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Dungeons & Dragons: Race for Retribution

Epic Tales: Race for Retribution

A lot of thought has gone into this work, and it shows in the way that it is organised and presented. The stated intention is to provide an epic adventure that may be interwoven with other events in your own campaign world and it gets close to succeeding, with only minor problems.

The material is presented as four booklets held loose within an outer full-colour panel with maps on the inside. The idea was - indeed it says so on the back - that the outer panel could serve as a DM's screen as was the case with early TSR modules... unfortunately somewhere twixt author and printer the message got lost and it's far too flimsy for that purpose.

The four booklets are the four phases of the storyline, intended to be played at intervals during an ongoing campaign. If nothing else, you are unlikely to gain sufficient experience from any section to be ready to face the dangers of the next one immediately! To allow for this, the DM is provided with a sophisticated set of rumour tables, the precise information available being determined by how many other adventures he intends to run before the next segement of RACE FOR RETRIBUTION. This also contributes to the 'epic' feel of the overall storyline: events go on while the characters are off doing something else, and then come back into focus, demanding their attention yet more. Each is self-contained, and could be run as a stand-alone adventure if for whatever reason the DM doesn't want to run the rest (or the players, being players, refuse to pick up on the clues and wander off somewhere else entirely!). A segment could be run in one or two sessions, depending on how long you play for and how intense you like your games.

To facilitate insertion into your own campaign, the entire story is set in a couple of townships and the surrounding area. The towns, both fairly small (one really classes as a village!), are about 3 days' walk apart. Everything's very self-contained, and neither town is big enough or important enough to have had much impact on the wider area, so if you add them in with the intention of running this adventure after the campaign has begun it's unlikely the characters will notice this new region springing up!

The towns and their inhabitants are well detailed with sufficient independent life that they can be used as part of your setting outside of this adventure. There's a lot going on, interactions between various people, which could give scope for a whole array of side adventures or whole plotlines of your own.

The whole plot revolves around the relationships - well, the emnity really - between some local adventurers and the orc tribes of the neighbourhood. What is particularly outstanding is that rather than skirt around the subject, the author has decided to address the little matter of the difference in race... some of the NPCs display overt racism, which is in fact pivotal to the plotline. It's refreshing to find racism (whilst being acknowledged as the unpleasant thing it is) being used creatively... and the characters have, if they play their cards right, the potential to bring at least some of the citizens of the racist township to a more civilised state of mind.

The gods play a fairly major part too. Although the deities are given names, they are left general enough that it will be simple to use appropriate gods from your own campaign setting - just pick ones whose alignment and spheres fit, who you can see acting in the way described. What makes it interesting is that some of the gods may mesh in, how shall we say, unusual ways with character motivations; and some folks may find that their god is on the 'wrong side' and so have some difficult choices to make as the adventure unfolds.

The adventure segments give quite a lot of variety - there's combat, NPCs to interact with, a bit of 'dungeon-bashing' and a murder mystery to solve - so whatever your players enjoy there is something for everyone to get involved in. Although separate, they are connected and once they have been played through the sequence should become apparent giving the characters a feeling of accomplishment over and above the XP earned and loot recovered.

In places the DM will need to be careful: it's quite easy to 'break' the storyline if the wrong NPC gets killed at an inopportune moment. In particular, at one point it is essential that a given individual escapes from the middle of combat and manages to take a specific item with him, or the next segment just plain won't happen. In several points, to progress the players are going to have to acquire a single critical piece of information; again something that can be difficult to manage.

Such niggles apart, it's a fun adventure with some noteworthy design points which should make it very useful as a component of an on-going campaign.

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