There aren’t many people who have written more adventures or contributed more to adventure creation than Wolfgang Baur. His company, Kobold Press, was the one selected to write the two Tyranny of Dragons adventures, which Wolfgang co-wrote with Steve Winter. Now he has released The Raven’s Call, a conversion of a previously released Pathfinder adventure (conversion by Dan Dillon) for his company’s Midgard setting.

The adventure concerns a bandit raid on a village. Things are made more interesting by the bandits actually being in possession of the village when the party comes upon them, and acting in intelligent ways (such as using hostages).

Did I say village? That may be too kind a description for this settlement, which consists of a mere nine buildings according to the map.

What makes this adventure challenging is the large number of opponents; most may be low-level threats, but enough of them in 5E will definitely wear down the party. A few higher-level threats mean the party can’t take anything for granted. To run the adventure successfully, the DM needs to track what the monsters are doing, and have them react to the party’s actions: counterattacking, moving to defend vulnerable areas and the like.

Wolfgang gives quite a bit of useful information on what might happen when the players attempt certain actions (sneaking in, attacking in force, etc.) and there are a number of interesting NPCs for the players to interact with. There’s no set path for the players; it just gives the tools to the DM with which to judge the action.

There are a few editing errors and the writing doesn’t always work for me stylistically, but for the most part the adventure is well written.

The adventure comes with six pre-generated characters (of level 3), which are pretty complete: you’ll likely not need to reference the PHB as they list all features, traits and spell descriptions.

The Raven’s Call is an interesting adventure, which provides a few situations for the players that they’ve unlikely to have experienced before, but it very much relies on the DM to run it well; the tools are there, but it requires someone to choose the right pieces to include. If you’re not afraid to do a little work, you’ll find The Raven’s Call to be worth your time.