Monday 13 January 2020

Review - Death Queen & The Life Stone

After a lengthy hiatus I've returned to another one of my original RPG passions; the solo adventure.

Rising Phoenix Games has published a Potteresque setting for both D&D 5E and Pathfinder called Scarthey on DrivethruRPG and in addition to a setting book and some traditional adventures they have also published three solo adventures, starting at level 1.

I started off by playing my way through Death Queen & The Life Stone.

The adventure was quite short (only 50 entries) and a successful run took under an hour from start to finish.  First up I have to say the art in general was good with the art of the Death Queen herself being exceptional (makes me want a miniature of that character).  The adventure itself is a traditional dungeon crawl with an somewhat Egyptian theme.  The adventure had a few unique encounters and a mix of combat encounters with a few skill/ability checks to keep things interesting.

Although there was a lot I enjoyed about the adventure there were definitely a few opportunities for improvement.  The first shortcoming I encountered was fairly early on, an entry gives you the option to make a History or Religion check to interpret some information but gives no DC for the check.  The second issue I had was during an encounter with some crossbow armed bandits where two escape options were given but in spite of the stats and combat rules being given for the encounter there was no option or selection to choose if you actually fought and won.  Those were relatively minor but both came early on so it made me a bit concerned more issues would follow (none did for the record).  The only other issue I had was that setting a D&D solo adventure at 1st level meant that in most encounters one or two bad die rolls would result in disaster.  In each early encounter the player fights multiple opponents where the action economy means that a character could go out in a single combat round.

Overall I enjoyed my experience playing the adventure and look forward to the next adventure in the series.  Death Queen And The Life Stone is currently available from DrivethruRPG at  https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/217497/Death-Queen-and-the-Life-Stone?src=hottest_filtered for $2.95

-Jay

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