By Joseph Bloch
BRW Games
1e
Levels “Medium” (which is 4-6)
The Eventide Valley has always been a place of mystery for those who dwell in the surrounding lands of the Great Empire. Isolated, backwards, and content to keep to itself, the valley has always been a source of rumor and legend. You have come to this valley to discover its secrets and find yourself in the peaceful shepherding village of Argylby, which has been the victim of raids by a force known only as the Outer Ones. But is there even more going on here than you suspect?
This 27 page adventure presents a short dungeon crawl in a ten room complex with mi-go. Really just a simple hack, there is little going on here of interest, in setting or language.
Buggems, No! Buggems, No! (I wonder if I can have that put on my headstone?) This adventure starts with the party witnessing some flying fungus crabs attacking a farmhouse. After driving them off and getting to the village they are told they come from an old temple. Inside the old temple the party kills ten-ish rooms full of things. Rewarded by the villagers, they are then betrayed as the villagers try to kill them at the feast in their honor. You know, the usual.
It takes 27 pages to detail these twelve encounters, the opening farm attack, the ten rooms and the villagers attack. 27 letter sized tiny font two column pages. Only about eleven are used for the adventure, the rest being appendix, of course, as these things are wont to do. But, still, thirteen encounters. That’s not even a one page of text, right? (To be clear, the main ten encounter dungeon takes about two pages of text.) And how can this be?
Let’s look at the first entry for the village! “SHEPHERD. All of the shepherds’ houses in the village have the same floorplan: the ground floor is a barn where the animals are wintered and cared for, while the family lives on the second floor. This is the home of Jakub Massey (F0, 4 h.p.; AL NE), who usually takes his flocks into the Eastern Moors. He is a down-to-earth type unconcerned with larger issues of morality or cosmic wars and is married to Zofia. They have 3 children, and all are members of the Church of Shatur. He has a flock of 200 sheep and 2 dogs to help tend them (AC 7; HD 1+1; 4 h.p. each; #AT 1;DAM 1-3).” Are you not entertained?! This is the prosaic miundantiy of life, explained in great length, adding nothing to the adventure. That is not the purpose of the text in the adventure. The purpose is not to explain to me the life story and motivations and family tree of some random ass dude in the village. Or, twenty random ass homes in the villages. The purpose of the text is to assistthe DM in running an adventure. And, thusly, we ask the question “How does this text contribute to the adventure at the table?” It doesn’t. It doesn’t springboard to anything. It isn’ anything interesting. To be sure, we can toss in an aside or some colorful characters, but, in general, the text should be much more related to things that can or could happen. And that Shepherd entry does none of that. NONE of the village entries do any of that. This is nothing but trivia. A huge amount of time and effort must have been spent on this. WHich could have been MUCH better spent working on the dungeon entries. Or, something interesting in the village. Or very nearly anything else. (Dare I hope … more appendix pages?!?!) Spend your fucking effort on the fucking adventure. Jesus, it seems dumb that I have to say that. (I noet that there is an interesting entry. A local “bad” family keeps to themselves. Their enemies have a tendency to appear all over the village in many pieces. Turns out they worship their gret great great great grandfather. WHich is actually a bar-luge hiding out in their barn over many generations, content, and now kind of likes the family, in a protective sort of way. It doesn’t do anything for the adventure but is, at least, kind of neato)
The dungeon is ten rooms. They are boring. They contain backstory. “CELLAR. Formerly, this room was used in a “descent to the underworld” ritual when the shrine was active, but is currently unused by the mi-go.” Great. So … empty room? Oh, oh! How about a room with a local tinker staying in, a spy and double and triple agent? “He can be found in most places throughout the valley, leading his dog-cart full of various bric-a-brac that he sells at farms and villages, trading gossip, and performing minor repairs to metalwork with his portable metalworking setup” Seems like maybe his entry should not be in the dungeon but in the main text, yes? So you can meet him before? Shit is just thrown in anywhere and everywhere in this adventure. Anyway, go room to room and kill a few things and maybe talk to a brain cylinder. The usual de rigeur mi-go shit but with swords instead of shotguns.
Yeah you do it! The villagers throw a feast for you and lead you in to the sacred grove, where they get rid of their weapons. You want your reward, right? THEY ATTACK! Oh no! All of the priests in the village know hold person! They are gonna sacrifice you! But you are clever adventurers, right? When you met the head priest you cast detect alignment, right? Not to worry brave DM! “A detect evil spell cast upon Hilbreth or his fellow clerics will not detect any emanations, as ordinary character alignment is insufficiently strong to be detected.” Ha! The old wound! This in spite of the text saying “Maintaining a pleasant façade at all times, even when he is bringing down a knife to sacrifice an old friend to his god, he has a beneficent smile on his face” Humph. But, then again, you can’t have a level 4-6 adventure with evil intent andbackstabby without nerfing detect alignment, can you?
There’s nothing here. Backstory and trivia. A simple hack. No adventure in the village. None of the greater conflict between religions plays out. No intrigue or warning glances from villagers. Just backstory, trivia, and hacking.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is only three pages. It doesn’t really show you what to expect in any way.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/504009/adventure-module-e1-war-from-the-stars?1892600
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To paraphrase Stephen King - "in order to be a good writer, you've got to be an avid reader". I think the issue here is just that the author hasn't been reading enough other modules to get a good sense of how it should be done. They've been writing (a few modules now), but not reading.
Just make the Old Ones-worshipping cultists truly amoral and Neutral-aligned, Chaotic Neutral if you must. Problem solved; no need to nerf a tried-and-true spell.
In D&D's metaphysics, this would be classified as Chaotic Evil. There are limitations to the alignment system, i.e. it should not be taken completely seriously, but game elements have a meaning, and here, the meaning is clear. You worship the Old Ones, you are Chaotic Evil.
More broadly, rules are the skeleton of the game, and they form the players' expectations about how things will work in practice. If I don't follow elementary rules (which doesn't mean minutiae, but the really central stuff), how can my players trust my milieu? It is foul play. AD&D offers methods to obscure a character's alignment, but if your reason is "because I want to create a specific plot outcome", you are cheating. Worse, you are playing 2e like some poncy renfaire git.
2E, to give the devil his due, nerfed detect evil and know alignment right there in the Player's Handbook.
Is this an argument for the defence, or the prosecution? :D
Detect evil (but not know alignment) is nerfed like this in the 1E DMG, so this is BTB. That said, I've never used it. IMO, evil is evil, whether it's a man or a monster.
Nerd-dom quibble: The Lovecraftian entities aren't evil; they are uncaring and amoral (save for Nylarlathotep, who is definitely evil-aligned). I would designate them all as CN.
I don't think that works in AD&D terms, though.
Says you! See? As I've warned over at Dragonsfoot for decades now, alignment discussions are pointless and always end in tears. ;)
The reason we've hovering at the precipice of the alignment rabbit-hole is that the writer decided to nerf know alignment. I was noting that there are far superior ways to address a heel turn than nerfing a spell that's a pretty straightforward tool in the AD&D toolbox. The writer is trying to disguise the heel turn, but is using the clunkiest way imaginable. I seem to recall, but could be wrong, that DUNGEON magazine had scenarios where the NPCs had magic items that hid their alignment. Weird how they were uniquely-tailored to that NPC and were never something PCs could use to disguise their alignment. ;) It's one step lower than the seemingly ubiquitous amulets that allow undead to be turned as higher-HD undead.
This writer really really wants to surprise the players but did so by stepping out of the rules (although ESP is also a second-level spell that might be even more devastating to the attempted ruse than know alignment, and the writer doesn't seem to know that). There's no need; there's a dozen ways. Are the cultists in Midsommer and The Ritual evil or insane (and, in the latter, movitated primarly by dread fear of the Elder God's wrath)? Don't like that? The priest is swapped out by a doppleganger while the PCs are in the dungeon, geased by some horrific outer deity, donned his helm of opposite alignment, was struck by insanity at viewing The Beyond. Get creative and don't nerf spells!
The entities themselves sure but the human cultists are CE
Wasn't the author on the "No buy list"?
I was very disappointed with this. The Mi-Go are a favorite of mine and they really don't bother people unless those people bother them first. Oh sure, they want to take people's brains, but that's because they want to show them the wonders of the universe and they are selective over who they pick. They clearly aren't going to steal the brains of a bunch of random farmers.
They only got Akeley because he was smart and investigating them and wouldn't take a hint.
I didn't feel that the mi-go avoided interacting with people for moral reasons, but rather because they thought wiping out humanity would require too many resources. Likewise, I think that the disembodied brains weren't being shown the wonders of the universe. They were being taken for the mi-go's own reasons. Given HPL's universe, humans would be reduced to utter insanity by what they "saw".
The Mi-Go went through an elaborate charade, including one pretending to be Akeley in order to converse with Wilmarth.
They could have easily killed Akeley or Wilmarth (they killed one of their own agents, after all, for being ineffective), but they chose not to and instead tried to recruit them. At the risk of their own lives, Akeley killed one.
This is expanded on somewhat by Robert Bloch (the Unspeakable Betrothal ) and Richard Lupoff's Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley
Maybe the way to do a "betrayed by the villagers" adventure would be to telegraph it outrageously. So the village priest DOES detect as evil, and for that matter the little kids do also. And even without Detect in the party it's just obvious you're getting stabbed in the back when you come out of the dungeon, so much so that its up to the party whether they deal with the dungeon or the village first.
Tradeoff is that gets pretty meta, but it could hardly be worse anyway.
Nah. Patron betrayal is only legit if the adventure itself gives reasonable clues of the betrayal and ideally gives some way to turn the tablea.
Otherwise you are just training up paranoid murderhobos.
>telegraph outrageously
>just obvious
"Nah, [needs] reasonable clues"
My reading-comprehension-challenged brother in Christ, I'm saying more than "reasonable clues," I'm saying "telegraph" and "obvious". Like what to do about is information up front that drives the real adventure, not a surprise at the end that they just might have deciphered the clues for.
I'll note here that the conceptual discussion surrounding the adventure seems to be more engaging than the adventure itself. Cool. It feels like those old boardroom meetings back in the waste-venture-capital 1990's, and I am the dumb one who doodles KISS ARMY on my legal pad while you all argue over projected KPI for Q3/4. I only brought four cigarettes with me anyway; when they're finished I ask what's for lunch.