The Garden of Flesh and Bone

By Michael & Brooke Strauss
ACKS II
The Pheonix Tome
Level ... 5?

In a remote forest far from civilization, an ancient faerie cultivates a garden of monsters created by his sadistic experiments, grafting plants onto beasts and men. His most prized creations are the corpse ower hybrids – horrors made from a dryad and her elven lover. These poor souls maintain their sentience and long for freedom. Meanwhile, the faerie caretaker searches for new victims to ensnare

This seventeen page adventure presents six encounters in a mad botanist fairies garden. As the page to encounter ration implies, it’s wordy, with little impact. Nice head crabs though!

This is, essentially, a single encounter location. There are six sub-sites, all within about two hundred feet of each other. The set up is that you stumble across it in a hex or some such. And old fey has a garden and he’s been grafting plants and people together. Notably, there are two that appear here: a dryad hybrid and an  elf hybrid, her former lover. Along the way you get his cottage, those two, a cave full of trolls, an awakened oak tree, and a chasm full of heads that have crab legs coming out of their mouths and scurry about. That, or, rather, the picture of that, is a highlight of the adventure. Nice and creepy. Otherwise, you’re gonna wander about wondering why you care, hit the fey’s cottage and get drawn in to a fight with him and his dogs. (Ths dogs bark when they detect someone, which will be inevitable, and that summons him, and he’s hostile, so …) I guess you also get his notebook telling you what hes up to. If you’ve randomly done things in the correct order then you can meet the dryad and elf encounters and convince them that they’ve been lied to. This lets you dig them up and take them back to the dryads tree where they die. Yeah! Also they give you some treasure for doing that. But, you gotta do it in the right order and make all the right choices, so … Really, there’s not a whole lot to this … especially for the page count. 

The troll encounter is just some trolls in a cave. The headcrabs are just some headcrabs in a chasm … with a chance of disease because of the filth. The tree is an angry old grumpy bug. These all take, I don’t know, a quarter page or less to describe? In fact, we’re looking at about 3.5 pages of text for the entire thing, with the six rooms of the gardeners cottage taking up two of those pages. The rest of this is padded out information. Long monster stat blocks in the black. Long if/then clauses. The actual encounters are, essentially, fact back minimalism expanded upon. “5A Troll Cave: A gang of five trolls and one troll champion nest in this shallow cave strewn with bones and refuse. A narrow tunnel at the back connects to 4 Headcrab Chasm. If the trolls are alive, there is an 80% chance that they are found in the cave. Buried under bones and refuse is a bronze statue of Talah, Queen of the Fire Elementals, with a large ruby mounted in her crown. The statue weighs 2 st. and the ruby is worth 6000gp” Dems your trolls cave. “ So, we’re looking at “nest in this shallow cave strewn with bones and refuse.” This is not exactly showcasing the delight of the english language. A little bit of padding with the IF the trolls are alive nonsense. 

Anyway, two problems with this adventure. Well, three major ones. First, the use of language. There is little effort here to conjure an evocative environment. This IS one of the value adds that a designer brings to the table with an adventure. You got a chance to think about it beforehand, you know the material and vibe better than anyone buying this, and you have a chance to really pour over the edit to make it come alive. Tersely. Otherwise I’m just rolling on Ye Olde Wandering table a couple of times and doing that. Let’s see, I rolled fairy, troll, and crab and treant. Ok. 

Related to this are the situations present. In this adventure we see one BIG thing going on: the fey is making hybrids. But this isn’t really a situation, it’s just an excuse to fight the dryad/corpse flower. Maybe the whole I trust the fey too much” thing that the dryad and elf are doing is a situation. You can, as the adventure points out, convince them otherwise. But I think not. This is just something associated with stabbing them. There is not situation in this adventure. Maybe the closest is the diseased refuse pile at the bottom of the chasm that, obviously, the party will want to search for loot. How to do it without getting diseased? Maybe A LOT more headcrabs and an obvious treasure would turn it in to even more of a situation, but I’m willing to go with whats written here. Theories just none of this in the adventure. It’s stabby stab stab with a lot of intricate backstory to explain why you have to stabby stab stab. I love stabbing, and I don’t need a backstory to do it. I need more than a stab, though, for a good adventure.

Finally the overwhelming amount of support material for a 3.5 page adventure. For 3.5 pages of adventure we get thirteen pages of support material. At some point you need to ask yourself if you are really writing an adventure or if you are writing support material and the adventure is the bonus. This would almost certainly not be something I gave a shit about, except that the adventure proper is so forgetful. Which means that all of that effort spent on the support material could have gone in to the adventure and, potentially, had it turn out much better. “Im gonna do great art and layout!” is another pitfall similar to this. The fucking adventure is the main thing. That has to deliver first. 

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview, and thus no chance to see what you are buying before you spend your filthy wage slave money.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/513169/the-garden-of-flesh-and-blood?1892600