The Night of the Goblin

By Howard Shirley
Parzoval Games
OSR
Level 1

A beautiful bride, a handsome groom, a starlit wedding… and GOBLINS! At least you have a wedding present for the young couple— a promise to rescue the kidnapped groom!

This 26 page adventure uses about six pages to describe ten rooms in a small goblin lair. Lots of read-aloud. Lots of stabbin. Lots of text, in general. Oh, also, your level ones get to save the world. *YAWN*

You’re at a wedding. You’ve haven’t brought your weapons and you’re not wearing you’re armor because you’re at a wedding. I mean, because you’re stooopid. The murder hobo trope wasn’t started by the players. Bad DM’s and bad designers are to blame, when when all you’ve ever cared about has been butchered. Anyway, the designer wants you to grab a smith hammer or the spit the pig is on, or a butcher knife and go chasing after the goblins who crash in and steal the groom. Goblins, a lot of them, wolf riders, shivving the old people. This is all the shitty hook, related over three agonizingly long pages of DM text and read-aloud. Anyway, you stab stab stab but you can’t win since it’s the hook and the groom gerd stolen by them and oh no you’ve got no weapons or armor and have to pick up what you can find and give chase to the goblins. 

Ok, so, second scene, you head in to the woods to give chase and come across two goblin wolf riders. Stab stab stab. Again. You keep going. You come to the goblins lair, a cave with a door in the mouth. You now have ten rooms to explore. You pull aggro if you’re loud at the front door, otherwise you just stab stab stab in every room. In the last stab stab stab room you meet the goblin shaman. The groom is on a throne in a trance and the shaman is doing his ritual thing. It takes him like a full hour to do it, after which The Evil One gets summoned in to the grooms body. Like, a level 36 evil cleric. Anyway, it takes an hour from then the party shows up at the rooms door, so, no hurry. You stab a bunch.

The text is single column and this thing is the poster child for why that’s a bad idea. The whole eye fatigue thing form scanning all the way right an left. Yeah yeah, it sounds like minor shit but it’s a real effect. And then the read-aloud is LONG. Like quarter page long. No one cares. After two or three sentences peoples attention starts to drift. You gotta keep the read-aloud short. And the text is LONG, in general. The goblin raid on the wedding takes like three pages to describe For goblins on wolf back to snag the groom. And then, in the cave section, it starts with like a ¾ page overview of what a captured goblin might know. With no formatting at all so it’s just read the entire fucking thing and hope you stumble across whatever the party is asking about. START THE FUCKING SHOT WITH A BOLDED WORD. Jesus, man. 

Oh, what else, you start with a locate object spell, I guess to find the cave? Although the tracks are easy to follow? You also start with a very high level dispel magic scroll tht can be used to break the ritual. You know, whenever you find a bunch of potions of water breathing laying by the side of the road then its time to head up in to the hills. You GOTTA write an adventure where you don’t need this deus ex shit. Why the fuck does it have to be the end of the world at level one, at the first adventure?! (Although … that’s a fun campaign. EVERY session has the party saving the world. Betty the housekeeper. Frank the night soil dude, EVERYONE is trying to end the world. TO save it you must end them all. Everyone in the world!)  You can fuck around and break the conventions, but do it for a reason. Give them six of every magic item in game one. But on purpose. Because the resulting power struggles are the campaign. But, no, no Staves of Power at level one because you need that to overcome some specific challenge. Write the fucking adventure without needing that shit. 

So, you wade through a lot of poorly formatted and overly long text in a railroad setup, for no reason, in order to just stab a bunch of goblins. I’m not real sure what goes through peoples heads when they write these things. Its easy to say that the vision and implementation didn’t align. But, that should be obvious from looking at it, right? So why not work it harder instead of just pressing publish?

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. The last four are the hook and the goblin chase. They are a decent representation of what you’ll find inside. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/582262/the-night-of-the-goblin?1892600

Also, you should see Night of the Hunter if you’ve not. It’s no Night of the Goblin, but, you know, what can be?