Review 3: The Croaking Fane
As this blog continues, there will be several adventures reviewed that were published by Goodman Games for their Dungeon Crawl Classics, Mutant Crawl Classics, and other systems. I've acquired and run a bunch of these over the years because they fit my episodic style of open table play pretty well. The first one I'll cover is "The Croaking Fane" by Michael Curtis, with art and cartography by Doug Kovacs, and interior art by Jim Holloway, Doug Kovacs, Peter Mullen, Brad McDevitt, and Stefan Poag. I ran this one as intended with the Dungeon Crawl Classics system, and it is described as a "level 3 adventure", though I find those to be more guidelines than requirements. The nice thing about DCC adventures is that they are very modular and can easily be added to any campaign at any level-- many of the fights are tough if you just dive in head first, and situations can be overcome by weaker characters with some player ingenuity.
Getting it to the Table
"The Croaking Fane" followed the house format of official DCC adventures, namely big blocks of text with a lot of backstory loaded into the first pages. This one includes details about the Toad War, a schism between worshipers of rival toad gods. Where this one differs from most DCC adventures is that nearly all of this information is in fact likely to reach the players through environmental storytelling, so it was actually helpful to have the collected lore dump to give the GM context before jumping in. The "Beginning the Adventure" section has some potential hooks for the party that must be sifted out of large paragraphs; I generally prefer there to be bullet points or a rumor table for ease of access. Ultimately, all of the more carefully constructed hooks can be bypassed in favor of "rumors say that there's an abandoned temple in the swamp full of treasure."
Moving onto the adventure itself, it becomes much more streamlined and organized. Many DCC adventures, this one included, have an "Encounter Table" at the beginning of the section detailing the map key-- rather than a random encounter table to be rolled upon, this is simply a reference table with a brief description of the potential encounters in each keyed area. I find this to be of limited utility, however, as there's no reason for the GM to linger on this particular page, so it's not clear why you would want to have a list of what is in each room when you will get that information when you're actually reading the room entry when the players explore it.
The room and area descriptions have some great read-aloud text that is easy to paraphrase and are oozing (sometimes literally) with Michael Curtis' great descriptions. Each section also includes relevant stat blocks and info that you'll need at that moment, and any details that will be useful in other areas (like keys or passwords found through searching) are clearly indicated. Another serendipitous bit of formatting is the new spell (Plague of Toads) that appears on the very next page after the stat block of the NPC that can cast it.
The maps are in the back of the module, and thus required some flipping back and forth to view them while reading through for the first time. My life hack solution when I'm at my computer is to just duplicate the tab and have that one set to the maps while I read through on my other monitor. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
What Worked?
- All relevant info was in the place where you needed it when the party was exploring that area
- There is environmental storytelling in nearly every area, and exploring/poking around by the party is rewarded
- Lots of drugs to play with and toad man pheromones to be used by creative players-- after one of the PCs failed his save and had to spend a few hours giving in to amphibious pleasures, another PC later used them to "distract" a bunch of toad men, turning a potentially deadly fight into something a little bit more manageable
What Didn't Work?
- Adventure hooks buried in text
- Maps in the back (again, I'm spoiled by the presentation like you can find in The Vermillion Throne)
- Encounter Table (would much rather it be replaced with a random encounter table for proper dungeon crawling)
Final Thoughts
DCC adventures are kind of a mixed bag for me, on the whole. While many of them have some fantastic set piece encounters and weird wild stuff that can make for incredibly fun sessions, they also tend to be a bit combat focused and linear in design. This one is no exception-- while there are two paths down into the lower level, one of them would require a 30 foot drop into a pile of hungry giant toads. Since I feel as though a lot of players would opt to avoid that, the dungeon ends up being pretty linear, with an exploration of the temple followed by poking around in some rooms and caves below.
All that being said, my players had an absolute blast in here-- there are some exciting fights, gross toad things, and lots of weird stuff to interact with. The wizard got stoned on bog weed and was rewarded with a bonus point of intelligence and a boon to spellcasting. The dwarf got to pry jewels out of giant statues. The cleric offended his god by wearing toad cult robes to sneak by some guardians, but then befouled the robes and made sacrifices to get back into his god's good graces and was able to call on divine aid to save the day. They had unimaginable riches in their hands, but had to abandon most of it in order to escape with their lives. It was a great picaresque adventure that was perfect beer and pretzels role-playing, so if your group is into that, you can't really do much better than this one!
You can get "The Croaking Fane" at the Goodman Games web store. Thanks for reading!