Sleeping Gods is a complete seven-adventure campaign in the
Lands of Legend, the gaming world of the Dragon Warriors RPG. It’s designed for
new Gamesmasters and players to the RPG hobby and this particular fantasy world
and the level of difficulty increases as the adventures progress. In fact it
has been designed so that groups can carry on from the adventure ‘The Darkness
Before Dawn’, the adventure in the Dragon Warriors core rulebook, but this
doesn’t need to be the case.
The book is split into eight chapters, Chapter 1 being the
introduction and the next seven chapters being each individual adventure.
Chapter 1 covers the basics – it fills you in on the
locations, how to use the book and other information pertinent to beginning the
adventure.
I don’t want to go into story details as I don’t want to
ruin it for any prospective players but the campaign starts proper with Chapter
2, ‘The King Under the Forest’. This is a simple beginning adventure for first
rank characters. In fact, Chapter 3 ‘A Shadow On The Mist’, Chapter 4 ‘Hunter’s
Moon’, Chapter 5 ‘The One-Eyed God’ and Chapter 6 ‘Sins of the Fathers’ are all
of the same ilk. They are basic adventures set in an underworld location, with
a series of rooms interlinked to build to a final face-off. It’s not until
Chapter 7 ‘Mungonda Gold’ and Chapter 8 ‘The Greatest Prize’ that the
adventures properly pit the players against some seriously good outdoor
encounters but even then they return to the tried and tested underworld
locations.
There’s nothing wrong with that but there is a danger of a
lack of variety if the game progresses from one adventure to the other –
experienced gamers might find the adventure far too linear. To help offset this
the campaign allows for the player characters to travel away and go on other
adventures between the ones in the book, allowing for breaks between the
chapters. It’s a good idea that any of the adventures can be inserted into any
other campaign quite easily, even independently of the rest of the campaign.
As the game unfolds the PCs come across all kinds of
characters and beasts and there is a real sense of progress for players new to
the game as they tumble from one adventure to the next. For experienced Dragon
Warrior groups it’s a great adventure but there’s also plenty of material in
here if you don’t intend to run the adventure as it is written, with maps,
locations, characters and stats. There’s a wonderful Dragon encounter in ‘The
King Under The Forest’ that I used in a game outside of the scenario, so in
that respect you can even get this book for higher-rank adventurers. You can
use the locations, single encounters and other bits of the adventures for your
own game, or even change the difficulty of the adventures to suit.
All said it’s a nice, atmospheric publication with some fun
encounters. It may be a little linear for experienced gamers, but as a first
campaign book for the Dragon Warriors RPG it’s a good product.
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