Stygina: The Land of Ice and Plunder

By Christopher Wilson
Self Published
OSE
Levels 9-12

During the War of the Heavens, it is said that an acrchangel of Janu deseneded from the skies like a great meteor, striking the known world with a sacred war hammer, laying the devils and demons low. The very earth trembled at the blow, cracking the surface and pushing up the mountains. The land of Stygina was created, as the continent was shattered and the Frostholm Sea was formed. And it is said that this mighty weapon is still buried in the ice in the frozen north..

This 198 page booklet presents The Frozen North, full of generic vikings (with one cultural exception) and uses about sixteen pages to describe a dungeon with 24 rooms containing an angels warhammer. And angel. Its entries are full of padded backstory explaining the why and histories of everything, and ultimately the various encounters are just stabbing of the generic variety. Imagine writing 198 pages of generic padding and then including “Roll on table H for the dragons hoard.”

I know I’m supposed to be taking more time with these longer adventures, but this booklet has the vast majority of its space taken up by generic cultural shit and generic viking encampments that lack any color. The whole purpose here seems to be going to get a magic warhammer, part of a longer/larger campaign arc with this adventure just being the latest in the series. But the warhammer thing only takes up the last bit of the book, thirty pages with the main attraction, the dungeon, being about sixteen or so? It’s hard to evaluate 130 pages of generic viking stuff. And I don’t mean Harn levels of culture; it’s just boring old stuff that any old DM could come up with if I just said “Vikings in the north.” 

I frequently call this The Kitchen issue, although it should be renamed the Fantasy Inn issue given the frequency of it making an appearance there. E all know what a kitchen looks like. I’m sure that we could all even describe a fantasy kitchen, or, perhaps, a medieval kitchen in a manor. Including Mrs Patmore. It’s been burned the fuck in to you by every piece of media you have ever consumed. Cartoons, books, tv, movies, everything ever produced by the BBC.  Every telenueve. You, and everyone else on the fucking planet, knows what that damn kitchen looks like in the manor house. So why the fuck did the designer just spend two paragraphs telling you what a medeivel kitchen looks like? Oh, look, two more paragraphs on what a little roadside inn looks like with another two on the jolly little rotund barkeep. Fireplace,soft light through the windows, smoke from the chimney, a murmur from outside, maybe a jaunty tune here and there, farmers a couple of merchants. Simple but hearty fare. Blah blah blah. Got it. The Prancing Pony. Just like every other of the 10,000 fantasy inn descriptions i’ve read, watched, and consumed over my life. 

The designer needs to communicate The Prancing Pony very succinctly and then proceed to tell us how THIS Prancing Pony differs from every other Prancing Pony. Cozy Inn. Seedy Inn. Serves slop. Maybe, instead of describing the inn, you could instead tell us about the smuggling ring that hangs out there? How the innkeeps family is weirdly leaning in to in to the Church of the New God? It doesn’t have to be bizarre, but including a subplot here is much better than wasting our time with Just Another Inn. If you have to have one then just tell us it’s a normal old inn called The Prancing Pony, or The Green Dragon, or whatever. A quirk or two is great. 

Likewise, the viking realm in this adventure. These are just vikings. Not Harn vikings, or realistic one, just plain old fantasy vikings. There is nothing special going on here. Nothing about the inns or settlements that makes them special. (Well, except for that mass human sacrifice thing …) And yet the adventure goes on and on about viking land. And not the vikings riding mastodons SO METAL of the only fantasy map you’ll ever need. Just generic vikings. No Grondusmoots and other local customs that might come up in the adventure or be central to a certain point. Just gener-o-vikings. It’s a fantasy village. But everyone is dressed like a viking,.A hundred and some pages of this. Even, for a gazetteer, this is a bit much for the local color, or lack thereof, that you get. The closest you get is a small wandering event table to spice up your short stay in the city. With an example below …

There is an exception to the generic stuff. The vikings up here have a ritual. Well, a holiday like festival. “In the past, as many as 10,000 slaves, prisoners, and various livestock have been sacrificed during the weeklong Festival of Aesa.” Hmmm. In the past, right? Well, no. They are still doing it and the party arrives during it. It’s part of the adventure. While you’re watching the head priestess slaughter slaves and prisoners, ritually, she reads the parties minds and that’s how we kick off an audience with the king. Lest you think you can escape with some abstraction here, there are a few random city encounters that bring it home. A slave child finds you and tells you that her owner is about to have her brother sacrificed and begs for you to do something.

Look man, I’ve had a shitty day at work. I’m here for the beer and pretzels and friends and a few laughs maybe. I do NOT fucking need a slave child. I don’t her pleading with me to do something. And I especially don’t need the ritual murder of a bunch of people in with the group that I’m supposed to be interacting with as if they were any other generic villager.

“The only words that can describe it is barbaric evil. But this is a gross misunderstanding of the Styginian belief system, as a whole. The Styginians are not evil as, for instance, the orcs of the Rok-Skull tribes. Orcs are inherently evil. The Styginian people are simply honoring their Gods in the manner that their Gods demand.” Big big fan of alignment being cosmically evil. It lets us hand wave a lot of things. But, dude, this is some Zone of Interest shit. Tht’s fucking evil, not a cultural quirk. This is supposed to be fun? I don’t see any need to collaborate to get a warhammer to stop an archdevil. We’ll find another way. Let’s skip this adventure. I don’t know what the fuck people are thinking including shit like this. That one with the halfling plantation owners. The one with the baddies all being obviously mentally ill. Yeah yeah, midwesterner. Whatever. This is not fun. I’m pretty sure I would launch an attack, get killed, leave, and then have a talk with the DM about what “fun” means. The fucking game is not a simulation of the barbarity of history. It’s a fucking game for christs sake. I’m not the biggest fan of trigger warnings, but including this kind of shit deserves it. I take it back, if you reach MY level of trigger warning then maybe DONT PUT THE FUCKING SHIT IN THE GAME!! Its not even fucking necessary for the adventure. There’s no call back. There’s no weight to it or significance. It’s basically just local color, like, they all wear tweed hats or some shit. Except its here and the designer has decided to spring it on the party as the hook/lead in to the hunt for the warhammer. You know what we do? We make the people mass sacrificing children EVIL, and we use them as the bad guys and we don’t force the party to collaborate with them. And we especially don’t make them participate, implicitly or explicitly. I D3 were on our way to kill their god and it’s all abstracted; THAT seems like a worthy reason for passing through. Yeah, we want to know our baddies are evil. But these people are not the baddies in the adventure and are just presented like a cultural norm. I’m really not happy about this. I’m going to continue the review of this garbage only because you can leave EVERYTHING out about it and still do the adventure with your plain old mercantile, murderous, raiding vikings. 

“For the Styginian people, this is mostly considered true, though they will not openly state such a thing. Only by immersing one’s self in the Styginian culture will one find this to be an overall truth. The Gods of both pantheons play an everyday role in Styginian society and every person, giant or Styginian, is devoutly religious. Every man, woman, and child, giant or otherwise, wears a token of a God that is believed to have some forbearance on that individual’s life. Gifts are given to the Gods on their holy days and sacrifices are made during the midsummer solstice, in the capital of Olafsvellir.” Speaking of gazeteer, the vast majority of this reads like an early travelogue. It’s in a rather dry style which is only exacerbated by the genericism of the content. 

And everybody and everything has a backstory. It’s everywhere. And it’s integrated in to the descriptions. “Large two story manor: Originally built by some of Arnvid’s generals after the sack of Miraslava, these two large manor houses were later added on to, becoming what is today known as the Capsizer Inn. Wood sign over the door: While the sign does not name the inn as such, every regular to Miraslava knows the carved relief of a longship tipping to the side in a large wave. The sign is stained in a deep burgundy that many claim is from the blood that was spilled when Arnvid came to power. These are most likely nothing more than tall tales.” There’s nothing to any of that. It’s just preamble to a fucking inn. Hey, you know one of those Black Demon Knight things? Lord Soth? There’s one of those in the adventure, in some room in the dungeon. He gets a backstory also. And when you walk in he immediately attacks and does nothing but fight. So, what’s the point of the backstory? I guess if you just want to read the adventure and imagine all of the games you’ll run then it’s great. But running the adventure? All of this nonsense padding just gets in the way of the DM locating the information they DO need in order to run the room. You have to wade through the dross in order to find what interactivity you need to respond to the party. And, it pisses me off. Because the effort spent on this backstory nonsense, this justifying and explaining the whys and wherefore, is effort that should have spent on the actual adventure, the interactivity, the shit that WILL matter at the table. That’s what the fuck the adventure is for, running it at the table.

The adventure, proper, is just a hack with a few traps. Sail on a ship. Fight a giant squid (with backstory.) Walk across some snow. Fight some frost giants. Go in a cave. Three levels, about eight rooms per level. Fight some ice trolls. Fight some other shit. Fall in a pit. Fight a bunch of 12HD druids. Yeah, it’s putin the middle of nowhere but there are all of these 12HD druid hanging around, protecting the place. I don’t need toilets and a mess hall, but SOME allowance for them as something other than a generic stat block would be nice. No names, just a bunch of 12 HD druids. There are a couple of groups of them. One group just fought some frost giants. The giants got past them so they are just standing there in the same room, not giving chase or anything. Joy. Injured? Missing spells? Nope. It’s just a stat block to stab.

And what stat blocks! It’s not unusual to see a full column of them! This is right out of 4e, with all of their special abilities present. Trolls? Why they are known to set traps, so we gotta include that in the stat block! It doesn’t matter that they just wandered in and have had no time, it’s in the creature stat block so it gets included. I don’t need Ready Ref one liners here, but, man, use some common sense. Don’t be beholding to your style guide. Include what’s needed and lave out what’s not. A trivial creature encounter takes up LOADS of space here. (It’s OSE, so none of that only four 12HD druids in the world shit. Although, I still find that rather romantic …)

Then there’s what’s NOT included. In a dragons lair, with dragon: “Glittering piles of treasure: Piles of coins litter the floor of this chamber. Sparkling gems are interspersed through these pile, marking a near incalculable wealth at first glance.” And the treasure? “Treasure: In addition to Izyntainth’s hoard, there is an additional 100pp, 5,000gp, 1,000ep, 2,000sp, 6,000cp, and 100 gems worth 10gp each.” BUT THERES NO HOARD DESCRIPTION! Jesus christ man, that’s what you SHOULD be including! How about a more differenter dragon? “Treasure: The entirety of Rirglazic’s hoard, from Treasure Table H, can be found here.” This is my life. This is what I signed up to do. Where’s that other entry? Oh, here. The Dangerous Shark. An inn in town. Like, eight pages to describe it. A fairly typical seaside bar/inn. But everyone looks like a viking. It includes a description, taking most of a column, of the owners bedroom. There’s nothing special about the bedroom. Just a normal simple innkeeper one. There’s nothing special about the inn. No hidden cults or anything like that which would make the innkeeper’s room interesting. But you know what we do get? This, in the OSE style: “Heavy door (this heavy wood door is good at blocking noise; locked).” And then, cause we gotta follow up, “Heavy door: Kalf installed a thick wood door on the master bedroom that deadens the sound from within and without. “When we’re in here, I don’t want to hear or know what you girls are doing out there, and I don’t want you to hear or know what we’re doing in here!” The door is locked. Both Kalf and Gudny have skeleton keys to all the locks on the second floor.” Is there a point here? Is the designer implying that the daughters are fucking and the parents know? I mean, that must be it?! BECAUSE WHY ELSE WOULD THAT BE IN THE ADVENTURE? This is the kind of trivial bullcrap that gets included. But, the dragons treasure trove? Nope. In what POSSIBLE frame of mind do you have to be to include that shit about the door, or all the other minutia in the descriptions of the bullshit parts of the adventure, and then NT include the treasure in a dragons hoard? That was your fucking decition that you made here? 

Oh, shit, I was bitching about the dungeon. Anyway, lots of stabbing. Nothing really makes sense or “clicks.” It’s just stuffing in some monsters in a lot of rooms for you to stab and finding a pretext for them to be herein their backstories. Nothing special about the stabbing. A few traps, nothing really special about them, not in a “specials” kind of way. Everything is very straightforward. It makes no sense, but its straightforward. 

It’s done in a kind of OSE style, with the descriptions. I know people have strong opinions about that. I think its effective when done well. Guess what? It’s not done well here . Emphasis on the wrong things, too long in its keywords, not very evocative. Blech.

But, that’s not the major problem here. I am hesitant to review fluff. I don’t know what makes fluff good, or, perhaps, there is less, from a technical writing viewpoint, about to critique in a fluff sourcebook. And most of this is just a regional guide to the land of Stygia, full of vikings. But it doesn’t approach it from a historical viewpoint. And it doesn’t approach it from a Metal standpoint. It’s just mostly a typical fantasy setting, with people dressed up as vikings. I have a hard time believing this is what folks want from a regional guide. After all, you know what a kitchen looks like. The focus on the mundane and trivial doesn’t hit what IM looking for in a regional guide, but maybe its for you? I don’t know, like I said, I don’t know fluff. 

On the adventuring side of things though, there are several problems that drag this down. The emphasis on stabbing and “normal” traps. There’s not much special here. Certainly there’s a place for a raid, but this just seems like a level noe dungeon scaled up to levels 9-12, and not a very interesting level one dungeon at that. Nothing fits together well. The depth is quite shallow and there’s little to learn or figure out. The added emphasis on the DM coming up with their own content for, say, the dragons hoards, is just icing on that little cake. I find the inclusion of the human sacrifice thing very distasteful. It doesn’t meet the moral compass test of either making them the baddies OR even raising interesting questions of complicity. (That would be a much harder line to walk and I’m not suggesting that anyone SHOULD walk it in a D&D game, but it’s the available out if you are going to do something like this. Gaeta during the Cylon occupation comes to mind. But, then, how much of this is appropriate for a fun game?)  I can’t see much in the value here.

This is $4 at DriveThru. The review is eight genero-background pages on culture, etc. You have to squint some, but the entire booklet is like that, to certain degrees. A few encounter pages would have been good to include. Not a great preview, although, it does tell you what to expect …

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/509390/stygina-the-land-of-ice-and-plunder?1892600