Three Witches

By Michael Robinson
Rutibex
"OSR"/5e
Levels 3-5

Greetings Adventurers! Embark on an exciting hex crawl adventure in the new module – Three Witches! Explore a diverse and dangerous realm, where three rival witches vie for power and influence. Unravel the agendas of the Desert, Forest, and Mountain witches. Will you ally with one to defeat the others? Can you resist their corrupting influence? The fate of the realm lies in your hands!

This 145 page adventure uses 35 pages to describe twenty hexes and about thirty rooms over three dungeons. A bland outline, I’m not even sure there’s a pretense that this is OSR.

Hey man, I’m reviewing a longer work! Know you all want this! Let’s see … “For OSR and 5e!” Usually that means its a 5e adventure with maybe a page of stat conversions for OSR systems. This doesn’t even do that. It is clearly a 5e adventure, even though the cover and marketing indicates that its compatible with OSR. Sure, in the same way that a Funyun is compatible as a hammer. I could take all of the stats in that Star Frontiers adventure and do my best, on my own, to convert it all over to B/X. But, then, is that worth marketing? So, fuck you Rutibex. After this one I’m moving on with my fucking life, such that it is. Fucking garbage.

Most of this product is the witch class, with the usual long ass spell descriptions taking up most of the page count. That’s about 35 pages for the hex crawl and dungeons and about 110 pages for the witch class, spells, and a couple of new monsters. Joy. Love this. A 140 page adventure with a hexcrawl and three dungeons and five pages of bullshit tackon? Super cool. But the other way around? No thank you. 

There’s no lead in here. I gather that there is a region and that there are three witches here all crying for power. We know nothing about the region, or town, or people, or even the witches and their vying for power. We just get a wandering monster table for each terrain type. Here we go! “A fairy ring. Entering it could transport the players to a fey realm or cause other magical effects.”No? How about: “A cursed statue in a small pond, with a puzzle that, if solved, breaks the curse and grants a reward.” These are typical. No detail at all. I get it, wanderer. Short. Terse. But, man, you write the fucking encounter. Put the fucking thing down on the fucking page! 

This is, of course, a pretty blatant symbol of whats to come. Let’s look at those hex descriptions, shall we? “A barren and scorching desert, where only the hardiest creatures survive. A large sandstorm obscures the horizon, making navigation difficult. The players may encounter a band of nomadic raiders, a hidden oasis, or a mysterious ruin.” Again, this is a fairly typical hex. A little one liner that is super generic about the terrain and then “you might encounter/see A, b, or C.” This is not creativity. This is not, IMO, a hex crawl. This is just a bunch of crap thrown down on page that requires a DM to do a metric FUCK ton of work to turn it in to an adventure. That’s not my fucking job. That’s not why I bought this fucking adventure. I wasn’t hoping for “frozen tundra. Maybe there is something here for the party to interact with?” Thats the fuck the job of of the fucking designer. I swear to fucking god. How can someone think that this is an adventure, or adding value, or making a DMs life easier? Or even inspiring to run? There’s nothing specific about anything in that fucking hex crawl.

Let us move on to the rooms in the dungeons. “”As you step into the cavern, your footsteps echo ominously through the dimly lit corridor” Second person read-aloud and purple. And the, how about this: “This corridor serves as the foreboding entrance to the Cavern of Bones, setting the tone for the grim discoveries that lie ahead” That’s the DM text, describing what the room is. You know what would be better? Designing a room in which you show us that this is a foreboding entrance rather than telling the DM that this is a foreboding entrance. It’s absurd to put in a line of text that tells us that room one, the entrance, is the entrance. In another place you come upon a pit trap with some bones at the bottom. The DM text tells us “it’s rumored that the bones within the pit belong to thieves and adventurers who sought to plunder the cavern’s secrets, only to meet their demise at the very threshold” This is clearly not written for a DM or for a player. It’s written to be read. And an adventure to read ranks just above “shameless money grab” at the bottom of the list of adventure sins.. In another room, the Guardian Chamber, the read-aloud tells the players “As you step into the circular expanse of the Guardian Chamber your torchlight flickers “ Now how the fuck are they supposed to know that its The Guardian Chamber?! 

This is absurd, and not in a good way. Page long rooms are the norm. Overwrought read-aloud in the second person. DM text telling us background and … I don’t even know what, information that no one can possibly know or care about? 

The hex crawl is abstracted encounters. The dungeon encounters are torturous to wade through. Bad read-aloud. Bad DM text. Standard challenges. And there’s not even a pretense of this being OSR. Nope.

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is fifteen pages. OIt shows you the hexes and the first part of the firs dungeon. More than enough to see what you’re in for, so, good preview at least.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524814/three-witches?1892600