Hi all,
The “Curse of the Pirate King” is a
TFT adventure published by Gaming Ballistic, LLC. It is intended for 4 to 6 characters with 34 to 36 attributes each. It costs $12 for
the print version (plus shipping), or $6 for the *.pdf version. I
bought the *.pdf version.
This is a 16 page adventure, (including
a title page and a page of counters to print out), written by
Christopher Rice & Edward Tremlett. There are a couple grey
scale illustrations, a couple maps, and tables of rumours, gossip, a
wandering monster table, a random trap table, and another wandering
monster table.
It is a tightly written adventure, a
lot of ground is covered in the 14 pages of story. The plot is the
PC's seeking a wonderful treasure: an entire island of
pirate loot now lays abandoned. I won't spoil the story, but it has
a Pirates of the Caribbean feel, sailing ships, supernatural bad
guys, and pirates (both dead and alive).
ART:
The art is very nice. There is one
picture of a woman in a big pool, arms chained down with her head
barely above water. A wizard is behind her, and zombies (?) are
moving in. That one picture made me want to read the adventure and
see what was going on.
The exception to the nice art is the
counters. Maybe they are color in the print version, but the *.pdf
counters are a blur of grey. If the counters had more areas of solid
black, solid white, areas of grey her and there, and thought put into
how the negative space is handled, they would be easier to read.
MAPS:
I am much less impressed by the maps.
They don't have the detail that makes real maps useful, and they lack
a scale! I worked out the size of the island by the size of some
ships, but the result was off. (An island that small would
not have enough food to support a native village.) The geology of
the island does not make sense. If it is an atoll, it is too rocky.
If it is a volcanic caldera, it is too small.
The map on page 4 has names on it which
are so small that they are illegible. (By zooming in on the *.pdf, I
could just make them out.) Since there is vast areas of blank space
on this map, there is no reason a larger font couldn't be used.
ADVENTURE:
It is pretty linear until you get to
the island. Then at least you get some choice about the pacing and
what to fight first. The overall feeling is 'workman like'. It is
not a bad adventure, but there was nothing that greatly impressed me,
nor was there anything that felt really bad. (Tho I did have a
number of minor quibbles.)
I have not played the adventure, but
there are so many encounters, it seems that there is a fair chance
that sooner or later a bad guy will get lucky and roll a double or
triple damage. After you have lost a couple people, things will get
tough.
The adventure says things like, “roll
3d, on a 4 or less, there are 1-3 magic items...”! Really?!? Is
giving out magic items something that you want to do randomly? If
they appear, how powerful are the magic items? They are rare, so you
want to give out powerful items right??? This sort of thing won't
phase me, but a new GM could have his campaign messed up if one PC
ends up with too powerful a magic item. Most people will only play
this once, so why all the randomness? Just say that there is 'an
Invisibility Ring that costs 1 fST per turn to power in the captain's
cabin’. (Or whatever.) It makes it easier for the GM and the treasure and encounters
can be better balanced.
The amount of treasure you can find is
huge. A lot of treasure is rolled randomly (e.g. $500 x 1d6). There
almost certainly is over $125,000 on the island. If the PC's loot it
all, they could likely triple their combat toughness by purchasing
magic items with this loot. If you are running a long campaign, this
is problematic. I suspect that this adventure was intended as more
of a one shot.
One thing I do like about this
adventure is that it uses a variety of skills. Some encounters are
not just combat.
There is an interesting mystery here, I’ve not seen anything like it in another TFT adventure.
Some of the encounters are with undead
pirates, undead children, and undead chickens (!). The number of
chickens are picked randomly, and if you roll high, you won't have
enough undead chickens in the counter sheet. If you are printing up
your own, make plenty of chickens, otherwise be prepared to use dice
or something to represent them. Strangely, there was room on the
counter sheet to fit in another row of chickens. No idea why they
didn't do this.
I think that the plan was for the
adventure to have some humour and be fun... not too serious. If that
appeals to you, then you might be charmed by this.
SUMMARY:
I've mixed feelings about this one. I
would never run it as part of my campaign. But it might make a fun
one shot.
I've been making home brewed adventures
for ages, and I rarely find purchased adventures as fun as the stuff
I make myself. (I largely bought this to support a new company
making TFT adventures.) It is inexpensive enough that if you like
the sound of it, it could be worth giving it a try.
Warm regards, rick.