I1 – Vakhund: Into the Unknown

This is a Castles & Crusades adventure however it can be used with any pre-4E version of D&D.

This is a brief story based adventure with significant role-playing opportunities in an interesting setting. It’s marred by an overly verbose style of presentation that is not organized very well.

The basics of the adventure are pretty simple. The party is with a merchant caravan and someone is captured during a raid. The party gives chase and attempts to free the captive. That’s a pretty basic and classic adventure set up, especially for beginning characters. What’s interesting here is the setting. The tech level, artwork, and proper names all give a very Germanic dark forest type of feeling to the adventure. That’s then combined with a seemingly rich humanoid kingdom & humanoid relations atmosphere. For example, the areas the party starts out in has a very germanic feel to it and it borders a nearby goblin kingdom. But rather than being savage humanoids they are presented as having a rich and sophisticated culture, at least that’ what’s implied, with trade & social interactions with their neighbors. That’s certainly a refreshing change of pace from the typical “See goblin. Kill goblin” mentality that is usually present in products. We also get to see other groups of humanoids interacting with each other and with humans. This is presented in a non-traditional way also. What we see is various bands of creatures, some of which are composed of integrated creatures, joining together to accomplish some common tasks. Thus we have a band of orcs, goblins, and evil humans who work with a pirate who are combining with a band of goblins and another mixed band of humanoid creatures in order to …. well they each have their own various goals. This differs significantly from the simpering slave relationships we usually get to see when two groups of humanoids come together: orcs with goblin slaves and so on. I found these sorts of relationships intriguing; perhaps this world has a significantly more lawful bent than most. This sort of thing is explored in several areas in the adventure. I don’t usually like humanoids in my adventures. I want my humanoids to have alien cultures ala Jorune, rather then just a ‘weaker than normal human with a sword’ or ‘tougher than normal human with a sword.’ The saving grace in this adventure is the different flavors the various humanoids have, as well as the tendency toward the implied culture in the background. This is getting closer to the ‘alien cultures’ type personality that I’m looking for. Not quite, but far better than normal, and the author should be applauded for it.

The party joins up with a couple of trader wagons going south, who also have two other passengers. There’s a multi-day trip through the wilderness, prior to reaching a small tower outpost, The Vakhund. The wilderness adventure is supposed to be dull & dreary, with a few ‘wagon gets stuck in the mud’ encounters as well as a wandering monster table. The wandering table is very well done. There are 12 possible encounters, the vast majority of which are with animals who act like animals; attacking lone figures and running away a lot. There are two humanoid encounters on the chart however both are personalized enough to be memorable. The tower has some nice roleplaying opportunities to interact with the militia while the trader heads south alone in to the Goblin Kingdom to do some sensitive work, returning in about a week to continue the trek.

This is where things start to fall apart in the adventure. Prior to this there has been a great deal of verbose exposition about the various characters encounters, their motivations, how they react, and the various places the PC encounter. We now get in to a GREAT deal of this, both for the folks traveling with the party and for the humanoid raiding party that is about to assault the tower. There is really a lot of detail, much of which is repeated. Unfortunately the detail is not very well organized and the extreme density of language makes things even more confusing. Making thing even more confusing are the great variety of unfamiliar names: Urk, Jzunad, Gratva, Magdole,  Zjerd, etc. The large number of NPC’s & ‘named humanoids’ and their unfamiliar names seems to have been a recognized issues; the module claims that there is a download available on the TLG website that has a summary of the names, motivations, etc. Unfortunately I was unable to find it, as were a couple of others on the tLG forums.

There comes a highly detailed programmed attack on the tower in which several of the major NPC’s are supposed to die, and several others are supposed to live. And therein lies the fault of all story based adventures. This is the hook for the adventure. If certain things don’t happen then it’s going to be very difficult for the DM to get to the rest of the plot. That can usually only be accomplished by the strictest railroading … but that doesn’t happen in this product; the party is given a great deal of freedom. The DM is going to have to quick on his feet in order to accomplish his main goal: the capture of a certain member of the group. All of that backstory and motivation and everything else has to take a backseat to that one objective because without it there is no adventure. What follows, hopefully, is a chase through the forest to recover the captive. Just like in TLG module S1. And in TLG module C1. It seems that chase scenes are mandatory in the first module in a series.

What follows are a few encounters that can be divided in to ‘scenery’ and ‘role-playing.’ The scenery encounters are the party stumbling upon strange little vignettes; scenes in which something strange of interesting is going that the party can explore a bit and which may provide a bit of information … probably not useful information however they do a very good job of building up the world around the party and helping to expand the atmosphere of the adventure. I enjoyed them a lot. The role-playing scenes come in the form of a roadway encounter with some clueless bandits and a goblin trading post. Hopefully the party handles themselves well enough in both situations that they can continue the adventure by gleaning a few bits of information abut the destination of the group they are chasing.

This leads to the party encountering an evil settlement. Maybe it’s just really really neutral, but I doubt it. It’s a small humanoid settlement just larger than a trading post based around a goblin holy site. As such this involves a mini Vault of Drow type setting; the inhabitants are not immediately hostile to the party and there’s a chance to wander about, learn more, and try not to get killed. The party will get to interact with several different groups, none of which really involve the humanoids initiating combat. What probably happens is that the party sees some prisoners, learns where more are being held, and initiates some kind of rescue attempt. As such this is a VERY good little open-ended part of the adventure. There’s an encampment, it’s not immediately hostile, you have some goals to accomplish … Get Cracking! I can’t say enough positive things about this type of set up. It really gives the PC’s the opportunity to role-play, explore, be creative, and hatch some overly-complicated schemes … which is what D&D should be about.

It’s a story based adventure that features humanoids … I should be guaranteed to not like it. I do like it, quite a bit. It’s a nice little set up and and has a kind of slow burn type of pacing. Trying to run it as written could be problematic. The DM is going to have to do serious thinking about the tower assault and how he’s going to accomplish his goal of getting a certain prisoner. The rest of the adventure depends on that one crucial hook. In addition, the DM is going to have to put in some serious work to plot out the various names and motivations so he can keep everything straight when he is running the thing. That’s really a non-trivial task that is going to take several readings  of the module with some copious note taking.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/20445/Castles–Crusades-I1-Into-the-Unknown-Vakhund?affiliate_id=1892600