A Place That Was, Is and Will Be

By Tobias Helms & Tobias Heidemann
Pink Pony of Death
Shadowdark/1e
Levels 1-3

The wooden city of Narbassal burnt for three consecutive nights and days. Those who couldn’t escape or were spared from death were led into captivity. Man-eating aquatic ghouls (Pale Drowners) have emerged from the depths since then, swarming the partially submerged and charred remnants of the city to feast upon the bloated corpses of the vanquished. Narbassal is now veiled in silence, city of the dead a place that once was.

This 67 page adventure describes a treasure hunt adventure in a half-floating seaside city that has been ravaged/pillaged/burned. It is essentially just a collection of abstracted mini-games and ideas, and is light even at those standards. It needed more focus to turn it in to a more useful adventure.

The premise for this is kind of interesting. We’ve got this city, kind of a primitive Venice. Some rocky outcroppings and foundations from under the shallow water combine with some wrecked ships and flotsom to create a city centered around a kind of Mont-Saint-Michel. And in about seven days some dudes are gonna show up and  invade and pillage and burn it to the ground. Or, as the intro says, it burnt for three consecutive nights and days.” That’s rough. But then the aquatic ghouls show up and make things worse dragging off people, gnawing on them and so on. But … none of that has happened yet. We’ve got a chick, the nascent leader of the thieves guid, who is sick. Because she found a time travel device that will send her a few days in to the future. She’s been looting the city, in its burnt state. Want in on the action? Thus we have a scenario where you perhaps scout things in the non-destroyed city in the present and then go forward in to the future to loot. 

That’s a decent concept with some definite possibilities.  You wanna grab some loot? Groovy! Hey, let’s also throw in some moral and ethical situations surrounding survivors of the city and the invaders. Toss in some quandaries about the survivors, their militia, and balancing revenge vs looting vs relief. Toss in some ghouls erupting from underwater and dragging people down and/or feasting on them in the open. There are A LOT of things that could be going on here, from a lot of different angles. Shades of that magnificent DCO opening, eh? And we haven’t even mentioned the possibilities of the two time streams, present and future; think o the possibilities of that! Even if, I think, managing events in two times is quite hard for an adventure to do.

Worry not, though, gentle reader! For there is little of that depth here! Well, there is and there isn’t.  It’s a fucking mess. First, let’s cover Lotting the Future. The city has ten wards. In each ward you can make up to three looting checks, at like a 12, 15, and 18. If you pas the check then you get to roll on the loot table. That table has twelve entries on it, each unique enough that I doubt you could repeat. That’s the core mechanic of the adventure. Just roll some dice to loot. Lackluster, to say the least. 

The adventure is trying, I believe, to provide resources to make things more difficult on the characters while they do those looting rolls. So you might get a random encounter like “A knocking, and muffled screams can be heard from a capsized galley. 1d6 aquatic ghoul (see 1, p.55) approach the scene at the same time as the PCs.” That’s a pretty classic “someone is stuck” situation. Or, there’s another entry where the dead kings bastard son shows up, returned from patrol with a small group of men. Are you loyal to the new king or an allied to the enemy? Did I mention he’s a snotty sixteen year old? 

The present time doesn’t have a lot locations, but it does have some interesting little conflicts going on at those locations. A new stone bridge is being built and the Ferrymen don’t like it so they are secretly sabotaging it at night. Or a dead merchant is floating face down in one of his urine vats; a relative has hired two thugs to find who did it … and they are not being subtle. These are not really complications, per se, in the present, but they tend to fall in the “local color” category of gaming. It does go a long way to make the city feel alive, but, also, they feel disconnected from the players and their characters as well as the situation (or, soon to be situation) in the city. They needed to be tied more in to things relevant to play at the table, situations for the party to avoid, use, or be taken advantage of. There’s just little relevancy to them. 

There are a lot of tables in this one. We’re not quite at the level of procedural generation; that’s would be too much for this thing. It’s much much lighter in content. Let’s think 1-012 of any one thing. SO, roll on a table of ten entriess to give the players some destruction vibes. Oh, look, once again we get “From where you stand, you can see the burnt remains of Narbassal’s fleet out in the bay” Oh boy. This would have been much more effective if it used the space to provide some keywords that the DM could then riff on. Ships. Burnt. Burning. Intact. Something like that. Also, how many times can you find “The flayed corpse of king Vessalamchir of Narbassal.” Fuck me, and by the using the useless space taken up by the time line ” 23 years ago …” And the “blood sausage with barley porridge and lentil” ‘whats on the menu’ table, you’d have plenty of room. Twenty fucking entries of that shit. 

Which is not to say that all of the entries are bad. When the adventure tries it can bring it. One of the present day encounters could be “A grizzled posse of ghoul hunters (p. 57) on small barges ventures through the muddy underbelly of Narbassal. They are placing chunks of rotten meat as baits, and scan the underside of pile dwellings, and piers. They are armed with long spears, harpoons, and nets. The ghoul hunters have been offered good coin by the king and are ready to recruit new members” That’s got some good color to it! There’s another table for happens if there’s a time mishap. For the most part it’s abstracted nonsense written in the wrong tense, as read-aloud AND abstracted as one would for a DM. But there’s an entry where you go back to the start of life on the planet and see the primordial ooze. And life starts. And then the first action of the primordial ooze is to attack you! That’s fun. I chuckled. I love it.

And then it falls apart in other places. Remember that criticism, where Lucas said the Phantom Menace was for children … and then included a bunch of trade embargo and finance shit in it? Yeah, well, that same sort of contradiction is present here in many of the entires of the rumor table. They are overly … formal? They lack life and don’t communicate the vibe of the rumor. 

So, the looting portion is abstracted. And the additional content is all on tables to spice up portions between the looting. But it isn’t really written in such a way as to do that. Many of the situations are more of an Ongoing thing, but are written like it’s just another random wandering monster roll. More brief problem, or opportunities, should be populating those tables. And there should be a section on, say, faction play, running throughout the entires.  The portion in the present day needs strong influences to interact with the players characters in a meaningful way, either as obstacles or resources in the present to the future. 

The adventure present a lot, but not in a way that drives the adventure in a meaningful way

This is $3 at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/484933/a-place-that-was-is-and-will-be-pink-pony-of-death-1?1892600