By David Hay
Third Castle Games
OSE
Levels 1-3
Travel from sun-drenched beaches to dense jungle trails, over vine-rope bridges and up volcanic cliffs. Encounter lizardmen, the living dead, diabolical cultists and worse. Find magical items, gold and perhaps some glory too. Or at least a good tale to tell, should you make it to the taverns of Hardwind Harbour. But don’t tarry too long – for dark smoke belches from the volcano and the earth trembles. Where will your party be when it erupts?
This 74 page adventure uses about 55 pages to describe sixteen points of interest, and some of their dungeons, on a tropical island you are shipwrecked on. It’s pretty good for what it is, combining some ok formatting and a more situational approach to the adventure. I wish the overall situation on the island, how it works together, was addressed just a little more.
Oh no! You’re shipwrecked on a topical island! You probably find your way to the pirate town and there you probably find out it’s a lot harder to join a pirate crew than I thought. The island, while it has a map, is laid out like a pointcrawl. Each location is either self-contained or has a small complex/’dungeon’ attached to it. A couple of caves, a town, a necropolis, ye olde volcano temple, and so on, each with between eight to, say, eighteen locations in them.
Ostensibly you are trying to get off the island, and many of the paths/leads go to the pirate town where you can bargain with the pirates. There’s pirate intrigue in the town, of course, and everyone wants something in order to help you out. But, also, there are other things about. You can find a small rowboat at one beach, and you see a much smaller island offshore, and it has a ship on it. A cursed ship, as it turns out. Do you know how to sail? Do you know how to recruit sailors to man a cursed ship?
And, thus, we see a larger kind of more traditional hex crawl sort of thing going on in this adventure. In those more traditional hex crawls there are generally resources and wants/needs from others that the party exploits to fulfill their needs. They are generally not explicitly noted, with perhaps a few linkages explicit but in most other cases the party comes up with some crazy thing to do to exploit hex Y to do something in hex X. And this adventure, while a pointcrawl, does much the same thing. There ARE explicit linkages between the sites, Bob wants you to deal with the cult or Frank needs their crew found before they can do THE THING. But there are more than enough resources, and weirdo things going on, that the party can exploit things of their own design as well. This is good. The designer has written the adventure to present situations, expanding that to also present some more traditional crawls, and that situation-forward writing is what enables the more free-form non-linear gameplay. And, as the adventure reiterates a couple of times: “oh, and don’t forget to make the volcano explode!”
The more traditional “dungeons” are decent, as well. Underground passages to swim to are a great example of a kind of hidden area of a dungeon that a party paying attention to can discover to get a reward/danger. A bridge over a chasm … and exploring the BOTTOM of the chasm is another example of that. Something a little oblique but obviously present, that the party can poke their noses in to. It’s the ol “cave behind the waterfall’ thing that I love so much. There are also rope bridges over a valley, complete with a corpse hanging from it and wild baboons on it. Or crack in a sea cave floor with an old rowboat, rickety, spanning it. The old “sarcophagus with something inside banging on it to get out’ thing. The rooms, much like the hexes, generally have more than one thing going on in it and many times the dangers are telegraphed well. A pool with luminescent seaweed, and when you go fucking around inthe pool you find out its strangleweed. Well, the DM told you the fucking seaweed glowed, did you think it was just window dressing. For that room, in particular, there’s a sandy floor with footprints, a pool of water, with the underground passage, a howling sound coming from somewhere and then that seaweed, and it’s all handled in one column rather than droning on and on.
As that column note implies, formatting and word count here is pretty spot on. There’s a little sections at the top of an entry that could be read-aloud or inspiration, with some bolded words that reference bullets deeper in the description. A couple of sentences for each bullet, and two to three for the read-aloud/summary. It’s easy to scan and easy to locate information. There is a case of three of information being presented a little late, with something more critical to the action being presented later in the description/bullets. If there’s an ancient red dragon in the room then maybe get to that part sooner rather than later, yes?
I do want to call out something I rarely do: the art. More than once in this I thought some associated art pieces did a GREAT job of bringing the room better to life, which is what I think ALL art in an adventure should do. I understand this is subjective to some degree, but I know it when I see it. Tommaso Devitofrancesco and Gary Trow are credited with the interior art and one/both of them did a good job. “This large room is filled with magnificently sculpted statues standing in rows. At one end of the room war relics are displayed – trophies taken from the Old Empire’s defeated foes. Mosaics depicting famous victories festoon the walls.” This is accompanied by an art piece of greek-style warrior statues on plinths that really brings home the scale of the room. It’s one of the few times that good art in an adventure made me want MORE art pieces to do the same for EVERY encounter. (Which I’d probably then bitch about, but, whatever.)
There’s not a lot of padding in this thing. A few pages of pre-gens and one page of magic items at the end. The preamble before the keys are focused on wanderers and other pertinent information. Still, I wish perhaps the ‘summary’ information was just a little more in depth. A better overview of the various linkages between sites and perhaps a bit more about … campaigning? Hiring a ship, living in town, a sentence on expeditions … this is an expansive adventure and the support for that part of the play could have been better. The whole “jungle vibe” thing doesn’t really come through much at all. I think this is related to the pointcrawl nature; the immersive jungle setting doesn’t come through because the journey to the next time is essentially abstracted in a point crawl. That doesn’t have to be bad, but it needs a little attention, I think, to bring the journey part to life. The sites feel weirdly disconnected, which I guess makes sense give the pointcrawl nature. But, as I said, the designer must then remedy this. And the lack of travel time issues almost certainly strengths this abstraction and minimizes the jungle vibe.
Still, a pretty decent adventure. I’m happy I found it and happy to see what the publisher does next.
This is $16 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages and shows you the entirety of the starting point/cave complex. It’s a good representation of the encounters to be found, and shows off the nice Glynn Seal maps.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/552809/escape-the-devil-s-eye?1892600