The Fall of Willowdell

By Martin A Cubas
Weird Adventures by Martin A Cubas
Castles & Crusades
Level 1

Willowdell was once a quiet halfling village hidden deep in the forest. Now, a blood pact with a vengeful spirit has transformed its people into fiendish predators, and the land itself twists with corruption. The characters must navigate the village’s haunted streets, face warped townsfolk, and uncover the truth before the horror spreads beyond the trees.

This 54 page adventure uses about 22 pages to describe twelve locations in a ruined halfling village full of crazed halfling-fiends. It’s padded out, and tries so hard to explain things that it comes full circle and is now HARDER to understand. It’s just a basic hack. 

The local halfling villages have appealed to the human castle for help. It seems they think there’s gonna be “a humanoid invasion.” Rather than respond with the army, some scouts and mercenaries are sent in to look around and see what is actually going on. You make your rounds and when reaching one particularly isolated village you see a bunch of bodies on the road. Gnolls and halflings, with most of the village razed. Rather than just go home and say “yeah. You lost a village, better send in the army!” the dogooders poke around, find some  crazed halflings as well as a survivor or two that tell you about the local “sacrifice a child for a great harvest and safety” tradition. Looks like it went wrong. At the site of the sacrifice a local specter fills you in via an exposition dump and points you to a small buried token. Taking the token to the town hall, you confront the evil forest spirit on the other end of the bargain, destroy the token, kill the spirit, and free the crazed townsfolk. Yeah! 

This is all a REALLY basic adventure. There are really only a couple of locations of note. The tavern with a survivors locked inside. The mayors house with the same, and some clues. The center of the cornfield where the sacrifice took place, and the town hall that contains the possessed mayor. The other eight or so locations add a little color but not much else to the way of the plot. There’s the required “oh no, what has happened here!” location when you first enter the village, and then the single crazed halfling that was partially lobotomized they transformed, so now he’s just banging his head against the wall. Literally. You’ve seen enough zombie movies to know what the score is. Err, I mean crazed halfling-fiend movies. 

There’s an art pack that comes with this adventure that is rather better than most. I’m a little confused why it’s stand-along pieces and they don’t appear in the text. Maybe to use as handouts? Anyway, it gives a pretty nice rural halfling creepy vibe. Only when you hear the wind blowing through dry corn stalks, or the liminal nature of farm fields and orchards can you truly understand the kind of … hollowness that the art communicated well. Anyway, it does a good job and it should have been included in the adventure proper. There’s no real art nin the adventure, just some full collor textured battle maps. I fucking hate that trend. They are confused and hard to read. I dare say that its not the fact that they are full coloror textured, just that the full color and textures are badly done., in the same way a hand drawn map could be clear or illegible. 

I’m rather fond of the hook here. It’s rare for an adventure to offer a pretext as to WHY the adventurers are doing the work instead of the local lord, but in this case it does make a little sense. Or, maybe, I just read Pillars of the Earth.  Anyway, the locals think they are going to be invaded “by humanoids” and so instead of committing the troops the local lord send out someone to see if he needs to send in the troops. “The castellan is now recruiting mercenaries and adventurers to scout for signs of hostile activity before committing regular troops.” And, then, when you reach the main halfling village, “The adventurers are received in Greeneye with every courtesy and comfort the humble village can muster.” Well, there’s a pleasant change. You’re treated like you’re there to help and that they’ve asked for your help. It’s a nice start. I am pleasantly surprised and looking forward to more.

But, of course, it’s gonna suck. And it does. 

Two pages of backstory. A lot of appendices, as the page count would suggest. The wanderers take a page to describe even though it’s just “you might run on to a roving band of halflings while going from one location to the next. (Which is a 33% chance every five minutes …) This is an insane amount of text for something so simple. And the only color here is a suggestion that the DM might make them come from a nearby house or something, in almost those exact words. There is no specificity. There’s epilogue, which I’m usually glad to see, except in this case there’s nothing much going on. You won! Yeah! The mayors wife is the new mayor. And if you lose? Nothing much happens, in terms of specific outcomes. “Epilogue – The conclusion of this adventure will depend on the characters’ actions and decisions. While there are multiple possible outcomes, these are the primary scenarios, which you can adapt to t your campaign:” Yup, that’s what an epilogue is and how you got there. I’m surprised, a bit, that each word used is not defined. 

But the major problem here, beyond the simplicity of the thing, just hacking, is that it is wordy and padded out to a pretty extreme degree. 22 pages to describe twelve locations gives us an average of two pages per location. And some are much longer, with the majors house being five pages long. And that’s not a bunch of room s being described. How do we get here? “CK Notes. This is the village mayor’s residence.” Yup, that’s what “Mayors house” usually implies. We get a bunch of backstory in it. And we get a SHIT TON of backstory and exposition. Everything is padded out. Every “room”, every creature, everything that you could come across. And every entry n the adventure is like this. Single column everywhere. The presence of bullets doesn’t really help, with information being spread out over so many pages. The effort to make it more approachable has resulted in it being infinitely more confusing. For a relatively simple hack adventure. And it comes off as rather generic. While there’s backstory and explanations on the hows and  whys there is little in the way of speciality to ground the adventure. 

It’s a simple adventure, padded out to an extreme degree.

This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages, and you get to see a bit of the first couple of locations, so it’s an ok preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/533161/c-c-the-fall-of-willowdell-c-c-compatible-edition?1892600