By Christopher Wilson
Self Published
OSE
Level 1
The characters find themselves thrust into a fight from the very jaws of death in a dark cave system, only to discover upon their escape that they are in a strange realm. None of them can remember what they were doing before they came to this place…and they soon realize that more of their memories slip away each day the longer they remain here. Hunted at night and in the dark places of this confusing world, the characters must find a solution to their lost memories, or risk becoming a husk of their former selves, wiped clean of all that they once knew or loved.
This 137 page adventure has five “acts” that mashup the Tv show From, The Good Place, and being dead. It drones on, bores the DM and the party, and sometimes does something interesting. The amount of trivia here is beyond belief.
Dude is pumping out about a hundred pages a month, so this is likely to be my last Christopher Wilson review. It says it’s not AI. Meh. You start the cave in a dark cave chased by monsters at level one. You have no memories. This is fine, it’s level one, it’s the campaign starter. You are then attacked by 2d4 shadows with 11hp each, AC7, and strength drain. Presumably you don’t all die. (Later on you get attacked by 8 ghasts. AC3, 4HD, paralyze. You fucking enjoy that.) Someone, I guess, exits the four room cave to find a road with crucifixes down it, the dead party members on it, clinging to life with 1hp each. You head down the road to a town. People in the town forget things. At night monsters that look like people come out to try and get inside buildings. But if you have this holy symbol inside and the doors and windows closed then they can’t get in. Yeah, I like From also. Spoilers! I think it’s … well, I won’t spoil it. But let’s just say there was a popular book about two people in Victorian times. DONT FUCKING RUIN IT IN THE COMMENTS. Mail me instead 🙂 Anyway, after the first night you bury some dead villagers (why were they out after dark? It’s not mentioned?) and then you fuck around until you hex crawl. There are a couple of places to explore in a rather large map, including a lighthouse in the mountains. Yeah, I like From also. Anyway, eventually you find out you’re actually dead and meet Charon in a bar and he takes you over the Styx and his brother picks you up in this carriage. It’s a long journey, you listen to Bro drone on and on, you get attacked, and make it to the halls of judgement, where you get reincarnated without any memories. So it’s all pointless.
The designer notes that this level one adventure is exceptionally dangerous. And that if a PC dies they can walk out of the woods or the ever present fog or something, back again. So. No consequences. Ever. For anything. Do you think it was supposed to be a nihilistic metaphor? No, I’m reading too much in to it. Drawing parallels between it and reviewing adventures?
You meet Madge, in the village, who monologues a giant exposition dump of read-aloud. A lot of things are behind “roll to continue” checks, so you nly get to go on to that part of the adventure f you pass a skill check. Which is always dumb. Sometimes monsters are highlighted with bolded text in the wall of text. Sometimes they are not. No idea; you got me.
There are hints here and there of more interesting ideas, that are almost never followed up on or emphasized. There’s a key called “A Dirt Path That Was Once a Road.” That’s evocative. There’s also this enoughter is a crying baby in a basinet. And when you go check the crying stops and you find a dead baby. Ewwww! That’s great!
But these little moments are few and far between. And I’m not even sure I’m be able to list any others that struck me as much as those two did. For the most part it is exposition dump at you and being led around by others with little to no consequences for your actions or die rolls. I like From. I think the way they leave you with questions is a PERFECT implementation of leaving mystery and things unexplained in a campaign world, a setting, a key, whatever. It makes the mind race for an explanation, gets you excited, you want more. And, the core concept is decent, being implemented here as a village with a road and monsters that come out at night. It gets far, far weaker when it transitions in to the Undead/Stux/Charon nonsense once you find the ferry. The wilderness crawl has a point or two that is good, such as dead baby manor, but it just doesn’t feel meaningful or like it advances anything, either in the plot or in the characters.
Aimless, I think I’d call this. It doesn’t feel like free-form D&D and it doesn’t feel like plot D&D. As if, perhaps, the designer didn’t really know what they wanted to do here.
This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is a pretty worthless first eight pages. It needed to show us some keys or something else of the actual adventure.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/542852/town-on-the-edge-of-shadow-ose-edition?1892600
Needs to tweak the cover a little. The OSE plate is too high, obscuring the ship, and the subtitles are partially illegible being layered over the light source there.
Sounds like the plot to try to save a DM from a failed campaign where there is a TPK in the first few encounters. Guess what? There is no way to salvage that campaign. Just start fresh and learn from mistakes. There are adventures to salvage dead high level PCs from death, but there is no demand for that at level 1. Frankly, I haven’t seen many good such adventures – they tend to be railroads with having the dead PCs facing/dealing with their biggest regrets in life (other than their regret of not running from the monsters that slew them).
Shadows can only be harmed by magic weapons. Another adventure written by a person who doesn’t even know the rules. Luckily, the PCs will all therefore be killed at the outset of the adventure, sparing the Players from the Author’s would-be novel.
I genuinely wonder if authors who genuinely think they grok OSR challenges think- oh they should flee or think of a creative solution! it’s not balanced!
But they don’t have the effing nouse to realise you can’t flee from a wraith, its move 2 fly… And it’s not like a troll you can trap in a net (provided in interactive environment you didn’t plan for) or a pit etc.
They just throw their hands up and say hey- no choice, no clues fuck you but hey no consequences either… It’s not even dnd at that point.
They seem to hide behind the trope that “Old School D&D was not balanced,” without understanding the concept.
Yes, many of the 1E publications had encounters that would surely result in a TPK – but they were avoidable. There is no reason to enter the cave in G3 that had 36 trolls in it. The party’s thief (and/or scrying) would have revealed that hazard and, as the dungeon maps were not linear, it could be avoided.
Requiring 1st level PCs to fight shadows that they can’t hit, or ghasts whose stench they won’t be able to save against (the save is already at -2) and who do 1-4+paralyzation/1-4+paralyzation/1-8 in combat, is a total failure in authorship.
There’s also a giant difference between levels 1-3 (almost all commercial adventure modules) and levels 7+. The last big challenge I threw at my players was a castle of giants with a couple of allied dragons, and I didn’t bother worrying at all about how they’d handle it – their characters had enough spells, magic items, and allies to figure it out. And they did – they used magic to sow chaos and thin out the enemy, then negotiated with the dragons from a stronger position.
But if I’m starting a new campaign? I’m probably not throwing a lot of hard-to-avoid encounters with invincible enemies at them. Low-level characters simply have fewer tools available, and it’s harder for them to get the time and distance that are necessary for a lot of creative solutions.