They Come at Night

By Stadtjaeger
Self Published
Generic/Universal
"Low/Mid Levels"

Something went quiet in Frostholm. The mining outpost stopped sending word weeks ago. Company says it’s the weather. Locals won’t go check. A mother’s paying good money to anyone willing to find her son — a scholar who went up chasing some old civilization and never came back.

This thirty page adventure presents a small village investigation and a dev le in to a mine with about eight rooms, plus a couple of overland events before and after. It’s more of a scene based “Experience” than an adventure, with the designer describing it as no-win. The writing is purple and there is no loot to be gained. 

This has elements of War Against the Chtorr, in that an alien organisms is trying to chtorraform the planet. You head up to a snowy mining camp that no one has heard from and have a few spooky things happen along the way. At the camp you poke around the buildings and find bodies and more eerie stuff. You survive (presumably) a night attack by a swarm of alien insects and head to the mine the next day. There you might get infected with spores in the weird crystal/plant environment and find a dude in an alien pod. If you free him then an unbeatable monster appears. Fleeing from it you fight hordes of crystal block constructs. You’re supposed to figure out to seal the mine shaft with some explosives you find. On the way back down the mountain, with the dude you found, a different unbeatable monster appears, klils the dude, and takes off for the stars. The dude you found has a book and if you perform the ritual in it then a portal opens in which armies of alien life forms come through to finish chtorraforming the planet. 

The vibe here is similar to those killer LotFP adventures. You know, you delve in and try to get loot while avoiding the doomsday scenario that is sure to happen. Maybe mix in a little Call oc Cthulhu where messing with books will fuck you up. Except, there’s not really any loot here. I find this annoying and it makes me want to put this solidly in to the Modern Adventure category where you’re just fucking around together at a table instead of gaming. Yeah yeah, there are different ways to have fun, but I prefer the one where the story is the one the party makes. But, with that in mind …

This is also a generic/universal adventure. Which means a lack of stats. You get some general “there should be twice as many creatures as party members” and other story based mechanics like “the attacks last until dawn” kind of stuff with a few “they should take one hit to kill” sorts of things thrown in. This, again, contributes to the more story based approach that the adventure is taking. 

It DOES do a fairly decent job with the investigation and lead in to the mine. You get a few eerie things happening on the trail to the mining town, dogs nervous, a body frozen in the snow and so on. And the town investigation is also likewise eerie. Strange scratch marks covering all of the buildings, skeletons huddled in corners stripped of their flesh or other clearly holed up and waited to die. The whole “meal still on the table” sort of thing. At one point you can’t get in to tone of the village buildings and have to go in a window to find the door blockaded. Nice.The whole preamble to the ride os decently done, in what is presented if not in its form.

Any by form, I mention that because of the writing style. It’s very much heavy with first this thing happens and then this thing happens and keep the party from doing X and so on. This is then exacerbated by a certain conversational style of writing, HEAVY with purple text. “The walls have stopped pretending to be stone. What covers them now is something else, layered thick like scar tissue over a wound that never closed — glistening, faintly pink where the light catches it, soft enough that you do not want to touch it and cannot stop noticing that you have to.” Or something like “Something is coming, but not in a hurry, It doesnt need to.” That least bit being a read-aloud line. 

While this MIGHT work in in the village/investigation portion, it breaks down in the mine where it tends to continue. The mine is mostly just poking around on a museum trip, looking at the weird plant life that might infect you with something only very high level magic can cure. There are a couple of light problem solving situations, like getting down the central shaft, but you’re not doing much until you find the dude in the alien pod thingy.

At this point all of the stillness disappears. The unbeatable monster appears as well as the hordes of lesser crystal golems. You’re supposed to run away. That’s the point of the entire adventure. Run away, beat off the crystal golems while ascending the shaft and, hopefully, sealing it lest the horrors are loosed upon the world. 

This is all, essentially, a railroad. It’s an experience. Follow the tracks laid down and survive and “win” by escaping with a sealed shaft,. If you don’t guess what the designer wants you you to do then die 

The conversational writing style makes running it difficult, and the purple prose if so bad that I’m not sure I could read it with a straight face. Even when it’s not read-aloud the DM will need to wade through it and try to translate it to something evocative for the party, which is not going to be easy.

The generic/Universal curse strikes again. Just write it traditionally and stat it for B/X and STILL call it generic/universal. Once you get good, as a writer, THEN you can branch out to more experimental styles. But you gotta learn to walk first.

This is $4 at DriveThru.The preview is the first three pages, which are all, essentially, designer notes. A few encounters needed to be included so a potential buyer can get a sense of what they are buying before they do so.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/578991/they-come-at-night?1892600