The Sylvan Harp is an adventure by Simon Collins for level 1-4 characters. It has a suggested playing time of 8 hours. The adventure concerns a Hag who has stolen a magic harp and wishes to overthrow the Elf Queen. The adventure is mostly set in the wilderness – a sylvan forest – with a few dungeon encounters. The adventure prioritises combat and role-playing, as the players seek to discover the location of the harp.

The adventure can be run as a standard investigation, with the characters proceeding from one location to another – with wilderness encounters intervening – until they discover the source of the trouble. The alternative is mostly the same, but with the addition of a ticking clock as the foes progress through their plans. A detailed timeline lists the enemies’ actions. It requires more work for the DM to run it this way, but some groups will find this preferable.

There is some freedom allowed for the players in their path through the adventure. The wilderness is represented by a hex-map with the key locations noted; this allows the players to diverge from travelling from one location to another and explore instead. Random encounter tables give the DM options for fleshing out what they find in the wilderness, with the encounters having brief descriptions to elevate them above “You find eight orcs”. Also, there are set-piece events used during travel through the forest; these occasionally provide key information for the investigation.

While most of the flow of the adventure is clear, the location of the missing harp strings is listed in the optional timeline, not in the main synopsis of the action. It doesn’t help that there is a mismatch between the timeline and the adventure text; one encounter assumes the strings have already been stolen, but the timeline doesn’t make that assumption. Meanwhile, the Hag doesn’t have the strings – and the NPC who stole them doesn’t appear in the adventure! The timeline is also very tight; once you account for travel time, the adventurers might not be able to complete the quest in time.

The adventure has a lot of small details that add to the experience. I found that some of the encounters aren’t presented clearly, or their emphasis seems wrong. The final encounter with the Hag feels more like a role-playing encounter than a combat encounter, but that’s primarily because it presents a little combat information, then goes into describing the role-playing. I’d reverse the order – as the role-playing will occur before the combat.

The formatting of the adventure is mostly well done, with clip art used to break up the text. The tables would look a lot better with shading to distinguish the rows rather than the basic “lines around everything” table format. The dungeon map is attractive; the wilderness map less so. It is functional, however.

Overall, there’s a lot to like in the adventure. The story is good, and there’s enough room for the Dungeon Master to put their stamp on the action. The riddle needed to enter the Hag’s lair uses antique words I didn’t recognise; I chuckled at the suggestion that the DM lets the players look them up on the internet. The adventure never quite engaged me fully, but I expect many players will like it. Recommended.