By Richard Davis
Explorer's Guild Publishing
OSR
Level 5
A Fallen Star. A Hidden Power. A Town on the Brink. When a blazing light crashes into the hills near a sleepy barony, mysterious events begin to occur. Animals, and even some people, are driven mad. Adventurers arriving in the region soon find themselves drawn into a dangerous mission that will draw them into the deadly crystaline depths of the earth.
This twelve page adventure uses about three pages to describe four rooms underground with a couple of mutated animals. Almost certainly a 5e conversion, it weirdly spends a lot of time in the lead up to the star-shard cave. An aimless series of mechanistic die rolls and skill checks with little glee in it.
You get attacked by a couple of weird wolves in the forest. Then you run across some mercs hunting them and they tell you Baron Fuckwit is hiring people to track down and stop these weird animals. Going to him you learn of a meteor crater and how dude sent two guardsmen to look in to it, with only one returning guy. You get to talk to guy. On the way to the crater you maybe have a challenge. THen you get to the crater and explore up tp four rooms, rolling dice to overcoming challenges and then eventually fighting a 6HD bear. You won. Congrats. Ain’t no treasure, but Baron Fuckwith might give you up to 1800gp. Which sounds great for a group of level fives as a reward. In 5e.
Yeah. No loot. Lots of skill challenge/attribute check shit. “Causes 1d4 radiant damage.” Uh huh. Conversion, yeah? Which doesn’t have to be bad but nearly almost always is. Hmm, or maybe nearly every adventure is bad anyway and therefore nearly every conversion is? Either way, it’s clearly not localized for the OSR. Which means it’s a fucking money grab. And, therefore Fuuuuuuck You!
Beyond the money grab aspect of a poor conversion, with it’s emphasis on die roll checks, I find the degree of lead in here quite unusual. The initial “hook” is a combat; you’re attacked by mutant wolves which leads to the merc showing up and telling you about the baron and his efforts/hiring./job offer. THis take at least a page to go over. And then the meeting with the baron and some follow ups, with the surviving guardsman and the home of the dead guardsmen perhaps. In another adventure I might look favorably on this. Supporting the DM, adding some flavour, etc. But in this the page count is off. There might be about five pages of this kind of lead in/.side trek stuff and then just a couple of pages for the adventure site. There is,certainly room for this sort of thing in an adventure. Investigation/bad guy lair, that sort of thing.
And the trip to the meteor site. There are four possible encounters possible, presented on a die roll table. This makes no sense. None of them really matter. In one you can find some game trails as a shortcut, if you have tea with a gnome. But there’s no urgency getting to the crater or the return. It’s just flavour. You need a reason to NEED a shortcut, or the shortcut is just the same as “the wind blows from the east now”; there’s nothing behind it. It’s just trivia.
It’s also hitting a pet peeve of mine, the use of the word “turn.” A decent example is “The water is the main vector of the curse, and if the party touches it, they suffer 1d4 damage per turn.” Every ten minutes? Round? Segment? Ten minutes seems off to me?
Everything here points to a very low effort conversion. But, beyond that, even as a 5e adventure, this seems like a throw-away. A disproportionate amount of adventure before the adventuring site. A mediocre hook. An overland journey that is pretty meaningless and should have been been handled as a static encounter that contributed to the adventure instead of just “I need a skill check” encounter. And then the disappointment of the adventuring site proper. A couple of challenges and then a fight with a mutant bear. The Steading, recall, was eight pages. I guess on the plus side there IS a cavern and there IS a star shard.
This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Sucker.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/542514/cavern-of-the-star-shard-osr-basic-fantasy?1892600