The Secret of the Callair Hills is a small 12 page adventure for the OSRIC system. This is a stand-alone adventure for 4-6 characters of levels 3-5. It should be fairly simple to drop this in to any standard fantasy world. The major opponents are undead and some vermin, with a few wild animals and bandits thrown in on the Wandering Monsters table. Goblins and Ogres also show up in the wandering table. While this is certainly personal preference, I like the creature allotment; it mostly makes sense to me. Undead, animals, vermin and humans are what I like to see liberally scattered about. The humanoids only show up on the wandering table so I can excuse their presence. We get one new monster in the back; a half page description of a level 5 Barrow Lord undead beastie. Again, this is a good thing: bad guys should be new & unique to add a good deal of mystery to the game. There’s no easier way to freak out a PC then drop in a new creature without unknown attacks & vulnerabilities.
Twelve pages isn’t a lot. An ad and the license take up two pages in the back and one more is taken up with the table of contents. Another is burned by the maps, leaving us eight pages, the same size as TSR G1/Steading of the Hill Giant Chief. Quite a challenge. We first get about a half page of history and background on the situation. I appreciate this brevity; I don’t need a five page history of what our bad guy had for breakfast and the twelve empires that rose & fell prior to the PC’s showing up. And as for that bad guy and history …
It immediately put me on guard. I don’t need social conscious shoved down my throat during my fantasy RPG. Recycler orcs, evil zookeepers and noble savages belong in Sophie’s Choice the RPG, not my fantasy RPG. I must now eat my words since this time it does fit nicely in to the plot. You see we are faced with a group analogous to the American Indians. Noble savages who do great things until the evil settlers show up and desecrate their burial grounds with agriculture. Our noble savages are wiped out when they protest. See? My knee-jerk is an eye-roll. A thousand years later new settlers show up on the abandoned land and start farming. Eventually they start to show up murdered in their farms. Nothing is taken and nothing is pillaged. We’re given about a half-page of information on getting the PC’s involved; a couple of hooks and a sample murder-cabin/farm.
The adventure proper is then launched in to. It works out to be a wilderness with scattered farms (working, abandoned, and murdered) with abandoned towers and burial mounds/barrows. There’s a simple abandoned fort and the evil bad guys barrow as well. The PC’s will spend their time crawling over the wilderness poking in to these objects. The core wilderness is about 23 miles wide, with the ‘barrowfields’ being about 12 miles wide. The wandering table is a little sparse in my opinion for this size of table, especially when wanderers are checked for every hour during the day (1 on a d6) and every hour during the night (1 on a d8.) Nighttime encounters will only be with lesser barrow spirits, of which there are a limited number. My opinions here may be flawed, which may come out in actual play.
Eventually the players will stumble on the main barrow and confront the ancient hero who still guards his land. If the PC’s have been respectful of the other barrows, and can speak his language (the mage DID memorize a comprehend languages spell, didn’t they? It’s OSR so they should have … ) then our Barrow Lord can be convinced that he is mistaken in his murderous quest and things can end peacefully. In all likelihood though the PC’s didn’t realize they were dealing with wronged noble savages and looted the tombs, which is just gonna piss off our Barrow Lord and force him to attack in a blind rage. Oh well, that’s what they make longswords & oil for!
I can’t decide about this product. On a very superficial level it’s a pretty bland wilderness adventure with a bad guy in a small lair at the end. But then again, the bag guy isn’t actually bad, he’s just misunderstood. That, along with a realistic (and brief) portrayal of barrows, is interesting. Then again, by ‘misunderstood’ I actually mean ‘running around murdering innocent farmers’ and I’m playing an RPG, not performing a historical LARP. It may be interesting however to insert some of the barrows from the MERP supplement ‘Bree & the Barrow Downs’ in to this to provide some more flavor & color.
This is available on DriveThru.