5E Adventure Review: The Holy MacGuffin

The Holy MacGuffin is the first in a series of short adventures by Matt Evans of Mithgarthr Entertainment. It’s a very short adventure – two pages of content, with two additional pages used for the cover and legal information. The name of the series is “Drop-In Dungeons”, and that’s basically what the adventure is: a short background, a dungeon map, and six encounter areas.

The adventure is designed for tier 2 adventurers (levels 5-10), and is a delightful expression of a small dungeon. A group of humanoids led by a troll have stolen a local relic (a magic sword) and are living in a nearby set of caves. The adventure basically consists of the player characters exploring the caves, slaying the humanoids, and recovering the sword, but it is enlivened by good descriptions, interesting combat situations, and a little bit of entertaining role-playing.

There are a few oddities in the adventure: the first is that a hook of the players being asked to recover the sword by the townsfolk is missing; instead the adventure just has the group running into some orcs talking about the sword (and then investigating). The second is that the last two rooms don’t have descriptive text. It’s a small point, but I found it curious.

The last point is that the adventure doesn’t give scaling notes; the foes would probably be best faced by level 5 or 6 characters, with some adjustment needed for higher-level characters.

Despite those points, the adventure is nicely constructed, and well worth taking a look at.

One thought on “5E Adventure Review: The Holy MacGuffin

  1. Thank you again for such kind words!

    I didn’t write any fluff text for those final two rooms, simply because they’re presented as hack & slash combats. A GM can of course play them in completely different ways, if’n he’s so inclined, but with the aggressive and immediate attack by the orogs, I didn’t feel the need to add any prose about them (it also helped keep the page count contained, haha).

    I did notice an error though that was unintentional, as I ended up using this dungeon actually in play with my group last night; the orogs are supposed to aggressively open fire on characters who start to enter their area, but I didn’t put the longbow information in their stat-block. D’oh!

    Ah, and as for the hook: since I’m attempting to write these Drop-In Dungeons as generic as possible, and the hook about being sent to find the sword (which is what I used on my own group) being just so obvious as to not need mention, I gave that one as just an off-the wall funny example of how a party could stumble across this cave and score a magic sword as loot.

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