A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement The Mad Manor of Astabar

The Mad Manor of Astabar by David Dudka is a role playing game supplement published by Survive RPG for use with Dungeons & Dragons based systems although no particular version is specified. This is an adventure for characters of levels 1-3. It is not really part of the Mini Quest series.

This is a seventeen page supplement that is available as a Pay What You Want PDF from RPGNow. One page is the front cover, one page has a map of the manor, one page has handouts that can be printed out and one page has ads for other supplements.

The adventure starts with some background. The titular mage, Astabar, tried to magically deconstruct a wand of wonder. This did not go to plan, Astabar was marooned in the Ethereal Plane and the wand’s magic was dispersed throughout the manor. A bard greets the characters in a tavern and asks them to help uncover the secret of the manor.

The manor has a puzzle, which the characters must unlock in order to gain access to Astabar’s study and thereby stop the strange effects affecting the manor. As well as the primary puzzle, there are a number of secondary ones, as well as the wand’s effects to contend with which can cause odd things to happen.

There is also a new monster at the end, a Poltergeist.

The Mad Manor of Astabar in Review

The PDF lacks bookmarks and, although they are not essential, it is long enough that they would have been appreciated. The text maintains a two column format and a number of minor errors were noticed, grammatical and missing letters because some sort of symbol was embedded instead of the letter. There are a number of custom black and white illustrations, and presentation is on a whole superior to that of the supplements in the Mini Quest series. Presentation is very good.

In some ways, this resembles classic computer adventure games. Wander around the manor collecting the necessary items to make it to the final room, combined with a few combats and puzzle solving. For characters who enjoy puzzles, this is a good adventure. It also, as is suggested, should be possible to scale it for higher level characters.

The Mad Manor of Astabar is a nice puzzle-based adventure and it can be checked out for free by clicking here.