A Walk in the Harwood

By Hilander
Self Published
OSE
Level …? I guess we don’t use levels anymore? The Big Bad is 10HD.

The folk of Almsville enjoyed a quiet existence far from the worries of city life and foreign wars, but recently a strange spirit has been seen in town, a weeping woman beckoning strong folk into the Harwood, pleading with them to free her from her curse. Just last week the mayor’s son, young Constance, disappeared, stealing away in the night with a sword and shield taken from his father’s wall. The town fears the worst, and Sister Verity senses unease amongst the local spirits. She has sent word to the City, pleading for help.

This twenty page adventure presents a hex crawl with about fifty hexes and twenty-ish encounters. It can turn a phrase now and then, but it’s simplistic in its implementation, mixing plot with what should be hex situations … and not doing either.

Let us assume I have a hex crawl adventure. It’s a thousand hexes. Your starting hex is along a border. I develop a page of backstory that within it contains a plot. The essence of the plot is that the prince has gone missing while searching for a monster. I populate the hexes at some density of encounters. Then I stick the prince in the hex next to the starting hex and the monster in the hex next to the prince. The other hexes don’t really have anything special in them, no help to defeat the monster or things to save the prince or anything like that. It really is as straightforward as I just described. Yeah, the other hexes have some stuff in them, but, also, it’s not really SITUATIONS. Yeah, there are monsters and treasures and weird shit. Some of them are just scattered randomly in the hexes without roads or trails leading to them and not really “in the way of” something you can see from a distance. I think we could all say that this is a poorly designed hex crawl. It meets the definition that it has hexes that you can explore, but there’s no real reason to and a decent number of them are VERY unlikely for you to stumble across in pursuit of other hexes. And, no real situations. Not really things for the DM to riff on and explode and for the players to exploit in a more strategic sense. This would all lead to me saying that yes, it is a hex crawl but it’s not a very good hex crawl, missing what makes a hex crawl a good hex crawl. And that is this adventure. It can, at times, turn a decent phrase of description, but it also seems to miss thes of what makes an adventure an adventure. The WHY of how things are put in to an adventure to drive gameplay.  

The mayors son is missing, trying to free some ghost chicks curse. The city is on the edge of the ghost wood. There’s a haunted house one hex away, before you get to the wood proper. A hex away from that, in the woods, is the witch chick who controls the woods and knows everything going on. A hex away from that is the big bad monster. None of the other woods encounters really contribute to this ghost lady/woods/monster/son plotline. They are just things like “Frank lives here in this house and can’t get out because of the animated vines” or something like “50 albino goblins, bloodthirsty, live in a cave complex here.”  They might stretch to, say, two or three paragraphs, including a read-aloud paragraph, but there’s not really situations unfolding. This is far, far closer to Isle of the Unknown. Perhaps not quite as obviously from a generator, but also not with anything larger or more interesting going on in them. 

The town is minimally described, which is fine. It does, however, have an encounter table. Thisis one of them: “Old Farmer Dale has seven daughters whom he’d like to marry off; Patience, Prudence, Mercy, Grace, Faith, Hope, and Charity. None live up to their names. “You could do, really, but I wonder for which?” So, yeah, but, also, what’s the point? Yes, it does add a bit of local color. But I think that’s all it is, Some local color to add in to some kind of home base place, that the party is likely to return to time and again. And in that case I’m not sure I make this a random table at all. 

What’s frustrating here is that sometimes the text is decent. At the site of a drowned woman in a river: “The skies grow cloudy here, and a cold breeze blows down the river. A single tree stands beside the water, its roots reaching in to drink” We’re going to ignore the “roots reaching to drinks” purple prose, but the rest of it is decent. It sets a good melancholy mood for the site of a drowned woman. There’s a forlornness that this description invokes, helped along by the room title “The Drowned Lady.” THis is how a room title sets the stage for what’s to come. It gets you into the right frame of mind for the description to come, helping to conjure more than the sum of the words used. The adventure des this a time or two, and when it does it’s a really great description. But those are by far the exceptions.

I mentioned that haunted house a hex from town. That place has 23 rooms in it. They are described in essentially ONE COLUMN. Jesus fuck man! You get such rooms as perhaps this one: “10. Guestroom. Huge plants.” Well, that’s something right out of Vampire Queen I guess. I’m not really cherry picking. It’s almost all just a room title and one or two words, an object to be found in the room. “Robes 300gp.” Yes, the room titles are decent (although, perhaps “RUINED guestroom” or “OPULENT Guestroom” would have been better.) but that’s it. It’s an extreme minimalism. To fit in twenty pages, I guess?

IN other places there is a distinct note of information missing. One fine example is “If the hill is dug into, it will reveal a large hoard of golden coins and rare treasures” With no details of what that is … although the consequences are spelled out large. It’s baffling.

There is, I guess, a mix here of two adventure styles. The hex crawl/exploratory  where you create your own adventure and a plot adventure in which you have something explicitly to do. I guess, if I squint hard enough, i can see adding some plot to a hex crawl to get things moving … but then you put the endgame to it next to the basE? And the hex encounters are not really the sort of strategic/dynamic situations that make hex crawls thrive? And the dungeon is straight out of Tegal? Nope.

This is Pay What You Want at Drivethru with a suggested price of $3. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/500040/a-walk-in-the-harwood?1892600