Ashes of Rhu

By Christopher Capone
Wicked Cool Games
OSR
Levels 2-3

Long Ago, the folk of Rhu made an agreement with a witch to save their tree-thorp from destruction.  She honored the agreement, but the folk broke their promise.  Soon the village was razed.  Now, years later, the adventurers must delve into Rhu to find a lost friend and deal with the evil still lurking within the ruins.

This 34 page adventure uses about four pages to describe a burned down village with ten locations. It wants a creepy horror vibe, but the lack of much evocative content lends itself to more of an abstracted vibe. Too bad because it’s got a nice premise. 

Ah, a tale as old as time: the town didn’t pay their dealer. Specifically, they bargain with a witch to save the town from attack, she keeps up her end and then they don’t give her the baby teeth that they agreed to. They didn’t even have to yank em out! She was content with them falling out naturally. The kids go missing and when they come back, with amnesia, they are carrying these little sack dolls. And then one night the dolls murder everyone and burn the town down. Oops. We’ve got a witch, murderous little sack dolls with knives that turn you to dirt if they kill you, baby teeth … good stuff! But the adventure doesn’t really know what to do with it all. This kind of excellent horror/folklore vibe just doesn’t come through. The burned down town doesn’t feel like a burned down town at all. The creepy little dolls get a “giggle when they run away” thing, but thats it. The entire horror vibe, along with a ghost child or two, just isn’t creepy. 

It’s hard, I gotcha, to write some evocative text and transfer the vibe, the intent in your head, on to the written page in such a way that the DM on the other side can pick it up and run with it. But, also, that’s a decent chunk of what folks are paying for in an adventure … to get the vibe that the designer is putting down. 

That’s not what we get here though. There is a lot of lead in. A starting village with people to talk to … which doesn’t really lead anywhere. There’s no real mystery to solve. There’s no amulet to burn or anything. You’re there for [pretext] and the entire framing, the entire backstory, is just there to explain the presence of the little sack monsters. Thus all o the NPC interactions in town are for nought. The wilderness encounters as well. Those don’t have to lead to something, but, also, they don’t So all of those pages, all of that text, is for nothing. What if, instead of all of the useless town material, and the description of a forest that the party will never enter, instead that effort was put in to the burned down village? To bring it alive? To give the party something to do in the village except stab little sack monsters. There is a dead dude trapped in a soul gem, but he’s just there to explicitly provide monologue and explanations, to bring out the backstory. Likewise the little ghost child, there’s nothing to really be done with him. He wants Bloody Tear, his sack doll, back, but if you do so then … he just goes away.

Nothing here contributes to anything other than the backstory of why the monsters are here. There is no real tragedy to bring forth and no triumph to be had, the witch is not present and you can’t really accomplish anything. It’s as if you wrote LotR as a backstory and the adventure was “pick a flower from Mt Doom” and there are a couple of orcs there. Ok, sure, I understand why the orcs and Mt Doom are there, but nothing contributes to the NOW of the adventure. 

“Apple barn: Processing & storage area for apples & mead. Slight sweet & rotting smell. Many overturned barrels and crates with a mushroom-infested sludge.” This would be a typical description of one of the areas in the adventure. There is more, but it mostly consists of sack dolls dropping from a ceiling and stabbing you before they run away giggling. There’s just not much to work with in that description. The sweet and rotting smell is a highlight of this description, and of the adventure. There’s just not enough of that. The burned down town. The tragedy of the parents being little piles of dirt (Ala On the Beach) … the children themselves. There is just not enough of the horror element here, not enough of descriptions that ground the place. 

The witch, the teeth, th children, the ever present mist … not really used in any way, not leaned in to. It’s not that it’s BAD, it just ends up being a whole of backstory for an adventure that amounts to little other than stabbing little sack monsters and an ant-lion  ala sarlacc pit. 

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. I got excited with the NPC summary, but nothing goes anywhere. It needs a better preview, of the actual encounter keys, to give a better feel of the core of the adventure.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/522590/ashes-of-rhu?1892600