The Fenworthy Inheritance

By Simon Todd
Montidots
BRP/CoC/Gore

When David Farrington decided to drag his sister, Jinx, away from the hedonistic vortex of London’s Bright Young Things for a peaceful walking holiday he little envisioned that they would soon be entangled in a web of murder, sinister cults and a festering thirst for revenge that has been festering for over sixty years.

This 75 page Call of Cthulhu-type adventure uses about forty pages to describe a revenge/occult situation in a manor home. It’s VERY wordy, and while not entirely focused on being scene based, I don’t understand how you could run it any other way … and thus linear. 

Ok, so, kids mom was a witch, running a coven out of their manor, kills her husband and gets arrested and executed. Kid grows up and now wants revenge on everyone in the village that he thinks was responsible, etc. Also, the witches body is in some kiddy doll. Also, there’s a cthulhu monster under the ground that is granting some power. The party arrives, car broken down by a pothole, finds a body (probably) and is present for the ritual that happens in a couple of days time. Not stopping it is a bad idea, with the usual ramifications. 

I love a good manor mystery/situation. It’s one of my favorite genres of mysteries/movies. You have a list of characters, a timeline, situations that happen. It’s a great genre! But, also, I think mysteries are more of a social adventure than an exploratory one, and thus the method of presenting it to the DM has to change. There’s a lot to keep track of, and the DM will need to be able to use the people, places, and situations to adjust what happens on the fly to adapt to the players … and the designer needs to create something that is focused on helping the DM do that. And that can be quite hard.

What we’re looking at here is roughly 25 events that happen over three days. You check out of the inn. You see a torn down signpost. You hit the pothole and find a farmer. You find a body. You hit the inn. You go to various places. These are ROUGHLY linear. The ones I just described could be the kick off/hook. Then you get this long list of locations and/or events. Like The Burnt Out Croft or The Inspector Calls (to look in to the dead body.) So, a mix of locations and events, culminating Monday with the summoning at the ancient stone circle. But,, also, peoples descriptions and motivations tend to be mixed in to the places in a linear order. So, if you go to the Grange then the read-aloud has you seeing the gamekeeper, which then has a short description of the gamekeeper and whats hes done, etc. And then it moves on to the location proper. WIth other people mixed in. Since this is ann estate & village and there’s a lot of people and places and normal events and occult events and timed events and untimed things … well, that’s a lot to run. It’s just not organized in a fashion to make it a reference document. You could go through it, place after place and event after event (for  the most part) and run it that way. But, there’s no overall NPC register or anything like that, and the timelines (there are multiple) tend to be scattered through the text. 

This is all compounded by the length of text. There’s a decent amount of read-aloud, some of it stretching in to a point where it’s hard to pay attention to it. And then there is A LOT of DM text. Sometimes we get bullets, especially when an NPPC knows multiple things. THis is a GREAT help. But, also, there’s STILL a lot of text not in an easy to grok format, and its also padded out with things like “if the  party chooses to investigate the bicycle then they find …”  and then it breaks in to the bike stuff.

Things are lost in all of this. The giant bug that goes around causing trouble. The pooka-thing causing trouble. It’s just a rough one. You can see what the designer was going for. There is a lot going on and a lot of places to look at. And quite the short timeline: you get there on Saturday and the ritual pops off Monday at 8pm … with a few events prior to that. Of course, one need not explore all of the sites, after all the ritual is popping off no matter what. But we want the party o have a sporting go at it, What What? I have some regrets, it seems. It’s just so rich in content … roughly fifty pages of it, and it feels likeit needs just a bit more time to really stretch its legs and go. 

But, also, it’s such a jumbled mess. Jumbled isn’t quite the right word … you can see WHY the decision son formatting were made, but, it’s just so alien to me in how one might want to organize things in to run an adventure like this. Substantially more reference data/summaries. Condensed timelines. Massive cross-references, and locations really focused to themselves rather then mixing in timelines, events, locations and NPC’s.

This is 5.50 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. AT best you get the table of contents. That’s not really enough to make a judgement call on purchasing the adventure, so, No Bueno preview.

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/192842/the-fenworthy-inheritance?1892600