Reckoning in Waterstill

by Coronal
Self Published
Generic/Universal

A far away villager tucked under a rarely traveled mountain pass, a storm, attack on the road, the player characters find themselves shivering in the night, waking up drenched in cold waters. The forests are dangerous at night, and the safest way out of here seems to be with a village of starving people. 

This five page adventure has more soul than adventures ten times its length. Which is not to say its good, but it is absolutely going down that that road that you dream of generic/universal adventures taking, giving you the vibe of a thing rather than the mechanics of a thing. I’m a big fan of the descriptions, but the lack of a more concrete adventure is going to keep me from ever using this.

I’m kind of the opinion that generic/universal adventures should not exist. Anything that is published as generic/universal could be stated for a system. and then, presumably, converted to the system of your choice. Presumably you, the DM, know how to run “My Weirdo System” and can convert the adventure to it. I mean, you have to do it anyway, right, if the adventure was published as generic/universal? Yeah yeah, I know, I know. Some systems have a unique vibe to them and Thou Are But A Warrior isn’t going to work in 4e. But, generally, I think for most of the more mainstream adventure, a B/X adventure can be converted to just about anything that it makes sense to convert it to. But, then, there’s also this sense that, in a generic/universal adventure you are getting something written with a conversion in mind. It’s giving you the building blocks to really solidify the thing. We’re just dubbing/subtitling Godfather 2 in to another language. That shouldn’t really matter, a good adventure should do all of that anyway, but someone it FEELS like a generic/universal should do it better, and I think I subconsciously think that a generic/universal adventure IS going to do it better. It’s going to give me great descriptions and a plot and so on. Maybe because I don’t think it’s going to get tied down in some nonsense like “goblins are AC11 not AC 14!” or some crap like that.

And this thing is doing a great job with some of those elements. The monsters and NPCs really get a focus on how they act and appear rather than the mechanics fo what the stats they have. And I absolutely love it when the focus of an adventure is on the impact the NPCs, monsters and scenes have rather than the garbage mechanics associated with them. This ties in to this “imagine it first, and then stat it” attitude that I wish more designers had. Forget the bullshit tropes and what has come before in movies, tv, and literature. I want you to image something, visualize it working, and then present it to me. 

The zombies in this are crawling bodies, weak, numerous, and intelligent. Best of all they screech in human voices when injured and killed. Given that these ARE the bodies of the villagers, and not just some kind of generic undead. It somehow humanizes them, and makes them so much more terrifying. That’s Gerty, crawling along the ground, pulling herself, talking to you, and screaming in her old voice. The horror of THAT bit of imagery! Or, the main monster, a murdered villager, transformed, body of bark head of a deer skull, a locket with her old portait in it on her chest. Appearing in a thick fog. ROts away villagers. by saying their names. Teleporting as a mist. Fuck yeah man! That’s a fucking monster. It is a part of the land, a part of the villager. It is tied to the thing, not just fucking pasted the fuck in. 

There are a lot of great little bits to this. The villagers, starving, have turned the church doors and pews but left the alter and its holy book in alone, out of fear. Or that “Thomas Pruce organizes hunters to defend the village the villagers call him captain for it.” Or that the main baddie, the murdered Olivia Woodmill, the Leshy, will gather the bodies of the zombies the party has killed and return them to the graveyard to be reburied. That figure with the deer skull, walking through a fog in the woods, reburied with her hands, fellow elderly murder victims, newly rekilled by the party … that’s some good shit right there. 

So the various elements of this are really great. But the adventure, proper, is almost nonexistent. You wake up at the bottom of the Million Dollar Highway, having crashed, and need to make your way to the village. A small boy scavenging your wrecked carriage and the bodies. Also, you go through the woods and presumably get attacked by the zombies. There’s nothing explicit here. Just that the party “wake up with him (the boy) searching through their stuff.” We then get four bullet points for The Monsters, that just describes how they act; all that crawling and human voice shit. But nothing that says or implies in any way you should make your way to the village or that the zombies attack you on the way or anything like that. Just “you wake up” and some zombie descriptions, but NOTHING to connect the two. Yeah, I guess it’s obvious what to do, but, our definition of an adventure here is something that supports the DM during play, and if you go too far down the “implicit” path then you’re not really supporting the DM during play.

And the adventure does this over and over again. The individual elements are great. But then the four scenes gives are almost non-existent. Like, two sentences each for three of the four scenes. Just really an idea of something that the DM could do. That’s not r4eally an adventure, yeah?

It’s so weird. Most adventures fall down on that specificity that is the soul of a description, but this adventure does a wonderful job with that. (Which, I think, I consider the hardest part of adventure writing.) But then everyone seems to get the plot part of an adventure dowwn … except this adventure. I really really like the vibe here. It’s horror thing is great. It’s appeal of a kind of realism or naturalism is great. But, then, there’s just a couple of sentences on what to actually do to tie it all together to actually have an adventure. Not cool.

(I could mention other shit. The gates to the village being the last thing described, when they should be the first. The cold water the party wakes up in not being emphasized, some references to “howard” that you can kind of follow, but just barely.)

What brought me in to this was the preview and seeing those monster descriptions right up front. So, fucking awesome from a “get Bryce to buy it” standpoint 🙂

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $3.21. Le Preview shows you the first three pages, which gives you a good idea of pluses, and some of the minuses.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/489104/reckoning-in-waterstill?1892600