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Nerdarchy > Dungeons & Dragons  > Adventure Hooks  > Kobold Press Prepared 2 Adventure Collection: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Kobold Press Prepared 2 Adventure Collection: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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Prepared 2 is the latest in the series of one-shot adventure products for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons published by Kobold Press. This product was released as an aid to Game Masters who might be caught short when players take a campaign in an unexpected direction. I’m sure we can agree that such an event is common. Therefore, such a resource would or should be invaluable. To fully ascertain whether or not Prepared 2 fills the bill, it’s important to look at it from several angles.

Prepared 2In the interest of disclosure, it’s important to note that I am in the printing industry, and have been for 30 years. This includes aspects of graphic design, layout, editing, production values and the like. I cannot pick up a newspaper without looking at print quality, ink opacity, image resolution, and the like. This product, even in PDF form, still falls under that lens. This is especially important because it is a paid product. The client, any client, deserves to get their money’s worth. That’s really important considering that this product can range anywhere from $6.00 to $20.00. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Nerdarchy received a copy of Prepared 2 from Kobold Press.]

The good in Prepared 2

There’s a lot on offer here. Jon Sawatsky is obviously imaginative and fills the passages with lots of options here. His intent to create a wide variety of encounters is somewhat successful, and even if technical issues may not rise to the demand of this variety, the spark is there. He addresses multiple types of encounters with a wide variety of challenges and foes. The joy of creation is evident throughout and that’s a huge plus.
A few encounters stand out as well thought out and easily accessible or adaptable. Dib’s Wagon of Doom, Assault of the Steel Horde, Neither by Sail Nor By Oar, and The Tangled Temple stand out to me as the best for a few reasons. Dib’s had me laugh out loud. I loved that.
In each case, the encounters seem organized and thought out well. They address how others act through the events, and contain a cast of interesting characters that have their own backstories that could build into more. There’s room for expansion for all of them and a reasonable amount of work frontloaded. For Dungeon Masters looking for encounters that require a minimum amount of work, these are the ones to go with. They aren’t perfect, as there are issues that could be explained a little better or have more content, but they have the framework upon which anyone should be able to build on with a minimum of effort.
It cannot be over-stated that this resource also contains an invaluable value-add for any table: player maps. Not only are there several full colour maps for the DM to use, but there are also full colour versions available for the players to use. Even if only a reference before larger tactical maps are drawn, such an item allows for players to readily imagine their characters in these worlds, and helps to build immersion. Fantastic!
There are also some fantastic visual aids in the form of graphics and such. I am a big fan of the drowned maiden. That, sir, is a tattoo waiting to happen. As someone who does not own the Tome of Beasts, I cannot say if this is a recycled piece. However, it is very evocative, and as such, it delivers the mood and intent of an encounter.

The bad about Prepared 2

Oh, boy. Whereas this is a paid product with the promise of helping GMs who possess players who go off the rails often, the execution is sub-par overall. Several encounters require references to the Tome of Beasts. For those without this product, it offers substitutions from the Monster Manual. The problem with that concept is simple. When you change any opponent for another, especially outside the realm of introductory monsters like goblins and skeletons, you change the intent and execution of the encounter. It takes on a new flavour and direction.
Prepared 2 adventure

A Starry Beach is one of the one-shot adventures in Prepared 2 from Kobold Press.

All That Glitters is especially bad for this. There is not a world anywhere in which a contract with a proper devil means the same as “just add an ogre magi and an elemental.” That’s unfinished design. The Assault of the Steel Horde above has the same problem as it uses a substitution based on a Tome of Beasts monster I know nothing about, but at least the direction means that you would add something you understand. Glitters NEEDS a fiend. That the writer failed to see this in his own product isn’t impressive. The rest of that particular encounter is very rail-roady in that it requires a path to success in a setting where the room for error is vast. Do not make an encounter in a town or city with a SINGLE approach to success where the population of NPCs is myriad. Again, short-sighted.

This isn’t the worst case. Other encounters contain odd or poorly thought out substitutions or lack content that a DM would KNOW a player will ask about. A Starry Breach is such an encounter. In this encounter, there is yet another investigation without maps or content to back it up, an NPC who apparently has all of 1 hit point for the purposes of the murder hobo character, and is intrinsic to understanding the encounter. It’s yet another single-route-to-success encounter, and has a confusing map as a visual aid. To make matters worse, the substitution of a white dragon for a void dragon is odd at best. I say this without access to the Tome of Beasts. Why? Because dragons, like giants, are distinctive from species to species. Thinking that you could “just use” one for another is not only disrespecting the lore of this or any other creature, but it’s another clue to unfinished content.
Night at the Odeum does this again, with a ham-handed “this is a fey encounter” background (which I hope you have a need for, otherwise it’s content you paid for but will never use), and then never explains the fey at all. It’s a dream sequence with no depth. To make matters worse still, the substitution for the Tome of Beasts choice is a medusa…because somehow an entire audience of unknown fey would somehow NOT turn to stone. It comes off as an encounter written to fill pages and not to aid DMs. I am offended by such an offering.
Kobold Press adventure

Ooze Tomb of the Oathbreaker is one of the adventures in Prepared 2 from Kobold Press.

Ooze Tomb of the Oathbreaker comes across as incomplete and unfair. It contains an obvious intent to create more than an encounter. It wants to be an adventure. But to be this adventure, it needs far more inclusive maps and a list of personalities within factions like the centaurs. It traps characters in open terrain and then rains down hard-to-avoid damage in the form of literal acid rain, when it’s not several oozes against a 3rd to 4th level party, which just comes off as an unfair move.

To make it even moreso, it requires that the characters cross a body of water that is actually Poison, crossed by a raft that actually a trap. Come on, guys. Really? To compound this, if the characters delay or avoid resolution of the encounter (which as a DM, I have encountered, and I’m not alone), the oozes and the acid continue to fall from the sky.
This WANTS to be a full adventure, but tries to cram all of that threat into a smaller series of encounters. It lacks the depth and description of a full adventure, and omits the depth of any sort of social relationship with a centaur band.
However, of all of them, The Void Walker comes off as the worst. It makes a lot of erroneous assumptions based on content the DM would know but the players never would. To make matters worse, it lays out several side encounters without maps and substitutions (again) that cannot be researched without the Tome of Beasts. It contains a massive walking construct that will obviously be the focus of player attention that’s immune to everything, yet is declared as a “non-combatant”, despite having attacks throughout the encounter. That’s not only unfair, it’s cruel. A DM should know where player focus might go, and should account for these wild cards. Not doing so is negligent.

The ugly of Prepared 2

The overall feeling of the entire resource is that it’s incomplete. If an encounter starts with a requirement by the DM to wonder why they are using this encounter, as well as filling in the details to make it fit, then the DM is doing the work and the product is just coasting. In a free product, that’s one thing. In a product where money changes hands, that’s another.
Even in encounters I liked, there are issues whereby the maps, actions of the NPCs, or substitutions for unknown monsters came into play. That irked me the most. I do not own the Tome of Beasts. That’s not a complaint – it’s just a fact. That means others do not as well, so the original intent of these encounters may be lost because the DM in question does not have access to the inspiring resource. Owning the core books is an assumption. Owning a third party product is not. The substitutions should have been more in depth than “a white dragon is the same as a void dragon”.
There are other issues as well.
For a paid product, there are certain expectations of quality. The resolution of the images both as illustrations and maps are not where they should be. I understand the need to keep the file size smaller for downloading and hosting, but I am also the proud owner of the Elemental Evil Player’s Companion. Comparing apples to apples, the artwork resolution is a lot higher in the free Wizards of the Coast product than in the Kobold Press product which has an attached dollar value.
Furthermore, the maps are not always easy to follow as a player or DM. There are issues where a DM may not be able to follow where the writer intended for an encounter to occur within a given map, and that’s a problem. If you cannot explain this encounter in theatre of the mind and make the players understand, then you need better maps.

Some of the new magic items included in Prepared 2 from Kobold Press.

I also have an issue with the art direction and layout. There are moments where the text and story are broken by content that should occur at the end of an encounter. To use a fair example, consider the page of any magazine. When you read the magazine, you can follow the text of an article because any advertisements take on a distinctive feel from the body of the text. This allows the reader to follow the desired article without being mislead by the content of other information.

There are moments where the editor or art director chose to interpose moments of “in your campaign” halfway through a paragraph with incomplete execution of a distinctive break. This could have been achieved though blocks of colour or bold borders, a change in font or inventive graphics and layout. It took the use of magnification to determine that a “break” had occurred when these two trains of thought clashed, and it was jarring. The borders between a change in topic were the same as the borders between the encounter and editor notes. There was a slight change of hue that only appeared under magnification.
Proper editing and art direction here could have added graphics or other content to allow the body of the encounter to continue unabated without confusing gaps containing very similar text with exactly the same layout – but completely different intents and content.
All of this made me more and more agitated to read, as its layout flaws were inescapable. Given that the majority of the encounters felt incomplete and possessed a half-thought-out series of substitutions, trying to follow the body of the text when it jumped into “how to put this into our campaign” before the encounter was even over (and sometimes mid-thought) made reading this work feel like a chore.
Some of this stress could have been removed by the inclusion of stat blocks like exist in many other products when a particular book is referenced. The fact that these were not included in a paid resource is disappointing. Even Out of the Box contains page number references, and it’s free. Stats were given for certain things that exist only within the body of an encounter, but no other reference material is given. In many cases, even that information was partial.
Risking backlash and anger, I cannot recommend this product in anything more than PDF form. For $6.00, it’s a good enough value to build upon. For a final printed product, I would be angry and disappointed to purchase this in-store to find out that I, as DM, was left with a good chunk of work to do when other products on the same rack of books likely do not. I cannot concur with the “four star” rating this product had at the time of this article. At best I’d give it two. Two-point-five. Tops.
Why? It’s a paid product which stands against all other products and the work and attention involved. It has to be held to the very high standard of production values laid out by the gaming industry, and to the expectations of a gaming public rightly spoiled by that high standard. Beginning DMs deserve no less, and experienced DMs have earned better.

Before you leave for your next adventure

Have you picked up a copy of Prepared 2 from Kobold Press to try in your D&D games? Do you have a PDF or physical copy, or both? Have you run or played in an adventure from the collection? Let us know in the comments below and as always, stay nerdy!

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Mike Gould

I fell into gaming in the oddest of ways. Coming out of a bad divorce, my mom tried a lot of different things to keep my brother and I busy and out of trouble. It didn't always work. One thing that I didn't really want to do, but did because my mom asked, was enroll in Venturers. As an older Scout-type movement, I wasn't really really for the whole camping-out thing. Canoe trips and clean language were not my forte. Drag racing, BMX and foul language were. What surprised me though was one change of pace our Scout leader tried. He DMed a game of the original D&D that came out after Chainmail (and even preceedd the Red Box). All the weapons just did 1d6 damage, and the three main demi-humans (Elf, Dwarf and Halfling) were not only races, but classes. There were three alignments (Lawful, Neutral and Chaotic). It was very basic. I played all the way through high school and met a lot of new people through gaming. My expected awkwardness around the opposite sex disappeared when I had one game that was seven girls playing. They, too, never thought that they would do this, and it was a great experiement. But it got me hooked. I loved gaming, and my passion for it became infectious. Despite hanging with a very rough crowd who typically spent Fridays scoring drugs, getting into fights, and whatnot, I got them all equally hooked on my polyhedral addiction. I DMed guys around my table that had been involved in the fast-living/die young street culture of the 80s, yet they took to D&D like it was second nature. They still talk to me about those days, even when one wore a rival patch on his back to the one I was wearing. We just talked D&D. It was our language. Dungeons and Dragons opened up a whole new world too. I met lots off oddballs along with some great people. I played games like Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Car Wars, Battletech, lots of GURPS products, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, Twilight 2000, Rolemaster, Champions, Marvel Superheroes, Earth Dawn...the list goes on. There was even a time while I was risiding with a patch on my back and I would show up for Mechwarrior (the clix kind) tournaments. I was the odd man out there. Gaming lead to me attending a D&D tournament at a local convention, which lead to being introduced to my paintball team, called Black Company (named after the book), which lead to meeting my wife. She was the sister of my 2iC (Second in Command), and I fell in love at first sight. Gaming lead to me meeting my best friend, who was my best man at my wedding and is the godfather of my youngest daughter. Life being what it is, there was some drama with my paintball team/D&D group, and we parted ways for a number of years. In that time I tried out two LARP systems, which taught me a lot about public speaking, improvisation, and confidence. There was a silver lining. I didn't play D&D again for a very long time, though. Then 5E came out. I discovered the Adventurer's League, and made a whole new group of friends. I discovered Acquisitions Incorporated, Dwarven Tavern, and Nerdarchy. I was hooked again. And now my daughter is playing. I introduced her to 5E and my style of DMing, and we talk in "gamer speak" a lot to each other (much to the shagrin of my wife/her mother...who still doesn't "get it"). It's my hope that one day she'll be behind the screen DMing her kids through an amazing adventure. Time will tell.

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