Knight of the Corpse Trials

By Odinson Games
Self Published
Cairn

Sir Zebadiah was once a war hero, celebrated for purging witches from the Wenderweald. Now he exhumes his subjects and puts their corpses on trial. His squire begs for intervention before her liege damns the barony entirely. You’re sent to capture Zebadiah alive—but the villagers want him dead, his loyalists stalk the woods, and the dead themselves rise for justice. Will you bring the heretic to justice or suffer his corpse trials?

This fourteen page adventure features about eighteen locations in a village/woods pointcrawl search for an errant and fanatical knight. It has a decent premise and detail in places, but it falls down severely when it comes to locations. Cutsy layout detracts from what otherwise could have been a decent adventure.

“You must arrest the false knight zebadiah and bring him to justice.” Well, actually, I think he IS a baron and knight, so, not really a false knight. Basically, dude burns witches. He got cursed and is now REALLY on a tear, digging up bodies, trying to find the last “real” witch he burned, his sister, who he thinks cursed him. The villagers get pissed and the dead are rising in revolt against having their graves molested. He runs off with his men in to the woods to look for more bodies. So we’ve got a village on edge with soldiers about, and a fanatic in the woods. In comes the party. 

I’m not super down with the hooks, they are all very honor, faith, justice oriented. I’m more down for some RealPolitik framings in situations like these. What was that runaway bridge adventure where the lord said something like “if you can do it without violence then I guess that’s ok also”, or “tie up the loose ends.” Essentially the hooks presented are all the same, with the party being of mine moral character, and I prefer to see some variety. Sure, a fine moral character hook. But also a RealPolitik one, or some other mood variety. Otherwise, it doesn’t really matter who hires the party, you’re just wasting hook space to describe essentially the same hook with different actors.

The general set up and specificity, especially around the village proper, are pretty good. We get some key NPC’s and a little villager generator with a two part name generator, trait, personality, and quirk. Excellent, although a page of these pre-gend would have perhaps been better. There’s also an escalating tension table which serves as a kind of event generator. You really feel the reality of the situation the villagers are in. “Grieving villagers claim their dead at the graves and squabble with tense guards.” or “Moreina doles silver to grieving widows outside the keep.” or “Jaanus leads a mournful family to collect their exhumed dead gibbeted in the square.” or “Edvin leads flagellants around the Temple, crying “Repent! Repent! Repent!”” Excellent window dressing to communicate mood and perhaps even spur some deeper play. “Several stockaded villagers beg for water beside it.” With guards about this could be fun. 

The dude is hiding out in the woods, running around digging up graves, and he’s got a short little three-day timeline associated with his actions, which ends with him razing the village after burning his niece alive. Ouch. 

The overall framework, the situation, the window dressing, this is all great. But things fall apart when we get to the keys. This is one of the, few, locations and typical for the location descriptions: “Rainrot Pit:  creek runoff drains into the cavernous hollow. Dappled light catches on gold down there. + A hex-smuggler stashed 300 gold pieces in a dry bag but the draw-rope was cut.” All of that fabulous situations and specificity , etc really don’t show up at all. So this is not a bad location description: “The Breedpool: mosquitoes cloud the reeds and algae films the still, black water. Helm-sized eggs float in the pool.” But then there’s nothing there. Yes, a monster has a 50% chance of being there, but that’s just a stabbing. The more interesting play just isn’t available. Dude has a timeline and he might be at one of these locations, but then the location is just which screen the Mortal Combat match has a backdrop, with it contributing little to nothing to the play.

And this is a shame. I suspect that there is MORE than enough room in the fourteen pages used to provide just a little more depth to the various keys.  Even if they are meant to be used as backdrop, they could be made in to more interesting backdrops. But it’s gotta use one of those modern hip edgy layouts. And it’s gotta use a fucked up font in place in order to make things hard to read. I just want more out of this. As presented it falls in to something like “a large social situation” adventure, which I can dig. But the way the material is presented doesn’t really help that too much. It seems like it is fighting against that. We need locales, people, timelines, situations, ad then a little bit on using them all together, as the DM, to put it all together. You’ve got this situation and the designer should be giving you the tool sections to help run that in the loosy goosy way that these things usually play out. And there is an attempt at that. You can see the village map and brief descriptions, the forest map and loose descriptions. The NPC section, the events section. But it just never gels to come together in the way I would want it to. It’s like, I don’t know, half a page of text is missing (in addition to the locales …) 

At the conclusion, you need to capture the dude to get the full payout. But, also, “The villagers will be enraged if they see Zebadiah captured and will demand his death, descending into a riot.” Noice. A couple fo extra sentences there would have been ice.

This is not a train wreck. But it also just misses the mark of what I consider decent enough to run.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. No preview, but it is Pay What You Want, so I guess the whole thing is a preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/527846/knight-of-the-corpse-trials?1892600