to make it a bit less deadly, run it as written. It was tough for the party, but this adventure is an excellent piece of pick-up-n-play work. It's by no means perfect, but for the harried GM in need of a quick adventure to kick off a party, this is really good.

I've been arguing with myself about what rating to give The Firemaker, and I've settled on 4-stars: The extras such as the maps; the XP/Treasure table; the brilliant room descriptions; the wonderful creatures and their relationships, hopes, and dreams. All those things push this above just average. It's a total beast to your party, but this adventure is a good one to have in your repertoire.


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1 person marked this as a favorite.

And reviewed here on d20pfsrd.com, submitted to Nerdtrek and sent to GMS magazine. Cheers!


Now with unlabeled maps!


Do they have a website or anything?


Not that I know of. But I know what's coming up next...

Dark Archive

I'm just a one-man band. My web site is what you see here and its partner at d20pfsrd.com

Richard

Webstore Gninja Minion

Free Preview PDF is now available!


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Rulebook, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

One review, ready, willing and able!

Dark Archive

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Chemlak wrote:
One review, ready, willing and able!

Thank you very much for your review which I thought was very fair, very reasonable and very well written.

I'm pleased you liked the maps. I don't consider myself any way a good map maker but I do the best I can. I will have to revisit it for the mistakes, though, and release an update.

Your point about "read-aloud text" embedded within the GM text is something I struggle to get right. I don't like read-aloud text either, because I think it makes the adventure feel like a narrative with a rigid progression, and it sort of straight-jackets the GM, but I know you have to try to make life easier for the GM too and I'm constantly trying to think of ways of presenting my prose so that the GM can:

a) easily find the bits to read aloud to players,
b) easily find the rules-related bits when the players start doing things, and
c) be able to read the prose from start to end in a way which flows and conveys the feel of the place.

It's quite a challenge!

With encounter balance, it's a funny thing because you have to present the right number of encounters at the right CR level to give your PCs enough experience to go up a level. That tends to be around the 4/6/2/1 spread for APL/APL+1/+2/+3 or 1/2/3/4 for a level 1 party. That spread gives you 13 encounters, which I tend to think is about right. However, you're right that in these early days I was a bit tough. More recently I've gone for the approach of designing over-CR for in the APL and APL+1 region, leave APL+2 as they are and helping out with the APL+3.

It's all a balancing-act / continuous learning thing and feedback, like yours, is very appreciated.

I think I can see that what I set out to do more than anything else, provide "real" (as much as possible) characters and places, resonated well with you as they did / continue to do with Endzeitgeist. That's what I enjoy about the game the most - it's what gives me that fantasy escapism that's so addictive in FRPGs. And in essence that's what I try to share that with the GM when I write - to tell them what's going on and why as if somehow the modules was "real" (as much as possible).

This was my first attempt and I think / hope I've got better as time's gone on. Once again thank you for taking the time to write this review, and I'm really pleased that you ran it. If you would like a review copy of any other of my adventures then please drop me a PM.

All the best

Richard


Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Rulebook, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Richard, thanks for the feedback on my review: I think it's the longest one I've written, and I tried hard to stick to my usual format (I'll leave the massive breakdowns to Endy and Malwing). You have a real eye for interesting characters, I love your writing style, and some of the quality of life additions were an absolute godsend.

Not being an author, but being an experienced GM, I've seen every sort of read aloud text, and I know what I like. I agree that finding the balance is a tricky thing, and what I want is a short, punchy, first-impression spiel to give to the players, followed by the GM details. If you want, I'll pull a room from this module and tweak it to show you what I mean.

One more thing, since I mentioned the QoL additions: those room summaries that give the encounter/trap/DC details? Awesome.

More later, got to get back to work.

Dark Archive

Chemlak wrote:

Richard, thanks for the feedback on my review: I think it's the longest one I've written, and I tried hard to stick to my usual format (I'll leave the massive breakdowns to Endy and Malwing). You have a real eye for interesting characters, I love your writing style, and some of the quality of life additions were an absolute godsend.

Not being an author, but being an experienced GM, I've seen every sort of read aloud text, and I know what I like. I agree that finding the balance is a tricky thing, and what I want is a short, punchy, first-impression spiel to give to the players, followed by the GM details. If you want, I'll pull a room from this module and tweak it to show you what I mean.

One more thing, since I mentioned the QoL additions: those room summaries that give the encounter/trap/DC details? Awesome.

More later, got to get back to work.

Thank you too. Your review was great to read.

With respect to your offer, I would like to see what you think of some of my later work. For example I struggled a little bit with this concept with Dance Macabre and ended up putting some parts of the room descriptions in bold, so you're more than welcome to look at that one.

Or, really, any other, according to your fancy and GMing needs. The Firemaker is quite short and not as detailed as any of my later adventures. As Endzeitgeist has pointed out in his reviews, my adventures are all quite different from each other, as I gradually move around tackling different aspects of the FRPG genre, so hopefully you can find something you'd be interested in next. I would love to hear then how you feel that side of my writing has progressed.

All the best

Richard


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Rulebook, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

I will definitely grab you for a later adventure!

Not right now, though, my reviews are a little backed up, but as soon as I've cleared off my next couple I'll be in touch.

Dark Archive

I'm pleased to announce that today The Firemaker became my fourth adventure to hit 100 sales.

Thank you to everyone who helped it get there. 100 is a significant milestone for any 3pp product, particularly with an adventure.

The Firemaker was the first adventure that I wrote and has been selling steadily over the years. Indeed, it has had a recent rise in popularity, even outselling all my other adventures last month. I've no idea why this happened, but it goes to show that some products can carry on selling steadily even 3 years on!

Please continue to support the 3pp scene whenever you can.

All the best

Richard

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