The Baby in the Briar

By Shanklimb
Self Published
Domenwood
Levels 2-3

A desperate mother, Brala, approaches the PCs – in a tavern, on the road, etc. When she awoke this morning, her infant was gone. Searching the woods around her cottage, she found tracks of hoof-marks, which she can lead you to. Crookhorns stole her baby, Lilith, and you need to find her before she becomes breakfast! 

This six page adventure uses three pages to describe ten rooms in a small cave lair. Weirdly incomprehensible in places, there’s no lead in so there’s no pay off. 

Hey, get an editor. If it’s not a real editor then have your worst enemy read over your adventure before you push the publish button. You want someone else to see what you’ve put down on paper. You’re too close to it. You already KNOW what you meant so your brain is filling in context that the rest of us fuckwits don’t have. And not your mom. You don’t want someone saying “its great!” You want someone to rip you apart. You don’t have to take every comment they make to heart but you want them making all of those comments.

Case in point. In one of the last rooms of the this adventure, nine or ten I think, there’s this witch buried under the dirt floor. Fuck if I know why. Anyway, if the witch Gwendolyne is with the party then the witch uncoverers herself and helps the party. There is no witch named Gwendolyn in the adventure. The name Gwendolyn doesn’t appear in the adventure anywhere except that sentence. And no, there’s no Gwen or anything like that. Have someone who hates you read the adventure. 

This next point is probably not relevant to anyone except me, who finds it very interesting. How much can you ‘lie’ in an adventure if it serves a purpose? This adventure is using the OSE description style, which some fuckwits overly hate on. But, anyway, in one of the early rooms, an entry tunnel, it read “Narrow (unsupported ceiling)”  I hate this. I hate it because of the hypocrisy it reveals. It is fucking dumb. Of course it’s unsupported. No other ceiling reads as supported. It’s not important to the adventure. It’s like putting (alive) after every creature and NPC description in an adventure in which that doesn’t matter in any special way. It’s fucking bullshit nonsense. Oh, yeah, and also it does accomplish the purpose of writing, which is to communicate a feeling to the reader. Narrow and unsupported certainly lends to a claustrophobic kind of vibe, yeah? I think the unsupported word helps conjure up a certain kind of imagery of the scene in the DMs head in a way that simply “Narrow” doesn’t communicate. So, it’s doing a great job, adding the superfluous Unsupported word, using the language in a way needed to communicate the overall vibe of the encounter. It just FEELS wrong to see it, although it’s just as right if you were to scan this in order to run it. You are allowed to twist and turn and push and pull the language in any way needed in order to communicate the overall impact the description is supposed to have. My ‘padding!’ hat hates it and yet I cannot deny that it is effective.

Looking at that tunnel entry, the description reads “Narrow (unsupported ceiling). Four

dead crookhorns (throats carefully slit, blood still fresh). Two dead women (adolescent, impaled)” I find that some striking imagery. Throats slit. Adolescent impaled women. That’s pretty nice. Vivid. A pretty decent description. And, also, when you imagine impalement, that’s some vlad stuff, right? With the pole in the ground? No, I don’t think so. While the description is quite vivid I THINK that the women were just speared, like in the middle of battle. Later, we find some other witches in the complex and I think its clear from their entries that they attempted a raid and that there was a battle in that tunnel, the witches doing some throat slitting and a couple of them getting stabbed with spears. So, striking imagery, but, perhaps, not quite accurate. 

The set up here is a little confusing. A woman finds you and says her baby was just taken. It’s suggested that this could be in a tavern, but I don’t think that makes sense, from a How a Community Reacts standpoint, the other option being on the road which I think works much better. Anyway, there’s some QUITE confusing text that follows. I think the witches kidnapped the baby, took it to their cave lair (the dungeon) and then it was invaded by the Crookhorns and their leader, let’s call her a hag. They want to kill witches and/or convert them in to their messiah. And, anyway, they don’t care about the baby AND the witches were mistaken, the baby they kidnapped was the wrong one. Actually, I think the witches think the baby is their messiah also. It’s a confusing mess and after several read-throughs I’m still not sure I have things straight.  There’s little lead in here, just the frantic woman and some tracks. This, I suspect, does not bode well for the complex situation that I think the designer is trying to get across across here, with the various goals and the creature factions mistaken identities, the lair invasion, etc. But the ‘thrust in to the middle of it’ thing doesn’t work well without the context needed, or any buy in. Not the greatest fault for a site based adventure, but, also, no real stakes except maybe for the baby, motivating the party to do anything other than just putting everyone to the torch.

Other than this, the adventure is mostly a hack. You can talk to some of the witches, and rescue some/all of them that are left alive, but no mention of rewards for their troubles. I think, maybe, three rooms with encounters, maybe more if you just start stabbing captured/trapped witches. They seem to want to talk a bit, but evasive about answers, which, in Brycelandia means you get to tell your story to Odin.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. The preview is three pages, which shows you the overview and the first page of four encounters, so, good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/584721/the-baby-in-the-briar-a-dolmenwood-adventure?1892600