Corruption of Ikaya is a pretty straightforward adventure... A Kai Lord has gone missing - go and find him. I'd say I don't have any actual problems with the adventure other than there is no real "plot development." There are no NPCs that the party has an ongoing relationship with. Really, it's a long string of random encounters until they end.
I do like the focus of the adventure - traveling into the icy wastelands of Kalte. It's not often you get to adventure in ice and snow. Characters have to worry about avalanches, snow blindness, and hypothermia! I also liked the challenge of stealth at the end. I think that's very hard for characters to do!
The thing that REALLY burns me up with this is that it costs $20.00 and is only 74 digest pages long! You've got to be kidding me! Now, I might be willing to pay that for an outstanding adventure that my players will remember for years to come but CoI is not that.
This thing is riddled with errors, typos, and omissions. The whole mission is to rescue the Kai Lord but when you find him... NOTHING. No stats, no dialogue, no options on what to do with him... nothing. Same with a pirate vessel that attacks the players. It says the pirates fire ballistae but not how many ballistae or the stats for a ballistae. Once the pirates are defeated the adventure doesn't tell you anything else. What's on the ship? What would the captain do with the pirate ship? One of the pirates has the Nightfire Rod... Which does what, exactly? The adventure doesn't even tell us. The maps to the final lair, a warehouse ambush, or the pirate ship aren't even included!!!
What makes it worse is that THIS ISN'T EVEN AN ORIGINAL ADVENTURE! It was first published in Signs and Portents, the Mongoose PDF magazine. Originally, it was a D20 adventure but was translated over to LWM rules. Somehow, they made the adventure presentation WORSE. They didn't even bother fixing errors from the original adventure such as on page 50 (from the PDF) it says, "they can meet Franklin," but it actually means, "they can meet Stephen Jarn." This is one example of something that is wrong in the original and never corrected. Frankly, this is simply lazy. You already have the whole thing written - take four hours and go through to edit the thing before rushing it out the door!
At the end of the day, even though I like some of the features of the adventure, the sloppiness is inexcusable. This is the worst book produced for the Lone Wolf Multiplayer RPG to date.
1LR Review - 8 out of 20 - It's a Miss!
No comments:
Post a Comment