The Price of Trust

By The Crafty DM
Self Published
OSR
Levels 1-3

Arriving with little coin and no reputation, the player characters must earn their place through action, not titles. The town is wary, its people practical, and its problems real. Strange signs gather along the docks, the nearby wilds grow unstable, and something stirs beneath the waterline. Through investigation, negotiation, and hard-earned victories, the party builds trust with the townsfolk while uncovering the first threads of a larger danger.

This 39 page adventure presents three mostly scripted fights mini-quests in a small fishing town. They follow a pretty rigid outline with some kabuki of interactivity that amount to monologue, fight, monologue. It seems to have some U-series overtones. 

We’re not starting out strong with this one. The pretext here is that the party is new to town and they have to do a bunch of mini-quests to gain the town’s trust. Then, in another module in the series the town will trust them enough to give them an actual task.This strikes me as aking to the asshole quest-giver tropes who treats the party like shit and still expects them to run errands. The implicit assumption is that you can treat the PC’s like shit and that they have no free will. Yes, we all want to play D&D tonight but how many hoops do we need to jump through before they just go somewhere else to seek their fortune? The party has free will. This is followed up with bythe designer with a comments “Not all of these quests are presented with full detail in this module. This is intentional, allowing you to tailor certain tasks to the personalities, abilities, and backstories of your players.” I see this sometimes in adventures. This is inevitably NOT a sealed off passage for the DM to expand upon. It is instead getting ahead of criticism by saying the flaws exist on purpose. The whole It;s Up To The DM To Bring Life To The Game thing. Which, while true, ignores the central tenant of adventure writing for others: you’re supposed to be helping the DM out. Leaving a sealed off passage is great. Flaws in execution are not.

You’re in town, arriving in a bar in the opening read-aloud. What follows is a series of mini-quests that all follow the same outline. Some comes up to you to ask you to do something. You talk to them. You go to a location and maybe roll some dice in a performative way to “investigate.” You get in a fight. You talk to the person who gave you the quest. I know, this sounds kind of like the platonic outline of a quest, but, the difference is that this is three scenes. Someone runs to get you. You talk to a fisherman and look at a body and talk to an old lady. You might roll some dice to look at a body. You go back to the docks at night (I hope …) and get in a fight. You talk to more people the next morning and are told you did a good job. You talk to someone about a druid. You go looking and fight some woodland beasts in three waves. You talk to the druid and do the performative thing. It’s all a really simple pattern here. 

There is nothing really to fail, except I guess the combat. If you don’t do the thing you are railroaded in to then you’re instructed to modify the end monologue but to keep the arc going. On the docs, the Sea Devils you fight are looking for the body you examined, and that get stolen no matter what you do. I guess if you have it strapped to your chest and chained to you it still gets stolen? 

It’s just so … obvious? Low effort? Read a bunch of text. Lots of read-aloud and lots of italics. Everything just follows along the “plot” without any deviation, no matter your actions. Your actions and die rolls don’t really matter. What’s the point of this? 

It’s just a railroad of an adventure with a VERY simple outline of a pattern that repeats. I mean, again, I get it. We;re playing D&D tonight. But the meaninglessness of it all. Rolling dice for no reason. No pretext of choice at all. Yes, the DM can fill in and bring it to life. But you have to give them something to work with.

A haunted house on a hill. Sea Devils Lizardmen, The house in this is red herring, not even really covered. The lizardmen are friendly. But it’s the same elements as the U series. It’s fine, I guess. You get to reimagine and respin the classics. Well, if done right. And this isn’t done right. Perhaps the platonic example of a low-effort adventure that one might throw together on the back of a napkin in three minutes before the game starts?

There is no price of trust in the adventure. And I’m not sure I’d come back for anothe rgame if this were the campaign kickoff.

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview. There is an annoying youtube promo. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/563326/sinister-secrets-the-price-of-trust?1892600