By Alex Kammer
Frog God Games
B/X
Level 1
The infamous reputation of Rappan Athuk, the Dungeon of Graves, is well earned. Legions of audacious adventurers against the foul and and the most dangerous denizens of the grand dungeon, lured by the promise of riches, fame, or some more visceral need, with scant few of them surviving to tell the tale.Zelkor’s Ferry is the last reasonable stop for downriver traffic to make a safe landing, so although the settlement is small, and the river traffic is infrequent, barges and keelboats do arrive here from time to time, off loading cargoes bound for the Round Coast. The last leg of the journey overland to the Round Coast is quite dangerous, requiring guards. The settlement itself is little more than an inn, a smithy, a merchant trader, and a ferry boat for those who desire to cross the river. Nevertheless, Zelkor’s Ferry is a place of comfort and safety compared to the ravenous wilderness that surrounds it.
This twenty page supplement details a small compound close to the n00b entrance to Rappan Athuk. It’s a low-effort high word count offering from the Frogs. Compared to the kickstarter entry for the same locale it offers less information for your game and is substantially harder to wade through.
Let me tell you about my character … I have a fondness for Zelkors Ferry, the location in Rappan Athuk. There are a lot of versions of Rappa Athuk, but I know Zelkors Ferry from the kickstarter. Zelkor’s Ferry is just a small settlement, a few buildings, in the wilderness and is close to an easier/n00b friendly entry point to the dungeon. I found the version in the kickstarter charming and, based on it being a beginning area, there was a lot of party activity in the area in my game, which cemented the small settlement in my mind. Just a few buildings, supporting a ferry stop on a river, and more akin, I think, to something like a walled roadhouse in the wilderness. The writing in the kickstarter for it was relatively terse, but full of specificity and resources targeted to help bring a game alive for a party visiting it as a kind of home base. There were rumors, keelbats plying the water, a wereboar dude hiding his relatively well known secret and all sorts of little throw away comments that were very specific. The kind of specificity that a DM uses to kick off a bunch of their content. That is ideal, and Zelkor’ ferry from the kickstarter did that specificity, and enabled the resultant riffing, well enough. In particular, Ulman Dark, the “necromancer” became a game favorite. This is because of one line in his description. He can cure poison “The procedure involves replacing the patient’s blood, using a quantity of goat’s blood as well as drawing 10 hit points worth of blood from humans to include in the transfusion.” And thus was launched one of the most memorable NPC’s I had. Never quite sure if he was evil, and with a list of bizarre needs to provide any of his services. That one line told me all I needed to know about the dude. I loved him, and thus the party loved interacting with him.
Seeing a Zelkor’s Ferry supplement from the Frogs I grabbed it, ignoring my “no more Frog products’ vow. I was wrong to do so.
The page count here is substantially more than the entry in the kickstarter but the content is somehow quite a bit less. There are long sections of read aloud. The fonts are small and the layout screams wall of text. The map shows locations that are not detailed, numbered, but there are locations mentioned that are not on the map. The rumors from the kickstarter are not present. The arrivals of new people. The keelboats. None of it is present. The eightish pages in the kickstarter have been expanded to twenty though.
Where the kickstarter description had relatively tersely written passages, concentrating on things for use in a game, this is just expanded trivia about the core buildings and their owners as well as a couple of events, like a gnoll attack and logging camp trouble. The charm present in the kickstarter version is largely absent, through the removal of those mentioned sections, and what little remains are those core businesses. Ulman, the wereboars “secret”, a bounty hunter wife and so on.
This is just expanded words. Long descriptions. Background trivia. Very little with which to drive the game forward or spring on the party to spice things up between dungeon forays. The kickstarter version remains far superior.
This is $15 at DriveThru.