2026 Reviews - Drought Dragon Desolation
Today we are facing some unprecedented wildfire smoke and it's been unpleasantly hot for a couple of weeks straight, so it's a perfect time to write up my thoughts about another desert adventure! I'll be talking about Drought Dragon Desolation by Liam Pádraig Ó Cuilleanáin.
If the author's name sounds familiar, that's because I just recently reviewed one of his other adventures fairly recently-- in fact, DDD was a continuation of the same campaign group that went through the previous adventure. Thus, this got the same conversion treatment that the other one got-- I ran it using White Box FMAG.
Getting it to the Table
Being another Merry Mushmen production, it benefits from the same excellent layout and information presentation that their other efforts did, so I won't restate the accolades yet again. My approach was a little different this time, as it was a continuation of an existing campaign. There are several great hooks included that could potentially focus the action in different areas within the adventure, though four of the six involve slaying the titular dragon. I connected this one with the previous adventure by having the hags from the forest outside Hendenburgh ask for a dragon's gizzard as payment for removing a curse that one of the PCs had been stricken with.
One major factor that I had to consider when prepping this adventure for play was the fact that there are not one but two rival parties that the players will likely interact with and potentially have to deal with, especially in the case of the NPC party that is overtly antagonistic towards them. The main mechanic by which the players will meet them is through random encounters; both groups are included on the encounter tables for the desert hexcrawl, the town, and the "dungeon" where the dragon makes her lair. This can thus require a little bit of fast thinking on the part of the GM, ranging from simply needing to reroll a result that doesn't make sense (for example, if one or more of the rival parties have been eliminated in one way or another), to having to come up with a great deal of roleplaying and interaction in an unexpected place, such as deep within the stronghold of the enemy.
Other than the wrinkles introduced by rival parties, the rest of the preparation was made pretty painless due to the solid layout and placement of relevant information where it actually is needed. There are a variety of encounter types and things to interact with, and it would be very easy to spend a fairly long time exploring all of the hexes and taking sidequests from all of the NPCs that are scattered about.
What Worked?
- Huge amount of opportunity for roleplay and faction play. There are things to uncover in many of the desert hexes, and many of them can be linked together to create interesting situations and change the balance of power. There are allies to be gained in many places, which are likely going to be necessary if the party's goal is to kill a dragon.
- Fun non-linear "dungeon". The pleasure barge that is both the headquarters of the primary antagonists and the lair of the dragon has plenty of looping paths and alternate entrances, and there's even a great section that indicates how these paths will be utilized and controlled by the cultists and the scorpion-men if the party makes it too obvious that they're trying to cause trouble.
- Great art by Bruno Prosaiko. The illustrations really brought a lot of the characters and situations to life, and it was nice to be able to show those to my players.
What Didn't Work?
- Overland travel procedure didn't feel quite right. I have yet to find one that does feel right, honestly. Every module seems to do something a little different, and they all end up feeling a little too fiddly and involve a lot of arbitrary rolls and math. Water being a limited resource felt like a step towards making it feel more dangerous to travel through the desert, but the time it took to travel didn't quite work out to making it ever feel like the party was in danger of running out of water, especially once they located the oasis.
- Dragon too tough to kill for the party's power level? This might have been on me. Since I converted it to White Box FMAG, the PCs relative power was a little bit lower than they would have been had I run it with Old School Essentials, for which the adventure was written. One major difference is that magic-users in FMAG do not have access to any direct damage dealing spells until they reach level 5, and the highest level any of the PCs in my group were was 4. But even so, the cover of this module says that it's designed for a group of PCs level 2-4 (in OSE), and I suspect that the dragon would be pretty difficult for them to kill as well, without some extraordinary assistance (which admittedly is available if they work with the right NPCs).
Final Thoughts
Overall, this was an incredibly enjoyable adventure to run, and it felt very different in tone and style from Hendenburgh, even though it was the same author and a similar general formula of a town with a problem and a wilderness area that has the solution as well as more potential problems. If anything, that just tells me that that's a solid formula for adventures that let the players just roam free and find their own fun. I feel I may have fumbled it a bit by converting it to FMAG, since the lower power level of the PCs was felt a bit more strongly in this one than in the previous adventure, so I'd be curious to run it again for its intended system.
You can get a copy of Drought Dragon Desolation from the Merry Mushmen web store and I highly recommend it! Thanks for reading!