The Vanilla Adventure Review

The Vanilla Adventure is a small book from Knight Owl Games that provides a setting for 1st level adventurers.

I bought this book from Amazon. I found that books from Drivethrurpg and Lulu take too long to arrive where I live (Chile), so usually I prefer to buy stuff from Amazon or Bookdepository. Aside of LotFP catalog, few OSR books are available at that stores. So I was glad when I found this book.

Written by Wind Lothamer, this is half adventure, half setting location. The players are going to move around various location at their will, as the adventure is presented as a sandbox. However, if players limit themselfes to explore and dont do something fast, the entire place (and probably the world) is goint to be reduced to ashes. While is a sandbox it has a clear beggining and end.

Something interesting about the location presented (and something you would dislike) is familiarity. As the tittle suggest, this is a pretty vanilla fantasy adventure, but that doesnt mean is boring or uncreative. You will find all things of regular fantasy books: humans, halflings, elves, heroes like Mary Pippins, Eric Snow and locations like Dragon Pass. Everything here is going to be familiar to players, and references are going to be everywhere.

SPOILERS AHEAD

After the first day players arrive, the city of Boson is going to be burned down by three red dragons. Escape is the only chance of survival. From this point, the players can explore the region freely. There are a lot of locations where they can find adventures, magic items and friends to help them to defeat the dragons. 

However, everyday the dragons are going to attack a place. There is a table where the DM needs to roll to figure out what location is going to be burned out. This is similar to Broodmother Skyfortress, an adventure from LotFP intended to destroy a campaign world.

Every location, if reached before destroyed, has a something going on and a list of adventurers that can be hired. There is even a human ranger that has defeated a dragon previously, obviously referencing to Bard from The Hobbit. There is also a wizard that can easily defeat himself from the dragons, but its too busy to help the player characters.

The sad thing is, even if the players defeat some dragons, there are an infinite of them coming. Every day more and more dragons will be born, and players may take a while to figure this. If i would run this adventure, i would give a lot of clues of what is really happening.

There are three key locations that will help players to know what is happening. The orcs are capturing all survivors from the burned cities for slavery, and its leader know that inside the dwarf mines there a cursed stone (the Dorken Stone) summoning the dragons. If the players find the stone, they will find its unbreakable, and an old text suggesting they need to sacrifice thousands of people. Of course, the orcs will not doubt to sacrifice the slaves.

There is just one alternative. If players dare to venture the Dragon Pass, where the dragons are coming, the may find the Greymund’s pick, a powerful weapon that will destroy the Dorken Stone.

While i like the adventure, it suffers from having too few information for the players. This can be easily solved by providing rumours from the different npc's that, by the book, seem just distractions.

The book doesnt explicitly suggest it, but this adventure can have really interesting endings and consequences. If the players take too long, the dragons will burn everything and start a dragon apocalypse like the movie Reign of Fire. If the players destroy the Dorken Stone, the survivors will fight to take the burned city, and depending of what people you helped (the dwarves or the elves), you may have a race conflict like at the end of The Hobbit.

I am looking forward to run this adventure, it can be easily played in five or six sessions. The vanilla fantasy setting can be enjoyed by new players, and it is a breath of fresh air against all the OSR adventure featuring weird and dark worlds.