by Benevolentgamemaster

shiva666 wrote:

Pilot episode (one shot) prelude
+
5 episode series (arc)
+
open ended for campaign

This is the Way...

by Maneloblast

An item RPG Designer: Reiner Knizia has been added to the geeklist 2026 Favorite Designer Challenge

by Derang3d

Related Item: Herald's Call

I've lost some cards, so I'll have to find them first. Then, fix things so's I can finally start sending things out. I'm not so much behind on all the schedules, it's more that the calendar is ahead of me ^^".

by gatekeeper86

An item RPG Item: D&D Starter Set: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle has been added to the geeklist 25 August 2025: How did your RPG session(s) go this week?

by Benevolentgamemaster

I try to "read the room" to see how much they're enjoying it, and improvise accordingly, or cut it short if they aren't.
Some PCs have "downtime skills" and want to use them obviously, and we have occasional random encounters to spice up these periods

by Benevolentgamemaster

My wife's Troubleshooters campaign is going tremendously well.

by Marcus Bone

The Mindthief is one of the handful of standalone adventures published by Triple Ace Games for their Savage Worlds-driven Sundered Skies setting. Written by Dave Blewer (the setting’s creator), it is designed to be the first part of a longer interlude within the larger, world-changing, Sundered Skies Plot Point Campaign*.

Note: This is the second in what I hope to be an ongoing series of reviews of all the officially published Sundered Skies releases (with my thoughts on the Sundered Skies Setting core rulebook here).

[heading]Summary of the Plot[/heading]
Designed for experienced characters of at least Veteran rank, Mindthief is a short to medium-length adventure that will likely take two or three sessions to complete. The story revolves around the Bright Cabal (a powerful cult of necromantic priests in the thrall of the God of Death, the Rotting One) and their attempts to reenact a catastrophic event on the good citizens of the Sundered Skies (see Spoilers below for more). A disaster that hopefully our heroes will stop, of course! Starting in the city of Gateway, the plot sees the characters travel to (or perhaps return to, if they’ve played the Blade of Destiny scenario) the ghost-haunted isle of Remorse.

Here, it is a race against time, as the cabal closes on the artefact they require to fulfil their nefarious goal, and it’s up to our heroes to locate and stop them.

During the scenario, the characters will learn more about the history of Sundered Skies, discover an experiment into the very mechanics of the floating isles, and be forced to fight the horrors left behind on Remorse. Challenged by the powers of the Bright Cabal and their degenerate leader, Mindthief, they will need all the skills and knowledge to succeed in this exciting adventure.

[heading]Content[/heading]
Mindthief is a good example of the type of scenarios released by Triple Ace Games to support their Sundered Skies setting. With the entire supplement coming in at just 35 pages (the main text of which takes up only about 16 of these), it has little in the way of art but does include all the stats needed for the plot's many encounters. As with all of Dave Blewers’ material I’ve read, the adventure is well written, though the text is quite perfunctory. This means you don’t get a lot of descriptive text, either on the scene setting or the encounters, but all the salient details you need as a Game Master are here, clear and concise.

[heading]Spoilers & Thoughts[/heading]
First off, let me caveat everything I say here by stating that I like this scenario. Sure, I’d make changes when running it (some of which I’ll outline below), but I see no problem in getting this adventure to the table during most Sundered Skies campaigns. In fact, with a few tweaks, I think you can make this work for characters of any level of experience, so that’s another positive.

The core plot – where the Sons of the Spire (mages who specialise in the power of the ever-present void) long ago decimated a once vibrant island in an act of hubris - is a good one. It allows the characters to uncover a little bit more about the Sundered Skies setting, while leaving plenty unsaid, which personally appeals. I feel this type of mystery is also suitable for engaging players. If it is structured well enough, as it is here, it draws their interest and motivates the table (even when their heroes might not naturally be so inclined).

That said, in my opinion, the scenario itself does have a few too many encounters that don’t really add to the overall plot. (Let’s call them filler). These, of course, can always be skipped or glossed over by a Game Master, but my preference would be to make them more relevant to the story.

The worst culprits of such filler are seen in the first part of the story, where heroes are dispatched on a voyage away from Gateway (the floating island on which they start), just to get them out of the way while their enemy, the Bright Cabal, kicks off their evil plan. On this journey, we get a random battle with a pair of Drakes and a larger fight against a sky pirate and his dastardly crew, only to discover that the person the heroes were sent to find is already dead. These scenes feel like a waste of space to me and could be easily rectified by having the pirates act on behalf of the cabal to eliminate the very person the party is after. This would not only make the encounter fit better with the story but also hint at the cabal's grander scheme.

In a similar vein, the following section of the plot sees the character’s return to Gateway to find their contact, a mad hermit mage, also dead, and the party ambushed by the cabal themselves. While I don’t have any real problems with such an encounter, there just doesn’t seem to be any reason or motivation for the cabal to attack the heroes (I mean, they’d done what they wanted by killing the mage and stealing his knowledge of the experiment). I mean, why would the heroes want to investigate the cabal any further – the ambush occurred in the middle of a bustling city, surely the authorities (i.e. the Trade Council) would be the ones to do this? I personally think that strengthening the link between the cabal and the heroes would work better.

Maybe having the characters learn that their mage friend was kidnapped would encourage them to track down the cabal? I mean, the old wizard can still be dead, but now the players have a reason to track down their adversaries and, in doing so, will discover the cultist’s hidden temple, rather than simply stumbling across it as indicated in the written text.

Moving on from the slight negative, I should mention the last third of the adventure, where the characters go to Remorse and discover what horrors the Sons of the Spire unleashed on that once vibrant land. This section will be a lot of fun for the table. Remorse is a dangerous, horror-filled place, and the encounters here make a lot more sense. Sure, I’m not a fan of the scenario’s ‘big bad’ Lord Mindthief (both because I think Vampires are a little out of place in Sundered Skies and the name Mindthief reminds me a little too much of a character I read about as a kid), but those are my problems, not those of the author or the text. Hunting ghosts, meeting remorseful survivors, and encountering strange monsters are the bread and butter of the Sundered Skies, in my opinion!

The only other comment I’d make about the scenario in general is that there are more than a few encounters that rely on a bit of randomness, but this is just one of the conceits of the Savage Worlds (which often calls on the Game Master to draw a card from a standard deck to choose an event or challenge). Your thoughts might differ from mine, but I’ve never been a fan of randomly choosing an encounter. I much prefer just selecting what I think is appropriate for the situation, but hey, I will say that this ‘draw a card’ mechanic doesn’t prohibit that in any way.

So, overall, Mindthief is a fun, though not overly complex, adventure that focuses on heroic battles and facing up against a powerful evil. As the first of a three-part series, it leaves enough leads to further stories, and I look forward to seeing how these play out in a future review…

* Note 1 - That said, all the scenarios in the ‘Songs of Remorse’ series can definitely be run as standalone stories either separately or in order with minimal impact on the overarching Sundered Skies Plot Point campaign.

by Steve Dubya

<div>Press photo circa 2020</div>

by Steve Dubya

<div>Press photo circa 2020</div>

by Steve Dubya

<div>Press photo circa 2020</div>

by Steve Dubya

<div>Press photo circa 2020</div>

by Steve Dubya

<div>Press photo circa 2020</div>