Reviewing the Reviewers: In the Name of the Principle

Formatting: Just don't overthink it.

An adventure by Melan, level 5-7.
Written for Swords & Magic
  I have a little side project here. I started this foray into the TTRPG space first as a module writer, beginning with The Fall of Whitecliff and continuing with the dozen or so more I’ve released over the past eight years. It’s only been a little over a year since I’ve started writing reviews, although checking my composition document it looks like I’ve cracked 100,000 words of reviewing already (I have reviews written all the way out to April right now). I’m not the only mixed reviewer/module seller, though, others have come before…Ben Milton, Gabor Lux, GusL, and Prince of Nothing come to mind. So, over the next few months, I want to review the reviewers here, looking at how an acclaimed adventure from one of these deeply-steeped holds up. Mr. Lux, known also as Melan, is the first one I’ll look at with his oddball In the Name of the Principle. It’s what he considers his most iconic, so let’s see how it plays.
  First off, this is a very unusual adventure. Just look at the summary blurb:
  Central concept: Open-ended assassinations
in the picturesque city state of Akrasia,
with the most state-of-the-art implements
of murder, including various futuristic
devices.
  So, we have a city adventure, which is rare. We have sci-fi devices handed out to the PCs, which is rare. We have a timed(ish) mission of assassination (not that rare) that ends with a full-fledged coup and seizing control of the city, which is so rare as to be unheard-of. Added to this mix is that the sending agency who gave the PCs their mission changed their minds and sent a second team of twelve hitmen, also equipped with sci-fi gear, to protect the PCs’ target. Now, add in the fact that there’s an impending festival that has tons of strangers filtering into the city and how the ruling clique are all paranoid, use secret police, and are equipped with some nice defensive magic and you’ve got an incredibly complex adventure here.
  Format and art won’t win any originality accolades, but the module is clean and clear, mostly conveyed in two-column paragraph-based prose, with simple hand-sketched (MS Paint?) maps sprinkled in where needed. As is normal for a city adventure, sub-maps are simple, almost more diagrams than proper room-by-room exploration maps. I think that’s probably the right call for assassination use, which is similar in game mode terms to a heist. Charming gear handouts and the occasional flourish of the orders sheets for the PCs and the hit squad are nice.
  The four rulers of the city are the standard prince, general, wizard, and priest, well-characterized in succinct paragraphs that give us what we need to run interactions with them, along with just enough stats/gear to make their assassination very difficult. The other factions are faceless but described in terms of motivations and plans/responses, which is fine, but the biggest interactive group that’s only characterized in asides is the mob of the city itself.

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  I love the city writeup, which is where the main meat of the module is found. Akrasia is a wealthy city, not at the center of an empire but almost a bedroom community for the “big city” elite. Greco-Roman elements convey a certain feel, conjuring an impression of a Rome or Constantinople in miniature, complete with essentials like a main aqueduct, a temple (one target here), a wizard’s tower (one target here), and a Neo-Classical palace (two targets here). The biggest campaign-significant element about the city is that the whole thing is focused around a big planar gate where annual sacrifices of young men and maidens get sent off into the unknown during the mystery festival. The least obvious element of the whole scenario is how the PCs are supposed to rule it if they manage step 2, control the darned thing. One assumes that at some point the PCs find the second hit squad with the order rescinding the initial plan, but if they don’t, then there’s not much GM support on how to wrangle the restive city. There is a chance to blow the whole place up though.
  Which leads me to probably the most controversial aspect of the adventure, those sci-fi elements. In addition to starting the players out with laser pistols, force cubes, and a bomb, there’s integrated futuristic stuff throughout the adventure, most notably that the middle of the palace holds a rocket ship; launching the ship destroys the palace outright and there’s a 1-in-3 chance that the thing malfunctions during ascent, turning into a fireball that wipes out there whole city. If the rocket doesn’t blow up, whatever hapless PC(s) are aboard are more or less out of the game heading to interstellar space. More intimately, the grand poobah of the city does all his public appearances in a Magic Popemobile: A hovering glass bell that blocks all weapons and deflects most rays/magic. While this hews to a very respectable tradition of classic D&D, your own personal milage may vary. While some of the gear could be reflavored as magic items, the underlying technomagical assumptions underlay a lot of the adventure’s core.

​  This thing is hard to accurately access because it is Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Not only does it assume a lot on the part of the DM, what with all the timers, factions, and locations…this is also not an adventure for all players. The sprawling open-ended nature of the scenario demands a lot of agency from the PCs. Treating this like a loot ‘n scoot assault, even at levels 5-7, will see the PCs failing fast, and the scenario falling apart once its clear that the mission is cancelled by the original senders will frustrate some parties. Not a scenario for every table I’m sad to say. Hard to seed into an ongoing campaign, and rather complex for a multi-session one-shot.
  There’s going to be a break out of ratings, then, because I’m always looking for usability. I admire this scenario a lot, but I’m not going to be one of the primary audience of users. Thus:
****/***** for most users, challenging as it is there’s also a lot of value for inspiration/stripping for parts.
*****/***** if you’re an advanced DM with high agency players who’s not allergic to gonzo elements.
***/***** for the single session/con slot user or someone with more go-along to get-along players.
  An impressive adventure, I suspect it’s going to be the best of the reviewers’ modules. Worth checking out for anyone, as it’s free and fascinating.