Hail the Heroes (1994) is the first adventure for the Karameikos campaign box. It is, itself, boxed and contains the standard assortment of maps, parchment handouts and the audio cues CD. There is yet another nice Jaquays cover painting (funny thing: the book the dragon is holding has the same sort of page layout as the Mystara line books). Daniel Frazier did the interior art – I usually find his art very soft and generic, and alternate between loving it and not really paying much attention to it (hence me not really reproducing his contributions for most of the posts this week). There is something I really like about these empty room illustrations, however, so you get a lot of them today.
The adventure, being part of what amounts to a beginner’s campaign setting, is a pretty by the numbers thing. Investigate where the magic shield is, explore the dungeon to get it before the baddies. There are some nice details, though, in how the adventure deals with the local religions. Weirdly, it also ties directly to the line of Mystara novels (which I was only dimly aware of until now). At the end of the adventure, they party finds a book which tell the same story as the one contained in the novel Dragonlords of Mystara. Always up on the cross-marketing opportunities, the adventure suggests you actually give the players a copy of the novel as a game handout. Which, sure, OK. I guess that dragon on the cover telegraphs that turn of events a bit, now that I think about it.
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