One for Sorrow

By Stone Fable
Stone Fable LTD
5e
Level Fucking 3

As you enter the town, you notice the hurried movement and averted eyes of the people passing you on the street, as if they are anxious to get away from something. When you turn into the main village square you see that a man is approaching anyone that passes him, pleading with them about something you are too far away to hear the details of. The other townspeople avoid his gaze and shrug him off with apologetic gestures, leaving him to sink to his knees, completely alone in the light drizzling rain except for a singular magpie which watches him from their perch on the town sign. As you watch, you see this man turn and notice you all. With a sudden sense of purpose he picks himself up and hurries towards you, clasping his hands together as if in prayer. himself up and hurries towards you, clasping his hands together as if in prayer. “Please, you have to help me. He’s not come home and the woods aren’t safe.” This man is Jay Andre.

This 125 page adventure uses about forty pages to present a linear plot over four sessions. It falls down in almost every way possible, including the standard “two encounters per session” trap. The list of what is wrong here is endless. All the handouts in the world, which this is heavy on, won’t save you if the adventure is an exercise in illogic and tedium.

And we can start with the fucking level range. It’s not on the cover. It’s not on the back. It’s not on the product description. It’s buried on page twelve. Page twelve. How the fuck do you handle something like this? Just throw money against the wall and hope you are buying the level range you need? It’s like people have never bought an adventure before. And that level range? It’s in two paragraphs of text that takes up about a third of a page. For a fucking level range! The padding and exposition is strong with this one!

But I should back up a bit. You wander in to town and there’s a dude in the streets that needs help. You wander in to the forest and find his partners dead body after two fights. Then you’re sent in to burn down a tree that is the source of the towns evil. Then the friendly druid tells you what is going on in session three. Session four has you fighting some townfolk for some reason and then going to mutant lake to stop the big bad, returning to town a hero. It turns out that AI, yes, that AI, was behind it the entire time.. You’re gonna have the standard two encounters in sessions. 

Hang on, hang on. I know I’m all over the place in this review, but, check out this art piece! I like it! It’s in the marketing and I like it so much that I bought this garbage adventure based off of it. I think it does a great job of complimenting the adventure, helping to communicate the vibe and tone. The Horror of a hybrid creature made up of woodland animals. It’s also, by far, the only art piece in the adventure that does this. So I guess the lesson is to have one good art piece and put it in the marketing! “Starring Bruce Willis!” 

You have to wade through a lot of text until you get to adventure synopsis. Nothing on the front cover, nothing on the back cover, nothing in the marketing. Again, it starts on page twelve. (And, just for the record, there are not eleven blank pages in front of it. The first SEVEN pages are are total blank page, content, credit nonsense, with the “Words to a DM” on page eight. Then you’ve got four pages of garbage advice to DM on how to DM crap, and, then, on page twelve, you finally get a level range and an adventure summary. And, then, the Synopsys is really just a preamble, followed by a brief summary of the four “episodes.” These are column long summaries which essentially say “have to combats.” There’s a challenge for you: condense this adventure down in to three pages, with each episode being a column long. Ha! 

You like italics? You like fucked up fonts? You’re in luck! Page or page and a haf long text blocks in some fucked up italics like font. Did you even TRY to read the text you put in your own adventure? Did you hand it to someone else and watch them struggle? And yet you STILL put it in the adventure? Mind you, this isn’t players handouts. I’m all for burning the tea-soaked italics note before we bandit to the players. But not the DM. The DM is running the fucking adventure. We make things easy for the DM. And i want to be clear, I’m just, to this point, bitching about the absurd decision to use italics for this. I have not yet begun to bitch about the fact that these can be a page long , or a page and a half long. A fuckign exposition dump. Nobody wants to listen to your fucking exposition dump. They want to play D&D. No, D&D does not mean excitement every moment. But what it does mean is an interaction, a back and for the between the players and the DM and each other. And listening to the DM drone on and on, even if they could readthe fucking font, for a page and a half is not the definition of back and forth interactivity. Time to wordle! Then you’ve lost me; I’m moving on to the Bee after that. And not stopping till I queen. It’s better than being bored to death. Oh, wait, the game has restarted because the read aloud is finally done? Oh, another one? People are not on their phones at the fucking table because the adventure is engaging. 

We start with the party rolling in to a small village in a clearing in the woods. There’s a distraught person in the streets begging for help. Their husband has gone missing. People walk by and ignore them. The local militia is no help. They are busy serving and protecting. This is not the way people operate. You help your neighbors. Even in the big city. Even the homeless in the abandoned house next door are gonna look out for you. Yeh, some petty shit happen, but nothing serious. And those are transients. This is the local grain merchant that the adventure tells us is trusted, respected, and a pillar of the community. No shit, words to that effect. And they are being ignored by the people passing them in the street while they break down in the middle of it. It doesn’t matter that you wrote a page about it. It’s unrealistic. A page for a handwave pretext or a sentence for a handwave pretext, it’s still a shitty pretext. At least if it’s a sentence we don’t have to wade through it. There’s another situation with a tree in the forest that needs to be burnt down. There’s a bunch of kindling already stacked around it ready to light. A huge amount. But the militia, who did it, heard a sound and got scared and didn’t light it. Seriously? If you don’t light the bonfire then the militia captain sends out a squad to light it. Yup. It’s pointless. It turns out that the militia MAY be up to something, but, still, it begs the question why, with good motives or bad, they spent so much time collecting wood. It’s absurd. And the grain merchant, the person breaking down in the street, they didn’t even try to go looking for their husband? None of these people deserve the fucking parties help. The best adventures treat people like real people, with real feelings and real flaws. This is nothing more than a long drawn out basic and formulaic hack job of a pretext.

And then there are the audio logs. Yes, audio logs. Yes, this is fantasy. There are “recording stones.” This smacks of sphere of annihilation garbage disposals. It’s the only appeal to this garbage magical society bs. Anyway, diaries are the worst form of exposition. I don’t care if you get to listen to an included mp3. It’s lazy shit. It means that you could not convey the information another way and you had to diary/audio log it. The fucking recording stones are just laying around, waiting for the party to listen to the backstory. “On any roll, the players find a recording stone lying on the floor by the foot of the work bench, as if dropped in a hurry. This stone is Trevor Andre’s Audio Log 1.” Fun. What if you don’t take the hook and help the person in the street? “This magpie will fly overhead and drop a recording stone in front of the players, which contains Trevor Andre’s Audio Log 1” So, sure, the party has to want to play D&D tonight, so they need to bite. But, also, perhaps we can be a little less hamhanded about it? Integrate diary contents in to an adventure, through actions and environment, don’t fucking exposition dump, be it in read-aloud, diaries, audio logs, or any other mechanism. “The party wakes to a magpie tapping on the window, holding an audio log in its beak.” I hate my life.

Did I mention the read-aloud is all second person and leans towards the purple side? “… he farmland and as you near the damp, cool woods you feel the bite of insects as they try and make a meal of your blood.” Joy.This isn’t good writing. Good writing makes the players feel a certain way, tha they are being feased upon. Good writing doesn’t use second person. These are both absolute sins when it comes to read-aloud. Keep it short, no more than a few sentences. Communicate a vibe, but don’t TELL the party what they are feeling or doing. And make it fucking legible!

Useful info to bookmark/have open:
– Kermit Krimes Character (p.70)
– Sigrid Ironspirit Character (p.67)
– Sergeant Percival Bevis Ironforger Character (p.72)
– Captain Jossur Character (p.74)

My initial thought, when seeing this, was to complain that the characters were not right next to each other. You know, put all of the relevant NPC’s right next to each other in the text so you don’t have to go flipping back and forth. It’s not that you have to flip, it’s tat you have other characters in the middle of these. But I was wrong. They are next to each other. It’s just that each NPC is three fucking pages long. I swear. This fucking shit. You don’t need a three page long NPC. We don’t need to know trivia about them, involved backstories that have nothing to do with the adventure. We just need to know the shit necessary to run the adventure. A vibe, a quirk or to, a want or need or motivation. Then move the fuck on. More isn’t better. More is worse. It makes it impossible to locate what you DO need. “Rich, detailed NPC’s” is HUGE

 Red flag when it comes to adventures. You’ve got a fucking DM to lean on. Give the DM what they need to understand the NPC and let them riff on it. Fuck me, the DM is going to anyway. Maybe, if the effort was put in to the adventure proper instead of rich, detailed NPCs then the adventure proper would be better? 

The sergeant of the militia mocks the party to the point that the party should really burn the entire place down. The enigmatic druid the party meets early returns and explains the plot to everyone; she knew what was going on the entire time. Where did the missing husband enter the woods, so the party can track them down? No clue. The woods are huge. Which way did he go? Meh, not important to the “story.”

Why even bother? Why even bother running a fucking game if you’re just going to handwave every part of the adventure that he party might interact with? “Ah, the party might hae to make a decision here! I shouldn’t let them …” The entire fucking point, even in a plot adventure, is for the party to interact with people and environment around them. Abstracting “where did the missing plot hook go?”, the INITIAL fucking hook, is just a totally bizarre decision. What could possibly be going on here?

Irony is not lost on me. The OSR, older D&D styles. The very soul of the meme of killing the monsters and taking their stuff. A Game, that you can win, by living to the next level. Let me tell you what is going on here: This is a shitty formulaic combat adventure. Oh, it’s gussied up with a lot of words and multimedia shit, but that’s what it is. The standard two combats. A pretext of a hook that the party barely interacts with. A plot that you don’t need to really interact with.  COMBAT! Or maybe a ROLL FOR INITIATIVE! Is embedded in the fucking read-aloud! If you go someplace new then there a read aloud that assumes its just a straight up fight. Like you knocked on the door and out came the monster. Wanna use your wits? This is combat as sport bucko. This is, rather transparently, nothing more than a fancy way to roll some dice to stab things. There is no interactivity, aside from the combats. Nothing special is here. It’s fucking garbage. Shallow garbage. And, lest you think that combat will interrupt things … “If the fight is going badly for the party and characters are dying, there is a deus ex machina that can be used to end the fight.” A bunch of magpies show up and kill themselves divebombing the monster. No escape, even in sweet sweet death. This truly is a hellish experience. 

“Additionally, this is where the players find the Boarskin Cloak item. See page 96 in the appendix for full details. If you are running a more rules light or streamlined game, perhaps this item pops into existence fully formed, or if your game is more gritty/realistic, perhaps the players would have to harvest some boarskin and craft* the item during a short rest*” Uh huh. Pop in t existence. Or, craft is during a short rest! Uh huh. For a magic item. In an hour. I guess its better than the fucking thing popping in to existence. There is no pretext here. 

“If asked why he didn’t look into the missing man, he’ll say it’s a manpower issue, that his man, he’ll say it’s a manpower issue, that his hands are full just patrolling the town and hands are full just patrolling the town and keeping the monsters* at bay.
*Used under the Open Gaming License v1.0a and/or System Reference Document 5.1” Yup, they footnoted a use of the term “monster” and referred back to the OGL license for it. Perfection personified.

Remember all that padding? How about an Optional Encounter? “Optional Encounter: This section is optional, and not required to progress the main questline. It is intended as  world-building and to add depth to the town of Thornborough. As such, while we recommend you include it, the players do not have to interact with it if uninterested, and nor does this situation need to be resolved by the players.” Yup. You managed to type Optional Encounter and then define what an optional encounter is. Good job!

At the start of the last act, the party comes back to town. The inn is on fire. The missing husband person, the initial session one hook? They stand accused of starting it, there’s a mob, and the militia is gonna hang’em right then and there. Ok, so, it turns out the milita is bad and the militia guard captain is the source of all evil or something like that. But why burn the inn? Why accuse the grain merchant and hang them? I don’t get it. And I don’t get A LOT of what happens in this adventure, including caring. 

Oh, hey, ai is behind everything. Yeah. There’s some kind of machine god under the mountain or something. At some point you fight robots. And the animal hybrids are somehow the result of this god. I don’t get it. Spare parts or something? Mutants? All of those are mentioned. They are all organic hybrids though and the machines now want organic parts, I guess? It’s not clear. And the magpies are the agents of the nature god, in opposition. Again, it’s all just pretextual. Yeah yeah, nature good and science bad. Got it. I assume the designers are English; this seems like their ingrained nostalgia for agrarian misery. Science and technology are the new Evil Cultists eh? The magpie thing is interesting, as the agent for a god, but everything else about the entire religious/robot angle is just trash. 

A lot of words, a nice layout and many multimedia handouts do not an adventure make. This doesn’t even get to the Colored lights standard. It’s just the usual formulaic shit. Prefectural and padded out beyond belief. Gussied up with some multimedia shit. First, write a decent adventure. THEN you can apply the lipstick. 

This is $20 at DriveThru. Preview? FUCK YOU! Just fork your twenty fucking dollars over to the designers. They deserve it, they dumped in the soundtrack and audio logs. Why should you get a chance to see what you’re buying before they claim their tax? “Perfect for GM’s and players seeking deep immersion.” Yeah. No.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/504394/one-for-sorrow-whispers-in-the-mist?1892600