By Roberto Marcarini
Old School Fox
OSE
Levels 3-4
Beyond those tangled boughs, deep within the forest, the cure that could save Baron Duncan Bravewater and his wife from a terrible curse may lie hidden. Moira, the hag of Gloomwood, might know the secret to free them from their prison of stone… but what price will you have to pay to earn her alliance? And what dangers await you on the path to her remote hut, concealed among gnarled trees and deadly marshes?
This 68 page adventure presents eleven pointless hex descriptions. There is the outline of a plot, I guess, and little else meaningful going on, and little else to drive the plot, or hexes, to any outcome.
Do people not understand what an RPG is or what happens in a game? This is not a recent phenomena, as many fuckwiths would suggest, but man it sure is frustrating. How can you look at every adventure ever published and come to the conclusion that nothing should happen in your adventure? That you should write about the price of tea in China for an adventure in one room tack shop in a small Indiana town? It’s inconceivable to me that someone doesn’t understand what the word inconceivable means! They don’t know what they don’t know, but fuck me it’s frustrating.
Baron fuckwit has been turned to stone. You need to seek out a solution to this in the DARK FOREST. Seems there’s a hag in there that may be able to help. The hag does hag stiff, striking bargains with people. Seems there’s a MOON CUP in some MOON TEMPLE in the forest and if you go get it for her then she can do the thing for you. Also, she’s got a beating heart in her hut and a skeleton knight, the first baron of these parts, and a bunch of his skeleton knight followers all as minions. The heart belongs to a dragon that’s now a man and running from a fortress surrounded by goblins and bugbears. Somewhere in the forest is the moon temple and the moon cup inside of it. You could just stumble upon the moon temple and get the cup and bring it back to town and solve the statue thing problem. Or, the hag could tell you about it if you find her first. Or the dragon dude could promise help if only you will retrieve his heart from the hag. There’s some other shit going on inside the forest, but thats the main thrust. Remember kids: if you need to find someone to fix a problem then they are going to send you on a fetch quest. You might as well just do the fetch quest WITHOUT talking to the someone and/or stabbing everyone along the way. There’s a reason murder hobos end up being murder hobos and its not because they want to be.
I’m gonna ignore the 8bit art stuff except in one tangential way: there are no keys. Or, rather no traditional keys. You have to look at the art on the map and then thumb through the book until you find a page with the matching hex art. That’s the hex in question. This is essentially a random indexing based on visual acuity of shitty art piece. (Which is circular, be cause I’m using shitty here to denote it doesn’t do what its supposed to fucking do.) The designer has managed to hit both a legibility issue AND an organization issue in one decision to use the shit hex art as the key “number.” Ok, sure, there’s no reason that the alphabet has to start with A and follow the ABC song, just as the only reason one comes before two is that its smaller. Except, these common organization techniques help us locate information. Where is three? Two after one. Where is M? About halfway through. Where in the 68 page adventure is this squiggle block art? I don’t Know. Let me just page through shit until I find it. Fucking rediculous. I’m not sure how a decision like this actually gets made.
The hag, the dragon dude, other “hex bosses”, they tend to be 8HD. And surrounded by lots of minions both high and low HD minions. So, I think, stabbin the bosses to get them out of the way seems like a nogo. The witch, 8HD, sits invisible in her main room with a 5HD skeleton knight and other minions nearby. The main rooms that has the dragons dude heart in it. There are similar set ups for the other hex bosses. So, clearly, stabbin is not the way that is meant to solve this shit. But there is NOTHING in the adventure that would lead you to something else. Deals, betrayals, events, subplots … nothing like that in this in any meaningful manner.
Let us take The Traitor as an example. Perhaps the most interesting thing in the adventure, there’s a Ranger of the North type thing going on. One of the ranger is a traitor, having sold out to the hag. He can talk to her with a mirror in his backpack. He keeps her apprised of the parties movements, if they use him as a guide. Ok. The goal of the party is to find the hag and ask her help. And she has set this all up. So, what’s to traitor? Ok, lets say the party skips this nice nice talky shit and wants to stab the bitch. What kind of traitor shit is he going to do? There is no guidance for the dude. There is no guidance for the hag. There are no examples, or vignettes.
The problem here is that this thing is just 68 pages of padding. Starting with the overview of the statue/hag/dragon situation, there is almost nothing else to this adventure. Not in terms of specifics. Oh sure, “werewolf clan in the forest with a key.” And nothing else. There are words, Lots of them. And they mean almost nothing in the context of the adventure or in providing interactivity toward play at the table. “The Forest Nomads are led by the Elder Council , composed of the three oldest and most respected members of the community. Their guidance is essential to maintaining order and cohesion among the nomads, especially given their life divided between human and wolf form.” Well just fucking great. You defined “Elder Council” in the sentence after first using it. This is padding. There is almost nothing in that hex that is interesting or interactive. One dude has a key. That’s it. It’s taking the old Wilderlands format and expanded it to two pages with almost no more interactivity than the Wilderlands two sentence description offered.
It’s just fucking weird, man. Like, no interactivity or specificity that would make this special in any way beyond what a one pager could describe.
This is $3.50 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. It’s all just bullshit overview stuff. It needed to show a hex or two so the potential buyer could understand the types of encounters and style they were potentially saddling themself with.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/582786/adventures-in-gloomwood-eng-ita-version?1892600