Review: Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 3: Deep Night and the Star

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This is a short review for a short item.

(Image coming when I can find one.)

Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 3: Deep Night and the Star
by Matt Riggsby
Published 2020 by Steve Jackson Games
10 pages
$3.00

This short (10-page) adventure was part of the GURPS PDF Challenge of 2020.

The adventure is, without spoiling too much, a raid by PCs into hole in the universe to where the Elder Things live. Or at least one thing - a god or mountain named Atoep - exists. The PCs need to go there, kill some stuff, break some things in specific ways, and then run back before said hole in the universe closes. Their sponsors don't have a lot of reward to offer, so this is a save-the-world quest.

The adventure has a relatively adventure area that gets used multiple times. It's an atmospheric place, if run as written, and both the environment and the monsters provide challenges. The environment could have been a little more thematically body-like, though, which would have added some charm to a place that just feels like tunnels and rooms full of weirdness. It's well-illustrated and the map is attractive and very clear. It's too bad the map doesn't also come as a .bmp or .jpg so you can more easily upload it to a VTT or print it for tabletop use at minis scale.

The short length does cost, though. Maybe the most interesting thing in the book is the sky-ship, but it gets only a couple of paragraphs - enough to use it, not really enough for how game-changing it could be if the PCs manage to keep it.

It's not the typical kill-and-loot, it's a smash-and-run, and as such is a potentially nice change of pace. It can also be frustrating if the PCs go in expecting loot, and acting only centered around loot - they won't be happy and will likely spend a lot of time searching for such instead of getting on with saving the world. The fights are potentially interesting, but suffer from a common adventure flaw - one-note encounters. Room 1 has monster X, Room 2 monster Y, Room 5 monster Z . . . so you never had to do more than figure out the best way to fight that one, and then do that thing. In my experience mixed-monster fights are generally more interesting and more challenging. But it's a small complaint, and the lack of mix makes sense for what's here.

It does have one new monster, and stats for another foe, both of which can be useful elsewhere.

Overall: This is a nice little adventure for DF. The monsters are oddball enough to require some reading and planning, but the encounters are generally single-flavor so it's not that hard to prep. It's a good adventure. Like a lot of these 10-page PDFs it could easily have been, and probably should have been, longer to support more detail and adventure depth. Good overall, and you can get $3 of worth of it if you want/need a drop-in adventure for your game.