Brink of Calamity

By Trent Smith
Storm Fetish Productions
1e
Levels 1-6

The town of Warnell, straddling a trade route that crosses two great forests, seems at first like any other backwater on the borderland of civilization, but menace and mystery lurk beneath the surface: a rash of disappearances from the shanties outside the town walls, a ruthless drug cartel operating with impunity while the town watch are powerless to stop them, and marauding bands of brigands and slavers ravaging the countryside. Rumors point would-be heroes and fortune seekers to the enigmatic sanatorium and casino outside of town that draw strange and wealthy travelers from far-away lands, to the abandoned (and reportedly haunted or cursed) old salt mines, to a remote mist-shrouded logging camp with an unsavory reputation, and deep into the trackless primeval forest where the xenophobic elves have forbidden all trespassers. While these locations likely hold death and destruction for the careless and foolhardy, they may also hold the keys to drawing this afflicted town and its hapless inhabitants away from the brink of calamity. 

This 180 page supplement describes a region with a couple of dungeons, towns, bandit lairs, eleven woods and such to have adventures in. There is design behind it, which has always been a rare thing to see and is always wonderful to see. It is dense, vanilla, deep, and pig-headed.

Why was this published?

It obviously took a lot of time and effort. There’s a cover. A credits page. Art has been inserted. So, it was obviously meant for other people to look at, not just personal notes. Is it an appeal to the ego? To have people say “Man, that dude, he knows what he’s doing!” I’m sure some people will say that. Here’s some quotes from Dragonsfoot: “Looks cool. “, “Cheers!” “Wow! Sold!”, “What he said!” “It looks nice!” “Sweet! I’m interested in the print version!” “Looks neat! Printed copy for me!” That’s not for this adventure, that’s for Into the Mite Lair, a dreadful adventure. But fear not, I’m sure the same people will say the same thing about this adventure. So, again, why was this published? For people to use? From the intro: “Be advised that, contrary to contemporary fashion, this adventure is not designed to be run with minimal or zero preparation by the GM. The expectation rather is that the prospective GM will take the time to read and study the entire thing, or at least the appropriate chapter, and take notes as needed to help familiarize yourself with the material and how all of its pieces relate to each other to form a complete tapestry.” A well designed adventure, with depth, is not mutually exclusive with easy to run. I’m not blind, I know what the meme is. “Brycey Bryce only likes those zero prep adventures.” This is absurd. But, also, it is absolutely true that the number one complaint is that adventures are hard to run. There is no “modern fashion in easy to run adventures”, as my continual rants will prove out.

That’s my bookshelf. You see that big stack of shit on top of Arabian Knights? A complete set of Federation & Empire expansions, to complement the main box next to Der Untergang von Pompeji. The core rulebook alone is 166 pages of dense type that compares to the bible or a dictionary. The base game takes weeks to play and dominates an OVERSIZED table, with other tables serving as support, with thousands of counters. It’s never going to get played. This is no Acaeum collection, waiting to be pulped by my kids when I die. With the exception of F&E. Six  months in this has generated little to no buzz almost certainly because of the barrier to entry. The fuckwits will chime in about now with some anecdotal examples, but I stand by my statement. This SHOULD be the new home base, the new general environment from which adventures spring. But it’s not going to be. Because SOMEONE decided that their strict condemnation of a fucking MEME was more important than people enjoying this during play. You’re damn right I’m fucking angry. Because this is a good adventure.

Parts of this have been published before, I believe. Melonath Falls I’ve reviewed before and one of the other parts seems familiar although I see no mention in previous reviews. Essentially you’ve got a small region with a town, a couple of dungeons interconnected, a wilderness to explore, and a spa/casino rife for some infiltration. No, it’s not a magical ren faire vibe, it kind of fits in to a Road to Wellville kind of thing. The way to think of this, I think, is a base to operate from while you explore Other Adventures. In your downtime things will pop up as you interact with the folks and places in this setting. And that will lead to more intrigue, forays in to the dungeons and spa/casino, and journeys through the woods, where you slowly become entangled in the things going on in this adventure setting. It is rich, interconnected and deep, none of it being in your face but all of it available. 

A great deal of this drop in comes from the more vanilla vibe of this, combined with a kind of seediness. A kind of underground thug thieves guild, drugs (or the black lotus variety! A great appeal to the classics!), slaves, streetwalkers and gangs of children on the streets. RIval guards. The core of this is solidly in the human-centric approach to a base, punctuated with just slightly off humanoids: bullywugs, xvarts, some fox-people (in a non-odious way) and so on. Just enough to add some freshness to the creature encounters while still anchoring things solidly in bandits, thieves, and scoundrels. The Taggart Gang. The Golarossa Brigands (although I would rename them to the Gorarossa Free Rangers or something like that.) Intrigue is here, if you just open your eyes …

The writing is generally straightforward and is at its best when Trent is adding just a flourish that grounds the encounter in such a way that the DM can riff off of it easily. Age and eye color and cloaks are no match for “one Erasmus Prokilios, an owlish, perpetually-bothered middle-aged man who is seemingly always carrying a large sheaf of papers and much too busy to be bothered by anything of less than existential urgency.” That’s an NPC you know how to run, a sentence that cuts through all of the noise; you need nothing more about him to run with it. That’s when he’s at his best at descriptions.

Mostly, though, you’re going to get VERY in depth and detailed descriptions of things. Unlike a lot of adventure, a lot of the description here is to a purpose. If you pay attention you can learn things. ABout people. About places, and the descriptions, lng though tey are, are the cornerstone of this. It’s design, where things at this locale and a different one and different one add up to a larger picture and allow the smart party to figure things out. 

And smart you will need to be. Seventeen giant rats. Eleven wolves. These encounters are not for the meek. You’ll need your experienced players showing up to handle this, The deck isn’t stacked against them (with a single exception), it’s all coming from the neutral judge style in which difficulties are explained and then the party set loose to run their zany schemes to overcome them. That single exception is the casino, where magic columns, stone golems, and a captured daemon all protect the casino and vault. I get it, but, also, this is the one area in the adventure in which this kind of shit appears and I would have preferred a more solidly human/normal grounding. 

An example? Hey, you know all of those times you explored a mine? How many times has the designer put in rules for undermining a support beam? Never? Well Trent covers it. Clearly, a reaction to playtesting, this is the kind of thing that abounds in this adventure. Detail. Mostly aimed at what you can see were actual play. Which is how it should be. A fucking dock takes, what? A page? A column? Yet it is key to understanding a piece of what is going, for a clever party who is paying attention. “The strongbox is trapped with a needle that will prick the finger of anyone who attempts to force or pick the lock, who must then save vs. poison or the hand struck will swell up and become red and will be useless for one week.” Excellent!

I want to call out, in particular, the handling of the woods in this. The wilderness environment is one of the better ones, with the elves in it being maybe the best implementation I’ve seen. There’s a black dragon in the wilderness (I love black dragons. I don’t know why? They just seem to fit so much better than other types? A byproduct of DL1 conditioning maybe?) We’ve got all sort of magical creatures, dryads, and so on that fit in well. And elf communities. With a way to contact them. Maybe. Standoffish. Ready to fill you full of arrows. And then a corrupted elf settlement, with corrupted dryad and a fungus that works REALLY well together. The whole vibe of the elves in this is great. Not the super-powered problem-solvers we think of them from LoTR, but more isolated, coming though well, without being asshole xenophones. (Just , I don’t know, Appalachian standoffish?) 

The wanderers in this are great. Clearly influenced by the 1e DMG, they get little paragraphs that give some guidance for the DM to riff on. Hookers who are in with the waifs. You know how ACKS tried to do a whole econ/larger game world thing? This delivers in the solid 1e style that I’ve seen only a handful of times. No sages in this town! No seafarers, unless they are on their way somewhere else. Because the book says there might be sages, Trent is clarifying. Training and trainers, how many times have you seen that mentioned in relation to a home base? Well it’s fucking here. Because that’s 1e. This is more 1e than anything T$R every put out. Not the bullshit petty arguments over minutia or stodginess that reigns online, but 1e, the way it was meant to be. The SPIRIT of 1e oozes out of this, so much so that even my Skull Mountain OD&D lair needs to check to make sure its door is locked lest its owner be tempted by the Harlots table. 

The issues with this adventure are too numerous to list. Monster reactions are in their rooms rather than in the rooms they would react to. The hex map, in particular, is quite hard to read. I get the barrier to entry the digital tools present, but that thing needs cleaned up. The adventure is low on WONDER. I’m all for gonzo, but it needs to be anchored in the mundane, and this runs as much to the mundane as possible while still having dragons and the like in it. You’re just not gonna get the weirdness that punctuates the more grounded 1e adventures from T$R. I’m not even sure weirdness is the best right term. Specials? 

The major issue here is going to be the DMs ability to run this. I am opposed to the DM making major efforts to run an adventure, particular with highlighters and notes. And that’s just not possible here. This is dense and obtuse. On purpose. As I think back, I recall an index of major NPC names and a little brief section on which areas are appropriate for which levels. That may be the only assistance you’re getting. And this extends to section headings. I’m looking right now at the Government & Law section There are long sections of text punctuated by a NPC stat block. What you need to infer from this is the part of the city that person runs is detailed above their stat block. Like, write about a column of text, stick in a stat block, write a couple more paragraphs, stick in a stat block for an NPC and so on. From this you need to pull out that NPC is head of the forces detailed in that block section above them. No headings. No bolding. Just a giant blob of text. I’m not sure how throwing in a section title of “City Guard” or “Night Patrol” somehow undermines the clarity of vision that went in to this. The writing is not conversation and is not all useless, the closest example maybe being the writing in Tharizdun? Except much longer chunks. I’m not going to insult Trent and tell him he needs an editor, challenges to authorial vision and all that. But it does need to be trimmed, with more focus, without losing the sections of depth he’s provided. More section headings, a better section on how the adventure works together, and so on. In a perfect world we’d see more use of indents and bolding to help focus the text and the DMs attention where they need it. This is not a dumbing down of the adventure or an appeal to zero-prep. The only person who can hold a 180 page adventure in their head is the designer, proper. You like Guy, yeah? He’s got a series of articles on layout. 

The binders to the right of Dungeonquest is what I run my games from. The books to the left of Arabian Nights are the D&D supplements I have in print. Some of them are also obtuse. But they ALL get used; that’s why I have them in print and that’s why there are so few of them. My fear, my great fear, is that people will get this and then NOT use it. And the fault is not on them because they choose to not make their entire personality Running Brink of Calamity. 

I would champion the fuck out of a Deluxe Edition Kickstarter that kept the depth while trimming it and making it more usable. 

This is $15 at DriveThru. The preview shows you some dungeon pages, and is probably a good preview for those sections. Mayhap a little misleading on the other sections though. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/508460/brink-of-calamity?1892600

Sorry to do this to you Trent, it’s unfair.  I’d love to clarify my points more but I’m not sure I’m able to. The reviews may be coming out a little slower. I’m still here but not at my best. Essentially every spare part that was inside my body is no longer there; if you can live without it then I don’t have it anymore. (Including a fucking molar? I went in WITHOUT any cracked teeth and came out with a cracked #31 for the Endodontist to refuse and send me to the in hospital oral surgeon!? Yeah, nothing happened, sure thing.) I’m going to try and use this time to cover some of the longer adventures that have built up on my Wishlist. I usually take about two days to do a thirty or so page adventure, with a longer one in progress as time permits. I’m going to switch to covering some of the longer ones, so you should expect things to come out a little slower until I recover from my System Shock roll. Not to worry, I got a +50 on multiple rolls of the Harlot table and have been giving generously to the Temple in Corinth for years; I’m well taken care of.