Nutcracker: Krakatuk by Jayson Brown is a role playing game supplement published by Swords&Pens for use with Swords & Pens. This is an adventure for level 4 characters.
The supplement is available as a 27 page Pay What You Want PDF from DriveThruRPG. One page is the front cover and one the Table of contents.
The Cursed Princess, Chapter 1 explains that the Winter Solstice is drawing near and the characters are approached by an old man, a toymaker working for the local lord. The lord’s daughter has been cursed, which has paralysed her and given her toylike features. He was tasked with breaking the curse and has been given a limerick, but is too afraid of the one who laid the curse to do the task himself. If the characters agree, they will head to the lord’s mansion to discover it is filled with snow that causes sleep.
Drosselmeyer’s Music Boxes, Chapter 2 is still in the mansion and the characters will find some music boxes created by the toymaker.
Queen of Rats, Chapter 3 is the room where the daughter is asleep and the characters will need to defeat a final foe to break the curse.
Premade Characters takes up 16 pages and has 16 characters.
Nutcracker: Krakatuk in Review
The PDF lacks bookmarks and is long enough with enough different sections that they would have been useful. The Table of contents covers the various sections and is hyperlinked. Navigation is okay. The text maintains a two-column format and appeared to be free of errors. Bar the cover, there are no illustrations. Presentation is adequate.
The adventure lacks a map, and given this all takes place inside a mansion, even a simple map would have helped. The text uses different colours for different things, such as checks, which takes a bit to get used to but is probably standard for the system. The system itself is close enough to D&D and some derived games that converting it to another system should be easy enough. Overall, this is a reasonable little thematic adventure that, with some tweaking, can be used with other systems and in various settings. Nutcracker: Krakatuk can be found by clicking here.
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