Lair of the Swamp Beast

By Peter Jewicz
Mellow Golem Games
"OSR"
Level 5?

This twelve page adventure uses about three pages to describe four rooms in a hag lair. It sufferers from the generic/universal curse and relies on tables for a substantial portion of the adventure. Abstracted content with little specificity to help bring it alive. 

The legend of the beast is persistent in these parts, a terrible force that dwells deep in the swamp and strikes fear into the hearts of those who live nearby. Little do they know, the beast is but a pawn, for something far more sinister lurks within the bowls of the swamp.

Ah, the generic/universal adventure. They seldom fail to not disappoint, even when statted for “OSR”, as this one is. There is something about them that makes a designer seemingly fearful of providing anything concrete to it. The designer wanted an adventure in which the party shows up to a village on the edge of a swamp. Fearful and superstitious locals. Talk of The Beast, everywhere, the cause of all ills. And then a journey through a swamp, full of dread, before finally arriving at the beasts lair, only to find out Muhahahahaha! The beast is the pet of a swamp hag! 

Instead, we get little of that.

Adventure writing can be hard. As a designer you have to get out of your head what you are imagining and get that down on paper so that when someone reads it they can get close to what you intended. We get what the designer wanted here because they out right tell us “To get the full effect for this mini-adventure, make sure to play up the townsfolk’s fear of the beast.” That is, in principle, great! You want a town that seems immersive to that point. The adventure designer needs to help bring that about. This doesn’t do that. The village is quite minimal, just one line or so about the town being on stilts and moldy. That’s fine, but, what isn’t fine is the lack of the The Best present in their ramblings. Or any rambling at all. We might look to the rumors table, but all we get is abstracted information like “1 The swamp has been especially active lately.” or that the swamp spirits are angry. There’s nothing much here at all about The Beast. I love that it’s called The Beast, but there’s nothing more. None of its misdeeds or lame calves or anything. The designer needs to bring an adventure alive through specificity for things like this. Yes, the DMs job is to run with it and expand on it but you have to give them SOMETHING to work with. 

Then we get to the swamp. This also is abstracted away. Just roll on a page full of random tables. “3 A large depression that collects rainwater.” or a smell that “A salty taste, similar to being near an ocean.”  That’s what you have to work with here; it’s totally abstracted away. There IS an encounter table, or single line entries or so, and it does show some decent things in it. “A series of stick figures are attached to the trees. Until they are destroyed, those traversing this area of the swamp walk in circles always arriving back at the figures.” That’s creepy as all fuck. And it deserves more than a line on a d12 encounter table. The swamp needed to be fixed encounters, or a pointcrawl or something, with the entries worked to bring them to life. 

The lair, proper, is four rooms. You get The Beast room, a Catoblepas, and then a potion room. In the potion room you get told EXPLICITLY how to make a potion, by a journal, that gets you through a bramble corridor. Then you hit, surprise, Lareth the Beautiful! Err a swamp hag. No hints of a hag up to this point at all. It’s all wasted. 

Make the town afraid. Make the swamp a real area and bring life to the best of the encounters on the table. Hint at creepy things to foreshadow the hag. 

Tables ruin adventures. Yes, old school uses tables and randomness, but not to create the entire adventure from. 

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages. You get to see the “village” and the “swamp”, or at least the dressing for it. The preview should have shown a bit more of the adventure, a lair page, for example. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/571424/lair-of-the-swamp-beast?1892600