Old John Stuart’s Mill

Archie Fields III, Matthew C. Funk
Witch Pleas Publishing
5e
Level 1

Set in the richly detailed settlement of Greenspires, a town nestled among the elven ruins of the Hinterwoods of Witch Pleas’ Legends of Lohre setting, this tale begins at the cozy Drunken Dragon Inn and escalates quickly. A goblins raid becomes an epidemic of the un-dead, with a zombified child stalking his cellar and a grieving father wielding dark magics. Old John Stuart’s Mill is more than a dungeon crawl. It’s a reckoning of morality, justice and consequence.

Before you go bitching, think a bit about my direct and indirect illocutionary force. 

This 28 page adventure is a rather simple and linear affair full of terrible choices when viewed through an OSR lens. Beyond the normal D&D stuff, two of the encounters provide an explicit challenge to the characters to solve, one simplistic and one more difficult, that involve morality in a more nuanced standpoint than it is generally covered in D&D. The more interesting one is worthy of inclusion in a game, perhaps, and fits in well to my People of Pembrocktonshire villager vibe.

This is a 5e adventure, but they stuck it in the OSR section of DriveThru. Normally I’d pass that by, but then they called it “John Stuart’s Mill.” Ever the sucker for marketing, I eagerly dove in. Who’s that Australian philosopher, you know, the one who posited that every time you drank something other than tap water you were making a decision to kill a child somewhere who doesn’t have access to clean water, because you could have spent that cash to help them/donate?

Just as we saw with the NASA adventure, our crossover friends may be perfectly competent in their own fields but have not been born with the innate ability to present an adventure in a useful way. This results in an effort that has a rather higher bar to run it than what I would prefer, or, even, when compared to other adventures from the more mainstream designers. These sorts of adventures, attempting to crossover to other audiences (in this case, classes and the like, using D&D to help ground philosophical concepts) face the added barrier of audiences new to the game, and thus needing that rigor that comes from good deign principles across the Bryce pillars. There are The Old Wounds: long sections of italic read-alouds. It has been known for quite some time that long sections of read-aloud causes players attention to drift. Phones come out. Limiting this to two to four sentences and making it interactive instead of exposition dump is the better choice. And, of course, there are studies showing the increased cognitive burden of long sections of italics. But, every adventure does it and thus the pattern repeats as new designers learn their mistakes from old mistakes. And the fucking font is small. Grrr…

But then the other issues: Eight linear encounters. We must agree to disagree on the modern trend of giving the players no agency in their lives. I recognize that this is the reality of the modern game, and yet I must insist that a game with agency is a more rewarding game. Decisions are, after all, the conceit of game theory, yes? (Ha! You see?! You see?! It a fucking activity and not a game!) 

Lest you think it’s all fun and games down this linear path of encounters, you will also get to enjoy a mary sue. I thought we had left this far, far behind us, but I do seem to be seeing a resurgence as of late? The sheriff is clearly a werewolf and, at one point, a giant wolf charges out to scare off some goblins attacking the party, reducing the number the party has to fight. Conan becomes king by his own hand. No, this is not a power gaming fantasy. This is design in which the players, running the characters at the table, get to be in control of the game with the DM as judge, not some Storyteller bullshit. Players in charge. And don’t go misinterpreting that statement in to Storygamer territory. My scorn here is somewhat lessened because the wolf attacks when the goblins are throwing their first firebombs, disrupting their attack. Telegraphing whats to come, for smart players paying attention, is generally good design. As presented here its rather a bit blatant, with no player skill required to figure out whats going on. Meh.

I can go on. Purple prose from novel writing instead of evocative descriptions from technical writing: “ Greenspires’ humble buildings huddle in the chill of the night, the brave little lights in their windows pressed against encroaching darkness, flickering faintly upon the antediluvian emerald spires of the elven ruins.” or “The scent of cedars, pine and oak permeates the night with a heavy impression of the Hinterwoods’ age.” At the mill there are various sounds; a hobgoblin butchering an animal that is screaming very loudly. Goblins arguing in the next room. These appear, though, in the rooms in question and NOT in the room in which you hear them. I can beat a dead horse here explaining ad nausea why this is  bad, just as I could spend time describing why the opening “run in to the bar to get help help” scene is unrealistic, bread immersion,  and ineffective in creating the emotional response that the designer is going for, or the backstory exposition that muddies up the DM notes sections of encounters making it harder for a DM to locate for what is the absolute most important thing in adventure design: running the adventure at the table. But, instead …

Let’s talk orc babies, in which my perfect knowledge of adventure design that can never be questioned instead turns in to shaky opinion. 

We gotta go in to this with a couple of statements. First, at some point things changed from Nature to Nurture in the role of Evil in a humanoids alignment. When there is a god of evil and you are born evil then many of our moral arguments fall apart.Slaughter thy orc babies as ye may, Old time is a-flying. You do have a soul, there is an afterlife, and you WILL be spending eternity being happy or punished up in Olympia or the Seven Heavens or wherever. Maybe figure out what Eru Lluvatar thinks the meaning of good is? I don’t care if you like the official changes WOTC made to humanoids and their relationship to evil, that assumption is where we have to start our discussion in the modern game. If it help you live with yourself, go look up the appropriate Aurelius quote about the othering and generalization of people in order to justify doing things to them you otherwise could not. While you suck him off. The moral question is more interesting in 5e than our pre-Nietzian OSR versions. 

Alignment, used in the way its used here, does NOT make the game fun. I don’t care what version the game is and I don’t care what your decision was in killing the orc babies, a DM that modifies the game based on morality is a bad DM. This adventure makes one damning statement in it: “Don’t decide who is ‘right’ among the players. Instead, let the world you craft respond to the players, ideally with deeply meaningful consequences to their actions.” Absolutely the fuck not. There is no place for morality in D&D. It’s supposed to fucking fun. Go story game activity if you want to trauma bond and moralize. I’m drinking beer and eating pretzels. I sucked diseased cocks all fucking day, eating literal shit, dealth with my commute, got bitched at at home by everyone on earth for not taking out the garbage, and, then, to relax, some fuckwit DM is gonna moralize at me? I think not. Do NOT do this in your game. Can there be consequences? Sure. Orcs don’t trust you. They sing songs about you. Whatever. But you must divorce it from moral decisions. Fortunately, the adventure doesn’t do this, in spite of that bullshit statement.

The philosophy portion appears twice, explicitly (although I believe you can see some shadows in other areas) in the adventure. The first is with two goblins attacking you. That have clearly been beat up. That are clearly incompetent. That are clearly going to, at a minimum, rob you. Except they don’t. What do you do with them? The adventure explicitly notes that it is designed around utilitarianism and Kantian ethics, and thus this encounter makes sense in that context. I mean, the entire goal of the adventure is to bring to life philosophical problems for discussion and debate, so, you know. It does that. This is the weaker of the two problems presented in the adventure. It’s rather straightforward and, I think, hamfisted. Designed, bluntly, for one reason, that stated debate.

And then there’s encounter two. John Stewart has braved the goblin attack, abandoning his wife and children, to run back in to his mill, under attack by the goblins. You find him in his basement, next to a boy. A boy with ashen skin, kneeling next to a goblin, still twitching in his death throes, tearing at it with his hands and teeth. ““Please…please don’t hurt my boy.” The man is John Stuart, and the zombified boy is his son, Emmett. Emmett is temporarily distracted from the PCs by feasting on the goblin’s corpse, so they have some time to talk to John.”

Jesu Christo! Nice touch there with the goblin still twitching and this being Ye Olde Flesh Eating Zombie. I mean, the gobbo was going to kill them, right? None of that ham fisted morality here, abstracted away in to academia. Dude is RIGHT in front of you. He loves his son and brought him back. Is it permissible for the chronically underfunded state school for orphans to have a pet tarrasque? What could possibly go wrong? The real world is messy as will be a discussion about what to do here. There are no right choices, only wrong ones. 

As a teaching adventure spur debate in a classroom, the two explicit philosophical situations do what they need to do. The overall packaging of those two is rather poor. It is going to be a hard adventure to pick up and run at a table,  accessible to those not overly familiar with D&D. As a teaching aid, this aspect needs to be approved substantially. Font, exposition, organization, you don’t have to go OSE style here here but you do need to make it much easier on someone WANTING to use it. As is the barrier to entry is rather large, which means a focus on trying to run the adventure instead of the adventure itself. 

This is $7 at DriveThru. Stick in a fucking preview and help a prole out so I can make an existential choice on if its worth buying or not! 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/530608/old-john-stuart-s-mill-1st-level-d-d-5e-adventure?1892600

Ganz Vargle—(Neutral Evil, he/him) a human man in his early 50s with gray starting to set in his dark brown hair and beard. He tends to dress fairly well, reflecting fashions from more populous cities closer to the coast, though he’s not ostentatious. Ganz is friendly and outgoing, but he hides a dark past: in his adventuring days, he sought to summon a demon with whom he could bargain for power, power he could use to change the world for the better. He found the witch of the wood, Moldred, who furnished him with the forbidden knowledge and materials necessary to call the foul spirit. The demon demanded a terrible sacrifice: the lives of Ganz’s adventuring companions. Though Ganz cared for his companions, he believed their sacrifice would be worth the good that he might ultimately accomplish with his magical might. Ganz slaughtered them all in their sleep in a profane ritual, but the demon was as deceitful as he was cruel: after the deed was done, he told Ganz that the best thing that a blackguard who’d sacrifice his friends for power could do for the world was to die. The demon afflicted Ganz with a terrible curse that would gradually weaken his heart and lungs until they cease functioning, and Ganz has been trying ever since to find ways to alleviate and remove the curse. The powerful talisman possessed by the witch Moldred can remove his curse, but when he approached the witch for help, she told him that he’d doomed himself by his own wicked hand and that his end is well-deserved. He swore on that day that her talisman would be his— that if she wouldn’t give it to him, he’d return and take it by force.

https://www.lukesurl.com/archives/comic/281-auto-whats

I fucking love Kant in this. “Because the Monster Manual says so! Don’t pretend you don’t know what evil is!

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/23