The Unfortunate Brotherhood

By Pitiless as Bronze Productions
Self Published
OSR
Level 1

While on pilgrimage to the winter faire at Saint Lewiston, the outcasts become entangled in the fates of a decaying monastic order and an otherworldly creature that might be their salvation, or the last rusty iron nail in their coffin. Now with inter-player paranoia and inquisitors!

This 36 page adventure is laid out in seven scenes revolving around the discovery of a wounded angel and that discoveries intersection with The Inquisition. An interesting concept that tries to do a sandbox in a scene based format. And wordy for what it is.

THis is based off a hex encounter in the Mythic North hex crawl for Outcast Silver Raiders. That encounter is a dude that has an angel under a tarp in his wagon. It mashes that up with some information about The Inquisition of the Black Bishop also found in the hex crawl. Thus, this adventure is doing what all hex crawl refs do: taking something tha party just stumbled across and riffing on it with something else that the party has stumbled across.

The pretext here is that the party is on the road travelling to someplace else. First, they meet a group of villagers, fellow travellers, who are injured. Turns out they got hit by bandits. Also turns out that they are feeling a village that the Inquisition just hit. We have, here, hints of a couple of upcoming encounters. And, sure enough, the very next encounter is with some bandits attacking a small group of monks. Saving them can give you a leg up when you hit encounter three, the Monastery of Sabriel. They are devoted the the angel Sabriel, who has not graced them with blessings in quite some time. Blah blah blah. Whatever. Next up we meet a cheery peasant on the road with a wagon and a tarp in the back … and an angel under it, in a very weakened state. This is the last normal encounter. From here you get to decide what to do. Take the angel? Help the dude to sell it? Free it? Kill it? The adventure could go several different places, literally. Next up the party meets a scout for the Inquisition, and then in the final encounter the Inquisition proper. They could meet the party on the road, or at the monastery, or in a town, or … you get the idea. Whatever the party decided to do, with the angel, they will then meet the scout and then the main Inquisition group. The DM needs to riff in these two encounters with the choices the party made earlier on what to do.

If we consider the opening scenes the hook, the pretext, then the closing scenes, with the angel and the Inquisition, aer the payoff. And it is here that the adventure shows its cracks. It is trying to represent a kind of natural flow and progression through the use of its scene based formatting. But the manner in which it does this is clumsy. It is, essentially, trying to say that the party should encounter the angel, and encounter the scout and encounter the main force. But, also, it doesn’t know what the party has decided to do prior to this. So while the opening scenes are rather static, you meet this person at this place doing this thing, the final ones must be more free flowing and open to being riffed on. This means the adventure, in the “scenes” must resort to something akin to “if the party is here then the baddies do this thing and if they are doing this then they are doing this” and so on. During this, in spite of the page count” we lose the specificity that brings an adventure life. 

I think perhaps that this shows the promise of a more traditional way to write a sandboxy adventure. Viewing a lot of this as hooks, we focus on motivations and goals, quirks and relationships. Toss in a few problems to get the party moving around. We then have a much more open ended adventure with the DM using the resources provided to respond to the party, perhaps with the benefit of a timelines of escalations. The DM responds to the parties actions by the counter actions of the various parties, be they the inquisition or a disgruntled peasant or monks or whatever. 

I’m not morally opposed to scene based adventures. They tend to not be my thing, in general, but I recognize that many folks play this way. The issue here is the mixing of the scene based format with what is, inherently, a more open ended set of potentials from the party and reactions from the other NPC’s. Confusing is not the word for it, but the if/thens grow tedious in a world where a more opened ended format would have suited it better. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages, near the end. It doesn’t really give you much of an idea of what you’ll be buying, so, bad preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/510894/the-unfortunate-brotherhood-outcast-silver-raiders?1892600