Swords & Wizardry Light - Forum

Monday, July 22, 2013

Looking at the Series of 59 Cent Adventures From Alderac Entertainment - Anyone Familiar With Them?


Well, originally this series of D20 adventures were 79 cents a piece, but with the OBS Xmas in July sale they are now 59 cents a piece (actually, some are priced a bit more, but still cheap as dirt)

I'm looking for stuff I can convert to the DCC RPG, even if it's just stealing the maps for Roll20 and the general plot. I mean, at 59 cents it's hard to go wrong, but it's still possible ;)

Anyone have experience with this series? Worth the bother to convert to DCC or not? Are there ones I should be looking for?

7 comments:

  1. I really liked these short D20 adventures. They are also easy to convert to DCC or any other Fantasy RPG. Not all of them are great but at that price how can you lose. My favourite was the Crypt of St. Bethesda.

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  2. Most of them are decent and pretty straight forward when running them. But your players like to scream "railroad!" avoid them.

    I second the vote for the Crypt of St. Bethesda.

    I recall a Dragon Magazine article from 2001 or 2002 that actually grades some of these adventures. I'll have to look it up.

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    1. Dragon Annual #6, "Head to Head: Mini-Adventures," from 2001, by Jim Bishop.

      If you have it, you'll find he lists the good with the bad and give them grades, based on how well a DM could run them as written without making substantial changes.

      The best "Grade A" adventures of the lot are:
      "Bring Him Back Alive"
      "Castle Zadrian"
      "The Heart of Amun Khonshu"
      "Jerimond's Orb"
      "Servants of the Blood Moon"

      "The Crypt of St. Bethesda" got a B+.

      He also pointed out some common problems with many of these mini-adventures, namely bad editing, but also not doing EL and stat blocks right (which shouldn't matter if you're convert them to DCC RPG).

      But, at .59 cents, I'm sure you can find something to use from these.

      Just make sure you don't already own the complations of these already, where AEG revised them and put them in books titled "Adventure I" and "Adventure II" --which are also on sale.

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  3. I have fond memories of Garadon Manor and Temple of the Iron Codex, though I don't know how much work my DM put into souping them up before we played them.

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  4. I bought quite a few of these and still have them. I have 11 of them. I'm not sure how many of them were produced.

    Your comment about them originally being $0.79 surprised me since I paid $2.49 for the physical product when they first came out. They I realized you were talking about the PDF.

    I think all of them (I've run all 11 of them multiple times as short interludes to longer stories) would EASILY be converted to DCC stats/encounters.

    I really did like them, and do did my group. When I felt the action sagging a wee bit in a long travel sequence (a bad habit of mine), I'd throw in one of these to spruce things up.

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  5. The series as whole was hit and miss. Some were pretty decent others were meh at best. At .59 cents a pop you won't go wrong, especially if you are just looking for bits to swipe. The Sewer Fiend sits on my desk at this moment looking for an insert into a DCC game.

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  6. i edited all of them and made them worse apparently by putting a theme them after the first 24 adventures were done. :)

    all of them were collected together and thoroughly improved in adventure 1 and 2, the last books in the d20 line.

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