The Hunt for Grimmelbach

By AB Andy
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Levels 3-4

A vengeful bear roams the woods. A desperate prayer awakens something older. Now the villagers vanish by moonlight.

This 53 page adventure presents a small village with about nine locations to investigate and then nineteen populated hexes to explore on a 6×5 grid, all in search of a rogue grizzly. It’s clearly going for those Old World vibes, but just falls JUST short on presenting the ancient-misty-forest-full-of-old-altars environment.

We’ve got this village right on the edge of the deep wood. There’s this ancient mama bear that lives in the deep wood, a kind of legend in the village. Oops, hunters accidentally kill her cub. She then starts killing hunters. And mushroom foragers. And wood collectors. And anyone else you ventures in to the forest. The village starts to suffer; lots of deaths and the resources are cut off. Some dumb ass wanders in to the woods in desperation and find an ancient stone altar and prays at it. Surprise! It’s the goddess of the hunt! And she sends a spectral huntsman and his hounds to kill the bear. Kind of. You see he hunts EVERYTHING. Including villagers. Oops. In comes the party. And to all of that we’re gonna add some other weird ass shit. It’s not quite an old world vibe, it’s not quite an appalachian vibe. There’s lot of antlers, stone altars ini the woods, and bone charms … along with one murderous hick family. I don’t know what vibe that is. It’s a decent starting point though.

The villager has about nine locations and is really just a place to gather some information. Frank saw signs of Y over at X. Mary thinks she saw something over at the fallen stump, and so on. The locations, proper, get a sentence or two and then the people there get, I don’t know, a quarter page or so, with their knowledge bulleted. This is all about right to me. A little bit of an evocative backdrop, but the emphasis is on the people AND It’s easy to locate what they know. I might have appreciate a little one-pager reference sheet on the NPC’s, to help run this section a little more dynamically (it’s easier to pull a rando name and fact out of a conversation ad-hoc that way) but I’m not gonna die/ It’s just gonna be a substandard experience. Oh, wait … Anyway, this is all supported by a Villager Stress table. This is, essentially, a random event generator, once a day, based on how tense things are. “A screaming match erupts between two families. One accuses the other of drawing the attention of demons. A knife is drawn” and that’s from the MEDIUM table. Yeesh. It’s a mix of fun little vignettes, as quoted above. Very little is outright supernatural, just hints and portents. The descriptions are also right at the line of what I would consider good. Certainly, that little scene I quoted can be built upon. It’s a good idea and I can run with a good idea. I don’t know, it’s slightly abstracted, maybe? Screaming match is good. Draws a knife is good. I think it’s the One accuses the other of drawing the attention of demons. That feels off. Abstracted. Non-specific. And I think this is a common issue in this adventure. It has some good ideas but it mixes them up with some abstraction which kind of drags the whole thing back.

After Ye Olde Village the party will take their information and set off in to the woods. Six mile hexes, about thirty of them, about half populated. Six hours to traverse a hex for the first time, or with a guide from the village. You’re looking at six hexes, minimum, if you somehow made a beeline for the bears new den. You gonna be in the woods a bit and/or returning to town. 

“An ancient corpse is nailed to a tree, throat torn. Its mouth is stuffed with wildflowers that do not wither. A charm made from deer teeth hangs from its hand” Well there we go then! How about “The air turns sweet. A woman?s humming can be heard from just beyond sight. If pursued, the sound grows into wailing. A banshee” That’s a nice banshee encounter, it fooled me. Decent wanderers in this. The hexes proper kind of mirror the village in their descriptions. A sentence or two and then some bulleted explanations below with some bolding here and there to emphasize words. It’s a clear and easy to use format. “Half-sunk into a moss-covered hillock, the old stone shrine to the hunting gods leans like a drunk. Burnt-out candles and rotted offerings litter its base. Wind always seems to blow here, even on still days.” We’re getting a little purple in places, in the leans like a drunk, but its not bad. There’s a faint whiff of the old in this. Freeing a soul, from a body nailed to a tree, results in “His eyes will then turn to polished pearls worth 500 gold each as the rest of the corpse withers away.” There’s an air of mystery to that. The unexplained. That wonder beyond your philosophy is what I want and the adventure delivers it. Oh, oh! The backwoods family. Purveyors of honey so good it heals! “They?ll wake up tied up in the hut, with the family about to murder them. As they sharpen rusty knives, they?ll mention that the forest must be left alone for the nature to balance itself out” Fucking druids man! Those nature folk are all the same. I hope you hit the overlook hex first, where you might see them dragging a body to a shallow grave … In fact, I love that overlook hex, giving clues to the hexes around it. It’s strikes me as everything D&D should be, taking advantage of whats around you and paying attention to the hints dropped. 

Before going on, I must mention the stat blocks: “6[13], 5, 22, 40?, 15[+4], 1 x bite (1d8), 2 x claw (1d4), known blood, frenzy, fleeing.” I’m a fan of terseness, but drop in the HD man, at a minimum. Yeah, I’m a smart guy and I can figure it, but I wish to spend all of my cognitive burden on the game at the table, not on the stat block.

Something feels off here, though. I have two theories. The first, and I’m willing to be told I’m wrong, is the somewhat slower pace of the hex crawl. The kind of slow, methodical plod feels a little unsupported. Hmmm, almost like it needs more per hex, or more random encounters or various types or something like that. I could be wrong about that. The second is the somewhat hit and miss nature of the descriptions. You can, every once in awhile, get the vibe that the designer is trying to lay down, the ancient forest, misty, old shrines, and so on. Or, perhaps, you can see that is what the designer is trying to do. The writing is just a little off though. It just doesn’t FEEL that way. Those little abstracted bits maybe? Not hitting it hard enough in line after line? I don’t know. I do know that this is one of the hardest parts of writing, so I’m not exactly mad. But, also, it just feels like the vibe is not pulled off. 

But, it’s easy to scan, the interactivity is there in a variety of encounters of various types. Souls to free. Corpses to talk to, and fight. Creepy shit in the woods. A murder family. A great mix of interactivity in the woods and in the two little mini-dungeons (the old bear lair and new bear lair) 

This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages. It’s a good mix of general pages, town pages, and a few lair pages. It’s a good preview and shows off the formatting, the style of village play, and what the bear lair is like. It’s a good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/526456/the-hunt-in-grimmelbach?1892600