Summer’s End is, as the title implies, a collection of short one-page adventures by Questing Beast Games for OSR.

If the name Questing Beast Games sounds familiar, it’s because they’re also the publisher of Knave and Knave 2e, an incredibly popular rules toolkit for old-school fantasy RPGs. In fact, you can run the adventures in Summer’s End using the Knave 2e rules (not unexpected, really).

Adventures

There are 12 adventures in total, each of them containing pretty much a map, a series of encounters, and some background lore in a single page. While that might sound less than impressive, each and every one of them is brilliant, having something that makes them stand out – be it a unique mechanic or just a funny backstory. For example, in the Alchemist’s Repose, the players will encounter several golems that contain metallic punchcards that denote an activity and a target – by switching them around, they can reprogram them. In the Wizards of Sparrowkeep, 4 wizards are competing for the affections of a witch, turning the area around the village of Sparrowkeep into a (somewhat ridiculous) battleground and making a mess for the poor villagers; includes little trivia for the wizarrds such as “accidentally cursed himself to be permanently enveloped in flame, but pretends that it was intentional” and “Has a collection of 400 jade miniature figures. He’ll get around to painting them someday.” (ouch – I’m sure this will be more traumatizing to some people than the permanent burning). I could go on and on about them – despite the limited space for each adventure, you’ll get a decent one-shot session for each of them, especially the more open-ended ones; the first 6 adventures take place in wider, open areas – a mountain, a sea, a desert – and the last 6 are more of a dungeon crawl with tiled maps.

Layout

The supplement is essentially a 24-page zine, with each adventure taking up a double-page spread. It’s in an easily printable form, and only using black & white (besides the front page); though keep in mind that if you want to assemble it, it’ll have to be in a horizontal layout as there’s no pdf version for printing in separate A5 sheets or in a booklet printing – otherwise the pages will be out of order. But that’s not really a complaint, just a note – you’ll most likely end up printing the adventures individually, so I doubt it’ll be an issue.

Final Thoughts

Summer’s End and Other One Page Adventures is honestly an amazing supplement for its size, with an immense “fun density” let’s call it. Even if you don’t want to run an OSR/Knave game, it’s trivial to use it in D&D as well. Also, at the moment of writing this review, it’s still on a 40% discount for the GM’s Day Sale, along with Knave and Knave 2e, so it’s a great chance to get them!

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