by sdonohue

The Fantasy Trip Quick Quest 8: The Maddening Song is a 2022 release from Steve Jackson Games for The Fantasy Trip game. It is part of the Quick Quest series and was written by Howard Kistler with art by Rick Hershey.

Presentation
Like other products in this series, this is a z-fold brochure with three-panels, each 5.5" x 8.5". They are double-sided. The cover illustration and the map are color, but the rest are black & white. The brochure is printed on heavy stock. It is also available in pdf which includes two versions. One presents each side of the brochure as a whole and the other has 6 pages, one for each panel.

Content
The players are asked to help some elves who have been beleaguered in their high tree town by a double threat: schismada, a cicada like creature whose cry can drive those who hear it mad and murslakes, a deaf predator. To avoid being driven mad, the elves wear ear plugs and then makes it easier for the murslakes to sneak up on them.

The adventure contains about a half-page each on the general workings of the village, and the habits and stats of the murslakes and the schismada. The rest of the book (essentially the whole backside when folded out) is the adventure. It shows a map of the village with about 20 keyed locations (some are used more than once). There are also stats for average villagers, and character sheets and motivations for 5 other villagers. These other villagers provide some challenge as they may be affected by the schismada and have turned violent; obviously they need to be stopped, but the other villagers would definitely prefer they be subdued.

The aftermath explains how the players could be rewarded for their efforts and presents the ideas that the murslake pack (about 30 in all), will not feel compelled to fight to the death and will flee if things go poorly.

Evaluation
This adventure provides a lot of interesting challenges. Because the village of the elves is in the trees, it's not easy for those who don't live their to move around -- there are ladders and ropes which must be navigated. It also provides options for characters to surprise the baddies. The adventure has more backstory than most quick quests, but it's useful information and makes it easier to run the adventure. There's no read aloud. This is more of a sandbox than a lot of quick quests, but it's still a great adventure.

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by jodokast

There is something of a disconnect here - Pendragon is the game of mighty valiant knights, and this expansion book has rules around graft and squeezing money out of people. This is of course the 'problem' in that AD450 was a rough time (in history) but this is not perhaps the theme of Pendragon.

The rules here are perhaps the weakest thing. There is 10 pages on Graft. Then 10 pages on a(nother) manor subsystem - this one is better than Book of the Estate it is very much build a manor, role for various events each year. I do particularly like the litigation event, which is a nice way of simulating the long complex legal process (and expensive!) which will lead to opportunities for players to 'pull strings' without being bogged down in detail. The other nice aspect is the 'tax' that is the King coming to stay. Basically the Holding is a glory mine, has a Defensive Value, and has some 'bits' for players to like.
About half of this books 190 pages are examples of what you can slam in such a Holding. We have fully formed holdings and examples of warlords from the reign of Uther. We have long lists of all the castles in the land, samples of holdings, various landholdings. Enough for a GM to create enough holdings to tempt his players.

The remaining 70ish pages of the book are more descriptive, including maps, NPCs (without holdings) and a historicalesque account of the feudal system and feudal justice. More useful if you are the sort to like gritty realisim in your game of magic swords, but certainly not a snooze fest of badly edited wikipedia.

So on this I am torn - what the book really needs (IMO) is 2 good adventures that focus on being a warlord and it would be a relatively complete package. I appreciate the subsystems are actually understandable as to what is meant to happen (looking at you Book of Battle: Second Edition as something that didn't really get that memo) and quite optional. I do think Pendragon is at its worst when we are trying to be 'realistic' so excuses to graft the system are not for me. But as a method of running a holding and designing holdings this is much better than the alternatives.

As to whether this will be useful to you is entirely up to how you run Pendragon. If you want your knights to more intimately know a small area/barony - this is very good for setting one up that is a bit better than 'hill hovel mine, another mine, two hovels, lake' that you'd probably instinctively do. I definitely used this system as the basis for the holding subsystem for my (landed) knights. [but did then just entirely burn their holdings during the anarchy because they need to have good reasons to hate the Saxons].

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