Review: "March of the Sane" by Owen K. C. Stephens

Welcome back to the Original Adventures review series.  The Original Adventures were free monthly adventures released by Wizards of the Coast to support their D&D 3.0 and 3.5 line (though they should be playable under Pathfinder with minimal conversion).  Owen K. C. Stephens' March of the Sane, released in August 2004, was the 14th of the series.  It's an event-based adventure for a party of four 5th-level adventurers. 

It's worth saying at the outset that I don't like this adventure one bit.  The Sane are a pacifist cult - in theory, a strange but potentially interesting addition to a D&D campaign.  However, Stephens is determined to present them in the worst light and I can't help but think his motivation was real-world politics.  There's a lengthy background story for the cult's leader, Wautto, but he's put across as simply insane and evil, while his followers are dupes.  For that matter, the game mechanics for the rank-and-file Sane have them all as 1st-level warriors kitted out in studded leather, to reinforce the view that their pacifism is a sham.  There's no suggestion that there might be genuine believers who have "fallen in with a bad crowd" - Stephens presents the Sane as just a gang and allies them with far worse.  Resourceful PCs might even gather the information that:

All the towns that Wautto has declared Places of Sanity have been wiped out within a few months.  Such is the fate that pacifists suffer in this harsh world.

Now, I don't demand that you disagree with the politics that Stephens seems to be promoting (though I do), but I think it's pretty poor to use a module as a means of crude propaganda.  I should also add that the character "Angel" gets a particularly rough time in this adventure considering the mechanical information provided for her and the brief description of her ambitions, although it seems to me none of the NPCs in March of the Sane are treated with much respect.

But taste is not the final measure of design.  As stated above, March of the Sane is an event-based scenario, with its numbered entries laying out a sequence for the player-characters to involve themselves in.  I can't help but point out that Stephens erroneously refers to his work as "site-based" because the action occurs in a particular place.  (If you're left weighing up who is right in this, consider that no map of the adventure site was included!)  It's possible that Stephens' foolish remark was carried over from an earlier version of the scenario, but it did nothing to raise my opinion of the author.  I will say that the "hook" encounter of this adventure is pretty decent and should give the party pause for thought.  Unfortunately, it all goes downhill from there and the DM is given a series of criminal acts to bludgeon the players out of any sympathy they might have had for the Sane.

On the strictly mechanical level, there are omissions and problems.  Stephens doesn't bother to detail treasure for the monsters encountered in his morality play but the DM is at least given some tactics to work with.  The EL statements given aren't much help, because after the first couple of encounters the actual threats to the party can vary - and in one case, the EL seems to have nothing to do with the events described.  It would have been better just to tell the DM to tally the EL themselves.

This is a very poor work of dubious intentions.  My rating is 2/5, as it can be played as-is without too much extra work from the DM.  Far better results would come from taking a quick look at Stephens' work and thinking over the basic idea more thoroughly.