By Ken Taylor
Ripped Tabard Adventures
Castles & Crusades
Levels 3-5
The autumn wind whispers through the corn, carrying the sound of crows and the rustle of straw. Somewhere in the fields, justice denied walks on legs of wood, seeking those who wronged him. Will your party bring peace to a restless spirit, or simply add more blood to the harvest soil?
This 25 page adventures presents a vengeful scarecrow taking out its revenge on a farming family. It wants to be a drawn off eerie affair, and tries to provide some advice in doing so. It also lacks meaningful specificity to help bring it to life in a way that is other than combats.
Fifty years ago an innocent man was executed for theft. His body was stuffed in a scarecrow to make an example of him by the local bigwig farm family who he supposedly wronged. Oops, he didn’t do it. A lightning strike all these years later has caused his spirit to animate the scarecrow, which is now killing folk in the same family. Oopsie.
The adventure here is doing something interesting with its organization. It wants to be a little open-ended sandboxy like thing and is organizing itself to help promote that. We get the basic set up and then a list of key NPCs and what they know, and a few others to add some color. We’ve got sections on how to run the scarehow, creating atmosphere, pacing, and so on. And, of course a whole lot of focus on the combat encounters and the scarecrows hit and run tactics, etc.
I can absolutely see how this thing is supposed to be run. Wander in, talk to people, see the tension in the air, set up a couple of glimpses, build some tension, find out more information, hun it down and/or deal with it in a way other than hacking it by putting it to rest, etc. And, some of the advice is decent. The scarecrow can set fires in a distant field to create a distraction while it circles around behind to try and get someone, or the advice to try and build sympathy for the wrongly executed man. And it’s all generally laid out in a decent manner, with bullets highlighting information for easy scanning and so on. I might take a little exception to some of the “people” information being scattered a little more than I would like, with motivations and timeline information not all being in the same place for a person. The single column doesn’t help with density issues and there is also a distinct lack of “other NPCs” beyond the main players. It would have been nice to have a few more just to fill in a bit when needed, a name, a quirk, a vignette, something like that to help support the DM through what is recommended to be three sessions of play. (12 hours?! For this?!)
Where the adventure falls down is in its specificity. I’m going to grossly exaggerate here, but, “make it spooky!” is not specific. There is a decent amount of general information here, which could be tightened up by combining some NPC information, etc. There is a general flow, and general advice on what the designer intends to happen. I think you can understand the vibe the designer is going for, they outline it several times. And there is some very general advice on how to create that vibe. For example, “build sympathy for [wrongly executed dude].” Well, ok yes. That is going to add some depth to this otherwise pretty straightforward adventure and may even lead the party to put him to rest from a position of sympathy and empathy rather than from solving a killer scarecrow/hack problem. But HOW do you do that? Given that the farm family is reluctant to expose their past deeds and the family secret, what to do what to do? A few words leading us down that path would be good. It does hit in places, like that whole advice to start fires as a distraction and so on. It’s just a few words like “it will cause distractions [starting a fire in a distant field, making animal noises]” And this is great. I think you can riff on a nighttime scene from that, the chaos and so on, in saving things from a fire. (Which, again would help with a few more supporting characters) But MOST of the adventure doesn’t really have that degree of specificity. I’m going to use the words “lacking in vignettes”, but I don’t think you even need to go to that extreme, of a full blown vignette. Just a few more tips to emphasize certain points, themes, actions and the like, as the party adventures and the DM strives to fill in twelve hours of play time.
Another example here is the AFTERMATH section. We have a couple of notes, based on the outcome, of the prominent farm family having a tarnished reputation or suffering from some setbacks, in about as many words. This lacks somewhat the gravitas that more specificity would bring to the outcomes and really bring home the weight of the proceedings.
There are hints in that screenshot of some decent things. The harvest setting portion in particular, although, again, this is mostly generalizations. It’s more advice than the grounded things that a DM could riff on to make an adventure really comes to life and hit home. This is not, by any means, a throw away adventure, though it tackles the trope of a vengeful autumn scarecrow. Anyone who has heard the wind wistling through dry corn can imagine the eerie vibes it brings, but if you’ve not then you’re going to struggle to bring that to life.
This is $8 at DriveThru. The preview is the first five pages. Given the unconventional nature of the organization, which I’m intrigued by the possibilities of in a sandboxy way, I’m struggling to imagine a better preview, but a better preview IS needed.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/541684/scarecrow-s-revenge?1892600