Trouble at Turnip Hill

By Stephen Smith
Mr Smith Design
B/X
Levels 1-3

The farms and fields around Turnip Hill are being plundered. Desperate locals need heroes to investigate—and stop whatever’s threatening their livelihoods. A straight-forward job—but things have a way of getting complicated.

This four page adventure features a fourteen room dugout cave/dungeon/warren under a hill. Nicely evocative but it’s just a hack and doesn’t really lean in to the Bone Tomahawk aesthetic. 

Fuck you. It’s my blog and I’m clearly intrigued by the possibilities that a shorter page count could imply. We all know it’s not going to fulfill all of my hopes and dreams (well, I don’t …) but we must carry on anyway, the search for meaning in a word cruelly devoid of it. I mean, how many fucking pages do you need to stab shit if you’ve got a dozen rooms and are getting eight or so to a page? Maybe six, I’ve decided. If we accept six to eight to page, with a page of monster stats and shit, then a couple of pages of Village Investigation and/or Overland Travel. Hmmm, no, I should think more about the perfect ratio of leadin/support and appendices to encounters. 

“We’re at our wit’s end. For the past few weeks something’s been making off with livestock and supplies. No tracks, no broken fences—just gone. Folks around here say they’ve seen shadows in the fields after dusk—the unnatural kind. I don’t know if I believe all that, but if we lose much more, our families won’t make it through the season” So we’re framing this as Heroes rather than adventurers, but, whatever. This isn’t bad at all, but that’s all that there is. No one to talk to, and no guidance on investigation in order to eventually find an entrance to a warren. Well, there’s a wanderer table for above ground which will lead you there, but each of the four entries literally leads you there. “You hear wind whistling from the entrance” or “You see a druid observing a hole.” And why the fuck doesn’t this fucking druid do something? Oh, because he’s a druid. Fucking neutrals. Anyway, it’s clear that I’m a little disappointed in the above ground portion. It feels like there was a page available so something was tossed in to fill it. Which means I feel like this was a stunt dungeon: majesty revealed in four pages! Look, use the page count you need to bring the work alive, just don’t fucking pad it out. That seems simple enough. 

The map here is above average for being so small. A little isometric, it gives a nice “warren under the hill” vibe via the map/art style used. There’s a great number of ramps, same level stairs, columns and such on it. It also fails somewhat in being a map, with some of the room exist not being shown in the best way, as well as a lack of walls (doors imply walls, I guess) that would get in the way of the visual impact. How close to a Rothko can you get before your patron starts to question if you’re doing a portrait of their spouse? This one is probably ok if you dig through the rooms first to better marks exits, Yeah, I do like the map even though its simple.

There’s some decent descriptions inside. The rooms all have these tree roots and things growing through the ceiling. “The air is damp, musty, and smells of soil. Footing is uncertain—shifting between eroded flagstones, soft patches of earth, and scattered debris.” or “The floor of this wide corridor is extremely broken and low-hanging roots require frequent ducking. Loose stones make the uneven stairs somewhat precarious..” That’s not terrible. “Wide” isnt great, but we’ve got low-hanging roots and loose stones on a set of stairs. It’s the modern style of presenting something that COULD be called read-aloud but isn’t labeled as such so could be DM notes. It does, in places, lead to over-reveal if used as read-aloud. “Then don’t use it as rad-aloud.” Ok. Another point toward that is the lack of creatures in the faux-read-aloud. These come later. So, in essence, this kind of room overview up top, then a little listing like “3 Giant Centipedes drop from the ceiling” and then a mechanics note or two like “-1 hit from swinging weapons” or a list of treasure to be found or something else. It’s not a bad format. The weakness, in all formats, being that they ARE formats and the designer always needs to keep a little willingness around to deviate from it in order to achieve the needs of the room/encounter/adventure/whatever. 

This is a hack. Monsters in the room attack. Not much in the way of interactivity beyond that. D&D has a long history of hacks, but the more interesting play expands upon that a bit. The hack as a fail condition is also a meme, but something closer to that. Things to explore and play with and so on. Something to discover, if only a hidden treasure behind a waterfall. 

But is it a GOOD hack? Well, there’s little in the way of an order of battle. Which means essentially no order of battle. And while the adventure makes a point of the lack of lack in this place the monsters also don’t seem to recoil to respond or get warned by light and react appropriately. Circle the wagons, do the defensive thing, use the halls to get behind people … nothing of any of that. Well, there is this: “If Chieftain loses 3 or more HP, he sends up an alarm-whistle. Any remaining Grimlings will add to the fray in 3d6 rounds.” There’s the extent. 

This thing is certainly moving in the right direction, much more than most of the endless line of adventures coming out. It’s tight, the writing tries to be evocative, the map is nicely evocative and things are least themed to a non-generic degree with the burrow/tree root/dugout thing going on. Slave to the format, be it the encounter format or the page count, means having to focus more on form over function, to the detriment of the adventure. Also, loot feels lite for B/X.

This is $2 at DriveThru. There is no preview. I don’t care if it’s $2 and four pages, I still want a decent preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548444/trouble-at-turnip-hill?1892600