By Olav Nygard
Cyclopean Games
Blood & Bronze
Intro Characters
The White Marsh is a great waste of caustic sludge. From a distance it looks like a wintery swamp, but it is arid and hot instead of wet and cold. In the summer months, the rapid evaporation causes the pale mire to coagulate into an ice-like crust of saline crystals, thick enough to carry the weight of an army. The marsh is corrosive and houses nothing but horrors, so travelers avoid it at all costs. Still, a caravan has gone missing, its tracks disappearing into the dreaded waste. No-one knows what madness or desperation led it there, but reasons matter little—what does is that its cargo was valuable beyond comparison.
This 48 page hex crawl with 10×14 hexes, details a salt swamp and the parties search for a caravan full of tribute. It’s a frustrating combination of great hex crawl content that can’t sustain itself over the full range of hexes. It delivers on those Akkadian vibes, but I suspect can be used in most wildernesses.
I’ve had a brand of Gilgamesh in cuniform for thirty years, that I get redone every ten. My home wifi is called humbaba. My truck says Enkidu on its plates. My passphrases are from a tablet. I played QAGS at a convention just so I could be Gilgamesh, and then framed the character sheet and hung it on my wall. This adventure setting is the land between the rivers. I may not be the most objective reviewer. Also, it’s for Blood 7 Bronze, so, I’m kind of reviewing this as a hex crawl that one might use in a more traditional D&D system … meaning some judgements could be wonky.
Weirdly enough, I also tend to start my new Dungeonland games with a missing caravan of gold. And, I also have it disappear in to a marsh, the Bleakmarsh. As the intro to this adventure states “It is but a matter of time before someone else will venture out to salvage the wealth; the adventurers’ only advantages are their speed and their willingness to recklessly travel where others are reluctant to.” It gives the party something to chase to get started, before they start running in to people and situations that expand the game. So, a decent little thing to get the party moving through the hexes. Likewise, the rules for hex crawls here are relatively decent, terse and yet covering what needs be. Get your ass to some dry land at night (the map is supposed to help here, I think, but I can’t for the love of me figure out the dry land portion of it) , what you can see next door, how far you can move. It’s all pretty simple and effective enough without becoming simulationist.
Hang in there as I describe what’s going on. We’ve got an aristo traitor, leading the caravan, in cahoots with some bearers. He got it in to the swamp with the intent of some swamp creatures/environment killing most of the caravan and making off with the gold. But the guide was too good and now he’s lost. The guide is still wandering the swamp, ol DeCaprio from the Revenant, on a revenge mission. (50% chance that when he dies he doesn’t actually die. Driven by hatred as he is. Nice simple but evocative mechanic to describe his passion.) We’ve got an invisible witch that can ride your back in the swamp, a necromancer up to some Make A Deal evil, cockroach people, brigands in multiple forms and desperados wanting to join them, as well as soldiers in the swamp sent to hunt them down. All with some potential clues scattered around on where the caravan is as well as the usual assortment of random danger and weird shit in a marsh. Rumors abound, with everyone getting one. Unless you’re a courtesan, then you get two. That’s the kind of specificity and idiosyncratic I can get behind! I think it adds loads of flavour when an adventure does that.
There is a main bandit camp. “Safe in their knowledge that no deputy will pursue them here, the raiders have painted their houses in every color and hung gold and silver from the ridges of their twigroofs to parade their illegitimate wealth. In their back-yards, water is slowly boiling in large bronze shields heated by the sun. There is a 50% chance that all raiders are out, leaving only the kidnapped women that are their wives and serfs” And then it goes on, for one of the NPC women “Despite her status, she hates her captors with passion but is prevented from action by her child with Yarosh who lives in his house together with Hamala. Has a small vial of poison and a dagger that she traded her soul for with an old crone promising her vengeance.” Now that is the kind of old school revenge drama/revenge thing I can get behind! FOr sports sake I spit my last!
The adventure is great when it has these little citations going on. Either some kind of a relationship between hexes or something interactive in a hex. And it is substantially less interesting when it abstracts or goes all Isle of the Unknown. “The soldiers are led by a deputy.” Well, fuck me. The adventure has no problem naming people and giving a brief personality to others, but not this very important dude. And then ethere are hex entries that are “An ossified tree from the time when cyclops ruled the earth.” That’s it. Or “Shubbery.” Ok. Sure. “A tunnel, leading straight down into the ground roughly five feet across and perfectly round. Its edges are dripping with pink slime.” That’s it. No more. Yeah, sure, every day is not Disneyworld, but, also, we’re looking for content here, and these things stand out given how good the NPC’s and situations are, and what a fantastic job it does communicating the overall vibe. I’m also more than slightly annoyed at the lack of … treasure? We don’t get anything on the hoard, just notably that 1/3rd of it is left at a certain location. Or that another group has a few urns worth. Worth of … ? I’m guessing that this all makes sense in Blood & Bronze … but its also a bit of a disappointment in the loot category. I guess maybe I’m a power gamer at heart?
That aside, I don’t think the Sumar & Akkad thing is necessary here. While I think the theming is spot on, I also think you can easily fit this in almost anywhere, as long as we’re doing a vast wilderness thing where we can have the unknown abundant and civilization pushing at it.
This is $5 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. And that always makes me very sad 🙁
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/215459/across-the-white-marsh?1892600
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What is “Blood 7 Bronze”? I have been interested in Sumer and Akkad for a long time but nothing turns up when I search for that.
"Blood 7 Bronze" is a Bryce-ism for "Blood & Bronze". I have only heard of it, no idea if it is playable.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/173051/blood-bronze-rules