The Giant’s Cottage

By Ethan Dunning
Self Published
OSE
Levels 1-4

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This eighteen page adventure features fourteen rooms across two levels in a classic fairytale-like giants cottage. Experience being small and looking at big things. And not doing much else. Classic elements, to no end. 

Man, I don’t know. There’s so little to work  with here, even though there are fifteen rooms and almost twenty pages. This is one of those “We’re small and the  world around us is big” adventures, the classic set up being “we’re in a giant’s house!” And, this is the classic one. It’s a cottage that a giant lives in. It’s four times your size. The giant is asleep in his bed. Pretty classic. There are giant ants crawling through his window to the table to grab chunks of bread and cheese. Pretty classic. The giant will capture you if you wake him and put you inmason jars in hte basement. That’s pretty charming. The giant rats have a queen who is wearing a cursed magic item that makes your intelligence five. Which isn’t much of a curse if you’re a giant rat, so Penny is now queen, naming herself after the Penny Grain Company sack she sleeps on. I mean, this is all straight out of children’s books and fairy tales. Get in to a fight with the ants? A giant preying mantis jumps down from the rafters so you can escape all StopMotion Dinosaur Movie style. 

The environment, though, is rather static. The giant is asleep. The ants don’t attack unless you fuck with them. The black widow under the bed isn’t at home initially. The rat queen wants to talk. It’s all pretty passive. The giant makes sense; you’re not fighting an 8HD t level one, and his stick you in a jar or on a meat hook also makes sense, he’s a puzzle/a special and not a fight. But the rest … the place is missing an element of risk. You just wander around.

There are some captured people and some of the hooks tie in to that; find the missing goblins or find the missing priest. There’s also a locked chest. The queen will tell you where the key is, but she wants the cheese. The cheese is on the table with the ants, so I guess you will be disturbing them, if you go that route. But these are clearly a preplanned path and not … oh, the encounters as independent agents living in their own world.

I’m not even sure this works well if you place your own quest object in it. It would still have the same problem: a rather confined location with rather passive encounters in them. There’s not much dynamic going on. There is a table of random events, like the giant gets up to go get water from the well briefly, or goes to the basement to get something and the like. But this all seems like more of a “quick! Everyone hide!” element then it is providing opportunities or some push to move the adventure along further. And I can get behind a Quick! Hide! Thing, but it’s hard when the entire adventure seems to be that. 

The adventure is one big long puzzle and trap adventure, in essence. Make your way through, figuring out the Giant Land thing while you are small. Avoid touching the metal rails and getting shocked. We can imagine room after room of Grimthooth rooms as a blunt analogy. Figure out how to pass and get the cash at the other end. This IS a valid type of adventure, and it certainly has many charming elements. It does, in fact, have a bunch of encounters which communicate that kind of Giant Cottage vibe. The Wee Willy giant adventure from Dungeon, though, from my memory, felt like a more dynamic environment. This doesn’t feel like you’re trapped, or after something. I’m not even sure it feels like you’re robbing the place or on a journey to free prisoners. There just are not obstacles to actively engage in, for the most part. Sure, the mason jars are in a cellar with brown mold, but I think that’s a rare example in this of challenge to actively overcome instead of just Not Fucking With Shit. Thusly, mostly a museum adventure where NOT interacting gets you more than interacting. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. There is no preview. I am not amused by that. You gotta put in a substantive preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/546423/the-giant-s-cottage?1892600