Echoes of Blackhollow

By Allan Bollinger
Black Dice Games
Cresthaven
Level 1

Something has awakened beneath Black Hollow, and the veil that once separated the world of men from deeper horrors is beginning to thin.

This twenty page adventure uses all twenty pages in a meaningless flaccid jerk off that never pays off in the end. Self-indulgent and purple prose with over explained situations that MEAN NOTHING. 

As I was going through this I had this great schtick I was going to use. I was going to quote various parts of te purple prose and then just say something like “I’m going to kill myself” after each section. And then I started to get worried. The page count kept creeping up. I suddenly only had two pages left and the adventure had not started. Ought oh. So, the designer has denied you, gentle reader, of my most excellent purple prose quoting and instead I get to do this.

FUCK YOU!

You know those fucking tick-toks that cut off the ending? All that edging and lead in and no pay off? Making you go watch part two (which is never fucking posted …) Fucking click bait piece of shits. Well guess what the fuck this adventure is? 

The adventure ends with instructions for the DM to conduct a survey! What fun!

• “What was your favorite moment from this session, and why?”
  • The part where it ended. Also, the moments of column long read-aloud allowed me time to rant about Connections. I appreciated that.
• “Was there anything that felt confusing or frustrating?
  • No. It was all pretty transparent. I mean, the whole Mayor Is An Imposter thing didn’t make sense at all, but that didn’t matter, so.
• “Did any part of the story or world-building pique your curiosity?”
  • I liked the part where the focus was on me and my character and my interaction with the game world. Oh, wait, there was none of that.
• “On a scale of 1 to 10 …”
  • -9. Fuck you. Would rather sit through another six hours of simultaneous gallbladder and kidney stones.

A summary, I guess. Dude steps out of the shadows, is a prick, and tells you his boss wants to hire you. (He’s also a prick.) You maybe investigate a little, go to the village which is mostly abandoned, and only a day away, and question the four or five people left. To no actual end. You then go to the mine entrance and the adventure ends. It’s supposed to be horror themed. Building suspense and the like. It’s pretentious nonsense and fucking clickbait. 

THAT COSTS $20!!!!! I don’t like to mention price in reviews. It is what it is and I’ll pay a lot for a short adventure that is good. But, also, I resent the expensive adventures because I know they are gonna suck ass and spending $60/week on garbage kind of annoys me. I don’t have a good reason for this. It just feels wrong? But, also, This is 22 pages long, costs $20 and is not an actual adventure, in spite of what the naysayers will quote about lead in and roleplaying. I know how to do those fucking things. And I also know how to make an actual fucking adventure out of them. 

So, you gonna wander around your start village and ask some questions, maybe. Then you gonna go to the village in question and ask some questions. That’s the adventure. I guess there are some fire beetles you could disturb. And a Carrion Screecher Swarm, whatever that is. A little description might be nice. All we get is “As the party nears a ruined spiral-marked stone, a swarm bursts from the dead canopy.” Ok, sure, whatever. Just yell COMBAT and roll the dice, I guess. No creature description. No real encounter. Just getting attacked. Fun.

One of my favorite sections of the adventure is the “PURPOSE IN ADVENTURE STRUCTURE” notes that are pervasive in the text. Long, lengthy sections that tell us what the purpose of the encounter is. Which is inevitably build dread, foreshadow, offer subtle backstory. Over and over again the text takes, what, a quarter of a page each time, to explain what the fuck it is trying to do. Repetitiion is one thing, but fuck man, its repeated like a gazillion times in twenty different ways. I get it. Be creepy. Note, it’s not advice on HOW to be creepy, it just says the purpose is to be creepy. So, you know, worthless. “The Mayor’s House is a roleplaying-heavy location full of tension, contradictions, and concealed information.” Yup, just like every place in this adventure.

Column long read-aloud. Almost a page long in places. Purple prose. “The man is tall and pale, his features sharp as winter frost. His eyes are cloudy like river glass, and his black robes seem to drink in the fading light.” Ok, so, I know, I said write evocatively. There’s the “stick an adjective/adverb in front of each noun/verb” method of fucking that up, and then there’s the simile.metaphor method of fucking that up. There is so much of this that I was going to make it the entire review. “From the moment the characters leave Cresthaven, the sky above them hangs heavy and oppressive, a leaden gray promising no warmth” Jesus H Christ. “Only silence, and the growing sense that whatever lives here no longer remembers how to greet strangers.” I’m gonna kill myself. “The final pages are nothing but spirals. Something broke them. Something reached in and rewrote what they were.” If I had to sit through it then so do you. “A stern but sincere man, Father Harder warns against venturing into forgotten places. He’s begun leaving the chapel door unlocked at night, in case the light must Flee. “ In case the light must flee? 

Look, this is just a shit adventure. Or, as the initial observations noted, not an actual adventure at all. To put a cherry on top of it all, there are passages out of place in the text. As if there were a copy/paste error and chunks were just moved to other area. EASL I can forgive, but a final proof read? [Insert standard joke/comment here] I think not. Twenty fucking dollars for this. Twenty fucking dollars. For 22 pages of nothing.

This is $20 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages and shows you nothing but endless designer puffery.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/529970/echoes-of-black-hollow?1892600

I wonder if I’m still alive and out of surgery yet?