The Perilous Secrets of Wilford Manor
If you thought 4E D&D meant the end of third party releases, you’re wrong. Under the Game System License (GSL), Wizards of the Coast allows other companies to produce material for fourth edition D&D. The Perilous Secrets of WIlford Manor is a great example of a high-quality indie adventure for 1st level 4E characters.
Publisher Neuroglyph Games has released a small but growing line of 4E products under the GSL. Wilford Manor is the latest, and it shows a fair amount of editorial polish for an independently produced game (which sounds like damning praise, but I don’t mean it that way). The design shows a clear understanding of 4E encounter dynamics, dramatic flow and game balance. Plus, the story is interesting.
Your 1st level party is summoned by a kindly Earl to track down his missing son, who was sent to resolve a tax dispute. The standoffish villagers lead the party to the titular manor, now inhabited by a group of sinister monks. Without spoiling too much, the monks’ nefarious plans lead the party into the Feywild — but are they rescuing the Earl’s son, or just retrieving his corpse?
The overall design of Wilford Manor is impressive. The encounters are intertwined in realistic ways (that is, success or failure in one encounter can alter the nature of subsequent encounters). There are some branches in the plot, so it isn’t entirely linear, but it’s not so freeform that it becomes unwieldy. It makes excellent use of skill challenges and role-playing to tie the combat encounters together. The combats appear to be well balanced for a 1st level party (although I haven’t had a chance to play through it yet). A variety of locales, including wilderness, the manor, some caverns and the Feywild will keep things interesting — each location is populated with hazards, so the players will have to interact with their surroundings in creative ways.
My gripes about this module are quite minor. Like all 1st level adventures, it faces the challenge of finding varied and interesting enemies for the PCs to fight. There’s a smattering of undead and some interesting opponents in the Feywild, but you spend a lot of time fighting variant cultist monks. Some kind of really freaky creature under the cult’s control (something created from scratch, or downgraded from a higher level monster) would have added an extra spark.
The adventure also takes a little while to get to the action. There are a few role-playing encounters and skill challenges before the PCs reach the manor and the action starts. This is fine in some situations (although starting with an action scene is never a bad idea), but as an introductory adventure for 1st level characters, it could be a little frustrating. You’ve just created your character, rolled the stats, picked your powers, printed a new character sheet, ready to go, and…you talk with the Earl. Then talk with the townsfolk. Then talk to an old hermit.
These issues certainly don’t prevent The Perilous Secrets of Wilford Manor from being a quality adventure. Experienced DMs can easily modify things if they have the same issues. Throw a downgraded demon into one of the encounters. Make the Earl not quite such a nice guy, and have the party fight and get arrested by his guards to initiate the adventure. It adds some dramatic tension to accept a mission from a guy who’s a jerk but is swinging a full bag of gold coins around.
You could play this as a standalone adventure, although it is part of a planned “world-shaking epic” called The Doombringer Saga. There’s more info at the Neuroglyph Games official site, and you can buy a PDF of Wilford Manor at RPGNow.
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June 16th, 2010 4:10 PM
I WAS wrong.
June 16th, 2010 4:40 PM
Doesn’t it feel better to admit it?
June 16th, 2010 5:33 PM
Maybe a little better. But also a little annoyed that Wizards allows people to create adventures for profit (which IS great by the way) under their GSL, but sends cease and desist letters to folks who create useful gaming planning tool sets and offer them for FREE to a gaming public. Adventure planning sets that, through to their very setup, encourage gamers to subscribe to D&D Insider and send Watt-See their money.
Unless, of course, Wizards has a comparable tool set in the works that seamlessly incorporates the Compendium with a intuitive and simple adventure planning software. Maybe you noticed something like that at WotC…
That’s enough ranting…
About the adventure: At what level does it expect the party to finish?
I agree fully with your gripes about 1st level. I’d have to say, 1st level is my least favorite. With 2nd coming in a close, well, 2nd. Having a well crafted, compelling story is absolutely necessary to navigate through those ho-hum levels. Heck, I’d suggest that it doesn’t even need to be all that challenging, since a single die roll can mean life or death to a 1st level character. Or a single white dragon.
Compelling and story driven are terms that come to mind when I think of ideal 1st level adventures. Based on your review, it seems this adventure accomplishes that pretty well with the tools the creators were given. Very cool.
June 18th, 2010 1:40 AM
I don’t really mind 1st level. This may be because I haven’t played past it in 4th, but it doesn’t seem that bad. Being a level one Wizard in Pathfinder, sucks.
June 18th, 2010 2:20 PM
I’m a talker, my campaigns are generally 1 fight every 3 or so sessions.
That said, the GSL hasn’t lead the the huge proliferation of games that the OGL did, & I think that is very, very sad.
June 18th, 2010 2:40 PM
I think it’s a good thing, actually. The glut of shoddy 3rd party OGL products turned a lot of people (like me) off of 3rd party material entirely. There was just too much to effectively sort the wheat from the chaff. I’m sure 4E GSL has about the same signal to noise ratio, but with less stuff out there, it’s easier to find what’s good.
June 19th, 2010 1:57 PM
With Pathfinder being 3.5 Compatible I looked at some of the 3.5 third party stuff and it is a lot of feces. There is so much badness in there that I just can’t describe it.