Fabien’s Atalier by Brad Kerr review based on actual play
Fabien’s Atalier by Brad Kerr.
tldr; Super fun, easy to run, definitely get this.
- Version reviewed: Cairn version
- Systems used: Into the Dungeon Revived
- Time: One 3 hour session
Fabien’s Atalier is a puzzle-centric adventure for low-level characters written for Cairn or Old School Essentials but compatible with most OSR systems. It serves as a direct sequel/expansion to Kerr’s Hideous Daylight, but could be run on its own. The PCs find a wizard’s workshop on an invisible, floating island in the sky. The owner is recently deceased so there’s little stopping the PCs from looting the workshop and/or commandeering the floating island, but it’s going to crash immanently if they don’t find a way to fix its failing engines. It’s a race to explore the workshop and find what’s wrong.
The Cairn version is a standalone, while the OSE version is part of the Wyvern Songs adventure anthology.
Let’s start with my three elements of a good adventure module:
Someone to talk to: There aren’t many NPCs in this one, and it’s possible the PCs won’t interact much with them. But they’re there. It’s fine with me that this one is a little light on NPCs, as Kerr’s other adventures are pretty heavy with them.
Something to experiment with: You betcha. A floating island control panel, a wardrobe that can shrink or enlarge people who pass through it, a djinn in a tank of goo, and more!
Meaningful choices: For sure.
I’ll start with the bad. Actually, there’s nothing I think is bad, so this is more of a caution: The PCs could well successfully commandeer the island, which might be somewhat campaign breaking or at least require a bit more creativity on the GM’s part to successfully integrate into a campaign.
I griped a little about the formatting of Hideous Daylight, partially because the formatting here is so good. I was able to read through the adventure once, then skim through it before running it, and mostly rely on the adventure itself to run it. No other prep or GM notes or anything else required.
Instead of random encounters, the module has a “countdown clock” towards the floating island crashing and killing everyone aboard. Every “turn” or approximately 10 minutes of game time, there’s a one-in-six chance of advancing the clock. Each interval brings some new portent: Starting with sounds, then later an earthquake, and eventually the entire island tilting. This is fun because it’s not clear to the PCs what caused any particular event or whether it might have had to do with some action they took (entering a room, pulling a lever). Also, I get pretty tired of dealing with random encounters so I liked having this mechanism to add time pressure instead. I’d love to see more adventures come up with fun alternatives to “d6 goblins show up at random.”
In short, Fabien’s Atalier is great. There’s lots of ways to solve the various problems the PCs will face, and the adventure presents some of those solutions. There’s stuff for different character types to do: Things for Fighters to fight, places for thieves to sneak around, many points of interest for magic users.