Muddy Mess

By Daniel Kingsley
Ripped Tabard Adventures
Castles & Crusades
Level 5

Not all decisions are easy. Sometimes heroes find themselves in a Muddy Mess, where every decision has the potential to be the wrong one. […] players will be challenged with gnoll extortionists, fiendling conmen, and an angry druid with metal-eating monsters.

This 27 page adventure is about a town caught between a strip miner and a druid. I guess? It’s got long read aloud, hard to navigate descriptions, and is full of missing information. And, in the end, it’s a rather basic thing with a couple of larger humanoid battles.

So, a miner hires a foreman, who hires hobgoblins guards, and the foreman kills him and takes over the “mine.” By which I mean a water hose used for strip mining. Hence the literal muddy mess. Everything is stripped bare with just mud hanging around. Druid gets pissed and sends “metal eater” tentacle monsters to eat all the metal in town. Party arrives, needing a blacksmith, and is begged for help. If you help the town and kill the druid then strip mining continues and eventually, off camera, some druids show up and destroy everything and curse the party for a year.  If you help the druid then the final battle is against the town-ish/miner and the town is abandoned. No other outcomes are encouraged. Hence the figurative muddy mess and “no good solutions” mentioned in the text. Seems ham-handed to me, but what do I know. 

There are some references, here and there, to some decent things. The initial mud description is a good one, gunking up and coming off in slabs. And here and there anNPC has a decent motivation, like the two dwarves shopowners who don’t really seem to give a shit. Cause they don’t. Cause they been through trouble before and they know they just have to wait for things to settle and the short-lived people to die. Heh. That’s a nice trait for someone with a long life span and perhaps the only really good description of a dwarf personality trait I’ve seen. 

Otherwise, this thing got hella issues. 

Read-aloud is LONG, and frequent. Monologues are never good, especially when they span multiple paragraphs or even almost a page. That’s a bad way to handle the situation. You want something with more interactivity, a back and forth with the players and so on. I like to play with my phone when listening to long monologues. Besides, they usually impart no information anyway. 

Descriptions are a pain also. Multiple paragraphs of DM text for the DM to slog through. Which makes it hard to find the information you’re looking for. The game pauses. Phones come out. Whatever was of interest in the text is beyond usable because of the delay. It makes for a boring game session.

The editing here is quite bad, and it starts at the first words. “The Angry Druid is a Castles and Crusades adventure …” No. Maybe that was the working title, but its now A Muddy Mess. The hired hobgoblins are a mess. They are only obliquely referred to in places and never actually make an appearance. “[the townfolks] are angry that [the miner] hired hobgoblins as city guards.” But the guards never show up, in any way. I guess they are referred to in the battle section, but that’s it. No vignettes. No actually encountering them anywhere. The water cannon is the same way. It’s just kind of referred to a couple of times and never shows up in the text. I guess I may have missed it, but I looked several times. Again, just obliquely referred to a couple of times.

There’s an entire section that is weirdly out of place. IThe text is describing some gnolls showing up for protection money and then it launches in to what looks like the hooks for the actual adventure? But that’s after, a long way after, the initial appeal for help. It’s almost like the entire thing is a stream of consciousness writing endeavor. “Oh, yeah, I guess I should include this.”  And the metal monsters, which everyone in town refers to, don’t really show up at all except when you meet the druid. “They are hiding in the woods, waiting for the druids signal.” Uh huh. 

It’s just a mess of an adventure. Hard to grok. Hard to run. Hard to dig through. Things missing. 

No bueno.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. Enjoy that read-aloud and the descriptions! So, I guess a good preview, if you imagine the entire adventure is like that preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/439343/Muddy-MessCastles-and-Crusadesv1?1892600