Altar 1 – Wormwood & Gall

By ScarletRevense
Melpomene Gaming
Outcast Silver Raiders

The outcasts encounter an isolated farming community where apocalyptic dogma has evolved into a growing apocalyptic reality. If the outcasts cannot shut down this sect, the danger may creep out into the larger world, perhaps even dooming the Mythic North as a whole.

Wormwood & Gall is a twelve page adventure inside of a 42 page digest zone devoted to Outcast Silver Raiders. It’s try to present this edgy biblical apocalypse thing. Instead it is just coming off as a small series of encounters in which nothing ever really happens. Good luck with your tribulation!

Maybe Outcast is everything I wanted Mork Borg to be? Creativity, but this time cloaked in the aspect of a real adventure? Except, it’s not a very GOOD adventure.

So you show up at his village. Seems a little quiet. Maybe if you ask around and make some rolls and do a good job roleplaying you can find out that the local priest, Ljsdfjgsd, summoned everyone up to old Ahjsgfsdg’s farm. Heading up there to the Ahjsgfsdg’s  place you eventually find some villagers in the middle of an apocalyptic fervor. After a more differenter villager tells you exactly what is going on. You stumble about from place to place, meet someone hiding, and then move on to the next place. 

Or, maybe, in the second hook, you show up in the village/farm because someone told you that a rock fell from the sky in the woods behind Ahjsgfsdg’s farm. ARGGG!!! You know, the adventure is trying to do this whole apocalypse thing, replete with the four horsemen, and then it goes and undercuts the entire thing by telling the party, explicitly, in the hook, that they are going there because of a rock in the woods. Well then, I guess thats what the fuck caused it and where the fuck we should go, right? Look, the rest of this adventure is not great, but, still, you don’t put the fucking twist ending to the suspense movie in the fucking trailer, do you?

And, as I have intimated, the NPC names are off the hook. I am open to being told that these make sense in the context of the designers country (I assume this is up Nordic way, anyway) but fuck man, its going all Forgotten Realms on me. I am NOT going to use your fucked up names. No, it doesn’t have to be Bill and Frank. But you gotta do things to make it easieron the DM rto run the fucking thing.

And, speaking of the fucking NPC’s, they suck. The adventure is supposed to, I think, run as a kind of open ended thing. The party stumbles about, meets some people trying to do something and other people interfere, etc. Except the people here are sooo loosy goosy htat you can’t do that. They don’t really have meaningful goals. I’m not even sure “bring out the tribulation” is a goal of anyone. The vast majority are hiding or cowering in some dark corner. Seriously, at one point I thought “the NPC in this room will be cowering in the corner.” Sure enough, they were. Anyway, they don’t DO anything. The big congregation scene in the barn has a bunch of villagers and a giant virgin mary weeping blood or some shit. That’s it. Yeah, I guess preacher kAksjdfhkdsh could rally them to kill the party. But he’s off elsewhere. Where you meet him. And likely stab him. 

There’s just nothing HAPPENING. Well, besides the cowering. You go someplace and someone or some thing interesting is there, but they are all isolated from each other. The giant blood weeping virgin mary statue in the barn. GREAT!  Nothing to it though. You meet a dude who is smeaty and obviously looks like hes having a heart attack and about to die. GREAT! If you mention him looking like that then he DOES have a heart attack and die. GREAT! These kind of individual elements are all great. Solid anchors to work from. But there is no follow on. He’s nothing but an NPC. The statue does nothing. It’s just all something weird, or someone weird, and nothing more form there,

And, speaking of that hook ruining things … the very first encounter at the room. Roo one. The first thing you are likely to meet … is a chick you tells you EVERYTHING that is going on at the farm. The preacher, ghost, the falling star, images in the mind manifesting. Shes got it all. No discovery for you, Mr Party! No slowly unfolding drama! No rising crescendo to a release.! 

Did I mention it’s digest. In two column format. With a tiny font. And long italics. And, even better, the PDF is spreads only, Jesus, I had this thing zoomed in a bajillionfold just to be able to see the fucking text. And, even better, you don’t NEED spreads! It doesn’t take advantage of that. It’s fucking digital man, make a page version available also.

Decent individual elements here. And I can see where the designer wanted to go with the apocalypse thing, and the villagers, and rivals and so on. But it’s so unsupported as to be goals and wants that mere suggestions of ideas. Those parts, the interactions, needed A LOT more support, perhaps even with a timeline. And some stakes that matter beyond Saving The World. There’s no reason to be here or to give a shit. And even THAT isn’t played up. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. Taint got no preview. Sucker.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/515517/altar-issue-1-for-outcast-silver-raiders?1892600