Tree Maze of the Twisted Druid: a Subjective Review

The adventure is available here for free!

Since I have now covered it in my Hill Cantons session recaps I thought it wise to make a short review of the adventure we have played through thus far; the Tree Maze of the Twisted Druid. 

I'll start off with a very brief summary of the adventure: This is a dungeon adventure in which the PCs are delving into a maze dungeon inhabited by a variety of forest and animal themed monsters. At some point the titular Druid was corrupted by an evil tree demon - which is the reason this is a place to adventure in and not a pagan holy site. The dungeon clocks in at 22 briefly described rooms, with the druid and tree demon to be found at the centre of the maze. 

This adventure is a really great introduction to the wider Hill Cantons setting. It sets the tone really quite nicely, being quite silly yet still a potentially very deadly adventure (especially for 1st level PCs). These aspects would work for any other similarly not-too-serious D&D setting also. It should be mentioned that the monsters found in the module are generally classic D&D monsters (gnomes, treants, rocs, etc.) with a sprinkling of weirder stuff as well. This I think helps to onboard those already familiar with some of the tropes of D&D by both providing something familiar and something new. 

My main gripe with the adventure is that though being described as a maze the dungeon itself is pretty linear and does not feel much like a maze. I have run this dungeon twice; once essentially as written, and once as a more linear series of encounters without actually mapping out the dungeon (heresy I know). 

The reason for my approach the second time is that the dungeon is very much littered with dead ends. Spending 30 minutes or more of a game session mapping empty dungeon corridors that eventually lead to nothing is not my idea of fun. Since most of the actual rooms in the dungeon follow each other in a very linear progression it doesn't actually make a large impact on the gameplay to simply take the room descriptions you want to include and string them along in a more linear fashion. If I ever run this adventure again, I would run it more traditionally but changing up the map to be more "Jaquaysed" by connecting those dead ends into the wider dungeon as alternate passageways. 

Overall I quite like this adventure, it has many fun ideas and is inspiring in it's simplicity. Any critiques herein should therefore I think simply be taken as the musings of one young man upon the imagination of an at the time even younger man. 

The Heart of Evil