Curse of the Blood Moon

By John Cavalcante
Self Published
OSE
Level 1

In the borderlands of a dying empire, in the Duchy of Gauvadan, the village of Braildorn now cowers in fear. This is the birthplace of the Blood Treatment: a miraculous Panacea created by the arcane scholars of Liardnia University with otherworldly influence. However, the days of prosperity and miracles would end soon. With the mysterious fall of the University, came a curse: The surrounding forest, once blessed by the fey, was transfigured into a cursed and dangerous swamp. People now are disappearing in the dead of night, and the noble house is the prime suspect to be behind everything, arousing anti-empire separatist sentiment. In these dangerous times, only one question remains: What will you do?

This 48 page adventure (riffing on Bloodborne) uses around eleven pages to describe about fifty rooms in a three level mansion in a “gothic with some firearms” setting. The writing is terse and well formatted. It does not make me hate my life. It also brings me no joy, lacking interactivity and evocative descriptions and scenarios.

Ok, so, I feel like maybe I need a new category: “Obviously, you tried.” Because dude tried. There is a certain “spirit of the OSR” present in this adventure, a kind of kit-bashing that was prevalent in the early OSR days. Dude has grabbed some house rules from other OSR products, and, perhaps, even some room ideas. The map is easy to read and there are AT LEAST four ways from the first floor to the second in the mansion. The keys start with a bolded room name “Living Room” and are followed by a short description and then some bullets for things going on in the room. The mansion tropes are here. Body in the chimney. Dude tried. 

There are a couple of things that are pulling this adventure down. Well, more than a couple, but two major ones. There need to be more cross-references in the text to make locations data, especially named NPCs, easier. The rumors are pretty generic, like “The house is now haunted because a wizard did it.” and so on. And the layout, the size of the map, is relatively small, at twenty rooms for each of the main levels. It’s just hard to get a really good environment going with that without some really good situations. The major issues, however, are interactivity and descriptions. 

The descriptions here are terse … and minimal. Nothing wrong with terse, that’s what they should be. But, also, they are minimal. We don’t really get the flavour of the room. The pantry says that it has naked walls with shelves full of rotten ingredients, and also kitchen and dining tools. Sure. That’s a pantry in a haunted house. We’re starting off pretty well with “naked walls”, but then it drags to just a standard description of a pantry. Peeling wallpaper. A jumble of collapsed shelves. The smell of old cinnamon. . A jumble of beaten up pots? We’re really looking to bring this room alive, and it’s just not going there. The kitchen next doors has “A central cooking table with a mutilated corpse in it, and 5 Ghouls in chef’s garb using rusty tools to prepare the meat and hurl it into a boiling suspicious soup.” So, the same kitchen in just about every haunted house adventure. A boiling soup can be great, but suspicious is a conclusion rather than a description. Mutilated is a little abstract for the horror that the kitchen scene is supposed to be conveying, and our ghoul friends are rather perfunctory with no description to speak of at all. The place abounds in “religious frescoes” with little more to go on. And by “little” I mean “nothing”. The rest of the adventure is more of the same. A degree of writing that is is trying, but the words choice, or the ability to convey the imagined room via the written room, in order to convey it to the DM, just isn’t getting there at all.

Interactivity is about the same. We’ve seen the ghouls in the kitchen. The rest of the rooms pretty much fall in to this same category. You can stab things, of course. And there are, to it’s credit, a decent number of things to talk to, especially among the servants. The interactivity, though, is fairly lacking. You get a body in a carpet of smoothing, the kitchen ghouls, a poltergeist playing a piano to summon specters (at level one!) and so on. Thus, our interactivity is somewhat related to combat, and generally to how combat starts. That’s not bad, in and of itself, but it’s lack of interactivity beyond this that drags the place down. We want things to investigate, leverage, figure out, discover, and so on. A challenge beyond merely what’s on the character sheet. 

This is, at its heart, a pretty standard haunted mansion adventure. We’ve got the undead running around, a couple of barely functioning servants, a ghost butler, dead-ish family members, and so on. Shadowbrook and Xyntillian remain the gold standard in this genre, towering above everything else. This is an also ran, but a good first effort for the designer!

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is 24 pages … more than enough to get a sense of the product and the the rooms. So, good

preview.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/428210/Curse-of-the-Blood-Moon-A-Bloodborne-Inspired-Module?1892600