The Minotaur

[Messageboard Golem]

Life is sometimes unfair. Now, at the moment you are attaining your nomination into the elite paladins of the Holy Order of St. Carminius, your stepfather requests your help.
Life can be unfair, but as a paladin, you have a single duty: help the poor and suffering people; and if those people are close to be family... well, you cannot refuse.

The nomination can wait.

Ancient tales, stories used to scare the children, are now coming true.

A minotaur, which no one has seen clearly before, has gone mad and has begun kidnapping young boys and girl from the simple farm community near his lair.

The thing is that this monster has lived in his maze for 80 years and never hurt anyone before. What is behind these events, and what is driving the minotaur?

You are a paladin, and you must find the truth.

The Minotaur is a double adventure, as a one-on-one adventure which features a bold adventure for a 6th level paladin, this adventure is a dungeon crawl, which will not spare few role playing opportunities and little mysteries to solve. This adventure may also be played with a standard four 3rd level characters group and can be placed with ease in any campaign world.

 

[GameWyrd]

This is my first look at a full 0one Roleplaying Game but I had previously encountered their work in the likes of Gaming Frontiers and had been left with the opinion that their cartography is simply stunning. I was right. When you unpack your zipped copy of "the Minotaur" you’ll discover three pdf files; two are clearly smaller than the third. Look at these two first. They’re fantastic colour maps and they’ll make you wish you had an industry quality printer and if like me you have a namby-pamby black and white printer you’ll wail. These are the sorts of maps that your players will remember the game by for years to come. One of the maps is presented in four different pages that you place in a two-by-two square to present the whole layout. The default setting on Acrobat Reader has been changed to side-by-side view so this effect is clearly visible as the document opens up. Great stuff.

The product isn’t a set of maps though, it’s an adventure and this review will contain spoilers for it.

"The Minotaur" is a story of two different mad alchemists trying to breed a she-minotaur and then a whole army of she-minotaurs. The she-minotaur is introduced as a new monster in the supplement and the mad alchemist is a new prestige class that also makes an appearance. It’s a story without winners, especially the nearby villagers. It is a story of a few twists and turns but it isn’t too complex. On a first read it might seem more awkward than it really is, 0one are an Italian company and although their English is good you can’t but help notice the interesting and unusual choices of words or phrases. I would advise any GM to read through "The Minotaur" before trying to run it but that advice goes for any game.

As a matter of fact, this supplement is actually two games in one insofar as that it can be run as a basic dungeon crawl with a GM and a player controlling a 6th level Paladin or a group of 3rd level heroes. If you go for the former option then you’ll be able to make use of the rather pretty character sheet at the end of the supplement. Whichever option you pick you’ll end up with a fairly basic dungeon crawl with a little investigating work to begin with. It is a basic dungeon crawl but the supplement makes no bones about that, using the same term to describe itself.

That said; it’s a dungeon crawl with a twist. In my opinion it’s pretty hard to conclude happily. The she-minotaur is a victim of circumstance and was only doing what she needed to do to keep her children alive. The mad alchemist who created the first she-minotaur and built the maze is dead before the game begins. In fact, I think the most likely outcome is that the players fall foul of the manipulation of the Aghav, the second mad alchemist. Yes, there is a maze, a minotaur and both were created by Daedalus. GMs who are not keen on using such a widely known Greek myth may want to rename Daedalus at least. What this dungeon crawl lacks in originality, though, I think it makes up for with careful game balance and experience. A look at the document turns up plenty of play-test credits and I do believe that it suits the 6th level Paladin or a group of 3rd level characters. There are some nice touches to the dungeon, the sort of twists I meant by describing the adventure as ‘experienced’. For example, if the players stay too long in the maze or even deliberately try and camp in it over night then this is when all the various predators who have made it their home being roaming about and when random encounter tables come into play. A possible encounter on one of the tables is that of Daedalus’ spectre. I’m not quite sure why that’s there or what to do with it. He died of a heart attack – so why is he a spectre? There’s no clue as to what the spectre wants. It might have reason for helping the players, you as the GM will have to decide what the undead form of the original alchemist thinks of Aghav and you don’t really have any clues. It might be easier to remove him from the table, ignore the result or otherwise avoid any direct confrontations. There’s a witch too, she lives outside the maze and isn’t in the village either. I’m not sure why or how the player(s) will want to speak to her and I think she could be snipped from the entire adventure without anyone noticing – but at least she’s there in case the players get very lost or nose around the countryside in the wrong direction deliberately.

There’s a map of the dungeon too. It’s just as good as the separately bundled maps and it’s in colour too. The use of colour really is a mixed blessing. It looks super but I don’t think it’ll be easy to print this PDF off. There are no sidebars to churn through your ink but each page does have a colour heading design that’s about an inch thick. If you’re planning to run the game off your laptop or even if you’re just flicking back and forth through the pages on your PC then you’ll make good use of the bookmarks. Every PDF should have bookmarks, even if only in their most basic form as they are here in "The Minotaur" and are presented in a straight, none hierarchical, list.

This adventure is full of quirks; it clearly leans heavily on the original minotaur myth, it’ll be a nightmare to print out, you’ll want to print it out, there are some bits which can be left out entirely and the English is a little flaky at times. Those are the quirks. If you look at the adventure as a whole though then you’re left with an inexpensive and carefully balanced dungeon crawl that can be played in two possible ways. "The Minotaur" does represent value for money.

* This GameWyrd review was first published here.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

By John Grigsby, Staff Reviewer d20 Magazine Rack

The Minotaur is the latest release in the Master Adventures series from ØOne Games. It is written by Mario Barbati (based on an original adventure by Diego Di Dato) and can be downloaded from ØOne Games’ website as a PDF for only $5.

What struck me as interesting about this adventure is the fact that it is written for a single character, a paladin of 6th level. While it also adapts easily to a party of four 3rd-level characters (and notes on adapting it for such are provided), it would serve nicely as a paladin’s quest and any DM will be able to find a place for it in their campaign.

Without giving too much away, the character or characters must confront a minotaur that is kidnapping youths from a small nearby village. Twists and turns and role-playing opportunities abound in this well-written adventure and it’s sure to provide a thrilling time whether used as a one-on-one scenario or an adventure for a small group. There’s plenty here to keep everyone on their toes.

The adventure also introduces a new prestige class and a new monster (neither which I shall name here because they feature heavily into the mystery and plot). The prestige class is well-written, though perhaps a bit too specialized for my tastes. It fits nicely into the scenario, but I can see only limited use for it outside of the adventure. Likewise, the new monster adds some mystery and depth to the plot of this adventure, but outside of this setting, it loses much of what makes it so interesting. Still, I’m sure that talented DMs can find other uses for it.

Also included is a full-color map detailing the dungeon environment in which the bulk of the adventure takes place and a fully-dressed character sheet for the suggested character, Gulthammer the paladin. It’s nice that the character sheet is included, but if the DM is planning on running a party through the adventure or if they have another character in mind, then the effort is wasted. Still, Gulthammer could make a good NPC, so it’s not wasted space.

Finally, the PDF download gives DMs two beautiful, full-color battle maps, scaled for use with miniatures or counters. My only complaint here is that while one of these maps is a room where a lot of action is likely to take place, the other is a close-up map of a room in which almost no action will be seen. It makes me pause to consider it’s worth the cost of the ink to print out a copy of this page just to place the miniatures in an empty space.

All the NPCs and the write-ups of the new creature and prestige class are designated as Open Game Content, which means that others can draw upon them and all of the encounters seem to be balanced according to d20 System standards. I was pleased to see that stat blocks are given right there with the monster. Kudos for this! I hate having to stop to look up a monster in the middle of a fight. I should have everything I need right there in front of me. On the negative side, however, special attacks and qualities of the monsters were not defined, which means that you’ll have to break out the book.

I give high points for originality for taking an old story and making it new again. The idea of a single hero challenging a horrible monster is older than written history, and the idea of a hero taking on a minotaur is even more cliché, but just trust me when I say that they’ve added a unique twist to this one. On the other hand, this is an adventure, not intended for players’ eyes. It doesn’t make it any less playable, but it does limit the scope of those who would find it useful, thus the low Playability score.

Finally, I have to say that this is $5 well-spent, whether you’re looking for a challenging adventure for a small, low-level group of whether you just need something to fill an evening with a single player. Ambitious DMs could even run it individually for each member of their group, designating a point system like the old tournament modules, to let their players compete against one another to see who the best role-player is.

To see the graded evaluation of this product, go to The Critic's Corner at www.d20zines.com.

 

[Simon Collins]

Beware! This review contains major spoilers.
This is not a playtest review.

The Minotaur is an adventure from 0one Games designed for a single 6th-level paladin or a standard party of 3rd-level adventurers.

The Minotaur is a 30-page 2.8 MB .pdf download consisting of the adventure itself and two larger room maps. It costs $5. Design, format and art quality are all fairly good, and the format's bookmark feature is used. Maps are, as usual from 0one, top notch. The writing quality would be quite good if not for the innumerable grammatical and spelling mistakes that litter the text. Its not quite as incomprehensible as Brotherhoods, but its still pretty awful.

The adventure itself surrounds a series of recent kidnappings of children from a small village. The aggressor has been narrowed down to a minotaur who seems to reside in a nearby hillside lair. However, the minotaur has lived there for about 80 years previous to this and has never attacked the villages prior to these kidnappings. The PC(s) must investigate the hillside lair and stop the minotaur taking any more children from the village.

There is a fairly complex backstory to the scenario that borrows much from Greek mythology but rehashes it in quite an innovative way. Inside the hilside lair, the PC(s) find that all is not as it seems. They have to deal with a mad alchemist, the minotaur itself, the spectre of the lair's creator and a number of other minor monsters that have made the hillside lair their home. During the course of the adventure, the PC(s) have the chance to roleplay with the villagers, the alchemist and the minotaur, and must use their skills to negotiate the minotaur's maze (there had to be one) and avoid the traps (both mundane and magical) that protect the minotaur's sanctuary. There are also plenty of combat opportunities too. The adventure holds a few plot twists, which should unsettle the players nicely, and provide some very grey moral ground.

Each event and location in the adventure has notes for amending for use with a standard party where relevant, but it is primarily designed for a pre-generated 6th-level Paladin whose details can be found in the appendix.

The appendix also contains an NPC-only prestige class, the Mad Alchemist, who uses potions instead of spells, with some rather nasty side effects. There is also a map of the underground complex that also shows the points where magic may affect the path the PC(s) choose through the minotaur's maze.

Conclusion:
Despite its claims to be a straight dungeon crawl, there is much more to this adventure than a hackfest - there _are_ roleplaying opportunities, traps, and a mystery. The only problem is that the roleplaying opportunities are not fleshed out as well as they could have been. Add to this the appalling grammar and spelling, and some mistakes in the stats (for example, the alchemist in the adventure is supposed to be a 3rd level wizard/3rd level mad alchemist, but one of the requirements for the Mad Alchemist PrC is Alchemy 8 ranks), and it doesn't quite make the grade. There's definitely potential in the adventure (despite the underselling by the publisher - very odd!!) but it would require a reasonable amount of work to really run smoothly.