The Raven and the Lone Star

By Bill Barsh
Pacesetter Games & Simulations
1e
Level 1

A ship lies in the frozen tundra of the far north. Its history is lost in time, but its future may spell doom for unwary adventurers.

Fourteen rooms over a three level ship over four and a half pages. It’s a shipwreck in the middle of the frozen tundra of Lambeau. Not an abundance of text, or an abundance of interesting. It’s a throwback to the early days of the OSR.

Why your level ones are out and about in the frozen tundras, blizzards, and glaciers is not mentioned. And while I’m usually ok with some hand waving, if you’re writing an adventure in SHerwood featuring Robin Hood then it might take just a wee bit more the designer to help the DM fit the adventure in to the parties lives. But, anyway, you’re in the far north and you see a full on ship, in the tundra and snow, down in a valley. Being good little adventurers, you go investigate. There’s nothing really to keep you on the ship, except … there’s this white raven cawing loudly when you get in to room one, the main deck. If you kill it then a witch shows up and makes you go get some spider eggs from below in penance. No stats for the witch; we’re referred to another Pacesetter adventure for more information. Other than that, I might hack apart the deck of the ship to kill shit from above or burn the ship down and loot stuff later. You’re not gonna get rich here; maybe 1500gp in cash/goods. But, also, a nontrivial amount of magic. +1 armors and weapons. And a bow that fires a 3d6 fire arrow once a turn! And a ring that does a 4d6  ice storm! I’m no stranger to powerful magic at level one, running a campaign once where I gave four copies of every magic item in the 1e DMG in session one. But that was the point of that game; I’m not sure about this one. 

Barsh keeps his read-aloud pretty simple. “While most of the floor of the room is covered with ice, a pile of ballast stones rises to form a small mound near the north wall.” This is a theme throughout the adventure: pretty lackluster descriptions. There’s not much here to inspire. Time and again that is seen in the descriptions, both in the read-aloud and in the DM text. That extends to the interactivity in the adventure. There’s just very little going on here except stabbing the next room of monsters. There IS a healing hot spring … in the very last room. I’m just gonna need more, even at level one, than moving from room to room and stabbing monsters. Yes, that’s right, I said it, Icewind Dale WAS much poorer than Baldur’s Gate. 

The read-aloud, when it does go in to detail, engages in over reveal. A core element of D&D should be the back and forth between the players and the DM. The characters investigate, they ask questions of the DM and the DM describes something back to them. The longer read-alouds here reveal too much about an scene, thus destroying that critical back and forth game play element. Instead of telling us that an elf is slumped over, wearing tattered chainmail and wiedling x, y, and z, instead tell us of a body slumped, or a warrior slumped. Use the word budget to do better than slumped and warrior, though. Then, in the DM text, provide the DM the information so that when the players investigate they see more. We’re not trying to be obtuse, we’re instead spending our verbosity budget wisely. 

And then, there are the bits of DM text that over explain and pad out things with backstory. “The tundra orc chief calls this room his lair during the hunting trip. This orc is old and missing one eye. He knows the area and has hunted around the ship his entire life. He lets the younger orcs perform the hunting duties while he directs and plans the operations.” Fifty words. Eight of which are relevant to running this encounter. Prune it back and focus on the environment, the interactivity, evocative descriptions … things useful AT THE TABLE. This emphasis on background data is irrelevant, gets in the way of scanning and running the text, and could be used to make the adventure actually interesting.

I’d say all we’re missing is an “appears to be … “in the adventure but that’s present also.

Low loot. Low interactivity. Non-evocative text. Padded out text. And, yet, Barsh keeps the text tight, leaning toward minimalism, meaning that he’s still writing better adventures than most 

This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages and you get to see almost half the rooms. Good preview for checking out the text quality.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/432773/The-Raven-and-the-Lone-Star?1892600