Review - Definitely A Dragon!
It's Definitely A Dragon
Definitely A Dragon! is a tri-fold adventure for Flail written and illustrated by Mauricio Cordero of GNAW Guild. Rumor has it there's a dragon stalking the woods, but things may not be as they seem.
What's It About?
A dragon is purportedly causing problems for a town by the forest, and for one reason or another, the players will get involved to try to fix this. The adventure is the form a 14-hex map with tight keying about the town, and various locations nearby, such as a quirky wizard's guild, a traveling circus, and a mysterious ziggurat. Along with this are some factions and NPCs and a number of unique creatures and magic items to interact with.
As they explore, players will find out that there is no dragon here, but instead a bunch of mutated humans in the woods, some of whom are walking around in a lion-dance-style dragon costume to hide themselves. This all stems from a wannabe wizard who stole an artifact from the guild and is trying to figure out how to make it work.
How About The Ideas?
Love it.
You can quickly go wrong trying to subvert player expectations like this, but this adventure doesn't put too much effort into stringing players along unnecessarily. It will become evident pretty quickly that there's not really a dragon and that something else is going on, and the real fun will be in figuring that part out.
Apart from the overall premise, I just love all the bits in here. There's some interesting NPCs, a table of cryptids you might come across [actually mutants], fun creatures [like the centipedal mice], and good magic items: you've got a bookmark that can learn spells, a rod that fuses the two closest organic beings, a pickled wizard's fist with randomized healing potential, and a magical five-tailed whip/claw/Flail that can grab things.
The NPCs and locations are great too. A wannabe wizard in over his head. Two apprentices fused together. A famous pickle shop. A circus master.
Also plenty of ways for players to get transformed, possibly permanently, in interesting ways.
What About The Execution?
It's mostly very good. The keying in particular very effectively and succinctly communicates what you need to know both about what's in the locations, as well as how they fit into the larger situation players are walking into. It's honestly a great feat on its own how much is crammed into here without feeling like anything is missing too much detail.
My one real complaint is that I'd like to have a bigger map with more open spaces. With 10 keyed hexes and only 4 empties, most of them link directly to another keyed hex, and there's not much reason to move through the empty spaces. That makes the wilderness encounters feel a bit pointless, as you'll already be mostly dealing with what's keyed. But, it would have been hard to fit a bigger map in here without losing the detail drawn in the hexes, so that's a tough call. If I were to run it, I think it'd just expand the map myself, which honestly wouldn't be a huge problem. There's only so much you can do in a pamphlet.
Art?
Stunning.
The cover image of the "dragon" is linked above, and perfectly sets you up for what to expect in this adventure. The individual character pieces in it are good to, but I think my favorite might be all of the images fit into the map.
Mauricio has a style I really like; appropriately old-school while also being a bit lighthearted and cartoonish. Just great stuff.
Summary!
You should get this. I know nothing about Flail, and would probably run it in a different game, but there's nothing that would make that too difficult to convert. I think this would be a very fun session.