Tongues of the Screaming Toad

Tongues of the Screaming Toad is a 3rd level adventure by “Weird Dave” Coulson. Art is by Matt Morrow (cover), Johnathan L Bingham, and Glynn Seal (cartography). The publisher is Cut to the Chase Games.

This is the third of four modules in the Memories of the Toad God series. This adventure is converted to Dungeon Crawl Classics, and is simultaneously available for Swords & Wizardry, Pathfinder, Castles & Crusades, and 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. 

If you have read my comments on the other parts of this series, you will not be surprised now. The adventure is certainly usable with DCC, but, while the conversion is more complete than with some other Cut to the Chase adventures, the judge will still have some work to do. In particular, the squamous Ibholtheg could use a full patron write-up. I am also not a big fan of sticking all the monster stats in the back of an adventure, away from where they appear, which is an artifact of systems that use much larger statblocks than DCC does.

That said, this conversion is definitely a marked improvement over the Wrath of the Kobolds series, and if you ignore minor glitches, you won't encounter any serious problems. I wrote once that the author didn't "get" DCC; he has definitely taken strides in the right direction. Few adventures written for multiple systems can capture the "feel" of each of those systems, and this is not the exception to that rule, but in actual play it should do fine.

This adventure starts with an investigation, with the PCs being deputized to deal with something beyond the abilities of the local constabulary. If you have read or played through Night of the Mad Kobold, you will recognize this setup. It's not a new one to gaming, and the author does a decent job of presenting an investigation where the links line up to form a chain of events that the players can unravel. 

One of the problems you may have, in running this series, is that DCC character leveling slows down as the PCs become more powerful. You may, therefore, wish to intersperse "chapters" of this series with other jungle-based adventures. Luckily, you have several to choose from.

Buried secrets have a way of finding a path back to the surface to reveal themselves to the world again. Sometimes it may take a long time, and during that time it’s likely that the world has forgotten about the secret. But if the secret is the loathsome Ibholtheg the Squamous Toad, an outer power of ancient evil, it certainly hasn’t forgotten about the world.

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