Filchers in the Feylight

By WIll Flora
Prop Co Games
OSE
Level 1

A secret thieves guild, The Crimson Web, has stolen an artifact from the Archmage Twane*, and the party must recover it. Twane’s spies have deduced that the hideout for these thieves is a ruin located in the Feylight Wood, south of the small village of Edgewood. These thieves are of the utmost cunning, and Twane must warn the party that they have spies everywhere.

This 21 page adventure uses five pages to detail eleven rooms in a thieves lair in the woods. Nothing to see here but padded descriptions of prosaic encounters. Who woulda thunk it?

You are sent by a sage on a ten day journey overland (dude give you two weeks food rations. I guess you raid to come back home again?) to raid a thieves lair in the woods. The lair itself is …  I don’t know what it is. Is it a dungeon? A fort? Treehouses? We’re simply told that after searching the woods for awhile the party finds the lair … and then a dungeon map ensues. Fucking wonderful. This is, mind you, TWELVE MILES IN to the Feylight woods. The Feylight woods which are, by my calculation, cover some 972 square miles. I guess, though, we’re playing D&D tonight and this is what is in front of us. Nevermind the whole “questgiver”/Elminster shit. God forbid you want to make a buck instead of sucking off an old wizard. Anyway, did I mention the Feylight woods? They glow different colors. All the colors, the trees do. That’s covered in, like, once sentence. Sure man, let’s name the adventure after something that doesn’t matter. 

There’s a village on the edge of the woods. It has five buildings in it. There’s a smith. “Yargle, Honest, Halfling, works for any who need Smithing.” Yeah man, that’s what a smith does. They smith for people. And then there’s a windmill description. It tells us what a windmill does. It also tells us that if we climb to the top and look out the window, I kid you not, you can see the woods that are next door. This is just padded the fuck out for no fucking reason. The village doesn’t make sense. The shit IN the village is the flimsiest of pretexts to have an adventure. Five buildings. No support. 

The fun continues in the actual dungeon. Padded out. If/then clauses galore. “Should the players wander in to this area they will be able to see …” and “if they somehow light up the pit they will see …” 

Ultimately the dungeon comes down to stabbing a few folks. No real interactivity beyond that. Oh! Oh! There’s this room with two halls off of it, north and northwest. North leads to a room. Northwest goes straight for about a hundred feet and then just ends. DUH! Secret door. Unlocked. To the treasure room. The map makes no sense at all. I can get behind, I guess, telegraphing a secret door to be found, but to the treasure room?! 

At the end of the adventure the Elminster tells you that the artifact you were after, that was stolen from him, that you just murdered a bunch of people for, that you travelled a month for, that you most likely lost several party members for, was the first book he ever purchased. Seriously. No magical. Just ‘Tales of the Ancient Hero.’ A normal book. Fuck me man. Fuck me. You gotta start selling this for more than a dollar a bag; we lost four more men on this expedition!

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. You get to see that magnificent village. Poor preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/514909/filchers-in-the-feylight?1892600