“Can’t admit that I ever expected to see you lot again. The old man wryly laughed, and spat into the fire. Behind him, he dragged a wicked looking wooden pole, stuck into what appeared to be a head of some unfortunate goblin…
Bringing up the rear, appeared Vulpin, leather armor cut to pieces, and covered in different shades of blood. As Lucan and Nathaniel emerged, they showed signs of burnt clothing and ash in their hair. Seraphina’s plate mail was destroyed or missing in several spots, and her entire left side showed a nasty-looking bite-mark. Whenever he turned his neck, he winced, and a small pool of blood formed under his ribcage.
Fargrim was undoubtedly missing a couple of teeth, and he seemed to have a hard time moving his left arm and left leg. Swollen purple eyes, bandages around the waist, and fang-marks from something that must’ve been enormous. The last two days had not been kind to them. As he stamped out the fire, and began to saddle the ponies, he stopped and stared in surprise at the ragged group of adventurers that plodded slowly forward. Thus, the Monster Vault tokens should work with this adventure, and you should be pretty well covered if you already own the D&D Adventure Games, or are collecting the Dungeon Command games.True to his word, their toothless guide was still waiting for them with the ponies when the heroes emerged from the forest’s edge two days later. Most of the monsters are of the common variety, albeit with specializations to spring on the players. You will need a battle map or dungeon tiles. The map does not cover all the areas used in the module. If you're up for it, you can cut and mount parts of the map onto cardstock and make your own tiles. While this gamer would prefer a poster map over a printout, you can conveniently make a second printout of the map for your own use. Half of one side is a ruined level of a keep, with the other half a garrisoned bridge.
The slaying stone maps pdf#
The PDF version of the two-sided map prints out as two sides of nine pages each (print in poster mode). 1/4 page diagrams of areas for combat are included. Like other book-to-PDF products, the adventure is in color, with color art. The PDF consists of the 32-page adventure and a large two-page map. As this adventure has been extensively reviewed on the internet, I will review the PDF format itself. Its non-linear sandbox style was a nice change from the usual linear module, but required work by the DM to fill in the details. HS1 is a first-level adventure, originally released in 2010. Each version uses its medium well, although WotC could have gone one better by including printable maps. On the other hand, the PDF is well bookmarked, something that doesn’t apply in print. The other big limitation, of course, is that the PDF version does not include the poster map that came with the printed version, so you’ll have to find an alternate way to construct those tactical encounter areas on your tabletop. This gets slightly more complicated if you’re running the module from a computer screen where you have to scroll up and down a lot, or on a tablet where you’re seeing one page at a time. Thus, if you’re running the adventure from the printed book, you just lay it flat and you have everything you need-all the maps and stat blocks and such-right in front of you without having to flip pages. First, the module was originally designed for print, with the assumption that the writeups for tactical encounters would span two facing pages. The layout and presentation are very nice, and the module makes the transition to PDF well, with just a couple of caveats about that. The storyline is pretty much in the “search for a MacGuffin, with complications” mold, but there are enough interesting NPCs and competing factions to keep things interesting. The whole thing is written in a way that is very helpful for beginning DMs but never patronizing or insulting to experienced DMs. “The Slaying Stone” marked Wizards of the Coast’s second pass at heroic tier adventure modules for D&D 4e, and as such it incorporates several years’ worth of innovations and lessons learned.