Greg Bilsland had a long (nine years!) stint working at Wizards of the Coast on Dungeons & Dragons and other things, so now that he’s no longer there, he’s free to indulge his love of off-beat adventures, which brings me to his new adventure release, The Hangover – A Real Balor Party.
Oh, boy!
With plenty of suggestions for running this at a real bachelor (or bachelorette) party, and drinking games to help the action along, it’s obvious that the adventure has “nothing” to do with the similarly titled film starring a wannabe trash panda. After all, the baby the characters have to care for is a drow. Or will be if it survives the adventure. D&D adventurers caring for a baby. That can only end well.
How the adventure handles the baby does make me smile, though. Oh, let’s just show you the relevant sidebar:
Honestly, I have no idea how much fun this would be to run. I do know that this adventure is a blast to read, however. The designer’s asides to the DM are frequently hysterically funny, and the subversion of several tropes of adventure writing is glorious. There’s a History check that gives you the lines of a song – but if you don’t roll high enough, you don’t get the entire song, and the DM can sit there being amused as you try to work out how it ends.
Fear not! Although the adventure does have certain resemblances to the film(s), it has enough changes (and D&Disms) so that players who assume they can use the film to find the solution to their problems will likely find themselves trapped, with the only way out having just locked itself behind them. Fair? Probably not. Funny? Definitely.
Do not run this adventure for people who want to take the session seriously. It probably won’t end well. There’s definitely an actual story here, though. There’s a mystery, there are clues, and there is much enjoyment on discovering how the clues link up to everything.
The adventure uses pre-generated characters, and a quiz at the start of the adventure allows the characters’ backstories to be somewhat personalised to humorous effect. If you want to run this adventure with other characters, you’ll likely have to do a bit of adjustment as the story assumes certain roles.
There are a few editing mistakes in the text, but nothing major. Not all of the humour lands for me, but that’s not surprising, as people’s tastes are different. The artwork is there. (It’s the writing I’m paying attention to!) There are no maps.
However, for the entertainment value just from reading it, I consider this well worth my time and money. You could easily transport some of the ideas to a regular campaign, and – given the right group of friends – you may have a blast running this as well. Highly recommended!