By Dylan Hyatt
Rampaging Snail
Shadowdark
Level 1
It’s Sunday and I try to watch a detective mystery on Sundays. SO you’re getting a detective adventure review.
In ‘The Swan Hollow Intrigue’, the adventuring party must solve the mystery of the murder of a monk from the Silverhelm Monasteey. The village’s two inns are close to open confrontation, and what has the haunted ruin of Tamwoth Manor to do with mystery?
This 52 page adventure presents a small murder mystery in a halfling village. It understands what a traditional D&D mystery is, its various parts and aspects, and it gets there in spite of leaning heavily on mechanics and exposition. Lot of classic village/inn tropes are present to lean on.
Hey, charming cover! I don’t do bonus points, but if I did I’d give you one for it.
So, Brother Lothario, up at the monastery, comes in to town A LOT to flirt with the innkeepers daughter. One night he comes in to the village to flirt with her and then ends up dead in an alley. Lothario’s brother runs the other inn in town, and is calling for justice! He wants the barkeep/dad hung! He obviously did it! Mayor McCheese wants you to gather evidence. Turns out the barkeep/dad run out after Loathrio when chasing him out on the night in question. And had a big cudgel in his hand when he did it. And someone say him in the area and throwing the cudgel over a wall to get rid of it. Oh, and Lotharios brother seems to have hated him. And Lotharios throat was cut. And he stinks of fish. And he gave waitress Cocktease a note about an abandoned ruin nearby. And … you get the picture. In reality this is a Name of the Rose situation. Lothario stumbled upon the secret bookshelves, learned something about the abbey, and the abbot has the librarian hire a lowlife fisherman to kill Lothario. Also, the secret is that the last group of human monks in the monastery made a deal with the devil, literally, to stave of the plague from themselves and now the old abbot from 300 years ago is a ghoul in the basement. So, you know, pretty please?
There are some classic elements at play here in the events going on. There’s a drinking contest in a bar, and a bar fight, and someone wants a drink paid for to talk, and there’s a chase scene and there’s a village mob. All of the things one would expect to see in a village inn. And this extends a bit in to the adventure as well, a minor haunting can be resolved by placing a child’s ragdoll on her childhood bed. You know ol Bryce is a big softie, so I’m down for all of these classic elements. The overall mystery investigation is not a bad one. A couple of things to discover and leads to follow up on. It’s not really complex in ANY way. It is supported by a coupe of events, like a village mob and a chase of a suspect through the village. Both of these are good in concept to add, just handled rather poorly in execution.
Alas, the implementation of all of this is not great. If it WERE great then it would simply be Yet Another Mystery adventure.
There’s A LOT of text here for such a simple adventure. There is a long background, most of which is unneeded. There are long stretches of read-aloud, in italics. Read-aloud should never be long and italics should never be long. Long read-aloud causes players to loose focus and pull out their phones. They don’t pay attention. Long italics is hard to read, cognitively. Together they are a nightmare for both the DM and players.
There are long bouts of exposition in here, everywhere. A lot of explaining and detail that just s not relevant to what’s going on. Well, I mean, it is, but only in a tangential way. You want to include things that are directly related to the adventure, to play at the table. More is not better. That shit, that trivia, it gets in the way of the DM finding the information they need to run the adventure. Further, instead of including that shit and spending time on it you COULD be making the core of the adventure, the actual things relevant to play at the table, better. The same goes for mechanics. We’ve got mechanics for a bar fight, mechanics for drinking contests, mechanics for a chase scene, mechanics for … and, yes, this is to be expected to some extent. But there is an appropriate level of detail to mechanics. You don’t want to drone on and on and on and be prescriptive about them. You’re not in charge of the game. You don’t know the specifics of the table. You want to give the DM some guidelines and let them run the thing.
There is, I think, often great confusion about details vs specifics. In this context detail is bad. It is trivia. It explains why’s or how’s that we don’t need to know, or almost certainly don’t need to know. Specificity, though, are those things that inspire us to greatness in running the game. It is terse, meaning it doesn’t get in the way of scanning an adventure and it doesn’t require a long pause to read while in the midst of running a game. It is the sort of thing that once you read it it stays with you. You grok it immediately. If a picture is worth a thousand words then one well written specific sentence is worth more than a page of details. It communicates exactly the vibe the DM should be going for.
In this adventure there is a wandering traveller table for one of the inns. One of the entries is for a Quack selling (dubious) portion of healing. That’s the entry on the table. That (dubious) in parens tells us a lot. There’s a decent sized paragraph expanding upon this one liner, which adds little of value except perhaps “Vagdoran” is his name and he’s got a wooden case with six vials in it and that by the time the party discovers the scam he’ll be far away. Not nearly enough snake oil in D&D games, ya know? Anyway, we’ve got something specific here. Still far too long for what it is, but this in the same neighborhood. Compared with “generic pilgrims” or “generic travelling merchants” it’s the spice of life.This is why something like those quick adjectives/adverbs used to describe NPCs hit so well. And it’s why putting in a long section of italics read-aloud for each NPC that is supposed to communicate their personality fails. I need to know Kylo Rens personality in half a second, not struggle through a bunch of second person dialog in italics. I get that they both get us to the same place, but one is much more effective during gameplay.
Mechanically the thing falls down a bit also. In one place we need to make a DC check to tell the innkeeps wife is not being exactly honest with us. However, with regards to the innkeep proper, there is no such opportunity to detect his honesty/dishonesty. I’m not arguing for either case to be correct, but noting that the inconsistency here is the issue. Are we rolling for this shit or not? And this is not an isolated example. There might be another example with the ghost of a child, that I mentioned earlier. We’ve got some specific (convoluted) say a prayer/perform a rite shit that is detailed, and noted about replacing a specific doll on her bed. Rather than the specifics of a rite that the party has absolutely no fucking chance of figuring out, all that mechanical detail can be removed with just some advice to let a party that seems to be doing the right thing/making an effort succeed. (Hmmm, does a Bless need to be sincere, or can you just Constantine the thing?)
The dungeon, proper, is quite small. Just a few rooms with a few undead, and, in fact, may not actually be a part of the adventure. Do you go underneath and kill the old abbot/ghoul? Well, maybe. If things play out the right way I guess so. So, right to handle it as a kind of an aside but the detail, again, gets in the way of anything memorable happening.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the first six pages so you get to see miles of backstory. The preview should show us some of the actual adventure text so we, as potential buyers and DMs, can judge if the writing is something we can hack or not.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/574699/the-swan-hollow-intrigue?1892600