Voadam
Legend
Review of Hackmaster B1
I was sent a free copy of Hackmaster B1 module Quest for the Unknown in return for posting an honest review here. This review will contain some spoilers so be forewarned.
I have never played Hackmaster or seen KoDT, the comic around which the game is based. I have seen Kenzer's promotional material and read Jeff Ibach's reviews of the core rule and monster books. The reviews piqued my interest. It sounded like 1e, 2e and house rule game mechanics combined with a straightforward hack and slash everything you come across style of gaming with humor added in. Player's are supposed to kill things and take their stuff to get xp, while the DM's role is to provide tough gruesome opposition and a high body count. I imagined Army of Darkness and the flying vorpal bunnies from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
I have played Oe, 1e, 2e, and 3e D&D. I enjoyed the three "Return to" modules (Keep on the Borderlands, White Plume Mountain, and Temple of elemental evil) that I purchased in the past. I started off my current ongoing DMing campaign about 17 years ago with the original B1 and I have fond, if vague, memories of the module. I remembered it was a dungeon with troglodytes and a magic rock.
When I got the module more memories started flooding back: the portcullis trap, the work-room with tools, Roghan and Zelligar and their stronghold named Quasquetron, the rumors, and the room of pools.
B1 is Hackmaster's introductory module and it includes advice for both starting players and novice DMs. The setup is straightforward, there is an abandoned stronghold that might contain treasure. Someone in the party found a map. The PC with the map gets some likeminded looters and they are off.
There is a good PC introduction with a little background. The DM's background was written in the same style and seemed more like a second player's introduction. To get the whole back-story of what went on you have to read the whole module.
The maps are clear, although the numbering is pretty scattered across the map. This makes reading the rooms in order and looking for how they spatially relate on the map a bit difficult, but should not be a problem in finding the room descriptions working from where the PCs are on the map.
The art is appropriately gruesome for a product called Hackmaster and most monsters have at least a little picture, many of them viciously devastating adventurers.
The review will get more in depth on specifics ahead so this is a spoiler alert.
The monsters are plentiful and wandering monsters are a key element at all times in the adventure. How long players spend in areas, how much noise they make, etc. are all factors for how many and how often wandering beasties show up to assault the dungeon delvers. Given this importance, and the fact that parties might need to return multiple times with new characters, I thought the number of unique wandering monsters might be hacked through before the adventure is over.
The monsters have a simple stat block and most but not all have their physical descriptions and special attacks described in the text of their encounters. The difference between Hackmaster and other editions of D&D is that all creatures (including PCs) of 1HD or greater have +20 hit points. So a typical 1 HD creature will have 24 hp. This of course leads to increased hacking. AC is the old edition version of lower is better. Noticeably absent in the stat block is a THACO or 3e attack bonus. In an e-mail Kenzer said that monster attacks follow a chart in their Game Master Guide that is close to but not quite linear.
Hackmaster players should always keep their heads up as death from above seems a popular tactic. There are a variety of creatures with a number of different types of attacks from strangulation, paralysis, and eye gouging, to straight out claw and weapon hacking.
There is humor throughout the adventure. Humor is always a subjective matter and some aspects of the humor I found amusing, others I found not to my taste or actively distasteful.
As a DM I can edit out the parts I did not like and run the game in an interactive style I do like, but I would not enjoy being a player in the module run straight. This is a matter of personal taste and gaming style, I don't like DM harassment, or bathroom humor in my games, and there can be too much silliness for my tastes.
In B1 the first unavoidable encounter is with mobile magic mouths that have gone bad, after giving their messages they start to harass the party. The magic mouths can fly and will follow the party until they get bored. One will target female characters and run through a series of pickup lines. This could be funny but it could also turn misogynistic. The other just harasses the party. My first thought was this is to spur the characters into Hackmaster style, the appropriate response to annoying things that provoke you being to draw a battle axe and hack into them. Then I read under the special defenses: only harmed by magic. E-mailling Kenzer I confirmed that a starting party will not be able to kill one of these 20 plus hit point things unless a magic user gets real lucky and criticals on a damage spell. The purpose of the encounter is to annoy the party with something that cannot be killed or avoided.
There is also a prevalence of bathroom humor in the product, There is a wandering monster that flings crap at adventurers, there is healing magic with laxative side effects, there is treasure buried in sewage, and a noxious emissions trap.
On humor, I generally do not like genre jarring anachronisms. So for command words I do not like "Green eggs and ham." Similarly I do not like too much transformation of the deadly into the absurd so the image of the drow advisor who wears curled toe slippers that have bells on the end struck me as a bit too ridiculous.
On the other hand, I found the treatment of the orcs was great. What happens to orc slaves when the boss is away and the underboss is overthrown? Step one, they raid the armories and get organized militarily. Step two they find the brewery and spend the rest of their time in an aggressive drunken stupor. I thought that was a great situation that would be fun to run or encounter and figure out. I also liked how some thought was taken in monster placement and interaction throughout the dungeon.
I also thought the spoiled brat mistress' diary handout could be amusing and work in the game context.
There are a couple of dungeon tricks, some magical and some mundane to confuse, delay, or trap the PCs. Magically messing with mapping, in my opinion, aggravates a mechanical chore of the game and takes time away from the fun and interesting stuff. The dozens of empty rooms that must be banged open noisily risking more wandering encounters in the hopes of something in the next room seems a bit much. I do like the portcullis trap and the pit that drops you to the next level, they introduce interesting situations that do more than merely annoy players.
The magical rock from the original is here but a little meaner than I remember in the original. However as in the original the means of accessing the rock's magic is not intuitive and unless the party has the correct rumor from the start (or cheat and read the module) they are unlikely to figure out how to use it.
One aspect of the adventure I really liked is that it provides random lists of details for specific areas. There are random tables for the alcoholic contents of a dozen barrels in the brewery (and Hackmaster has game effect rules in their Game Master Guide referenced for various stages of drunkenness). There are random tables for the wizard's lab, the alchemy cabinets, starting or information gathering derived rumors, and the library. The library has many book titles, short descriptions of the books, and game effects of skill increase for studying the volumes.
I was not expecting Ars Magica type scholarly advancement from text studying in a game called Hackmaster but apparently Hackmaster has rewards for literate studious adventurers. Another rule I was not expecting but seems to work well are damaged item rules so you can find incredibly shoddy and beat up plate mail that does not provide much AC. I think this is a great idea so that as the characters advance and get more money they can presumably have the armor repaired more and more for a better AC, etc., without having the character trade in for upgrades. It's a minor character visualization point but I like it.
The humanoids in the bottom level are connected to events and creatures in B2 Little Keep on the Borderland and there is a map of that area as a treasure at the end of the adventure. This is a great tie in and intro to the next adventure which could easily be changed to a different dungeon if the DM did not have B2 or wanted to do something different.
There are one or two roleplay encounters but most everything is hack and slash. This default can be changed for some of the sentient creatures or the PCs deciding to capture and interrogate an orc or two instead of slaughtering all of them. The background story is there to be found by the adventurers nevertheless. There are diaries and artwork, letters and signature items that all tell the tale of what happened in the dungeon for those with any interest in figuring it out.
At the end of the adventure there are sheets with the stat blocks of every monster in the module plus little blocks of squares for every hit point the monster has. The monsters have the location where they are and the page number for the Hacklopedia of Beasts for their full descriptions. While I wouldn't use the hit point blocks, having all creature stats easy to find on a single combat sheet is useful. Also having the room number where they are found and book reference handy are great tools for easily flipping back to the areas with more relevant information on the encounters and creatures.
If the bathroom humor, DM harassment, and some of the silliness were scraped away, I would find the adventure a decent dungeon that was fun to run. I would really hesitate before playing if somebody else were running this adventure or any Hackmaster game because these seem to be default themes for the game. Some may find that humor and DM-Player dynamic fun, and it is for them that this game is designed. Others will modify them for their own games as these moods are within the DM's control.
Hackmaster still appeals to me for the hack and slash aspects and I might pick up some sourcebooks for the ideas and massive number of spells, magic items, and monsters, as well as the "return to" nostalgia of the modules. The crude humor and the theme of DM as PC humiliator as opposed to referee of tough adventures make these products less desirable and therefore less of a purchase priority for me.
Now then, as for using the adventure outside of Hackmaster, there are a couple of ways I can see it being adapted. For 3e the biggest change is the monsters. Most significantly there is the 20 hp bonus in monsters. Either the monsters will need to be converted or replaced with 3e ones. For conversions, the monsters stat blocks only include int, so everything else will have to be assigned and determined including attack bonuses and saves. Monster type will be easy to assign and the special abilities and attacks should also be easy to determine. This will just be bit of work for the DM
If you are looking for a cheap rules alternative for a one shot adventure in B1, use Oe, 1e, or 2e rules if you have them, and add 20 hp to the adventurers base hit points. Then just run with it. (1e PH, DMG, and UA and Basic D&D are available as $5 or $6 ESDs on WotC's site) I would ignore the honor and crit sections of the monster stat blocks but otherwise it should work. Alternatively take 20 hp away from the monsters and you are back in straight old D&D. However, more hit points on both sides means more time hacking and slashing in every combat which seems more like a Hackmaster atmosphere which would be fun to try out. Just expect sleep and color spray to become much more useful spells than magic missile during the adventure.
I was sent a free copy of Hackmaster B1 module Quest for the Unknown in return for posting an honest review here. This review will contain some spoilers so be forewarned.
I have never played Hackmaster or seen KoDT, the comic around which the game is based. I have seen Kenzer's promotional material and read Jeff Ibach's reviews of the core rule and monster books. The reviews piqued my interest. It sounded like 1e, 2e and house rule game mechanics combined with a straightforward hack and slash everything you come across style of gaming with humor added in. Player's are supposed to kill things and take their stuff to get xp, while the DM's role is to provide tough gruesome opposition and a high body count. I imagined Army of Darkness and the flying vorpal bunnies from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
I have played Oe, 1e, 2e, and 3e D&D. I enjoyed the three "Return to" modules (Keep on the Borderlands, White Plume Mountain, and Temple of elemental evil) that I purchased in the past. I started off my current ongoing DMing campaign about 17 years ago with the original B1 and I have fond, if vague, memories of the module. I remembered it was a dungeon with troglodytes and a magic rock.
When I got the module more memories started flooding back: the portcullis trap, the work-room with tools, Roghan and Zelligar and their stronghold named Quasquetron, the rumors, and the room of pools.
B1 is Hackmaster's introductory module and it includes advice for both starting players and novice DMs. The setup is straightforward, there is an abandoned stronghold that might contain treasure. Someone in the party found a map. The PC with the map gets some likeminded looters and they are off.
There is a good PC introduction with a little background. The DM's background was written in the same style and seemed more like a second player's introduction. To get the whole back-story of what went on you have to read the whole module.
The maps are clear, although the numbering is pretty scattered across the map. This makes reading the rooms in order and looking for how they spatially relate on the map a bit difficult, but should not be a problem in finding the room descriptions working from where the PCs are on the map.
The art is appropriately gruesome for a product called Hackmaster and most monsters have at least a little picture, many of them viciously devastating adventurers.
The review will get more in depth on specifics ahead so this is a spoiler alert.
The monsters are plentiful and wandering monsters are a key element at all times in the adventure. How long players spend in areas, how much noise they make, etc. are all factors for how many and how often wandering beasties show up to assault the dungeon delvers. Given this importance, and the fact that parties might need to return multiple times with new characters, I thought the number of unique wandering monsters might be hacked through before the adventure is over.
The monsters have a simple stat block and most but not all have their physical descriptions and special attacks described in the text of their encounters. The difference between Hackmaster and other editions of D&D is that all creatures (including PCs) of 1HD or greater have +20 hit points. So a typical 1 HD creature will have 24 hp. This of course leads to increased hacking. AC is the old edition version of lower is better. Noticeably absent in the stat block is a THACO or 3e attack bonus. In an e-mail Kenzer said that monster attacks follow a chart in their Game Master Guide that is close to but not quite linear.
Hackmaster players should always keep their heads up as death from above seems a popular tactic. There are a variety of creatures with a number of different types of attacks from strangulation, paralysis, and eye gouging, to straight out claw and weapon hacking.
There is humor throughout the adventure. Humor is always a subjective matter and some aspects of the humor I found amusing, others I found not to my taste or actively distasteful.
As a DM I can edit out the parts I did not like and run the game in an interactive style I do like, but I would not enjoy being a player in the module run straight. This is a matter of personal taste and gaming style, I don't like DM harassment, or bathroom humor in my games, and there can be too much silliness for my tastes.
In B1 the first unavoidable encounter is with mobile magic mouths that have gone bad, after giving their messages they start to harass the party. The magic mouths can fly and will follow the party until they get bored. One will target female characters and run through a series of pickup lines. This could be funny but it could also turn misogynistic. The other just harasses the party. My first thought was this is to spur the characters into Hackmaster style, the appropriate response to annoying things that provoke you being to draw a battle axe and hack into them. Then I read under the special defenses: only harmed by magic. E-mailling Kenzer I confirmed that a starting party will not be able to kill one of these 20 plus hit point things unless a magic user gets real lucky and criticals on a damage spell. The purpose of the encounter is to annoy the party with something that cannot be killed or avoided.
There is also a prevalence of bathroom humor in the product, There is a wandering monster that flings crap at adventurers, there is healing magic with laxative side effects, there is treasure buried in sewage, and a noxious emissions trap.
On humor, I generally do not like genre jarring anachronisms. So for command words I do not like "Green eggs and ham." Similarly I do not like too much transformation of the deadly into the absurd so the image of the drow advisor who wears curled toe slippers that have bells on the end struck me as a bit too ridiculous.
On the other hand, I found the treatment of the orcs was great. What happens to orc slaves when the boss is away and the underboss is overthrown? Step one, they raid the armories and get organized militarily. Step two they find the brewery and spend the rest of their time in an aggressive drunken stupor. I thought that was a great situation that would be fun to run or encounter and figure out. I also liked how some thought was taken in monster placement and interaction throughout the dungeon.
I also thought the spoiled brat mistress' diary handout could be amusing and work in the game context.
There are a couple of dungeon tricks, some magical and some mundane to confuse, delay, or trap the PCs. Magically messing with mapping, in my opinion, aggravates a mechanical chore of the game and takes time away from the fun and interesting stuff. The dozens of empty rooms that must be banged open noisily risking more wandering encounters in the hopes of something in the next room seems a bit much. I do like the portcullis trap and the pit that drops you to the next level, they introduce interesting situations that do more than merely annoy players.
The magical rock from the original is here but a little meaner than I remember in the original. However as in the original the means of accessing the rock's magic is not intuitive and unless the party has the correct rumor from the start (or cheat and read the module) they are unlikely to figure out how to use it.
One aspect of the adventure I really liked is that it provides random lists of details for specific areas. There are random tables for the alcoholic contents of a dozen barrels in the brewery (and Hackmaster has game effect rules in their Game Master Guide referenced for various stages of drunkenness). There are random tables for the wizard's lab, the alchemy cabinets, starting or information gathering derived rumors, and the library. The library has many book titles, short descriptions of the books, and game effects of skill increase for studying the volumes.
I was not expecting Ars Magica type scholarly advancement from text studying in a game called Hackmaster but apparently Hackmaster has rewards for literate studious adventurers. Another rule I was not expecting but seems to work well are damaged item rules so you can find incredibly shoddy and beat up plate mail that does not provide much AC. I think this is a great idea so that as the characters advance and get more money they can presumably have the armor repaired more and more for a better AC, etc., without having the character trade in for upgrades. It's a minor character visualization point but I like it.
The humanoids in the bottom level are connected to events and creatures in B2 Little Keep on the Borderland and there is a map of that area as a treasure at the end of the adventure. This is a great tie in and intro to the next adventure which could easily be changed to a different dungeon if the DM did not have B2 or wanted to do something different.
There are one or two roleplay encounters but most everything is hack and slash. This default can be changed for some of the sentient creatures or the PCs deciding to capture and interrogate an orc or two instead of slaughtering all of them. The background story is there to be found by the adventurers nevertheless. There are diaries and artwork, letters and signature items that all tell the tale of what happened in the dungeon for those with any interest in figuring it out.
At the end of the adventure there are sheets with the stat blocks of every monster in the module plus little blocks of squares for every hit point the monster has. The monsters have the location where they are and the page number for the Hacklopedia of Beasts for their full descriptions. While I wouldn't use the hit point blocks, having all creature stats easy to find on a single combat sheet is useful. Also having the room number where they are found and book reference handy are great tools for easily flipping back to the areas with more relevant information on the encounters and creatures.
If the bathroom humor, DM harassment, and some of the silliness were scraped away, I would find the adventure a decent dungeon that was fun to run. I would really hesitate before playing if somebody else were running this adventure or any Hackmaster game because these seem to be default themes for the game. Some may find that humor and DM-Player dynamic fun, and it is for them that this game is designed. Others will modify them for their own games as these moods are within the DM's control.
Hackmaster still appeals to me for the hack and slash aspects and I might pick up some sourcebooks for the ideas and massive number of spells, magic items, and monsters, as well as the "return to" nostalgia of the modules. The crude humor and the theme of DM as PC humiliator as opposed to referee of tough adventures make these products less desirable and therefore less of a purchase priority for me.
Now then, as for using the adventure outside of Hackmaster, there are a couple of ways I can see it being adapted. For 3e the biggest change is the monsters. Most significantly there is the 20 hp bonus in monsters. Either the monsters will need to be converted or replaced with 3e ones. For conversions, the monsters stat blocks only include int, so everything else will have to be assigned and determined including attack bonuses and saves. Monster type will be easy to assign and the special abilities and attacks should also be easy to determine. This will just be bit of work for the DM
If you are looking for a cheap rules alternative for a one shot adventure in B1, use Oe, 1e, or 2e rules if you have them, and add 20 hp to the adventurers base hit points. Then just run with it. (1e PH, DMG, and UA and Basic D&D are available as $5 or $6 ESDs on WotC's site) I would ignore the honor and crit sections of the monster stat blocks but otherwise it should work. Alternatively take 20 hp away from the monsters and you are back in straight old D&D. However, more hit points on both sides means more time hacking and slashing in every combat which seems more like a Hackmaster atmosphere which would be fun to try out. Just expect sleep and color spray to become much more useful spells than magic missile during the adventure.
