Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Morgansfort - The Western Lands Campaign for the Basic Fantasy RPG



To get to the point this is a much better adventure and starting point than JN1. It has a wilderness map, a base town, multiple low-level dungeons to explore, and even some named NPC's - with some personality traits mentioned in their description. It's an old school adventure so it has all the trappings of old school dungeons - puzzles, traps, wandering monster tables, rumor tables, and lots of the quirky things found in the old classics.

Why is this so much better than the Chaotic Caves? Because although it feels very much like the early edition adventures, it's not a direct rip of any of them in particular. There are goblins, undead, and giant insects, sure - but the maps and encounter descriptions don't read like they were cribbed from something else.

What makes it good? The whole thing instead reads like it came from someone's campaign and it feels very useable, a distinctive quality of a lot of the old adventures. They weren't weighted down with background overkill. They had just enough to whet your interest - a sentence, rather than a paragraph, or a page. They tended to be less about plot and more about exploring and overcoming the challenges within. They were meant to be dropped in to your game and run and this book clearly follows the same path.

I would run this with any of the old school systems if I wanted a solid area for kicking off a campaign without writing one up myself. It looks to me like it could be adapted to 5E pretty easily too if that's your inclination.

If you want an inexpensive older D&D-type fantasy RPG then this plus the BFRPG rulebook is a solid way to go.

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