The Scourge of Northland

By Jacob Fleming, David Cameron
Gelatinous Cubism
OSE
Low Levels

Beyond the city wall, there are creatures with their own plans. Giant spiders desperately assault the city in swarms. No one knows the cause of these attacks, but their frequency increases by the day. Far to the north, smaller orc war-bands are beginning to gather and remote settlements are all that stand between them and the walls of Obanhold. Too much blood has been spilled in the name of human expansion and the orc tribes of Maut’hgar have called for retribution. It is a matter of time before all out war is declared. A storm is coming.

This 72 page adventure presents a sandbox region to explore with a few things ostensibly going on. It feels, though, like it doesn’t have a soul. Going through the motions of an adventure. Going through it very well, but it doesn’t feel like it’s heart is in it.

Yeah yeah, I know how that sounds. Hang in there though.

We’ve got this city, Like 35,000 people. Just past it is the wilderness. Abandoned ruins. Hardly any people. And lots of orc bans. Don’t make sense to me, but, it’s D&D, so, we’ll ignore reality and handwave a “supporting lands/communities to the south” kind of thing. Anyway, there’s another town, like sixty miles north. And then there’s a lot of hexes to explore. It’s not a hex crawl, but more of a sandbox region to explore … although I guess the difference here is mostly in format. You’g got these orcs in the north, various tribes and their ancestral homeland. You’ve got some bandits here and there hiding in ruins. You’ve got some kind of spider queen thing giving birth to lots of spiders who like to charge the city walls every couple of weeks. And you’ve got some ancient ruins of The Builders, some three eyed giant dudes who liked to leave statues of themselves in the ruins, it seems. A wyvern flying around, some orc ancestral artifacts/magic items … some decent elements to mix it up together.

Then, you chuck in the party. This would normally be flamethrowers in the gas factory, but, not in this case. IN this case it’s … boring?

There’s this really nice region map. The art style is great, with nice shading and topo marks and a clear legend. Maybe my favorite of the various styles of overland maps since it looks fairly realistic. And then the design on top of it is interesting. Towers in high places. Trails that lead, out of nowhere … but they make sense when you look at the map. I note, also, the presence of a couple of treasure maps in the adventure that leads to buried hoards, noted also on the map and unable to be found without the map. A very good implementation of this feature. Not quite a full adventure hook, but finding them gets you moving on the overland map, wandering encounters, and perhaps finding a few of the other fixed locations that are off the beaten path. Quite the nice map and utilization of it. The wandering table isn’t large enough, or interesting enough, to support the map and Idon’t think there are rules in OSE for hex visibility, so I’m not sure just exactly how you’re finding some of these places. But, handwave handwave handwave … nice map.

The rest of the adventure is, well, …

We get an opening story. Rated on the “fiction in adventures” standard it’s a fucking masterpiece. Which means it’s inoffensive. It’s just some farmer who has his village raided by orcs and rides off to the city. Oh, oh, good time for this, I guess. This is a Colonization adventure. The orcs are featured as natives who just want to get along, their lands encroached upon by the humans. Some want peace and some want war. “The orcs had been here long before humans settled it. “They had no tolerance for the human expansion and saw any encroachment on their land as an act of war.” Also, their history has them encroaching on these lands when they migrated to it. SOMETHING THAT ONE OF THE ORC NPCS ACKNOWLEDGES AS A REASON THEY SHOULD JUST MOVE ALONG AGAIN. That’s interesting. Anyway, this isn’t really played up, at all, beyond what I just typed. Yeah, they are nomadic traders and it goes on a little long with this, but, sure, whatever. Alignment: Evil. Hey Frank, what’s your god say, they glow evil? “Yup.” And you cast Detect Evil, not Detect Different Culture, right? “Yup.” And there’s a god of evil that they worship … whose goal is the destruction of all life? “Yup.” Okay man, just checking before I get to stabbin.

The first half of the adventure is useless. We get a generic description of a generic fantasy town. Then we get a generic orcs-as-natives overview, and a generic overview of a few locations on the map. Like a paragraph for each location that includes little to no specificity. In one village you get a couple of sentences and then it ends with “Some of the villagers claim to have seen orcs roaming in the distant hills, and there is a standing reward offered to any who can find those missing and deal with the orc menace” That’s your call to adventure, so better pick it up. Seriously, there is very VERY little to help the DM get things moving. Just like with that entry, there are hints here and there of the adventure actually having a soul. One watchtower had all of the guards recalled to re enforce the city walls. Except, three of them stayed behind. That had some play opportunities. Grizzled rangers or some kind of shit. Guerrillas. Maybe doing some Aldo the Apache type shit to the orcs. “And the Orc will be sickened by us, and the Orc will talk about us, and the Orc will fear us.” But, nah, it doesn’t give us anything like that. It just says that three of them stayed behind to keep a watch on the orc movements. *Yawn*

The orc strongholds are treated much like the human villages: a single paragraph of description. The second half of the adventure describes about ten locations that you can explore, each with between six and two dozen rooms … with a dozen being average? That’s a decent number of locations in the region. 

But …

It’s all just a little … staid. Static. The descriptions are note very evocative, and, again, I might make the statement that they feel soulless. I’m not even sure I might say that these are fact based descriptions. They feel lifeless. And the interactivity is just seemingly lacking as well. A trap here and here (although, far too often the adventure says something like “the door is trapped” and then doesn’t actually tell you anything else about the trap.) but, mostly, it’s stabbing monsters. In the grand context of the region there might be interactivity. The orcs, their cultural magic items, some thieves in a tower, the interlinking ancient ruins. But, individually, it just feels like the rooms are going through the motion of being an adventure. Descriptions which lack life and rooms rather than situations.

I could, I think, get behind this in some ways. It’s a more realistic, or, naturalistic adventure in a region. But, you are gonna have to bring hella imagination to bring the thing to life. You’re going to have to take “three soldiers stayed behind to watch the oc movements” and turn that in to a full on thing that the party will remember and enjoy playing out. And your’e going to have to do that for every single thing that the party encounters, in every region, in every room. That’s really not much of springboard, in any of this, to build upon. Cutting down on the word count, the mundane vanilla and generic word count, and instead inserting a little life in to the encounters. Turning things in to situations and giving them, and the NPC’s, some character, would have gona long long way to turning this in to a kind of instant classic. The region is there. The locations interlinked are there. But the lack of a soul means this is not a classic. I don’t hate it, but I would never in a million years run it.

This is $10 at DriveThru. That’s a fair price, if the content delivered. But, the preview is broken. Sad 🙁

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/456393/The-Scourge-of-Northland?1892600