Today we look at Before the Barrier Peaks by David Warren. This is a 51 page adventure without bookmarks, with some color interior art and maps, and a nice 5E-ish two-column layout. It also comes with a set of 15 player maps/battle mats, handouts, and tracking sheets, which look quite nice. There are about 10 pages of appendices with monsters, NPCs, tracking sheets, a table of random discoveries (basically expanded encounters), and magic items.
This is a prequel to one of my favorite WotC-era Greyhawk adventures, The Lost Laboratory of Kwalish, serving as a means to get the party to the Barrier Peaks to play in that adventure. It’s written for 1st-5th level characters, and is mainly focused on the Feywood at the base of the mountains, where a number of cults have arisen due to Kwalish’s opening of extra-planar portals. There is a village that can be used as a base, and there are a number of well-designed encounter areas that look both challenging for the indicated levels and thematically appropriate to carry the PCs into the Lost Laboratory. For $2, this is a no-brainer.
You can purchase the book here.
