Cascadia Caverns

By Frank Schmidt
Adventures in Filbar
OSR
Level 4

After starting your adventuring careers, you arrive in Runnymede a small village. A man in the center of the community is spouting something and you quickly discovered a child has gone missing. The citizens are reluctant to send the city watch out and that gives you the opening you to jumpstart your careers!

This nineteen page adventure features fourteen rooms in a cave full of goblins. Big fan of stabbing goblins with low-effort editing? Look no further!

Small village outlying farm is burned down and a young girl kidnapped. Rather than mob up or use their militia the villagers instead hire the party to go kill a bunch of humanoids in a cave and save the girl. The first adventure I ever provided feedback on, prior to publishing, had some kids disappearing in a house and the families mobbed up outside, refusing the house. I pointed out this was rather unlikelyBut, it’s  a D&D adventure and we’re ignoring logic today, so …. (Although, I will point out that the books Town and Fief are a pretty good look at life during the village time period. It provides a lot of good background for running adventures and, while relatively expensive at $20/pop, they are a good read. For example, the townsfolk in this adventure would NOT turn to strangers to help. You need someone to vouch for you. Anyway, segway, I guess …)

The writing here is long winded, in single column format. Lots of “you sneak down the hallway” and other first person narration in what I assume is the read-aloud portions of each room.

“After another hour of trudging through the dark forest you reach the other side. Staying close to the river has allowed you to stay on tracks and intermittent signs of passage have been spotted including several blood smears on trees. It is apparent that someone or something had been seriously injured. Breaking into a meadow you hear the crashing of water as the river goes over a cliff and deposits into a lake. Noises are heard near the edge of the forest on the far side of a meadow!”

That’s just one example. It’s trying to provide, obviously, that “movie camera” experience and thus, like all adventures that try to do that, fails at both doing it and in being an adventure in which the characters have agency.

It’s full of passive perception checks and short & long rests. Make a DC12 vs DEX or take 2d6 damage. (In the OSR, seriously?) One place lists the adventure for level four but the text continually implies that it’’s a level one adventure. IE: this is a conversion. The extremely light treasure, for a level one, is a telling sign. For level 4’s it is criminal.

The text is confusing and I still can’t make out how certain places are supposed to be laid out and experienced. Most rooms just have a few goblins in them for you to stab. There IS an order of battle in places, but that’s about the last good thing I have to say. Oh, and he map, a digital one, is somehow blurry. How the fuck does THAT happen?

This is $3 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Otherwise you’d never buy it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/321498/MAR2–Cascadia-Caverns?1892600