Game: Epic Tales: Volume 1
Publisher: Bard’s Productions
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 22nd, May 2003
Reviewer’s Rating: 6/10 [ On the ball ]
Total Score: 6
Average Score: 6.00
The four component parts of Epic Tales: Race for Retribution have been kicking around for a little while, available, I think, as downloads from the Bard’s Productions website. Epic Tales is a set of four adventures and as adventures and that’s the sort of thing you’d want to print out and have in front of you while you’re DMing.
Epic Tales balances several competing elements rather well. The pre-written adventures are clean and succinct enough to suit a new DM and yet the flexible and broad enough to suit a more experienced gaming group. Pre-written adventures really have to be linear but Epic Tales is designed so that a DM may (and probably should) insert their own encounters along the way, that’ll allow the group to stray and by the use of a rather clever rumour system the PCs can easily be baited and then reeled back onto the published plot strands.
The four modules of Race for Retribution are obvious. Take the shrink wrap off the supplement and you’ll find that the cover falls away to reveal four staple bound, 30-paged, bundles. These booklets don’t have covers of their own but have the OGL on the back page and the credits on the front and it doesn’t matter if the players see that. The idea behind the fall away uber-cover is that the insides can easily be laid flat so that the group can use the colour, cgi maps or be propped upright so the DM can use it as a screen. The Bard’s Productions habit of producing thin covers continues for Epic Tales but in this case I think they’ll get away with it, the cardstock should just be thick enough to support the DM screen idea.
Epic Tales is fairly campaign world neutral. A default D&D setting where the player character races aren’t too uncommon and where orcs will be seen as a problem will do. Epic Tales does need two towns in relative proximity and two towns that can have the history Epic Tales requires from them. The core background for the Race to Retribution is based on an unlikely bunch of heroes who pushed away an orc menace and founded a town but left quite a mess behind them.
Bard’s Productions Common Grounds series tried to make life easier for the DM. It’s not all together surprising to find that Epic Tales is carefully complete and easy to navigate. An unexpected benefit of splitting the product into four sets of stapled pages is that there’s never very much frantic page flicking to do. The stats for most encounters are right where you need them to be anyway. For example, where there’s at least one locked door you’re likely to find the hardness, break DC and HPs of all the doors – even if their unlocked – just in case someone decided to bash them all open, and needless to say the Lock DC for the locked door is there too. The presentation is clean too. Stats blocks are always cluttered but Bard’s Productions keeps the font size reasonable, use bold text effectively and intend the text where it needs to be. For example, rather than listing spells in a single block of tiny italic text, the boxed sections offer up spells know by NPCs level by level (so it’s easy to jump straight to the strongest or weakest spell) and in a cleanly cut list.
To be honest, I don’t like the look of the four “bare” modules, the sets of stapled paper looks cheap. The saying goes “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, or in this case, lack of cover, and that age-old wisdom seems to be right. As I worked through Epic Tales I kept on finding advantages to the format. There are maps and floor plans in the back of the modules and in most cases it’s easy enough to simply put the booklet down on the table and run off the map. The staple binding means the booklet lies flat. Mind you, it means you can’t be reading from the booklet at the time though and in one case there’s DM text on the same page as the map so this tactic isn’t appropriate there.
The paragraphs designed for DMs to read to the players are always a bone of contention in pre-written adventures. Epic Tales is pretty good here. The list of possible crimes is long and Epic Tales only commits a few and even then doesn’t do so heinously. I hate having DM text that tells the players what they are doing. Epic Tales doesn’t tell the players that they’re walking into rooms, running for cover or pulling levers. Occasionally the text will suggest something like “Your eyes turn north to the walled city…” and that’s not too bad. “As you stretch the sleep from your bones, you wonder…” is worse, that’s really taking control of the PC albeit in a non-critical way. Slightly more serious (but still not game wrecking) is the habit of presenting a whole string of actions in a single to-read paragraph, actions that the players are bound to want to jump on, in one instance the players come across orcs fighting some skeletons, a NPC zapping a ghost and then the ghost retaliating with magic. I imagine some players would have tried to interfere long before that series of events conclude. In other instances, in a single action, an ogre steps out from cover, has time to grin, bash you on the end, introduce more assailants and then knock you unconscious. Those are about the worst examples that I could come up with – the thing to remember is that most pre-written adventures are far worse.
Dungeon crawling does not dominate the game. Although there are dungeon crawl style encounters, some of which are tough and important, the game is all about characters, decisions and indecision. You’ll find some combats noted as especially tough if the players haven’t encountered and befriended the right NPCs. It’s good that these encounters are pointed out – so DMs are warned, and it’s good that they’re there. Part three is presented day by day (rather than room by room) and does well to use summaries at the end of each. Its here the DM has the chance to review what’s happened and see if the game is still on course. It might have been better to have the summaries up front so the DM can see what needs to be done but these guidelines are better than none at all and DMs should read through the booklets before running them anyway.
Epic Tales has surprising scope even if you run them back to back rather than spicing up events by adding side encounters of your own. The breadth of the chain of adventures could so easily be off putting to new DMs but Race for Retribution is extremely good at breaking everything down to easily handled chunks and making the DMs life easy. At times there are even summaries of battle tactics that might be used against the PCs, notes when wizards might summon their creatures and how aggressive warriors will be. Race for Retribution isn’t just for rookie DMs though, experienced gaming groups will appreciate the nuisances of the adventures. Race for Retribution is set for characters of levels 1 through to 5 and so whether the players are experienced or not it best suits a new group of characters.
