by Jeffrey P. Talanian
Knockspell Magazine
AS&S
Levels 1-3
Fair Warning: Talanian has a writing & DM style that annoys the hell out of me. He also let me out of my Kickstarter pledge for AS&S, so this is more a case of clashing style preferences than “he’s a jerk.” (Besides, it should be obvious by now that _I’M_ the jerk in any pairing that includes me.) I should also mention that I played this adventure at GaryCon and left halfway through because I way having a miserable time. (See Above.)
Oh boy, we get to clean the basemen out of giant rats! How exciting! Maybe there’s a way to make this cool. Maybe this adventure does it. Either way “giant rats in the basement” is an impossibly hard sell. This one has slightly more background data than the others. You can go investigate the widow’s err … taverns, upper floor and first floor. There you’ll find … giant rats! Oh, there’s holes in the walls, and there’s a bloody crib, there’s a crate of silverware worth 100gp and there’s a whole lot of nothing that is wrapped in Talanian text. Yes, it’s only about 3/4 of a page of text, but for some reason it annoys me. It’s detail added for the sake of detail without any game impact. Thanks, but I can do that. I’m looking for inspiration to help me add that detail. These descriptions relate former uses of rooms and descriptions of the past that SERIOUSLY make me think someone would rather be a published author. I feel like I’m having a thesaurus shoved down my throat for no good reason. I feel cheated.
The basement has … Giant Rats! It also has a big fucking No-No. There’s a secret door in the basement behind which the adventure is. There’s no clue. There’s just a secret door. There’s no reason it should be there. There are no hints. It’s well hidden. Without finding it the adventure is over.
Past that secret door are … more rats! Oh, and 6 skeletons. And a 5HD rat. And wonderful flavor text like telling me that the skeletons wear capes made of homespun cloth. It’s almost like every single description has to have several modifiers in front of every noun and verb in the hopes that some of it will stick and be cool. There are two decent encounters in the basement: a demon rat and a demon skeleton. Those are nice classic endings to a giant rat adventure in the basement. Redeemed! Well, maybe not. Most of the adventure is a lame slog except for those two images.
The treasure is a weird mix of good and bad. All of that extraneous adjective/adverb insertion does an ok job with the mundane treasure at points. A golden statue of Cthulhu, or a book of sacrificial rites or a set of gowns inlaid with jewels in a constellation pattern. Not bad. The magic items though almost certainly suffer. +1 silver dagger. +1 halbred. Hey, how about some descriptive language there? There’s great non-standard effects that happen with statues and curses but that doesn’t get extended to the magic items at all; they are all book. That’s quite disappointing.
This is available on DriveThru.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/93700/Knockspell-4?affiliate_id=1892600
I loved reading AS&SH (for both its writing style and well-edited rules that communicate atmosphere well); this adventure, however, would’t have convinced me to check it out. I wonder if Jeff’s other adventures are like this…