Wondrous One-Shot: The Frog Days of Summer Review

Wonderous One-Shots

The Frog Days of Summer was created by Dungeon in a Box and is compatible with Dungeons & Dragons 5e. Wondrous One-Shots is a subscription that comes to your door on a monthly basis. I subscribed to add to my game materials with battlemaps and minis along with some one-shots that I could run. I just want to add, I paid for my subscription and I am not affiliated with Dungeon in a Box. Let’s get to the review.

The premise of this one-shot is that summer is not ending and the people of the local town believe that the frogfolk in the Burbling Bog have something to do with it. The party is tasked with investigating the bog, finding out what is happening, and to fix the problem if they can.

Any monsters used from D&D sourcebooks are referenced with which book and the page number. The page number is very useful since certain names cannot be used due to copyright, I appreciated this since I was a little thick and didn’t realize at first what a frogfolk was really referencing.

The final big bad is very cool with a unique stat block that was included in the adventure. You do have to pay extra to get its skinny mini which is fine because everybody needs to make money, but it would have been nice if it was included.

The materials provided in the box.

The sourcebook and map are printed on quality materials and they look great. The box that the adventure comes in looks fantastic as well. I added a sticky label on the side with the name of the adventure so that when I store it I’ll be able to find the adventure easily when stacked with other boxes. There were a couple of minor issues with the materials. There were not enough bases for large creatures. Only two bases for large creatures were included with the materials and one of the encounters had three large creatures attacking the party. This will not be a problem when you have more than one of these adventures and have extra bases (or if you have a large monster mini lying around).

The unfolded map straight out of the box.

The map under plexiglass.

The battlemap is double-sided with the pond on one side and the room of the final battle on the other. The battlemap does not lie flat because it has to be folded to fit in the box and the paper is so heavy that it holds the creases. This was an easy fix with a sheet of plexiglass that we already had for putting over maps. Plexiglass also allows you to write on it with dry-erase markers which is always useful. The lines demarking the squares on the battlemap were hard to see but this was not the worst thing in the world, we just had to look closely when moving the minis across the map.

The skinny minis look great and will be useful in other adventures. They also store easily by removing the bases and letting them lie flat in whatever storage unit you use. I can also foresee using the bases as showing area effects in certain situations. I usually use colored disks for most of my bad guys that have a number on one side and an “X” on the other. This makes things easy when dealing with large numbers and keeps the paperwork to a minimum behind the screen. What I like about the skinny minis is that once a creature dies, then you take it off the base and lie it flat on the battlemap. This will be so much easier to deal with than using minis that make it difficult if a character or monster ends their turn in a square where someone has fallen. Also, the clear bases of the minis allow our effects disks to be seen easily, which sometimes get missed in a hectic combat when placed under the opaque base of a standard mini.

All-in-all the Frog Days of Summer was a fun adventure that took about three hours to complete. It had some good puzzles to solve and interesting combats that take place in cool environments. I liked running the one-shot and plan on having the players run the same characters in the next one-shot. This is possible because Dungeon in a Box has materials to help upscale the adventure to match the level of your players’ characters. I’m looking forward to Raiders of the Red Water which is next month’s adventure.

The Party & the Hook

I had a party of three bards which included a triton, changeling, and forest gnome. They worked for a circus and I had the town where the circus spends their winters be the location of the adventure. The circus usually ends its season in the town and then spends the winter preparing for the next season, but summer just won’t end. The townspeople keep showing up to watch the circus giving the performers no chance to prepare for the next season.

How it Played

Skinny minis along with a standard mini on the plexiglass covered battlemap.

The party took their time investigating the Burbling Bog. They were too cautious about getting their collective feet wet in the pond. They ended up doing a little investigating but planned on going back to town to buy a potion of waterbreathing. They did end up finding the chest that included the potion, but they wanted to make sure that everyone had a potion who could not already breathe underwater.

Once they actually entered the water, then the adventure really got rolling. First with the fight against the giant bog toads. This particular combat could have been really deadly, but the bog toads consistently rolled really low (I’ve never rolled so many 6s and 8s in my life). I did end up killing one of the players, but they were stabilized by their fellow party members before ever having to make a death save.

Each of the doors in the Inverted Tower were figured out by the party, but it made for interesting moments as they worked out the puzzles without using dice rolls. The funny moment was when door two could not be opened because they used an unseen servant instead of the players themselves. Considering the party included a triton and two players using waterbreathing potions, I thought this would be opened quite easily.

The quippers were a nice addition to the final fight and made the players decide if taking a point or two of damage each round was worth using their action to try and stop. The frogfolk running the ritual being able to use a bonus action to keep it going was very good. This kept the players engaged trying to stop the ritual. The layout of the room also had the players in areas of the battlefield that they normally would not occupy. The bard who was designed to be the frontliner was stuck in the back because they were too short for the water level in the room.

The reveal of Croakiton was a great moment, but the monster was too slow to cause too much damage. The party kept out of range as it lumbered around the room. They nickel-and-dimed the thing until it died.

What I Changed

I did not plan on changing anything since I wanted to see how the adventure played out as it was written.

Some skinny minis, a standard mini, and some of our usual battlemap materials.

The only conscious change I made was putting a frog’s footprint on the door to the entrance to the tower. I’d rather have my party figure out what to do with a clue than do a die roll to solve a puzzle. I did inadvertently skip a quick combat encounter between the players and two frogfolk guards. This was not bad since this adventure is designed for 4 to 5 players and we only had 3.

I would have jumbled up the items in the Hoard of Seasons room, but I wanted to make sure to list off all the items. My players were quick to figure out the connection between the life cycle of the frogs and the seasons. They spent a little bit of time figuring out which items to use since they did not know that the specific item did not matter.

I read through the adventure twice before running it. Since most of the materials needed to run the adventure were in the box it was easy preparation. I printed out stat blocks for two of the monsters and had a couple of minis to fill in the materials not included (one large and one huge monster).

My Ratings

Ratings are not about quality, but quantity. A low number means very little or none of something, while a high number means that it is the main focus of the adventure.

Roleplaying: 2

There is very little opportunity for the player characters to interact with NPCs. My players hid when one of the frogfolk came out of the pond and everyone else they ran into tried to kill them. The forest gnome in the group was able to glean the information the party would have gotten from the frogfolk civilian from some of the local wildlife.

Combat: 6

There are good combat encounters that are interesting especially if the characters do not have a swim speed. The battlemaps allowed these combat encounters to really shine.

 Exploring: 8

There are some good puzzles to figure out to move between the levels of the Inverted Tower and disturbing the ritual is a nice bit of color added to the final combat encounter. Investigating the pond before entering it also gives the characters a chance to learn more about what they are getting themselves into.