11/21/2015

Frugal GM Review: A Guide to Hallowfest

Frugal GM Review: A Guide to Hallowfest
I was link-hopping recently and came across this "Halloween" themed Pay-What-You-Want supplement called A Guide to Hallowfest. It was published by Sundered Blade Games.

I had never heard of Sundered Blade Games, but a quick check of their publisher's page revealed that they only have a few titles out and almost all of them are PWYW. They also have one adventure for sale that is written for two systems.

Really not bad for a start-up from earlier this year.

A Guide to Hallowfest is an 18 page black & white PDF in a Zine (5.5" x 8.5") format that  comes in under 4 MB. The PDF is secured, but I don't really see the need to extract pages or reassemble the PDF.

There is a little bit of information on what appears to be a custom game world, but at best it is a couple of sentences and this adventure could be put anywhere in an existing campaign. What this supplement is really about is a small dungeon crawl. The creatures and items listed in the beginning are used in the adventure.

Normally I'd rather have the adventure written 1st and then have a listing/entry for the monsters and items. When I was reading A Guide to Hallowfest the fact it started out with the monsters and then the items before going into the adventure.....didn't really bother me any. The art in the PDF was a  little "cutesy", but not distracting. One monster didn't have a picture but instead some text reading "Image not approved for all audiences". That felt like a bit of a cop-out.

This bit of text and the cover are my only criticisms. I'd have preferred a white cover instead of an orange one so I could print this out for use. An inclusion of a printer-friendly cover would have bumped up the page count to 20 and if they enlarged some of the fine print (like the legal stuff) and/or included a title page they could have gotten the page count to 22. This would allow the end-user to print pages 2-21 (a 20 page spread) in a booklet format and have a nice, full printed product.

Frugal GM 5 Star Review: A Guide to HallowfestThis is a minor consideration though and not something I care enough about to drop my rating any. Overall I did enjoy this adventure and think A Guide to Hallowfest would be a fun adventure to run my players through.

0 comments :

Post a Comment