Orestruck

By Amanda P.
Weird Wonder
Cairn/OSR

Orestruck is an adventure module for Cairn and other adventure role playing games. Adventurers arrive in Pact, a village in the Tannic Forest, and discover multiple problems: a corpse thief, a cruel gang leader hunting a privateer and her crew, and a miner rescue mission into the nearby Capellia Cavern where a monstrosity gnashes victims with pincers made of stone and bone.  Within the Forest lurk two minor gods, the Dreamers, who seek mortal servants to enact their bloody wills. 

This 44 page adventure presents a three-level mine/cavern with about seventeen rooms, supported by a small overland area and town. It leverages several situations going on to create sine factions play and has a decent amount of interactivity for its small main dungeon size. Evocative writing could be a bit better, but a solid adventure that is, perhaps, just a little off with its timings.

The crux of the adventure is this line in a backstory: “Captain Enid raided a smuggler’s ship and stole something precious from the city lord Melchior.” This puts Enid on the run, having letters of marque retroactively revoked. Power comes from your ability to enforce your will, and Melchior (offscreen) has hired a mercenary band to bring in her bounty. She’s fled to known ground, a place she grew up, a place where her sister still is, and where her former lover now rules as a lord. A lord who is still in love with her, in a way; ala “I’ve always got a thing for the chick I was infatuated with in high school. Oh, and my spouse is now dead …” Thus the mercs are in town trying to find Enid, and will kidnap her sister eventually to serve as leverage, as well as being generally a rough group of almost-outlaws. The Lady in charge has an issue also, with her mine nearby having been overrun and miners now in town lamenting and licking their wounds and she needs that mine problem solved. Oh, and, as a sideline, it would be great if you found Enid for me. Which is a delicate matter she dances around. And then there’s a huckster who has dug up a local grave to see the finger bones as charms of protection against the mine monster. And, the mine/surrounding area has a history and the recent bloodletting has reawakened an old god/spirit who’s got an agenda also. This is the backdrop for the party getting to the mine, meeting pirates, mercs, miners, god-servents, and the rest along the way in the mine and on the way to it. This is all supported by a little timeline to help the mercs, in particular, drive things forward with their kidnapping of the sister, etc.

This is the way you do factions and complex environments. People want things, they are running around with their own goals, and you stick the party into a dungeoncrawl that is enhanced but the party’s navigation of the social aspect to it. These are enhance with little snippets of specificity. So, the miners are motivated by making money to send back home to their families. Historically accurate, very relatable, and lets you run them with their worry and angst. The guy who had his dad dug up? “Symon is a boatman but his father was a musician who left him debts and a tuning fork.” Well, we can see from that how he probably talks about his dad. A “non-hostile) troll lives under a remote bridge in the forest, a bridge that has been destroyed and he is rebuilding. “but runs, cursing his if attacked or menaced. He has many petty grievances.” Gonna help him rebuild his bridge? Or at least commiserate with him on his petty grievances? The villagers include this snippet: “No villager will spend a night in the forest if it can be avoided due to half-remembered superstitions. Locals often utter sayings like “Tricky as a Dreamer”””. A hint to the forest spirit/godlings. This is all great specificity and adds to the fun. It’s relatable, and when an adventure is relatable it helps both the DM in running the encounter and in the party relating to it. The town and overland are mostly going to be opportunities for the party to learn, make friends, enemies, and so on. You can get in to trouble but the bend of the encounters tend to be a trigger happy party getting in trouble and a calmer one picking up a side-quest or getting some kind of advantage. Mamma spider wants someone to carry her (fist-sized) babies out of the swamp to dry land. She doesn’t SAY that, but the way the encounter plays out is that way if you are cautious and don’t start stabbin. And if you can figure this all out you’ll get a decent magic item from mamma. There is A LOT of fun to be had in the town and overland ,and it’s one of those things where you, as the DM, can just SEE how things are, gleefully, going to play out. You’re looking forward to running them. And that’s fucking good. Lots of weirdness. It’s great.

Inside the three level mine/caverns have a few ways between levels, waterfalls, chasm bridges, statues to fuck with and a lot more. Some skeleton dudes want to eject you from the dungeon in order to save you. Those fucking godlings were handing out side-quests in the forest and now the payoff comes. Surprise! They are assholes and there’s consequences to their seemingly-benine tasks. Miners and people trapped. The pirate crew moored in an underground lake firing cannon at a swimming undead monstrosity. Frankly, the dungeon stands well on its own, but when you add in the mercs, their leverage, and a great beast rushing through the caverns gobbling up anything it finds, its pretty damn good. 

Text is decent. “A natural bridge, 10 feet wide, spans the natural cavern chamber which is 5 feet across. There is a roaring subterranean river 15 feet below. A waterfall thunders to the south. Stalactites hang overhead. Mushroom clusters and puddles fill impressions in the stone.” Not the most evocative, but it covers the ground well, leaning towards facts rather than relating the emotion of an environment. There could, and should, be more of that. I can quibble at the cannonfire and flashes from it not going on outside its own room. And the great beast rushing around, almost as an environmental hazard, could use a little bit more. Treasure is light on the coinage side of the house, this being for Cairn, so a little beefing up there would go a ways as well. 

This is a decent little adventure, both with and without the factions running around. You’re not going to fall over yourself to run this, but I think it’s th kind of solid adventure that I wish we saw more of.

This is $12 at DriveThru. The preview is the first twelve pages. You get to see the factions, town, and a few forest encounters. I would have preferred a page of mine/cavern encounter also, but I think you get a good sense of the faction possibilities from the preview, and a bit of the forest weirdness.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/534673/orestruck?1892600