B12: Queen's Harvest is a follow on module to B11: King's Festival designed for use with the Dungeons & Dragons rule set and intended as an introductory adventure for 1st-3rd level characters. PCs who have not played through King's Festival will probably not be significantly hampered as the only connections between the two adventures are some background NPCs and the general location in which the adventures are set. Unfortunately, this module contains a fairly bland and uninteresting adventure that seems annoyingly (and purposefully) incomplete in some areas.

The adventure starts promisingly enough. The PCs are recruited (by a character they would have met before if they played through King's Festival) to deliver a message to a powerful wizard named Kavorquian living in a nearby town. Once there, they discover that Kavorquian has died, and are met by his adopted son Kaerin, who appears to have recently lost his arm. However, this promising beginning soon devolves into a standard dungeon crawl. Instead of being asked to investigate Kavorquian's death (they are told he died of old age), or being told why Kaerin lost his arm, or learning anything about the message they were delivering, Kaerin asks them to go into the basement of the dwelling and recover a sword and a tiara (they can keep anything else they find), giving them a 48 hour deadline. Assuming the PCs agree to recover these items, they embark on a pretty standard issue dungeon crawl as they deal with the various traps and guardians left in place by the deceased wizard.

Oddly, despite the fact that Kevorquian supposedly died a mere three weeks ago, the dungeon seems to have been abandoned for some time: food has rotted and spoiled, monsters have starved, and so on. This, oddly, is never explained in the adventure. In fact, I suspect that the author never thought about this incongruity, stocking the dungeon in this manner because all dungeons are supposed to be long-abandoned ruins.

This portion of the adventure also commits what I consider to be one of the cardinal sins of adventure design. After pushing the PCs into a canalized railroad of an adventure (including slamming the doors behind them when they enter the dungeon so they can't leave the way they came), the adventure then places items necessary to continue the plot of the adventure behind a series of secret doors. If the PCs don't happen to find those secret doors, the entire adventure screeches to a grinding halt until they do. This, to me, is not fun, as it is a recipe for frustrated players. While a table full of frustrated players might be fun for a short while for a sadistic DM, such a situation is, by and large, highly undesirable. While secret doors are, in theory, something actual villains would probably use to hide valuable treasure and information, we aren't dealing with actual villains. We are dealing with an adventure that is supposed to provide fun for the participants (which, after all, is the entire point of an RPG). Secret doors, in my opinion, should be used to conceal things that the PCs would gain a benefit from if they find them, but not things that are necessary for the adventure to continue. Otherwise the DM is often in the position of having to guide the PCs to finding the secret door with not-so-subtle hints, which defeats the purpose of having a secret door to begin with.

After the adventurers finish knocking about in Kevorquian's basement, assuming they find all the things they are supposed to find, the meet up with Kaerin (his arm now healed, making another detail not very relevant), discover that the butler was a traitor, and that the message they carried plus some information they should have recovered in the dungeon point towards a threat from Illyana, the illegitimate sister of the local ruler. They are then recruited to make their way to the villainess' fortress and deal with her embryonic army. In a masterful stroke of railroading, the module instructs that any recalcitrant groups of PCs should be attacked by groups of evil bandits until they decide to "do the right thing" and head off to defeat Illyana.

The PCs are then expected to trek off to the mountains to assault Illyana's fortress, stocked with a standard assortment of goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, mercenaries, and gnolls. While the garrison is probably decently realistic, it is also pretty dull - most of the fortress inhabitants are in big rooms of full of large groups of homogenous humanoids. The module gives some basic tactics for the defenders to use, which is helpful, but only gives vague suggestions as to how the garrison will deploy for follow-up attacks. The module also engages in an annoying practice of stating that some rooms have "incidental" treasure, and but not stating what that treasure might be as well as stating that additional "dungeon dressing" should be added to the various sparsely described rooms in the fortress. These sorts of gaps, in my opinion, defeat much of the purpose of using a pre-published adventure: to relieve the DM of the necessity of spending time creating detail to flesh out an adventure. In many ways, the design of the adventure seems to be a throwback to the vagueness of B2: Keep on the Borderlands, which for a module published in 1989 is simply unacceptable. In a new twist, some information that is left out of this product is located in another product (the weather generation system which is found in the Expert set), which the DM is told to acquire if he wants those rules, once again pointing to the intentionally incomplete nature of this adventure.

Eventually the PCs locate the dungeon area of the fortress. Explanations are given as to why the dungeon dwellers don't come to the aid of the garrison, although there isn't really a way for the PCs to find this out - a gap the writer suggests that the DM should fill in himself (another indication of incompleteness). The dungeon section is quite small, and although the individual foes are tougher, a party that has gotten this far should be able to handle them fairly well. Assuming all goes well, the PCs save the day, get rewarded, and have a party thrown in their honor.

The conclusion to the adventure is a one page blurb that suggests that the DM purchase a variety of supplemental products to continue the PCs on their adventuring career. While I don't mind a gaming company trying to sell products, arranging their products in this way such that you have to pay to get an advertisement strikes me as simply tacky.

The adventure includes a few new monsters - three magical constructs to help populate Kevorquian's basement, but they seem to be of fairly limited ongoing utility, and don't even spice up the adventure very much.

On the whole, this is not a particularly well designed adventure. The wizard's basement is a side trek at best, and several potentially interesting possibilities are simply ignored in favor of sending the PCs on a series of bland dungeon crawls. Even the overarching story (an evil illegitimate child seeks to eliminate their sibling and claim their inheritance) isn't particularly original. This, coupled with the lack of detail in the execution of the product, results in a module that simply doesn't offer a DM very much that he couldn't do himself in short order. Any competent DM should be able to create a better adventure than this without much trouble, and without taking much time. While a truly novice DM who was playing using the classic D&D rules might get some minor benefit from using this product, it is simply not worth the time it would take to convert it to the 3rd or 4th edition rule set, and certainly not worth the time an experienced DM would need to put into it to bring it up to par. ( )