Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… Fortress on the Wild Frontier

​An entire dang sandbox campaign by Nameless Designer, levels 1-10
Written for Heroes of Adventure
  SKENRITH KEEP STANDS AS A SOLITARY BULWARK OF CIVILISATION AGAINST THE VAST AND
UNTAMED WILDERNESS THAT SURROUNDS IT. THE SOLDIERS AND RANGERS STATIONED THERE ARE
TIRELESS AND VIGILANT IN THEIR EFFORTS TO SAFEGUARD THE KEEP AND THE LANDS FROM THE
MYRIAD OF THREATS THAT LURK BEYOND ITS WALLS.  AS A HEROIC ADVENTURER SEEKING TO MAKE YOUR MARK IN THE REGION, YOU WILL UNDOUBTEDLY FACE A RANGE OF CHALLENGES AND DANGERS IN THIS VOLATILE AND UNPREDICTABLE LANDSCAPE.
  I don’t know how to even begin this review; the scope and scale of Crapshoot Monday is all about dinky little artsy adventure modules, put out for free by a random assortment hoping to get the occasional PWYW dollar and high fives from the close little itch.io community. This…this is something different. Fortress on the Wild Frontier bucks the clear B2 reference to present not just a keep on the borderlands, but an entire sandbox designed for campaign(s) of either aimless exploration or involved plots. This thing is sixty-four pages but it is DENSE, holding not just a hexmap with procedural content generation but also multiple factions and sites; something like ten dungeons, multiple villages and adventure sites, and a whole portal to the Shadowlands, another plane of existence between life and death. It assumes you’ll want to adventure in all of these but doesn’t presume anything about the PC actions aside. It’s a Nameless Designer product, so it’s colorful with AI art and nice layouts, everything is clean and clear. Dagum.
  I guess to describe the plot I’d really look at the “adventure seeds”, which were diffidently offered as optional but you and I both know the way to make this campaign really pop is to have all four seeds active at once. Each one these is neatly set up in a half page that details the antagonist(s) goals, the heroes’ objective, and possible ally and enemy factions, then it lists five milestones, and then neatly summarizes the outcome(s) if the antagonist(s) succeeds. The four ongoing plots are that a marauding tribe of beastmen (orcs) are invading the region, deathly shadowriders from the Shadowlands are emerging from a portal trying to link the two planes, a secretive cult is trying to resurrect a plague god, and finally the guy in charge of the keep wants to mount and expedition to the nearby barrier peaks. Turn on every one of these (they have similar time-scales), add PCs, and you’re cooking with gas.
  Beyond the presentation and ambition what I liked were most of the adventure sites. Megadungeons they ain’t, but nor are we talking about five-room-dungeons here either. The main hexcrawl’s random encounter table has a clever idea, where every encounter has description->discoverable->secret, fleshing out something that can be just a fight into something that’s a memorable encounter or even a significant quest. The system, lacking as it does simple +1 bonuses, has here encountered varied and interesting magic items ever time they get discovered. NPC personalities are brief but well-sketched, with basically every named NPC (and there are dozens) having enough to run for multiple sessions with motives and moods made very clear. Sites are interlinked, so even a “let’s just go thataway” hexcrawl will rapidly generate objectives and PC-motivated quests. Or also not…the choice is theirs. I know I touched on it above, but I also loved the Shadowlands…it’s not just a hand-wavey “death zone” but an extraplanar location that has multiple points of interest and its own planar rules. There’s a ton to like here.
  What can be improved is, of course, a lot with this much content. All the interesting things happening are at times a bit difficult to picture; a page-sized timeline of expected events would be helpful in coordinating…obviously the players’ actions will change it but knowing what was baked in at the beginning helps to judge their actions’ impact. A relationship map of factions/prominent NPCs would also be a notable improvement, not just for the reader’s understanding but also so that the author himself thinks about how everyone interacts; this is the homeland of the wildfolk (elves), surely they have opinions about the Shadowlands portal, right? Given the clear aim to keep the module to 64 pages, the page space for these improvements could probably be taken from some of the villages and little outposts that adhere to a strict number/key format unnecessarily. With this many dungeons obviously map quality is going to vary somewhat but a general pass looking for a little more connectivity and verticality wouldn’t go amiss in most cases.
  As an aside, this is where some reviewers might complain about the vanilla nature of the content overall. It’s a keep on the borderlands with an orc invasion and a dark cult and an expedition to some barrier peaks and a portal to the deathlands, we’ve heard all these adventure seeds before. Sometimes, though, the palate calls for vanilla, it’s a wonderful flavor. This is high-grade genuine pure vanilla extract, not the crappy beaver butt-squeezings that we’ve become accustomed to as “vanilla”. It is what it is, and I think reviewers look too hard for novelty where the real spark in a TTRPG comes from the freeform emergent gameplay at the table…and this module gives all the ingredients for an epic and memorable campaign.
  The best use case for Fortress on the Wild Frontier is to play it as a great sandbox campaign. While it’s written for the niche Heroes of Adventure system, converting this to either modern-style D&D (5E), tradgames (3.P), or old-school systems shouldn’t be too difficult. There’s so much content that the “mine for bits” use case is well-stocked too, there are well-made adventure sites, neat magic items, and fun monsters (with wonky AI-art) to salt into our own games. This would be worth paying money for, but it's Don’t Pay I Don’t Want (Your Money). Astonishing value.
  Final rating? *****/***** I waffled back and forth between four and five stars on this one, feeling a little bit of ennui on the more generic elements here. In the end, though, that’s a symptom of Pompous Reviewer Syndrome, or maybe Module Reader but Not Player Syndrome…screw that, this is released to be played and I think in play it’s a top-flight adventure module even in normal competition, let alone in the dire dreck mines of itch.io.

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