I had great fun running "The Sinister Secret of Peacock Point" last night! I reviewed it on my blog here. TLDR: You will have a great memorable experience running this, highly recommended!
thanks for the comment! Good suggestion! But the entire thing is also small enough to go back and forth between rooms, have doors be open arches etc to mingle everything up a bit.
This is a short little dungeon that we used to fill a session where some players dropped from our regular game. It was the first time playing Cairn for the players, so we spent a little time going over the rules and rolling characters. I used the conversion notes provided on the Cairn Website for appropriate treasure and stat conversions. In terms of layout and design I liked the evocative selection of public domain art and the indulgent use of space with a single room per page with huge font size. This works really well if you print the dungeon as booklet and you staple bind it, which I generally prefer to tiny font one-page dungeons as it allows you to add your own scribbles in the margins. We started right outside the dungeon and dropped any pretence that this would be anything but a simple dungeon crawl. In terms of content the dungeon presents you with pretty standard DnD fare: Skeletons and an assortment of creepy crawlers, some light puzzling and opportunities for jovial role-play. This might sound boring at first, but was extremely well executed and made for a very pleasant experience. The setup of the dungeon also manages the sequence of encounters extremely well, never does anything feel repetitive and there is plenty opportunity for characters to express their agency. Treasure had a nice elvish flavour but could have been a bit more creative mechanically, however, this could also have been lost in translation between systems. I would highly recommend this, especially to GMs that are new to more old-school inspired DnD adventures. It is easily completed within a single session. 8/10 Review taken from my blog.
Me and two friends played this last night and we finished it in a little more than two hours. I only had 30min to prepare the game, which I used to read the entire adventure through once. This was actually the perfect fire test for the adventure, which it passed with flying colors: descriptions of rooms and NPCs are short and inspiring, and the tables on the final pages are giving you that initial spark to fill the emerging scenes with life. The adventure strikes the perfect balance between setting up an interesting situation and providing the GM with the tools to meet the players on whichever path they choose to navigate it by. It is hard to find a fault in this. The only thing I felt myself wanting towards the end of the module was maybe another type of devilish party guest to switch up the combat. The two Monster stat blocks provided were great, but as my murder hobos slew their way through the dungeon, combat was beginning to feel repetitive. After completing the adventure one player exclaimed "Wow, that was gory! Nice!". Very nice indeed! 9/10 Review taken from my blog.
