Review: "The Shrine of Sruukor" by Steve Gilman

The Shrine of Sruukor is the first episode of Steve Gilman's Sundered Chronicles, self-published under his Sundered Blade Games label.  The module has been designed for 1st to 3rd level adventurers and Gilman has taken the interesting step of producing an OSR version (native to Swords and Wizardry) and a D20 version (native to the Pathfinder RPG), both priced as Pay What You Want.  I've mainly followed the OSR version of the module in this review.

The module runs to 18 pages for the OSR version and 20 for its D20 analogue, which requires longer statistical presentations.  It features a wilderness hex map and a dungeon map for the main adventure site.  These full-colour maps are easy to read and reasonably attractive.  (I suspect that they were drawn using Hexographer or a similar design programme, and recommend that DMs wanting to fairly easily produce good maps look into this kind of software.)  The black-and-white artwork in the interior is attractive but feels a bit generic.  Sarah Gilman's cover art seems more specific to the module and its setting.

Steve Gilman clearly has something fairly grand in mind for the Sundered Chronicles.  His background introduces a fallen kingdom and its nemesis, but in The Shrine of Sruukor the party will only be dabbling in the overall plot.  It's up to the DM how the PCs arrive in the starting town of Rockcrest, but after that the scenario is well-explained.  I would have liked a little more information on Rockcrest, because the main action is geared around a person going missing while the PCs are in town.  It's also a rather simplistic plot - nobody attempts to frame up the party and the newly-arrived adventurers are entrusted with their mission fairly automatically.  Although The Shrine of Sruukor has some details on possible roving in the wilderness, it's not particularly rewarding for an OSR party.  When using Pathfinder, it's more plausible that a party would benefit from "levelling up" by battling the monsters that inhabit the wilderness near to Rockcrest.  (I think a bounty notice in the town would be enough to give the PCs the right idea.)

However they come to it, the party end up tasked with going to the shrine to retrieve the missing person.  I feel that the encounters there are pretty dangerous and the treasure on offer is rather meagre, so this is definitely a job for do-gooders!  Gilman has included three DM specials to spice up his scenario.  One of them is just a strengthened version of a regular monster, the other two are somewhat more interesting variants.  At the very least, The Shrine of Sruukor has some traps to spring on rules-memorizers.

My rating is 3/5.  Although this is a short scenario and a bit generic, it does the job and the information provided could be mined for further adventures even without going on to the next step in the Sundered Chronicles.  My general feeling is that the material is better for D20 than it is for old-school games, due to differences in the relative strength of adventurers and monsters.  Judging by the presentation (which is reminiscent of Paizo's trade dress), I suspect that the module is more squarely aimed at those rules.