The Shrike

By Leo Hunt
Published by Joel Hines
OSE
Level 1?

The Shrike is a world of decay – rusted iron, crumbling stone, saltwater, blood, and fog – surrounded by a roiling ocean, a lifeless archipelago, pewter-hued clouds, seabirds, and pitiless stars. In this infernal Galapagos, players will encounter masked Devils, blood which gives life to things which should not have it, stones which give life to people who do not want it, terrible and stranded monsters, perilous locations, and wonderous treasures from across the planes.

This 169 page sandbox provides for about seventy locations in five zones in one of the better representations of a dante-like hell. It riffs on suffering without becoming grecian about it, presenting a picture of many desperate people trying to survive with hopes of either escape or despair. It does try to do everything to everyone, presenting several options for the direction of the goals the party might chase/factions they support/ends they want to obtain, and suffers somewhat for it. Lots of situations, with  a lot of people who want something.

Welcome to Hell! Literally! Well, a part of Hell, anyway. Well, a part of Hell that is no longer a part of Hell. It’s a G I A N T chunk of ragged metal surrounded by ocean and it has a god impaled on top of it, dying for all of eternity. You know, just like your morning commute feels. Anway, Hell being what it is, sometimes shit happens and chunks break away, detaching from Hell proper. And that’s happened here. You’ve got some sinners here, serving out their normal old sin of divine punishment, as well as some devils (five factions worth) overseeing things, a few other beings of power, and then some inanimate objects that have been turned in to people by the dying gods blood. Hmmm, something sounds familiar … Anyway, if the sinners die they get reborn the next day; death isn’t the end of things for them. Oh, and nearly everyone is starving. As the booklet says, play them like they are one meal away from starving to death. So, almost everyone is a cannibal. Sure hope you’re not a player character who ends up here; that create food and water spell is looking pretty good about right now! This part of hell is laid out like a pointcrawl, in about five zones with maybe fifteen areas per done, and maybe a dungeon per zone with about another rooms. 

One of the highlights of the adventure, and the reason I think it does such a good job modeling a kind of hell from Dante, is the focus on the normal every day old sinners. Sure, the place exists because of the dying god impaled on top, his blood animating things, but it’s the normal people that bring the grimness and false hope to life. 

First, everyone IS starving to death and almost everyone is a cannibal. You’ve got your friendly folk in caves playing their violins, who turn out to be cannibals. You’ve got your villages, who have a ritualized combat every night where the loser gets eaten. You’ve got your run of the mill cannibal gangs. There’s a line in this about the people living near the shore being able to eat fish, but that’ not what is going on here. There is no food for almost everyone. Everyone is a cannibal. But, it’s more the false hopes and resignments that I mean when I say it strikes well on the Hell front. In one encounter “Another hour’s walk and one comes across a great grove of silver trees, deep-rooted within the coastal stone, each branch holding countless sputtering candles. Careful observation reveals the candles are slowly going out, extinguished by harsh winds and drizzling rain.” You’ve got these two sinners, an old man and a young teen, huddled, living in a cave nearby, scared of the party. But they have to keep the candles lit. For if they can do that then they will be saved! “He believes Pin to be his daughter and the Candle Grove to be their penance. Each tree must remain lit, to demonstrate their faith in salvation.” She wants to journey to an island nearby, where she sees a green flame, believing it stays alight forever and they can use it to light all of the candles and win their salvation. If the party does not agree then she slips away in the night to do it. (Only to end up a thrall to it, but that’s another locale.) And, the party being the party, what if they manage to help out and light every candle?!?! “When they are not immediately freed from their suffering, Herot loses hope completely, becoming a Husk (p.148) within days. Pin will follow the PCs from this point on, whether they invite her to or not.” Well now, that’s depressing. Crushed expectations and disillusionment abound. People believe in things, they give themselves hope and are sustained by it. We must follow the devils orders explicitly to be saved. We must defy them at every turn to be saved from this place. At one point you see a MASSIVE chain coming out of the sky. Following it up leads to a floating ship  inhabited by people who think it will leave and take them away. A wizard is trapped here and constructs a bathosphere to escape through what he thinks is a hole to the abyss at the bottom of the ocean. These things sustain them through eternity. And invariably they want the parties help. And … some of them ARE true, Which do you think? And who is going to be devastated when you, the party, bring the crushing truth of reality in to what they have been clinging to for hope to sustain them through eternity? It is this, the hope and futility, that really shines here. Gonna harden your heart?  Gonna swallow your tears? Do you become like The Ghoul? Do you give them hope? Help them? Shit on them? How do you decide which ones MIGHT be on to something? Eternity is a long time to figure things out. 

Take, for example, the dead god. Forgotten name. No one knows his crime, blah blah blah. He’s got an avatar, created using his last strength. The devils would sorely like to capture and destroy it. It’s only a disembodied voice. And its working to free the god. Shall you help? Get the heads of the five devil houses to show up at the top of the spire in the Garden Incomparable and have them all five vote to free him. Which will free him. His avatar doesn’t tell you that doing so will destroy the Shrike and everyone in it, immortal or not. So, you know, I hope you pick the right people to cozy up with.

We come then to the sandbox nature of the adventure. The party ends up here somehow. The motivations for doing so are loose, but the mechanisms are the more interesting part. Beyond thepbvious “you died” and a journey by sea, we are presented with a false burial, in an iron coffin, replete with someone giving a false eulogy listing all of your sins and lapses. Buried in sand as the tide rolls in, you end up on a beach in an iron coffin as the tide rolls out, in the Shrike. There’s some local color for you! Or, perhaps, you would travel by traitor goat? “When a goat has performed this duty for seven years, it is slain by impalement, and its blood daubed upon a door made from iron, bone, silver, stone, and gold.” I think there are like two sentences to this, but which provide oh so much color. Great specificity and a good example of what TO color. 

The adventure keys and locations provide little in way of goals. For that, and perhaps in your reason for coming to the Shrike, we rely on another page in the front of the book. Escape and general exploration are covered, but then also working to free the nameless god or agents for the infernal court, working for unity, or against, to sow discord amongst them. It is one of these that is suggested as a goal for the arty, with the keys and locations proper remaining rather neutral in their orientation. There are some clunky rules for GOLD=XP, dumping them in to the mouths of idols to Mammon or offering them to one of the five devil leaders as tribute. Both seem clunky to me, as stand ins for “spending it in town”, since there are no towns, but, you can always ignore the “spend” part. Once in the mix most of the folks want something that the party could do. That bathosphere wizard needs a bunch of parts obtained for the construction. Him being level one makes it difficult for him (A great example of the consequences of a teleportation accident!) “The Abyss is pitch-black. We must have supernatural radiance to guide our path.” And then it’s up to you to find something, somewhere to help with that. There IS something provided, in the DM notes, but it’s also left openended as a problem to solve any way the party can. Continual Light isn’t mentioned, but hey, you’re the DM. And thus with a giant iron vessel to ride in (the kettles in one locations?) or something else the party comes up with. Looking at the Candle Tree situation, that’s open ended as well, as are most of the problems to be solved. They do, mostly, feel disconnected from each other. Vignettes, with the occasional “I’d really like a X”, or “I hope Y suffers.” In one of the devil courts you can interact with some random imps: “Have you all seen the light over in the Lantern Isle? Loads of stupid Sinners dance around it. We should go up there and steal that light from them.’ Two Imps of Salt will accompany you to the Lantern Isle (p.53) to steal the Wormwood Lantern.” Colorful, fun, and fits in with the imps. And a little quest-givery. This is the problem with an open-ended sandbox. You can do what you want and join any side but then also most things are written to be quite neutral and disconnected from each other with only tenuous ties. That’s not my favorite, I prefer something open ended and yet with a clear direction it is going, but I see how the framework can be appealing to some.

The maps for the five zones are all pointcrawl, with notes in each location about the various exits. “If you walk along the beach ,,,’ There is a small dungeon in each zone of, say, twelve rooms? The layout is not going be award winning. It’s better than a lair dungeon but not by much. 

There are parts of this that are quite quite good. “A tablet of stone containing the spell: The Storm Speaks Through Me (Lightning Bolt)” That’s the kind of thing I like, color. It evokes a vibe of thunderstorms and holding your arms outstretched and grey beards. Or was that Moses? Anyway, good local color. But, that doesn’t carry through the work. It lacks, I don’t know, cohesion? Falls apart at the devils? Some combination of the two?

The devils in this here part of hell are not exactly what you might call Go Getters. The locations of the devils courts and the devils proper tend to be rather static. There is some weirdness about, and some minor devilry, like those imps wanting to steal the sinners green party light, but the Grand Game is off. There is no VIBE of devilry here. The leaders of the devil courts are suitably weirdos, and most are willing to talk to you if you’re not immediately hostile. But it really just feels like a facade. There’s no life to them or their courts. And, no, this isn’t Marie NDiaye, this is an RPG adventure, it’s not on purpose. 

That is a pretty serious disconnect here. While the sinner, proper, including the forgotten god, feel suitable mythic and sisyphean without being too much in your face about it, the devils themselves, just about everything about them, lack that mythic nature. Or, pretty much any nature at all. They seem almost completely disconnected from the rest of the locales. You will recall I noted the lack of an overall thrust to this adventure. This is, I think, one of the ways a sandbox can fall down. Yes, we want an open environment, but, also, there should be a few things to hang your hat on. 80% of games will go like this … well, then lets write for that 80% while not explicitly excluding the other 20%. I might make an analogy to the Generic/Universal adventures. They are so afraid of doing anything specific that they come off as bland. Pick a path and go with it and then throw in a few extra words here and there on alternatives. Aimlessness is not a virtue. The locales have some wants, but they generally seem just that, local. La Grande Campagne does not exist here, or even a mini version of it. 

It does an absolutely excellent job of creating those little mini encounters, mini locales, mini situations. Everyone seems to have a want or need. (Maybe too many sometimes. Now what the fuck does THIS guy want?) But those connections between sites are weak and shallow. Local Troubles, as they say, if even that. More like uncles lightbulb is out. 

I seldom bitch about money. I’m willing to pay a lot for a good adventure, no matter the page count. I am not thrilled to be paying $30 for a PDF for encounters that are mostly isolated. Accepting its flaws, it’s a decent enough little thing for what it is. But that doesn’t correlate to $30 to me. It’s missing purpose. It’s missing a vitality, at least in the devils. 

This is $29 at DriveThru. The preview is 37 pages. You get to the overview of the devil courts, the various background information, hooks, endings, and so on. But, you don’t get to see any of the encounters or locales. That’s too bad. Those ARE the strength of the booklet. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/501615/the-shrike?1892600