Dan Hass’s seventh adventure, The Poison Works, sees the adventurers finally making their way into the territory of the Red Blades. As is typical with these adventures, the formatting is poor, the maps are adequate, it would be nice to see better editing, but there are some good encounter ideas.

The formatting problems really hit the first encounter, which explains the details of the PC’s mission. The result is not good, and takes a lot of reading and re-reading to understand what exactly needs to be conveyed to the players. A few spelling and grammatical mistakes don’t help matters. It really doesn’t help that the text seems to indicate that the goal of the mission is for the party to abduct a town! In fact, the town is named after someone who lives there, but it is anything but clear from the text.

Most of the adventure is taken up with the travel to a Red Blade settlement, which does not make for inspiring adventuring. Being unable to rest whilst travelling was interesting the first time I saw it, but it got boring very fast.

The destination of the PCs, the orc town, is described in a moderate amount of detail, although there are a number of flaws in its presentation. Many of the problems come down to the idiosyncratic formatting of the adventure, which does a really good job of obscuring important details.

I’m not particularly pleased with this adventure; it’s poorly constructed and would require a significant amount of work from the DM to run it. The title of the adventure promises a lot that it just doesn’t deliver.