A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement Vathak 5e Adventures – You Left Me to the Wolves

Vathak 5e Adventures – You Left Me to the Wolves by Rick Hershey is a role playing game supplement published by Fat Goblin Games for use with Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. As such, it is covered by the Open Game License and some parts are considered to be Open Game Content as a result. This is an adventure for the Shadows Over Vathak setting for four characters with an average part level of 1.

The supplement is available from DriveThruRPG as a 14-page PDF for $3.95 but was purchased at a reduced price as part of a special bundle. Two pages are the front and rear covers, one the front matter and one the Open Game License.

Adventure Background explains this is a short adventure set primarily in a cold bog.

Adventure Location explains this can be set in a cold region, but in Shadows Over Vathak it’s near the remote city of Kandar and the cold bog known as the Muskeg Bog.

Adventure Hooks has ways of getting the characters involved.

Running this Adventure and Abbreviations explains what’s needed and how material is laid out. A sidebar gives some details on the Shadows over Vathak setting.

Beginning the Adventure has the characters on the Old Bog Road, and there are six possible random encounters. The Muskeg Bog is described in a sidebar, with a mention of maps for it being available on Patreon.

The Sound of Silence is an encounter with two carts being attacked by wolves.

Ludis the Betrayer is an encounter with an individual who ran away from the first encounter, leaving his associates behind.

Appendix 1 takes up a good chunk of the supplement and has details on the city of Kandar, including NPCs, locations, lore, events, economics and rumours.

Vathak 5e Adventures – You Left Me to the Wolves in Review

The PDF lacks bookmarks and is long enough with enough different sections that these would have been useful. Navigation could be better. The text maintains a two-column format and appeared to be free of errors. There are a number of colour illustrations. Presentation is decent.

In truth, this is not really an adventure; it’s a couple of encounters on the way to a city. With much of the supplement being taken up by the city, it functions more as a resource for that city. This does make it useful for other adventures that are set in the area of Kandar, and there are quite a few of those; it does, however, make the adventure less useful for other settings. Though it’s easy enough to drop into other settings, the amount of information on Kandar makes the supplement less useful in such cases. Vathak 5e Adventures – You Left Me to the Wolves is an okay adventure and it can be found by clicking here.