Review: The Zircon Zephyr
Today we are looking at The Zircon Zephyr by Cameron Maas & Jason Terry. Full disclosure: I have done some Shadowdark adventure editing for Jason Terry, although I was not involved in the creation of this adventure in any way.
This 9-room crystal on the back of a giant crab was written for the Appendix N game jam and is limited to four pages (including cover). Despite the limited space and time, it comes across as a very polished work, including beautiful original art and maps, and a clear, functional layout. The goal is to wrest control of the Zephyr away from a chaotic wizard and his bandit allies.
The dungeon is essentially a two-floor tower and towers are tricky. Despite being a popular adventure location they are somewhat limited when it comes to possible layouts and navigation options. There's only so much you can do within the confines of a tall, narrow building. One solution, employed to great effect in Sision Tower, is to do a side-elevation rather than an overhead map, using the verticality of the tower to full effect. The Zircon Zephyr uses a different sort of trick make navigating the tower more interesting than going up the stairs - the central portion of the tower rotates allowing (or denying) access to the surrounding rooms. It does this on a roll of 1 on the random encounter table. We aren't given a frequency for random encounters (oops) but if we assume it's every two rounds, that means that there's only a 4% chance every two rounds of the rooms rotating. I appreciate the attempt at mixing up the tower format, but putting it on the GM to decide arbitrarily which rooms can be accessed and when ain't it.
Perhaps a timed rotation would work better. Or maybe just ignore the rotating aspect altogether. But don't let it stop you from running this thing because it has a lot going for it. The writing is terse but contains the details that matter both for running the game and firing the imagination. There's a perfect example right in the intro - we don't just have bandits we have the Yellow Patch Bandits. We don't just have a bandit captain, we have Osjan the Blade. These little bits of flavor don't seem like much but they give the GM a nice jumping off point for creating something vivid and memorable.
And the amount of gameplay that the authors have managed to cram into essentially one page of rooms is impressive. We've got some nice, if simple, faction play, a variety of potential foes and some unique treasures. It presents a dynamic situation with lots of potential energy stemming from how to deal with the bandits, which treasures are worth getting and even how to get into the location itself. It also has the kind of campaign-altering impact that I love.
At the end, if the party has played their cards right, they end up in control of a giant crab with a laser eye and a "smash" button. As a GM I find this both terrifying and captivating and I wouldn't have it any other way.
On a scale of 2-12, The Zircon Zephyr gets 9 stingbats.
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