Love Songs of the Death Goddess

By Jesse Burneko
Bloodthorn Press
Black Sword Hack

A mercenary company storms into an ancient library and demands access to a forbidden tome. When they are refused they begin to set fire to the collection of books and scrolls. What could be so valuable it’s worth destroying a thousand years of knowledge?

This 48 page adventure provides a loose framework through six-ish scene/locations as the party searchs, for some reason, for a chick that has sailed in to the land of the dead cause she’s in love with the death goddess. It is a pointless adventure, both in motivation and in the loose framework that seems to pass for an adventure locale. 

You read the intro. You’re in a library when some dudes barge in, want a forbidden tome, are denied, and then set fire to place to apply some pressure. For some reason you get involved. I mean, sure, arson and all that. But, you get involved BEYOND that. An abbot hired them, so for some reason you meddle and go there. Before reaching the monastery the nearby village warns you off with some spears. You win their trust and they say the monks are now kidnapping their kids. Getting to the monastery, they are now some vampire/zombie hybrid, sleeping underground during the day and eating children at night. The abbot fell in love with the death goddess and sacrificed everyone to see her, but made a mistake and now they are all undead. Also, he has one half of the time of which the other half resided in that library. Following up, for some reason, now that you have both parts, leads you to a village of squatters and an abandoned temple of the god. Inside the avatar statue is sad, the high priestess, who wrote the tome, left the god to pursue her love of the death goddess. You win him over, or take his heart, and go to a lighthouse to replace the beacon with his heart. This calls back the ship of the high priestess from the lands of the dead, where she was searching for the death goddess to give her the present of a magic scythe she made. End of adventure.

I cannot tell you how much I loathe this. It is completely open ended, in a bad way. It has few details of any location, giving just a rough layout of the locales, sand room/key. “Frank lives here. Here’s his backstory. He is sad about chick leaving.” Would that it just took that amount of text. Oh no the text must drone on. In a very general way. 

It’s presented in long-form paragraph. Just a whole lot of words with no organization at all in a format that speaks to Wall of Text issues. I know what it’s trying to do, it’s trying to present situations for the party to interact with. “Here’s what’s going on at this location and here is the chief NPC at the locale and what’s going on with them.” But it’s so muddled and so loose. It really is little more than “The avatar is sad that she left and pines for her.” along with “the squatters in the village don’t want the party to enter the temple and they are led by kind-hearter Bob.” 

I was really, REALLY hoping for more with those zombie/vampire monks. Sleeping in the catacombs during the day, kidnapping and eating children at night. Ravenous for tender flesh. That’s a fucking GREAT concept. But, no, we get very little more than that. A textual description of the layout of the map and a very loose “they don’t use their cells anymore.” sort of thing. Even the whole “set fire to the library” thing is pretty good, but there is not much more than that. No exciting library action. Sure, the dudes who set fire are there and you cankill them, but no running through the library, or falling bookcases, or smoke visibility/damage or anything like that. It’s all VERY loosely defined situations and the DM is just told to run with it and see where it goes. 

And then there’s other weirdness here. The forbidden section librarian dude is like a yuan-ti, for no reason. And then the major section headings are in one of those fucked up gothic fonts that s barely legible. And we all know what I think about the adventure making is difficult, on purpose, to locate information. What little information there is.

It’s just a mess, dumping text at you. I suppose you could read and memorize the entire thing and make copious notes about how the parts are interconnected. Highlight and underline and so on. But why would you bother? I mean, why would the party even bother to get involved here? Because they are really in to the chief librarian? It’s suggested that the party have a preexisting relationship with the library, but, even then, I’m not sure why you would pursue things beyond the initial arson event. Nothing here makes much sense at all.

This is $10 at DriveThru. No preview. Sucker. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524848/love-songs-of-the-death-goddess?1892600