Eldritch Borderlands

By Stephen J. Jones
Unsound Methods
OSE
Levels 4-6

Twenty years ago the denizens of Faerie poured forth from the Circle of Mehriz and fell upon the sleeping town of Harpagus. Men, women and children were killed indiscriminately, and the town was burnt. The invaders moved eastwards, driving refugees from villages before them. King Sardis sent his elite legions and the Scholar-Priests of Khordesh to stop the planar invaders, and succeeded in halting their advance. Now, after years of grinding war later, the eastern provinces are a wasteland which remain under occupation by the invaders. The motives of the aggressors remains a mystery. Rapidly-abandoned mansions may still hold riches. Some even say the King’s youngest son has recently gone missing behind enemy lines.

This 31 page adventure presents a kind of regional sandbox/hexcrawl with about sixteen locations. Set on and behind “the front lines” of a fantasy invasion, it does a decent job of conveying horrors of war without getting TOO gruesome. A puzzle to learn and unlock, for the party to end the war. It’s a decent crawl.

So, a bunch of Unseelie Wights have come screaming out of somewhere and are laying waste to the countryside, killing and burning. Like, an army or four of them. Warty goblins, sidhe mages elfin with white hair and dragonfly wings, gnome recaps as murderous berserkers, and brownies as 4 foot tall wizened humanoids with a mastery of shape changing. Nobody speaks common and they are just going to town, killing and burning everything. The human kingdom fights back, and gets help from clerics; it seems the fey have no religion to help them. Front lines are established along a Looooong front of about sixteen 6-mile hexes. Patrols from both sides, a dike and palisade. The fey HATE the humans and the humans are embittered by the atrocities of the fey and are paying them back in kind.

It’s stated explicitly that the designer wants to bring out some of the horrors of war. The humans are taking trophies, ears. At one point you find a large fey patrol, dead from combat. Except for one, a gnome, you has been badly beaten and has had every bone in his body broken over a long period. You find burnt refugee wagons full of human women and children, and human soldiers, prisoners, driven off of cliff sides. Soldiers wound tight, or gone all lone wolf vengeful hunter/scout mode, collecting trophies. Or an old man, in the war zone, hiding in his cabin, not leaving cause his dead wife is buried there. I probably could have gone just a bit farther with some of this, but it’s also a balancing act to be respectful as you get closer and closer to the actual realities of war … in a game. 

The prince of the human kingdom has joined up to the army. There’s a draft, it’s unpopular, and he’s joined to show common cause with the people. And then his patrol got killed. Other patrols, and maybe the party, are out looking for him. He and one other man escaped the ambush. Then the other soldier tied the prince up and hid him and tried to sell him to the fey. The fey don’t care and are now torturing the other guy in a location. The prince is locked in the basement of a building in a destroyed/burnt village. When the party comes upon this place they will find a pit in the middle with some human prisoners in it, in miserable condition. Trying to save them will trigger some web shit that it HARD to cut them out of. Also, some brownies, shapeshifted in to eagles fly over a few times a day to check on things and see if they’ve caught anyone new in their trap. And can call in a patrol. All of this the party is balancing in this one hex. Let’s hope they don’t get distracted by the pit and look in the other buildings and thus find the prince! But also, if they do, then he will INSIST on freeing the captives. This is hard. The captives ARE a trap. The prince IS important. And, correctly, the adventure doesn’t moralize about this. You are not penalized or rewarded in some way for a choice (other, of course, than for saving the prince.) 

There are hints of other things in this that really hit. There are noble estates behind enemy lines. One daughter, her father dead, needs money. She goes to the underworld for a loan. In return, she tells them of treasure in her family’s estate. Again, behind enemy lines. That is one of the potential hooks, and not a bad one. This hook, deserters, criminals freed to war, growing up in the shadow on the front line city of a twenty year war; the desperation is present in nearly all of the hooks. This is a better Midnight adventure than anything Isaw for Midnight (although I didn’t see much of it.)

You’re playing on a hex map, six mile hexes, 16×18 hexes or so. The action is going to start three or so hexes from the front lines. The hexes are loosely connected with some hints/roads/trails/etc that can lead from one to another, along with wandering patrols and other encounters for the “empty” hexes. It’s ok, but, as always, I would really like to see a standard set of “what you can see/travel” rules in hex crawl based adventures. Hey man, who wants to pick up a loyal zombie horse that eventually falls apart? This IS a higher level adventure, levels four to six, so while individual enemies are low HD, maybe 2 HD or so, there can be A LOT of them. Like, thirty in some cases. This is a warzone with smaller patrols, larger patrols, and larger units running around, human (mostly rogue elements or looking for the prince behind enemy lines) or fey. And, other things, besides the zombie horse you can discover some primitive weevil men, death;y afraid of fire, gorging themselves on flour. Who might also know a few things … 

So, there are these ‘evil’ dwarves that have totally conquered the underworld. Wiped everyone out. But, they now have no women. So they stole a magic flower from the fey plane, while has turned the fey realm to glacial ice. The fey are PISSED. Oh, and they framed humans, leaving a dead human behind. They are growing new wives with the flower. Put they pissed off a lot of people in their genocidal conquering of the underland. Maugrim, the Night Witch, has had her people wiped out and has captured the flower/growth complex and put in it a giant guardian, aided by another ‘last of his people’ intelligent giant spider. So, beyond rescuing the prince, the initial theme, you can also discover the dwarves, their lies about the witch, the witch, the flower, and even take it back to the fey to end the war, possibly. These are some nice tie ins. 

Pretty good overall. A little more specificity in the human encounters, their personalities, ravaged by war, would have been nice. And the religious element isn’t really covered at all. That specificity for the soldiers could have been in to that a little more. It just needed a little more in the way of, I don’t know, despair, especially in the terrain, perhaps? But, also, it has to walk that line of knowing it is a D&D game, and not going too deep. Overall, it doesn’t a decent job, but just comes off a little flat in places, maybe because you can tell with a little more work it COULD have been the best rendition of the grimness of actual war life. Well, it probably still is the best at that have been achieved yet, and I’m not sure it COULD have done more and still be Just A Game.

This is free at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/539491/eldritch-borderlands?1892600