Traveller’s Adventures – The Bone Wage by Lara Bulut is a role playing game supplement published by Muqarnas Games for use with Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The supplement is available as a 20 page Pay What You Want PDF from DriveThruRPG. One page is the front cover and one the front matter.
The Introduction explains that this is an adventure for 3-5 characters of levels 4-6, occurring near a vast battlefield.
Adventure background explains that a kingdom hired a mercenary army to fight a war it couldn’t win on its own. The king who hired the mercenaries died before payment and the son reneged and had the leaders executed and the survivors driven out into the battlefield. Which does beg the question of why they needed the mercenaries in the first place if they were so easily defeated. The mercenaries died, but the battlefield caused them to rise as undead, and warding stones kept them in place. Now one has been destroyed and the dead are marching on the nearest city. A sidebar explains that the adventure is morally grey and more interested in the adventurers solving a problem than gaining heroic glory.
Adventure Synopsis covers the acts of the adventure in brief.
Act One: The Reeve’s Commission has the characters hired to try and stop the army of undead. There are some details on important NPCs.
Act Two: The Ashfield has the characters heading out to the battlefield; there are various undead encounters, but these can be talked with.
Act Three: The Negotiation has the characters trying to talk the commander out of their attack. Several different potential resolution paths are given.
Conclusion & Rewards has rewards depending on which resolution path is used.
Appendix gives an overview of the major NPCs as well as the handouts.
Traveller’s Adventures – The Bone Wage in Review
The PDF is bookmarked with major and minor sections linked. Navigation is good. The text maintains a single column format and appeared to be free of errors. There are no illustrations. Presentation is okay.
There are mistakes made in the legal text; it’s published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License but it makes reference to the Open Game License, which is a different license, and this mistake will probably have an effect.
This is intended as a one-shot adventure, and though it could be completed in one session, it might be a bit long for that. It’s also an adventure where outright violence isn’t going to succeed; there are thousands of undead and trying to attack them will fail. Though it covers a small area, it will also be tricky dropping it into another setting as-is, thanks to the sheer number of undead and the size of the battle that would have been fought. Traveller’s Adventures – The Bone Wage can be found by clicking here.
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