The Cresting Pearl Light

by Wayne Peacock, Dee McKinney
Kismet Games
OSR
Levels 1-3

A ragged sailor speaks of an island no chart has ever shown—one he claims rose straight from the sea, crowned by a bone-colored lighthouse that casts shifting, multihued light across the waves. His tale might be madness… if not for the opalescent, fist-sized pearl he carries as proof. When both sailor and pearl end up in the possession of Gokleve’s notorious twins Valde and Valada, the pair hires you to voyage to this impossible island and return with whatever pearls you can pry from its shores. Are the pearls the true prize… or just the bait?

This 28 page adventure uses six pages to present seven rooms in some sea caves that have you fighting. Right out of the 4e era, you’ll be stabbin and everything else is a pretext. Or maybe it’s the 3.5 era since there’s not much terrain. Whatever. 

This is weird. The sea caves, the actual adventure locale, are just a few pages long, six if I recall. The lighthouse, the one that features so prominently on the cover and in all of the adventure lead-in? Not covered. Or, rather, it is essentially a rock formation on the island. It gets about three quarters of a page description which amounts to “The lighthouse which pierces the island is a magical device, not a building.” There are a few odds and ends, like seaweed covering it, but that’s the description. Which I guess means you can’t go inside? Which is why I’m calling it a rock formation. It’s got that beam of light, rotating, at the top, which is clearly magical. But there’s no notes about fucking with it. About climbing the tower, flying up, or painting the lenses with tar or anything else. When you make your entire adventure about the fucking lighthouse then you’d better do something with the lighthouse, or have some way of communicating to the players “Hey, its not about the lighthouse” once they reach the lighthouse. Yes, you can see a cave mouth, which is where the party will end up, so, good on yeah matey. 

Ket’s mention the quantum blind dude. He’s on the top of a mast of a wrecked ship. Unless the party doesn’t go to the wrecked ship in which case he’s in a wrecked lifeboat at the cave mouth. Its actually called “QUANTUM [Dudes Name]” Why? He’s not crucial to the adventure, so why the focus on making ABSOLUTELY sure the party meets him? And, during that HUGE leads in to the adventure we get LONG sections about V&V, the crime lords who hire the party to go the lighthouse. Like, pages of this shit. (Clearly, we have a hard on for V&V the crime lords. And for the quantum dude, for some reason. Search me. But I can tell when someone is a mary sue DM pet.) With some nice fucking LONG  read-aloud. In Italics. In a fancy fucking font in italics, and long. Look, I promised not to do the screencap thing anymore, but come on man, this shit is falling closer to the illegible end of the scale than the legible. Weird flourishes at the ends of e’s. I guess its supposed to be nautical-ish? BUT ITS FOR THE FUCKING DM. The DM has to be able to read the fucking shit and communicate yor long ass soliloquy to the players. I’m all for tormenting the players with handouts that nigh illegible, but not the DM. The DM needs information presented in a way that they can absorb it and transfer it to the players in an efficient and effective manner. Also, the island “appears to have a working lighthouse.” There’s a giveaway if I ever saw one. No. It has a working lighthouse. There’s a tower with a light spinning at the top. As far as anyone else knows its a fucking lighthouse. Nobody needs to know it’s not actually a lighthouse. (Although, isn’t it? Is it form or is it function? It’s tall with a rotating light you can see. It’s a lighthouse. The purpose of the light is to attract ship … so its function is not that of a lighthouse?) 

Oh, what am I bitching about here … the interactivity is just stabbing shit. Go in to a room, stab the monster, go in to the next room, stab the monster, go in to the next room. Repeat. There’s a person or two (See Also: Quantum Dude) who are like “we shipwrecked!” and are now have facehugger ova in them. They get, maybe, one sentence. Actually, most things get one sentence. Stab stab stab. Stab stab stab. I’m gonna call this a 3.5 adventure since there’s stabbing without the terrain effects needed to make it a 4e adventure. 

Room two of this exciting sea cave adventure: “2. Nest. The nest is home to the tenders.” Are you not eNtErTaInEd?! There’s a couple of bullet points for the DM to embellish upon, but the core room dynamic is more than a little lacking here. And, it’s just stabbing after all, so any description is just wasted. I guess this genre is for people who want to play mini’s but, I don’t know, want more? Roguelike D&D where combat is the main thing but you can level up and the graphics are raytraced?

And that’s all too bad because there is some imagery here and there that is decent.  “Bodies lie about the wreck, some wedged into the rocks where golden crabs feed upon them.” Noice! Always great when the crabs have some steamed human legs. And eyes. Nothing like a good rotten crab feeding frenzy to conjure the nausea, or, there’s this water elemental you can meet. It looks like an eel, its totem creature. That’s a great idea. Its tormenting a fisherman: “darting under to menace the trapped fisherman. The fisherman was harvesting eels, the elemental’s totem species, which pissed it off. It now plans on drowning its victim, Lars. The more prolonged the terror, the better.” That’s great! I mean, it’s all useless here since you’re just gonna stab it. But the potential man … and lets make lars desperate, so even though he KNOWS there’s this eel creature, there are also a lot of eels, and his families hungary, or he owes a lot or something. And maybe tie that in to the crime lords? Who have hired you. Great! Or, we could just put in some backstory for no reason and then just make the encounter a combat. *sigh*

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is the first four pages, which is useless. Title pages, credits, one page of background. The purpose of the preview is to show us enough so that we can make an informed purchasing decision. Like, show us an encounter so we can understand your style of D&D.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548411/the-cresting-pearl-light?1892600