By Edwin Nagy
Parallel Dimension Gaming
OSE
Level 1
Construction camps along a new mountain pass are being destroyed, and danger awaits along every twist and turn. Can your heroes uncover the source of these deadly attacks?
This 33 page adventure details a little wilderness journey and a small thirteen room mine full of murderous dwarf miners. It’s fucking weird; it’s got the underpinnings of something decent, but never goes all in on it and pads everything out terribly. Lost potential, I guess.
Getting trade goods from Town A to Town C means taking the river through Town B, which is run by a tough, and probably corrupt, business family who controls a portage. So Prince Dipshit builds a road through the mountains directly to Town C, bypassing Town B. Groovy. Except the road construction camps got attacked. Since this is an important project he hires a bunch of no-names to go figure it out rather than sending the army. Well, to be fair, the party is supposed to present each of the towns guilds, which does seem chiller. Playing up the guild angle would have been nice, but as is you don’t get anything more than “they represent each of the towns major guilds.”
And that IS the major problem with this adventure; it hints at things but never goes there. The “evil town” doesn’t get much more than the fact they are shrewd and a maybe a little shady. The freedom fighters get that “they meet in the basement of the local pub and are all talk.” Clearly these things, covered in the thirteen page intro, are meant to provide some play opportunities, false paths, other various sorts of entanglements and fun. But they don’t show up again.
Instead you get to plod along a half-built road, with a work camp about a day apart, four in total. Here’s a sacked one. Here’s an abandoned one. Here’s one with three dudes in it. Focusing in on that last one, you have three guys patrolling camp. Nothing else. There’s a mention that they are charmed and that the party can roll to detect that they are. That’s it. Stats? No. Direction, like they attack, or challenge the party or something else? No. What do they know if they wake up? Nothing. In spite of this being about a column … of large type. What’s a boy in love supposed to do? “The horses are anxious to eat and drink not having been fed in a few days.” Ok. And the dudes? What about them. NOTHING. Absolutely Nothing. It absolutely boggles the mind how one could leave out something so trivial. And, there are lots of editors and producers and the like attached to this.
No one cares. Remember. No one cares. Your publisher does not care. If something decent pops out then thats great, but they do not gie a SHIT. Someone, somewhere, has to care about the adventure that’s about to get published. Sometimes we pay an editor to care. Rarely a small press publisher cares. And seldom does anyone else. If you pay them then they care. If they pay you then they do not care. Usually. Blech. I hate it when I’m not optimistic.
Somewhere along the road you’re gonna be the victim of a rockslide. Caused by a dude who triggers it. I guess the party sees him do it? The entire layout isn’t clear, there’s the road being constructed and a ravine and a dead-end and a mine entrance and none of it makes sense. In my own head I don’t know who you see the dude who triggers the rockslide (and then retreats in to the hidden mine entrance.) And, therefore, I don’t see how the party finds the hidden mine entrance. And this is important because this is where the actual adventure is. I’m open to being wrong here (Page 14 of the document/page 15 of the PDF) in that I’ve missed something or an not understanding something. But I don’t think so. So, good luck finding the actual adventure.
Inside the mine you’ll get a bunch of boring rooms that described in a boring way. “Crossroads This is the first area of worked stone, with passages leading in each cardinal direction.” Exciting! And then six lines of text telling us where each corridor goes. Joy. That’s the fucking map. That’s the purpose of the fucking map. I know some of you fuckwits like it when the text explicitly describes the room exits and where they lead, but I think we can all agree that when it SUBSTANTIALLY outnumbers the room description/text then we’ve lost site of the goal. Don’t do things by rote. Do them because they make sense in the situation you currently find yourself. Yes, there are guidelines, but don’t follow them off of a cliff.
Anyway, inside you find some dwarf miners. I guess this is a kind of illegal mining operation and they feel threatened by the road being constructed. I don’t think there’s really any way to tell this. You can see where a barge might come up one of the mine entrances and infer, I guess. But, also, the miners always come screaming out of the darkness and attack the party. That’s it. No playing dice or whatnot. They just come charging out of a hallway and attack. All … eight of them? In two encounters? Plus Lareth, of course, in charge of everything, with no foreshadowing or hint. Wasted potential everywhere, Lareth. Mom always knew you were gonna grow up to be a failure.
Not mentioned: the single encounter on the wandering table that only occurs once. About a messenger found dead on the road. Roll twice on the random message table to determine the contents of his message. Don’t fucking do this. That’s not how randomness is used in an adventure.
This is $5 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Joy. That seems to be a trend these days. We need a preview, a substantive preview that shows us some encounters, so we can make an informed decision on if to buy or not.