This past Sunday marked about three months since I've started running Through the Valley of the Manticore, an adventure module by Jacob Fleming. We've essentially wrapped up the whole thing, so given my previous few blog posts about hexcrawls, I wanted to give my thoughts and experiences on the module here.

If it wasn't already obvious, there are spoilers for this module below. Read at your own risk.

The Hexcrawl Itself

I've written at length about what I think some common problems are with hexcrawls, and how to go about making them yourself, so I won't reiterate that here. Needless to say, I found a lot of the travel in this particular module boring. There isn't much of anything in the hexes that don't contain the module's dungeons and the random encounters, while conducive to building the ecology of the region, aren't particularly interesting in any way.

The one thing that I do really enjoy about the travel in this is the roads and the landmarks. The landmarks aren't outright explained in the text of the book, (or, if they are, it didn't stick out to me much when reading through) but the names of the landmarks in the various hexes were nice and alluded to a greater regional context that the scenario existed in. This, combined with the little details like the distance in miles printed alongside the roads, are quick and easily referenced at the table.

Adventure Sites

This is where I think Fleming's work here is a bit stronger, but unexpectedly where I started having less fun. The dungeons are certainly properly laid out and have interesting set pieces in them, but too often I found that Fleming's encounters often ended up in combat, or were so biased towards it as to make a nonviolent outcome nearly impossible. This is fine when it happens every once and a while, but I found that more often than not there were encounters which, for no discernible reason, the members would always fight or otherwise resort to military outcomes.

The broader design of these dungeons and the way they interact with the fabric of the module is pretty good. In the Temple of For'gothu, the largest dungeon in the module, there is a door that can only be opened by retrieving three keys from the various adventure sites in the map. This is cool, because it:

• Encourages exploration of the whole map
• Asks players to think about objects as items in the fiction instead of checks you turn in back in town for gold and silver.

This first point in particular would pair really nicely with the hexcrawl, but the problem (as stated above) is that the hexcrawl is mostly empty beyond the few dungeons.

The Manticore

I think the manticore really makes or breaks this module. The adventure sites are middling enough and it's not exactly difficult to fill in the empty gaps in the hexcrawl (especially if you use my method :P) but the titular manticore is probably the greatest point of failure in the module. Essentially, it's hyper intelligent and knows its limits and its skillset really well. The module asks you to play the manticore in a suitably unfair manner. Ambush unsuspecting travelers at night, grab lone targets and drop them from a great height, etc. are all fair game. The manticore also gets mind control powers, because a manticore with mind control powers is just about the coolest thing since the invention of the home refrigerator in 1913 by Fred W. Wolf.

I'll be the first to admit I likely didn't utilize the manticore to its fullest potential, but I'm not quite sure that I could have in my case. My party entered the valley with about 20 hired guardsmen, so any issue of getting ambushed by the manticore was likely out of the question. Beyond a climactic night-time ambush at the entrance to the den of the manticore, the party was impervious to night-time ambush. Without the constant pressure of the manticore influencing them, the party was pretty free to move around the area, which made the emptiness of the hexcrawl a little more obvious.

Things I Would Change on a Rerun

• Rewrite the random encounter tables
• Put at least one thing in every hex
• Change most of the dungeon encounters to be less immediately violent

Closing Thoughts

I think Fleming does good work establishing a base with an interesting concept to work off of. It's not to be mistaken with a fully fleshed out module, but it is most of the work necessary to clobber together a pretty cohesive and satisfying adventure. When I spend money on a module, though, I usually expect to get something complete, which I don't think this ends up being. That being said, my players had a blast and I only started running out of steam and excitement for the module towards the end, which means that for the most part it did its job!