Michael's RPG Shelf: Folnar's Dagger (2001, Mike Mearls)

Second Edition Dungeons & Dragons was a gloriously sprawling product line, one of the largest ever created for a single table-top roleplaying game by a single company. While 1st Edition was nothing to sneeze at, with its plethora of hardcover rulebooks, a modicum of campaign expansions for Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, a steady supply of new content via Dragon and later Dungeon magazines, plus a small foothill's worth of adventure modules, 2nd Edition D&D came of age during the hobby's biggest growth spurt. By the time of its acquisition by Wizards of the Coast, 2nd Edition D&D had spawned not just rulebooks and adventures, but dozens of entirely new campaign settings from every sort imaginable: gothic horror in Ravenloft, multidimensional mischief in Planescape, space travel in Spelljammer, the low-magic/high-brutality post-apocalyptic Dark Sun, and more.

And of course, what's a campaign setting without adventures? TSR's guild of writers churned out ever more content, from low-level introductory modules to sprawling, self-contained boxed campaigns promising weeks, months, or even years of heroism and excitement in exchange for your cash.

Then, like a supernova which has reached its full expansion potential, Second Edition D&D began eating itself. It grew too bloated, its options too numerous, it's offerings too expensive for all but the most deeply-pocketed individuals to afford to follow. New releases from TSR went from being highly-anticipated moments for gaming shop pre-orders to viewed as cynical cash grabs put out by a company willing to publish anything if it meant adding another coin to the coffers. The product line, so vast and sprawling no team could hope to keep it lashed down to proper production schedules, came to summarize everything wrong with Dungeons & Dragons. Players walked away from the gaming table entirely, or shifted gears to supporting a different system.

When Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR, Inc. in the twilight years of the 1990's, they made a decision that would change D&D completely: their product line would be lean and mean, based primarily in Greyhawk, and light on adventure content. To this end, WotC published a single set of modules, a basic adventure path beginning with Bruce Cordell's The Sunless Citadel, which could take new characters (and players) through a long-running campaign, and a few stand-alones like Monte Cook's Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil which served to invite older players back to the table with familiar faces and locales. When compared to 2nd Edition's pile of professionally-written adventure content, Wizards of the Coast's output in this area is barely a foothill.

That's where third party writers came in. While Wizards was focusing on building a brand, the Open Game License let other publishers play in the Dungeons and Dragons pool. Alderic Entertainment Games, or AEG, made prolific use of that door over the years, and one of their best ideas was to create a series of small, inexpensive, quick-play adventures designed for single-sessions. Folnar's Dagger is just one of roughly two dozen I own, but it's unique among the others: it's not meant for nice PCs.

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You probably noticed the price from my cover scan: at $2.99, these were the RPG equivalent of those magazines you impulsively pick up at the cash register because they're both interesting and cheap. It's a small booklet, only sixteen total pages, roughly the size of a map you'd keep in your glove compartment, and only lightly illustrated (although one of those illustrations is a map spread across two pages). For its size, Folnar's Dagger might seem like a single encounter as opposed to a whole adventure, but you'd be surprised what Mike Mearls managed to mash into the manuscript.

Folnar's Dagger is my favorite type of RPG adventure: the 'base under siege' scenario, where a small cadre of defenders has to lock down an area against incursion by an invading group. In fact, I like this set-up so much I wrote a post back in April containing tactics and strategies for defending against just that sort of assault. Feel free to give it a read, but don't think it's going to help you very much, because in this scenario your party's on the offensive. You aren't defending the artifact in question, you're out to pry it from the cold, dead hands of its guardians and use it to summon a demon.

Folnar's Dagger is for Evil-aligned PCs.

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I really can't stress how impressive this is. The D&D rules allow for Evil characters, of course, but it's much more geared towards parties of Good (or at least Neutral) people working to change the world for the better. While there were products like The Book of Vile Darkness or Reverse Dungeon, and the occasional Dragon magazine supplement geared towards the darker aspects of PC-dom, adventures designed specifically to let players be the bad guys are few and far between. Writing a scenario where evil characters are meant to triumph over the forces of good is a tightrope act of balance requiring considerable authorial skill. Doing a simple role swap where you're attacking low-level clerics and paladins instead of goblins and orcs is just lazy. At the same time, you don't want to force players to torture, rape, and brutalize the NPCs in order to accomplish their goals either. Fortunately Mearls is an adept enough writer that he straddles the line quite nicely, and the end result is a gaming session where the PCs get to plan an assault on a well-defended bunker where all the bets are off, then see if their tactics are up to snuff.

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The best part of Folnar's Dagger, by far, is the NPCs. Mearls devotes literally half the booklet to explaining who they are, their strengths, their weaknesses, their attributes, and their tactics. Of course, the bulk of the forces are simple low-level mooks--not everybody gets a storyline here, but the higher-level lieutenants and garrison commanders all have their own individual personalities...for better or worse. Watchful and resourceful PCs can learn much that will improve their chances for success. As usual, a direct, frontal assault is tantamount to suicide, even for a half dozen 7th level PCs, but there are plenty of other options available to parties who do their due diligence in reconnaissance.

The other thing I love about Folnar's Dagger is Mearls' handling of the conclusion. Instead of providing for one set-in-stone outcome, Mearls hands out eleven different options for what could go down once the PCs get their hands on the dagger. This ensures even if your players have been sneaky bastards and read the adventure in advance (something every experienced DM assumes anyway), they've no idea how it will resolve. Mearls' suggestions range from 'everything works like it should' to 'this was just one step on the path to success' to 'Holy CRIT, did we just summon an Elder God?!" Your players may be portraying the most stone-cold assassins ever to walk Oerth, but they should respect and fear you. Folnar's Dagger lets you gently nudge or viciously ravage players who forget this.

Heh heh heh...

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The downsides? Well, its size makes it perfect for a one-shot session, but it's much better served as either a stepping stone or the capstone of a longer-running campaign. There's also one extremely obvious spelling error right on the map...quality control was clearly having an off-day. If you want to use Folnar's Dagger as part of a longer-running campaign, you'll have to lay plenty of groundwork beforehand, dropping rumors in taverns, using Bardic songs or Barbarian lore, having the players hire sages or succeeding in a slew of Knowledge skill checks to figure out that the dagger exists, what it (theoretically) does, and where it's being held.

With as much tactical combat on offer, you'll also want some sort of battlemat or other erasable surface suitable for keeping track of everybody. The guardhouse alone contains 25 NPC guards, while Folnar's estate holds an assortment of wizards, paladins, fighters, and even a handful of monsters keeping an eye on things. Mearls points out the usefulness of a battlemat in the text, but it's worth repeating here: unless your players are uncannily silent, stealthy, and lucky, there's going to be a rumble of Pay-Per-View-esque proportions before the night is out. Its size is deceptive--Folnar's Dagger is far, far larger on the inside than it appears.

One thing you'll have to do is read it very carefully and thoroughly, since stuff isn't always as obvious as it should be. For instance, there's a new monster type introduced in the adventure during the beginning info dump on the NPCs, but it's not stated until later in the adventure how many of these creatures actually patrol the halls. Same with the number of guards stationed in Folnar's home: the NPC info at the start gives a number for the guardhouse, but the number of guards in the manor proper is left to the area description. Having all of this information together, in one place, would make the adventure much more user-friendly, and I recommend making notations of these numbers in the margins so you don't have to flip all through the booklet.

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One final observation: even if you have no plans to run an Evil campaign, Folnar's Dagger is worth acquiring. While it would take some work as it's not meant for this sort of thing, the adventure could be adapted for a group of Good-aligned PCs and a force under their command to hold Folnar's home against a siege from Evil NPCs. You could also do the obvious and switch it to a party of Good PCs out to acquire an artifact held by a bunch of cultists/fanatics, but there are plenty of other adventures and encounters of that sort out there. Take Folnar's Dagger for what it is: a kick-ass single-session with the potential to lead to any number of memorable conclusions.

Well worth the $3 cover price, the better news is Folnar's Dagger, while out of print, is still dirt cheap. As of this writing, you can snag a copy on Amazon for $1.75. That's a steal--for the price of a cup of Starbucks coffee, you get something that will last far longer with the potential to leave a horrifying taste in your players' mouths.

What? They're personating a bunch of evil assholes. If stuff doesn't go how they planned, well, Karma's a big ol' beeyotch, ain't she? :D