The Whispering Lights

By Ramsay McGregor
FantasyBound
D&D
Levels 2-3

The church in the village of Endmarsh have asked the adventurers to investigate dancing lights that flicker across the horizon of the sea. This phenomenon started at the same time as when fishermen had begun mysteriously disappearing, and the folk of Endmarsh started experiencing haunting dreams and whispering voices at night. The Graenician priests of the Endmarsh church will pay a handsome sum of 230 gold crowns to investigate and if possible, remove this supernatural incursion.

This six page adventure uses four pages to describe … six encounters? Long overwrought read-aloud, wall of text DM notes, plot, backstory, it’s got it all. The concept here should be, like, a quarter page in a larger dungeon.

Oh no! Lights on the horizon of the ocean! Missing fishermen! Strange dreams! Better have the church spend a bunch on some adventurers so they can take a rowboat out to investigate! Once out to see you hear some voices. You land on an island and see a puka chained to a cart. You go down some stairs in to a ruin and maybe fight some zombies. You go in to another room and maybe fight a revenant. And, a 50% chance, you might a 5hd witch. Then there’s three more boring rooms, one of which has a magic gate you can step through. Your weekly evening of torment is now over.

The read-alouds are long. People get bored listening to long read-aloud. Don’t put in long read-alouds. You get three, maybe four sentences tops. The first real adventure page of this is taken up by almost a column or so of read-aloud. The read-aloud is in italics. Don’t do that. Italics, or any weird ass font, is hard on the eyes. You lose your place. It’s a cognitive burden. You can use italics to highlight a word or two, but if you want to offset a decent chunk of text, like read-aloud, then use another method. Shade it. Use white space. Th read-aloud over reveals information. A core feature of an RPG is the back and forth between the players and the DM. How they ask questions and interact with the game world and then the DM responds to that. If your read-aloud over reveals information then you are working against that model. When you tell us, in the read-aloud, what the etching on the inside of the cauldon says then you prevent the players from walking over to the cauldon, the DM describing it. The players examining the cauldron and the DM describing it, and so on. Don’t over reveal in your read-aloud. The read-aloud is very second person focused. “You feel …” or “You find yourself …” This is a symptom of poor writing. The designer is trying to tell the party hat to think. Instead, a better practice is to describe what is going on in way that makes the party think “oh, i feel sad/angry/whatever.” Besides, it seldom takes in to account the fact that the party is invisible, dig through the top of the room with shovels, or some other, now destroyed, implicit assumption that the designer has made. 

The text of the adventure is overwrought. “You feel the sudden pressure of the ocean against this unnatural island as you continue downwards until at last, after a minute, you feel yourself touch the base of this underground ruin” You don’t need this. This focus on feeling. Calling it an unnatural island. Until at last. This is all text that tends to the purple side of prose. Again, we’re trying to make the players think “man, this island is unnatural!” not TELL them that the island is unnatural. You know, showing instead of telling. 

There’s also this tendency to dump in awkward wording. At the end of the zombie room encounter the text tells us “The witch has since placed a terrible spell on the bodies.” This is referring to, I’m 90% sure, the fact that the bodies are now zombies. And, yet, its … trivia? Padding? Or when the party arrives on the beach of the island the text eventually gets around to telling us “There is nothing of value on the coast besides a silver bracelet worth 60 silver crowns.” This is an awkward way of saying there’s a bracelet on the beach. It would have been far, far better to say its sticking out of the sand, or catching a glint of sun or something instead of saying There is nothing on the coast except.” And, then, the famous if/then statements appear. “IF the adventurers open the party.” Which I’m pretty sure is supposed to be IF the party opens the chest, but whatever. Samesies. No if/then statements in adventures. That’s padding. “If they do, the GM will read or show them the following …” 

There’s no real interactivity. The last room has a teleport gate with a book in a different room telling you how to operate it. You might fight some zombies or a revenant. The main baddie, the witch/necromancer, only has a 50% chance of actually showing up in the adventure. That might be fine for longer term play, I guess? But, also, I’m not sure anything takes place here. Talk to the pooka, I guess. Free some air spirits. I don’t know. “ 

There’s not really anything here of any interest.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. There’s no preview but it’s Pay What you Want, so, there/s that.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/496605/moss-stone-steel-the-whispering-lights?1892600