Review 29: Neon Knights
Oh no, here it comes again. Can't remember when we came so close to... reviewing another Brendan LaSalle DCC adventure! This week I'm talking about Neon Knights.
This is a level 3 DCC adventure with cover art, interior art, and cartography by Doug Kovacs along with additional interior art by Friedrich Haas, Cliff Kurowski, William McAusland, and Chad Sergeketter. This one is another odd outlier in the world of DCC adventures, because it is intentionally meant to be used in a variety of ways. In the Background section, there is a paragraph that suggests a few different uses-- a straightforward one-shot, a side quest, or an alternate route to a remote location in your campaign (such as the Purple Planet in the DCC universe). In essence, the adventure boils down to an interesting situation that is largely left up to the GM to decide how to apply it in their game, which is nice!
The general premise is that the PCs find themselves in a city besieged by an overwhelming army of supernatural creatures, and they are tasked with finding a solution to the problem. Suddenly they are transported to a wizard's tower and are commanded by the wizard to defend him from a group of attackers. Essentially, the PCs have been the target of a powerful artifact that summons heroes from other planes to do the wielder's bidding. It's a nice inversion of a fun sword and sorcery trope, complete with mechanics to resist the power of the artifact and such.
Getting it to the Table
When I ran this adventure, my group was doing what we called a "ladder" campaign-- basically we would run a series of unconnected modules, leveling up between them. The goal was to try out the huge number of DCC modules that are higher level and might be a little more tricky to weave into a cohesive campaign; thus, I didn't have to worry too much about the "why" of the major plot points of this adventure, which I think the way it was primarily intended to be run. When you can just run it as a standalone episodic game, you can just dive into the weird fantasy stuff and not have to worry too much about tying it into a story. So in that regard, prepping it for the table wasn't very difficult at all. It suffered a little bit from the DCC house style, but because I was treating it as a series of set pieces rather than a classic "dungeon crawl" that was focusing on exploration and player agency, it worked out fine. The players still had to be clever and try to figure out exactly what was going on and decide how they were going to counteract the power of the artifact, and there was some good investigation in the city between summonings, and the module includes many clues for the PCs to uncover that will help them.
What Worked?
- Solid premise. We've all seen the spells and artifacts that summon a champion to fight for you, but where do they come from? Did they have any say in the matter? I feel like this was the kernel around which this entire adventure was written, and it does a great job of creating a sense of something bigger going on in the wizard's plan that the players can never quite grasp, because they've got more immediate problems.
- Stat blocks where you need them. Despite the verbosity of the text, the information is all in the place where it's going to be used.
- Very Cool Artifact. The Garand of Unknown Xastro has the potential to be a campaign-altering magic item, and I could see a whole bunch of great games come out of this thing messing everything up.
What Didn't Work?
- Must have the right expectations. This is one of those instances where you have to be aware of what sort of adventure you want to play before you go looking for it. One of the biggest misleading factors of "Dungeon Crawl Classics" is that there is surprisingly little classic dungeon crawling! If you are going into the game hoping for a procedure-driven exploration game that balances risk versus reward in delving ever deeper, you will be disappointed by nearly all of the modules that Goodman Games has published. However, if you go into it expecting some wild and over-the-top set piece fights and fiendish puzzles where most of the procedural bits of exploration are hand-waved, then you'll do fine.
Final Thoughts
That last point above was starting to morph into this section, so here's a nice jarring transition for you. This module is a great example of a magical wrench that can be thrown into a campaign to send it off the rails in an exciting way, and it can even spin off into whole new directions.
You can get Neon Knights at the Goodman Games web store. Thanks for reading!