Con Job at the Broken Jug

By Thilo Graf

This pdf is 14 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial/ToC, 1 page SRD, leaving 11 pages of content, so let’s check it out!

The con job is essentially a rather interesting encounter that can serve as a set-piece adventure or an interjected detour or red herring in any given urban environment.

The location is interesting – the Broken Jug comes with rules for their resident drink, Axegrinder Blue and 5 levels of inebriation as well as a nice little map of the tavern and a whole page of things to do in the tavern, from darts to drinking contests.

The Con job has a female femme fatale drink with the PCs and make a pass at one of them only to have her husband appear and catch them while leaving. After a crossbow-stand-off, the couple might either try to get the PC to part of one of his possessions to let the “husband” save face. As thievery is involved as well, the whole con job is rather clever in its set up and extremely detailed guiding you as the DM through the whole scam easily – to the extent that the encounter might even be run go-play style with even minimum preparation, making for a nice diversion of just about any adventure.

The adventure also comes statblocks for the con men and patrons of the bar and extensive information on scaling the encounter.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn’t notice any glitches. Layout adheres to a full color 2-column standard and the pdf is extensively bookmarked. There unfortunately is no printer-friendly version. The artworks are ok for the price, but nothing I’d show to my players. The level of detail and attention to even minor diversions the PCs might encounter, the drinking rules, alternate strategies for the same to work etc. – all of these options conspire to make the con job even better than its detailed set-up would otherwise be – the vast plethora of little details make this a good buy if you’re looking for any small diversion or just a tavern to spice up your PC’s next stay in town. Unfortunately, there is no information on the amount of XP gathered, so you as a DM probably have to handwave this aspect and the statblocks lack XP-information as well. My final verdict will be 4.5 stars due to these minor inconsistencies, rounded down to 4 stars.

Endzeitgeist out.

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