Voyage of the Golden Dragon (Nicolas Logue) is a short collection of 4 adventures that all revolve around the titular "Golden Dragon," Khorvaire's largest airship, originally meant for the Breland military, but auctioned off to a private company after the war, who turned it into a luxury cruise ship.
With the caveat that each adventure is incredibly short (maybe 6-8 linear encounters), it's a good cross-section of what you might do with a luxury cruise ship in a "post medieval, pulp-inspired, but not really (::wink::) world." There's a fancy gala event that gets taken over by terrorist infiltrators who want to hold the rich folk for ransom. There's necromancy-enhanced political intrigue between two of its high-status passengers. There's a shoreside adventure with an obnoxious explorer type. And there's an aerial attack from an implacable foe.
It's all pretty utilitarian. The book has a singular mission - get you to use the hell out of that damned airship - and it pursues that mission with maximum efficiency. And if that seems like a pretty bland thing for me to say about a series of fantasy adventures, consider it merely an artifact of the book's format. None of the adventures last long enough to do anything super cool, but they also don't leave themselves enough time to notably screw things up. They just work.
I guess it was a little . . . sketchy that the description of the ship's onboard casino took pains to tell us that, "Goblins in green-tailed surcoats scamper about, bringing patrons their beverages and exchanging their currency." It's probably nothing. But racial homogeneity among a luxury casino's serving staff strikes me as . . . a trope.
But that's literally just one sentence, and I'm probably only paying attention to it because there's so little else to talk about. The kitchen is powered by fire elementals. That's pretty neat. Of the eight named crew (though more, like the goblins, are implied to be aboard), two of them are spies for the Brelish crown, which is pretty funny. There's a canonical sexual relationship between a halfling and an elf.
Overall, I guess it's just a decent location, with some decent NPCs, that is the subject of some decent adventures. Score one for basic competence.
Ukss Contribution: The first two adventures feature a reoccurring villain, Paldrith Malinko, a wealthy and powerful pirate prince who wants to destroy the Golden Dragon because it is slightly larger than his own still-under-construction flagship. That's impressively petty. I'm trying to avoid putting airships specifically into Ukss (because I got the idea that more fantasy worlds need to have actual airplanes, and because I think the early-20th-century vibe planes bring is interestingly different from the steampunk aesthetics of airships), but the same plot should work equally well with naval vessels.
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