Black Rock Bandits is a new, 30 page, adventure written by Tracy Hurley, aka the infamous Sarah Darkmagic, and intended for a group of up to six level 1 PCs. This adventure is part of the 6 Pack Adventure series from Postmortem Studios. 6 Pack Adventures are apparently intended to give a DM everything he or she needs to run a 2-4 hour adventure. This includes a full color battlemap, pregen characters, and tokens for both pregens and opponents. Perfect for cons or other one-shot games. I shouldn’t need to say it, but since this is a PDF product, you’re going to be printing all of this yourself. Black Rock Bandits sells for $2 and can be found here at RPGNow.
Let’s get into it then, shall we? The very first thing you see is… half of a battlemap. It’s a peculiarity of layout and it’s a bit off-putting, I have to say. Half of the included battlemap is before the title page and the included tokens are seen before any of the adventure text. The second half of the battle map is the very last page in the adventure. It’s not a huge issue that will make it difficult to use the adventure, but it is kind of strange. I found the art in the adventure to be very hit or miss. Some of it is quite nice, some of it just serviceable, and some of it just ugly. The full color map falls into the “serviceable” category. It’s not horrible, but it’s not so good that I’d be rushing to use outside the confines of this adventure either. Your mileage, of course, may vary with regards to quality the art and cartography.
The gist of the adventure plot is that PCs are attempting to deal with the eponymous Black Rock Bandits who have been plaguing caravans traversing the King’s Road through the Black Rock Hills. The first page sets up some of the background for the adventure as well as providing some of the more interesting places and people in the town of Black Rock. Most of these places or people have ties to the pregen characters, but it’s nice to see some depth given to the area. It’s enough for a good DM to build off of if they need to.
After this background information, the adventure proper starts. There are three related quests for the adventure, totaling 700xp. The pregen PCs have immediate hooks with the adventure, but if you’re using your own characters there are only some basic and vague hooks included to get them involved. It shouldn’t be too difficult for even an inexperienced DM, but it would have been nice to have more thorough suggestions. Anyway, the adventure is fairly straight-forward, but well written with a lot of fun details and unique twists to the entire situation. It’s not a pure dungeon crawl and there are good opportunities for NPC interaction and roleplaying. On the downside, however, the adventure layout feels rather jumbled and cramped, especially the monster stat blocks, and there is an error where one of the side bars appears twice, once on page 14 and again on page 16.
The pregen characters are solid mechanically, although you won’t be able to play straight from the character sheets since some power/feat information is not provided. If you’re the DM for this adventure and you have access to DDI, I’d actually recommend running the pregens through the Character Builder to solve that issue. The players might otherwise need to consult a book or two to understand everything their character can do. Each of the pregens has a nice background as well as descriptions of how their relationships with the other pregens, which is a nice lead in to roleplaying. My personal favorite is Paeter: baker by day, wizard by night.
So there you have it. Overall I think Black Rock Bandits is pretty good and worth picking up. It’s not without some problems, mostly in terms of layout and presentation, but the adventure at the core is worth ignoring the issues. Especially considering you’re only paying a whopping two dollars for it. Two bucks for a night full of gaming is not a bad deal, especially with things like GenCon and PAX Prime coming right around the corner.