Game: The Divine Alligator
Publisher: 0one Roleplaying Games
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 8th, June 2004
Reviewer’s Rating: 6/10 [ On the ball ]
Total Score: 6
Average Score: 6.00
The Divine Alligator is an adventure title that grabs your attention. This 49-paged PDF comes from 0one Roleplaying Games and that’s a company known for absolutely fantastic cartography. Sure enough there are excellent maps in this adventure; we have the usual battlemap tiles and we also enjoy a bird’s eye view of wide area geographic locations. There is, however, a separate Battlemap PDF just for the key building of the adventure.
The interesting thing about The Divine Alligator is that you don’t have to have an alligator in it. Nor do you need to set it in a swamp. Nor do you need lizardmen. I suspect most DMs who buy pre-written adventures do so with some expectation of changing bits. It’s good to have the publisher offer some helpful bits of help. Oone’s adventures also typically find some space to help DMs scale adventures up, making them harder, and down to make them easier. The Divine Alligator is no exception. As with others in the Master Adventures series some of the encounters in the game are probably too tough to combat dice through. Thinking will be required for this adventure and this is always a good thing.
This is a d20 adventure. It’s written for four 7th level characters and it works best if one of those four characters is a druid or ranger. It’s also preferable to have someone with a touch of diplomacy, religious knowledge and it’s a whole different adventure if someone can speak Draconic.
And that’s it. If you’re a naughty player who suspects your DM might run The Divine Alligator then go read something else on the site now. Er, run the divine alligator? Take it for a walk? Walkies! I wonder if plays fetch.
Problems in the swamp go back to the dealings of an ancient black dragon. Working to please a draconic deity of Death and Decay the black dragon sets about creating a horde of minions. The dragon creates the half-dragons by infusing each with dragon blood. One of the more terrible and therefore satisfactory creations was Tannin the dragon-alligator. The dragon retires to hibernation but Tannin remains. Some time later human and Halfling settlers move in to the swamp. There’s conflict with the local lizardmen tribes; newcomers over natives. Many of the lizardmen tribes move deeper into the swamp to escape. One of them, unluckily, moves into Tannin’s lair. Problems. Deaths. Then after some internal politics in the tribe – important later on – a new, Tannin worshipping, leader comes to the fore. Tannin can’t grant any divine power of his own but the draconic Death Decay deity is more than happy to feed the cult. As the conflicts gets worse the whole swamp begins to change and this includes the creation or mutation of new animals. It becomes an evil place known as the Dread Swamp. This is where we take our player characters.
Rather conveniently 0one includes a chapter-by-chapter summary of the adventure. DMs shouldn’t read this and think they know the game, The Divine Alligator requires more preparation than that and the summary is selectively concise. This following overview of the adventure is even shorter.
Chapter one has the PCs arrive in the outskirts of the Dread Swamp where they become (hopefully) involved in sorting out tensions between the settlers and the nearby lizardmen. In a nice twist there are plenty of human and Halfling settlers who are really the aggressors and troublemakers in the conflict.
Chapter two has the PCs have their first real trek through the swamp. This will involve encounters with some of those warped creatures. The PCs will (hopefully – ah, the problems with pre-written adventures) meet the nearby tribe of lizardmen and find them quite friendly. They’ll learn of a splinter group, a break away tribe, and that it is likely to be them causing the problems.
Chapter three has the players meet the Splintered / God’s Tribe and enter their settlement. The God’s Tribe is so-called (by themselves) because they are Tannin’s lot.
Chapter three isn’t a combat-fest. It isn’t a skirmish which pits the player party group up against the tribe. At least, it doesn’t have to be, it could certainly wind up like that. There are two more chapters. Two chapters where the players can explore the temple and come face to face with Tannin and even here there doesn’t have to be a grand finale.
0one’s work is always pretty. The Divine Alligator has some excellent maps and illustrations. There are maps so there’s bound to be an element where the game is designed to have miniatures moved around in a tactical melee. To a point The Divine Alligator is a linear adventure and to a lesser extent it is a dungeon crawl – but that’s not really fair. The Divine Alligator is as non-linear and as open as a game designed to lead players to an ultimate encounter in the deepest level of an atmospheric building as could be expected. The Divine Alligator works best, I think, if the DM has it handy but doesn’t need to use it. PDF adventures suit this sort of “handy resource adventure” role well. 0one’s help on scaling the adventure and setting it elsewhere is exceptionally handy in this respect. On the other hand, with the exception of the cartography – the bulk of which is else product – there isn’t anything here which a DM of some experience couldn’t throw together quickly himself.
