Review - Across Thunder River

Arkobla Conn

Mongoose
Sigh...

How can a book so carefully written, with such wonderful attention to detail, with nice layout, excellent NPC's, and very nice maps, actually fall short?

Well, I supposed that's when you compare it to ultra high expectations.

The first hint was a few months ago when we heard that this book was not a 'Campaign book' the way much of us thought it would be. I certainly thought, due to some posts I read, that it was indeed such a book.

Alas, it is not. Now, mind, I think it succeeds in what the author's intended - to be an excellent sourcebook about Picts, the lands about them and the motives of the peoples there. Where I'm disappointed initially is in the campaign...but then again, I figured I would be.

I was breezing through this book today and found hordes of adventure ideas. An unbelievable amount. If I were still in college, this would be great fodder for creating the mother of all campaigns, and I'd be as happy as a pig in a slop field.

But it is today...and as I turned to the back to review the 'campaign' I found the following paraphrased comments...

"This can be easily modified for higher characters...just add more..."

and

"This campaign does not feature 'read the text box material'

sigh...

This means alot more reading to do before I can jump in. Reading that is going to have to wait until I finish this silly proposal writing class I'm taking....(dang paper is due in 3.5 weeks!). This means I'm going to have to work with the mod .... It means my impression of the 'campaign' is that it was added as an afterthought...

That might be a mean thought, especially since I haven't "read" all the text....but I do wonder if the discussion we had a few months ago about what this 'book' was going to be might have been heard and an attempt was made to do something about that. And the campaign *might* be excellent...but I've got to slough through columns of text until I get the gist of it....well, the overview sounded ok...

to Vincent, who has painstakingly given us the absolute best Conan RPG products we've ever seen - I'm sorry. Again I state, your book DOES come though as you intended it....but it's not the book I was looking for. Please speak to the folks at Mongoose and tell them that the folks who can buy these books (50 bucks for the core book, + more for the sources) are not young, still in school, folks. The demographics, I'd wager, are closer to between 30-40, most of whom are established members of society (IE careers and families) and we don't all have the time to turn the hordes of wonderful adventure hooks into adventures.

You've got the best damn RPG running Mongoose...Please Please Please - Dedicate MORE of your sourcebooks into a series of adventures that can be used with little preperation, within hours of purchasing. If you want to see a good example of the type of stuff we like, go to the Wizards website and visit the d20 modern and D&D websites for adventure downloads. They are FREE, Formatted in a similiar, understandable, fun, and easy to use format and take 1-3 sessions to run. While I'm not asking for free stuff, I am asking for all of the other criterial.

I should be grateful, because the Pirates book, the Scholar book and the Road of Kings book had nothing in it by way of set adventure, and I am happy that we got something. Next time, consider a different format...(ala your PDF adventures...)

Disappointedly frustrated,

Arkobla Conn
 
The problem is, Arkobla, I'm in much the same demographic as you. And, what I want from the Shadizar sourcebook is hooks, NPCs, organisations, maps and background to insert into my campaign - not fully fledged campaigns in their own right.

There is no doubt that many people want campaigns and adventures. Whether it is worth it for Mongoose to make these kinds of sourcebooks focused on detailed campaigns is another issue entirely.
 
I must admit that I would also appreciate more adventures from Mongoose but I think sourcebooks sell better than adventure books. The great advantage of a sourcebook is that it can be used "perpetually" whereas by definition an adventure will be run once with a group of players.
I don't know if Mongoose will ever publish adventures or campaign in book formats, but I suggest you, Arkobla, to use all of your possible spare time to create adventures, even hooks.
You can list some general ideas about goals, stories and starting point and then improvise into a full adventure. It's hard at the beginning but with some work and experience you should be able to run easily one-session adventures that way and possibly developp on the long run a great campaign.
As you are I'am quite older now than before (how logical :lol: ) as I'am reaching the 40's. But then use your life experience to create from nought what a teenager wouldn't be able to do.
 
Perhaps I'm living under the shadow ofa 60 page paper, and an interviewing process that is doubling the size of my team from 7 to 14 and just getting over coaching my son's football team while preparing for an April convention where I sell boardgames on the side....nevermind my hobbies/gaming...(My poor wife...) and it's clouding my vision...

Don't misconstrue - I like the sourcebooks too...but they have the chance to use all of the material in the book, integrated with previous offerings, to give us a nice couple adventures. I'd rather shorter adventures that are formatted for easier/quicker play than 'campaigns' that will take alot of work.

For Shadizar, for example, I want a 1-3 session (text boxed) adventure that brings us into contact with several key NPC's and has the PC's involved in some seedy activity.

For the Pirates book, we should have had a naval/island adventure.

For the Scholar book, it should have been something which pitted our heros against a scholar who used new magics...magics they'd never heard of before.

I'm not saying replace the whole book - I'm saying look to what others have done. Another example (and I'm sorry it's from Wizards again), look at the Ebberon Core handbook. That had a 1-3 session adventure in the end. Took up about 5-10 pages max and was a nice intro.
 
Good points. I didn't buy the book for the campaign. Heck I doubt if I will ever run another studio adventure again to be honest. Stones of Kavag Re (SP?) was a bit of a joke. I ran through it with my player and was dissapointed to say the least. I even came up with about 9 pages of additional material which in my opinion was necessary for a first time Conan GM (lucky I am not a n00b GM) It was still pretty poor though as everything the player thought was lame, so did I when I went through it. Still lesson learned - I have Hanuman too but ya think I'm gonna run it? nah.

What I want now are hooks and lots of them! So I will read studio adventures but will take whats good from them and weave my own tale. Mongoose, please listen to the man either present a module/campaign that can be run more or less out of the box or fill your pages with something else.
 
Hi guys,

Stick with us - you will be getting the Mother of all campaigns early next year and a lot of our other Conan books will have dedicated campaigns/scenarios built into them, just for those GMs who are always busy doing other things!
 
msprange said:
Stick with us - you will be getting the Mother of all campaigns early next year and a lot of our other Conan books will have dedicated campaigns/scenarios built into them, just for those GMs who are always busy doing other things!

Wow!
The Mother.
Sounds fantastic. I will definitely stayed tuned for more info on this.
:D
 
Hey Matt - I'm hooked already - I'll be here.

And I certainly hope that Vincent hasn't taken any undo critiscim to heart, as I said, the book works as intended...and well.

I'm very happy to hear about the campaign, and am looking forward to it and the promised additions to the other books.

thanks!
 
Maybe it's odd, but I usually spend less time preparing a seed-based adventure than studio stuff. I don't usually write the ideas down, so I make most of the details on the fly just keeping to some basic order of vital scenes or encounters. Therefore I like the idea of having tons of story seeds and 1 or 2 more detailed stuff, in case I have enough time to prepare it.
 
Zeus said:
Maybe it's odd, but I usually spend less time preparing a seed-based adventure than studio stuff. I don't usually write the ideas down, so I make most of the details on the fly just keeping to some basic order of vital scenes or encounters. Therefore I like the idea of having tons of story seeds and 1 or 2 more detailed stuff, in case I have enough time to prepare it.

Snap! Thats the way I always used to run things. I haven't GMd a fantasy game in a while. GMd Spycraft and have been playing instead but the free Living Spycraft serials are wonderful. For my next game I will be doing it seeds/winging it style. I'll see if that goes better, it always worked in the past :)

If I am going to pay for a module, like with Kovag-Re I want to play it as presented. What did I pay for otherwise? I may run Hanuman sometime even though I am put off of the studio modules now. I will probably just take the general idea and a character or two and discard the rest. I dunno, they felt a bit too boring for the player. I seemed to be reading a fair amount rather than getting the player to interact. He didn't seem to mind but I felt like I was cheating him somewhat (and at the same time being cheated myself) It ran nice a quickly though, we got through it in just over 3 hours!

Looking forward to seeing the mother campaign next year though, hopefully it will be a bit less of a chore to prepare for, may just have to wait for the review though.
 
I've been 'winging it' for so many years I can't remember...(other than those one shots I mentioned)...I'm really good at it and everyone (but me) is happy... I just want to use the really cool stuff I don't have time to incorporate, and am hoping they do...
 
msprange said:
Hi guys,

Stick with us - you will be getting the Mother of all campaigns early next year and a lot of our other Conan books will have dedicated campaigns/scenarios built into them, just for those GMs who are always busy doing other things!
Excellent. I love it when Mongoose takes our wishes into consideration.
BTW, when I hear "Mother" I immediately think of Ishtar. So an Adventure in Shem? How lovely.
 
when read mother I was hoping for a epic adventure taking in as many countries and dangers as possible but looking forward too the mother in whatever format as the last mongoose mega adventure the horned god saga for slaine was the best I have ever ran and being a series of softbacks could buy the one I was using then the next etc..
 
I picked up AtTR the other day, and I've been looking through it.

This is the initial impression I got:

The Good:
1. Chris Quilliams. This guy is one of the best artists in gaming today. Do NOT let this guy go! He captures Conan almost as well as the greats of old. Plus, the various Prestige Class illustrations are also excellent.

2. Tons of story ideas, background information and integration of both core and pastiche material. You guys do an excellent job of satisfying the REH purist while simultaneously including tons of outside material for those who want it.

3. Interesting new mechanics and feats, such as the 'minimum 1 damage' rule, the Drum/Paint/Mask feats, and Pictish prestige classes.

The Bad:
1. Who the hell do you have on the editing staff, a bunch of semi-trained monkeys? I've quite literally seen grade schoolers in West Virginia who could write with fewer grammatical and punctuation errors. If the Conan series has one major flaw, this is it. Take some time, do it right, and you won't have to do it over again.

2. Not as much new art as I'd like to see. There's some really good art, some really mediocre art, and a lot of recycled art.



That said, I love the Conan series overall. It's far better than I had hoped, and I thoroughly enjoy the new mechanics. I use them in all my fantasy d20 games now, with some minor houserules (but then, who doesn't houserule a bit here and there?). Keep it up, and hire someone who can read above the 3rd grade level to edit future books. You've got quite possibly the best thing going in the fantasy RPG market.
 
Johannixx said:
...Who the hell do you have on the editing staff, a bunch of semi-trained monkeys? I've quite literally seen grade schoolers in West Virginia who could write with fewer grammatical and punctuation errors. ...

I'm impressed that you actually saw a West Virginian that could read, let alone write.

Okay. West Virginia jokes:

How can you tell that the toothbrush was invented in West Virgina?
If it were invented anywhere else it would have been called a "teethbrush"...

Why couldn't the West Virginia boy join the army?
He couldn't leave his brother's behind...

What are the three biggest lies in West Virginia?

1 The truck is paid for.
2 I didn't know she was my cousin.
3 I was only helping that little sheep over the fence.


What do you call a pretty girl in West Virginia?
A tourist.

More later. My wife is kicking me off the computer. :p
 
For the record, I'm allowed to mock West Virginians because I was born and raised there. Not all of us are illiterate sheep-botherers, just the ones in the backwoods of Wetzel county ;)
 
I'll have to agree on the typo issue - the second thing that most people will look at who pick up the book, the back cover (the first thing of course being the front cover), has a typo in the text! I mean it's a blatant typo, just running the text through a standard spellchecker would have picked it up.
 
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