FRN01 – Ghosts from the Dark Wood

Wesselrum is a small hamlet of free farmers located deep in the northern pine forests.  The secretive hamlet folk fear and repel outsiders but now seek out a band of heroes to help them end the suffering of their children who are succumbing to a terrible wasting sickness caused by a frightening forest ghost.  The heroes will find themselves wrapped within a web of misinformation, half-truths, and outright lies as they attempt to save the children of Wesselrum from an unexpected foe.

Lurking inside of this product is a decent little investigative adventure in a small village. It is surrounded by the trappings of plot and “Supposed to …”. Plot doesn’t have to be bad and a timeline can lend the aid of realism to an adventure. However advice of “make sure the adventure doesn’t end too quickly” causes a visceral reaction in me.

I LOVE a stooopid villager. The opportunity to me to DM a group of salt of the earth morons fills me with glee and is something I nearly always take advantage of. Usually to a degree that my players want to lynch me. I let my son name the sailors they hired to take them to the Isle of Dread. “Stupid. Boring. Lazy. Moron. Stupids Brother” and the like soon emerged. This module would give me AMPLE opportunity to gleefully cackle behind my screen while my wife communicates the location of a good rope to her fellow players. A group of salt of the earth farmers (e.g. morons) pissed off a hag in the forest by raiding her vegetable garden. When she threatened them they then went and, singly and in small group, got themselves captured by the hag. In exchange for not eating them the hag made them promise to deliver their first-borns. One woman eventually sent her daughter, which tricked the hag in to getting burned up in her own oven. The villagers then raided her vegetable garden (really?!) and stole a hen that lays golden eggs. It’s been a few weeks and the villagers are getting rich from the hen, but the hags sister has turned up and is now slowly killing the villagers children as revenge for killing her sister. There are clearly some fairy tale elements at play here. The villagers, being idiots, haven’t really put together the hag/hen and the wasting disease that is killing their children and forest ghost. The adventure involves the party talking to people and looking around, gathering clues, and then fighting the hag when they figure out what is going on.

Some day I’m going to have to review “100 Bushels of Rye”, a Harn module that I’m pretty sure is the platonic model that all of these sorts of “villagers/monster” adventurers are derived from. This one does a pretty decent of putting together the required elements. The village is described very well with lots and lots of NPC’s for the party to talk to. There’s something like 70 buildings/locations with 80 or so NPC’s for the party to interact with. This combines with a massive rumor table of 50 entries to create a wealth of information for the party. These sorts of adventures live or die by their NPC’s, the more interesting they are the better the module will turn out, in my experience. The NPC’s presented don’t seem to entangle much and most of them don’t have strong personalities. The ones that DO stand out are the ones who argue, scheme, and otherwise make themselves notable. Too many are just farmers or craftsmen involved in their own little lives. “I need to train a new apprentice.” and so on. The village needs a little more life to be successful. Some attempts are made at this with the wasting disease, but I don’t think it’s enough to sustain the complex interrelationships that drive a real village and lend petty drama, realism, role-playing opportunities to a city/town/village adventure. I’m also perhaps being a little overly critical here; the village is pretty nicely done.

There are a few programmed events that happen while the party is looking in to things. I’m a big fan of things like this when they don’t force the party in to certain plot lines. These do NOT do that. Certain children in the village get sicker each night. The hen eventually lays another gold egg. The party has nightmares at night. Villagers catch sight of the hag and report to the party, and so on. I’m not a real big fan of the Dream Sequence stuff, in general, however the rest of the programmed events are fine and appropriate for the adventure without railroading the party. They certainly do give the impression that life is taking place around the party. A few more mundane aspects of village life could have been thrown in, like a keg tapping party or a farm accident or something, but again I’m just nitpicking.

The magic items are nice & unique, even if the monsters are not. Books of Quick Learning, a Styx Cauldron, the Gem of Weak Souls, and the Hen that Lays Golden Eggs are all wonderful little magic items. I truly wish that more designers would spend more time on making their treasure allotments unique. It pays off in spades during play. Let me note as well that Johnny Rook seems to have a knack for layout.The use of color and tables in this module, and indeed in all of the Johnny Rook modules I’ve seen so far, is excellent and does wonders to help understand what’s going on and running it during play. I’m not sure I’ve seen another publisher yet that puts forth this kind of effort. I do tend to associate that with a “2E style”, however I suspect that someone back at Johnny Rook is involved in the editing/publishing industry. I just can’t say enough about how well it’s organized with actual play in mind.

The eventual Hag encounter feels a little anti-climactic. “100 Bushels” had a fairly decent little location for it’s solo battle at the end but this one is really just a small cave with a hag in it. There are a couple of nice little atmospheric touches, however it feels a bit sparse. The adventure also has quite a few sections where the party can ruin it, to paraphrase the module advice. The fear is that a creative and smart party will short-cut certain aspects of the adventure, this not getting full enjoyment out of the experience. This smacks of telling a story for which there is NO GREATER SIN! NO GREATER SIN! The party creates a story through their play, not by doing what the designer or DM says they should do. This isn’t a movie; the future is not written. It’s also very easy to ignore that type of advice and run it the way you want.

I’m apprehensive and uneasy about this type of D&D adventure, perhaps because it resembles a form that was and is readily abused by railroading. This module does not do that, in any way. I don’t keep a lot of what I review however I’m pretty sure I will keeping this one; it may be one of the best investigatory modules written. I haven’t seen a lot of good ones so it’s harder for me to judge this genre. I would have preferred a little more whimsy, however this module would fit in well with some kind of ‘realistic’ dark fairy tale campaign, along with The Mortality of Green, from Troll Lord.