The Beast of Jelin’s Mire

By Irene D.B.
Self Published
Zweihander
Basic Tier

Something lurks within the perilous swamp of Jelin’s Mire. The Townsfolk of Jelinton are falling victim to a series of grim attacks by a terrible creature. They have called upon the aid of the Guild, a grim organization of monster hunters to kill the Beast of Jelin’s Mire.

This was a review request from someone. A very very very bad someone.

This thirty page adventure uses eleven pages to detail … two scenes? Three scenes? Of which two are combats? It’s a nightmare of formatting and not knowing how to write an adventure.

You’re monster hunters, sent to the village of Jellin to kill a monster. It seems a few villagers have died and a kid has gone missing. 

This adventure contains trigger earnings for animal death and monstrous plants. And general violence? Isn’t that D&D?

And isn’t Zweihander a Warhammer clone? Isn’t that the game where to kill muties, who want to eat your flesh? And those ratling things that everyone seems to masturbate continually over? That’s Warhammer, right?

This adventure has a golem in it that is a townsperson. And a guy with a clockwork arm. And an ogre dude lives in town. And a dude with a boar head. And a ratling chick that works at the inn who has many suitors, both men and women. That’s Warhammer? Can it be a Boot Hill adventure if its in space with no references at all to the old west or the themes therein?

But, let’s explore a little more that boar dude. His description tells us that “Jor has the head of a goat, and a heart of gold. He is constantly sweaty. He refuses to wear a shirt, and has a sculpted body. He stands at about 7 ft.” Uh … ok. I guess we know a little more about the designer now … Did I mention that there is a brief little break away section dealing with threesomes with some of the townfolk? 

Lest we think I criticize, I do not. I mean, yeah, I am, but not for THAT reason. Especially since it does nothing related to the adventure? The morons are gonna come out of the woodwork to quote the downfall of society, but all I give a shit about is the relevance to the adventure.

But, also, I don’t really give a shit very much about that. I mean, in the context of including shit in the adventure that is irrelevant. Backstory, sex shit, I don’t care. What I DO care about is the degree of concentration on these irrelevant topics to the exclusion of the actual adventure. 

Kristi Fortis is an NPC. They have the profession of Courtier and the Social Class of Aristocrat. We are told “They have been elected uncontested for the past four elections by the town.” For what? Mayor? Garbage collector? There is absolutely no indication. Hey, instead of concentrating on other irrelevant shit, maybe you could put down what the fuck their job is?

This continues to the adventure. It’s a fucking mess. You get to dig through paragraph after paragraph, with sentences like “If they want to go to the local tavern …” Seriously. It’s just paragraphs. Oh, there’s a heading now and again. Here’s one “Later Gator.” Hmmm, I wonder what that means? No? No idea? Don’t fucking do this. There’s so much wrong here that it’s hard to actually list it all. Don’t use if/then conditionals. Don’t write in paragraph form as the major style of writing. Use some keys to help separate out content. Make the adventure easy to scan so the DM can find information quickly and easily. NONE of that is done. Just scene after scene with a fuck ton of conditions embedded in paragraphs. I weep for the future.

But, the adventure proper, you ask! You go in to town. Oh no, people missing/killed. FOr some fucking reason you go find a woman in a tower. She’s a golem. (Thats fucking boring. Don’t say golem. Tell us shes made out of weeping mud. Or snow. Held together by hair or something. With STATS as a golem. Imagination trumps mechanics. Ok, anyway, you go to this golems tower, for some reason, and get some rose petals, I guess to help a dying kid. Then you go out in the swamp and fight an octopus with hands on the ends of its tentacles. The adventure is now over. Thirty pages for that. Sorry, no, eleven pages are used for that. Eleven pages. 

But, hey, if you attack the golem then she chokes each of you out, ties you up, delivers you to the town sheriff, who tells you that you shouldn’t attack her if you want to keep the monster hunter contract. IE: No Consequences to our actions. IE: Mary Sue.

This is an absolutely atrocious adventure. There is nothing evocative. There is no interactivity to speak of. There is no formatting to help run it at the table. It fails on every account. I don’t give a fuck about the sex shit. I give a fuck that the adventure design, formatting, and interactivity stinks.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages, with the last three being relevant to making a purchasing decision. By then you should be able to figure out the focus on anthro kink and lack of organization in the text.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/340119/The-Beast-of-Jelins-Mire–Adventure-for-Zweihander-RPG?1892600

And, lest we think I’m a heathen, the last page advertises a work called “LGBT in a Grim and Perilous World.” The description is pretty interesting. To quote “exploring how other cultures have historically seen such things and how you might use this knowledge in a Zweihander, or other fantasy RPG, game.” A focus on how gender and sexuality have not always been as cut and dry as presented in history, and influences seen in history and mythology. That’s cool. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/331633/LGBT-in-a-Grim-and-Perilous-World–Supplement-for-Zweihander-RPG

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29 Responses to The Beast of Jelin’s Mire

  1. Seneca says:

    I believe at this stage it would be worthwhile to crowdfund a sort of phrenological atlas of the fandoms of various retroclones so we can map the deterioration as it progresses down the lines from the sacred to the infernal. Note here that the entry point appears to be Lotfp, whose fans, while still possessed of the broad foreheads and aquiline noses of healthy rpgplayers, exhibit the excessive hairyness, blubbery lips and underdeveloped chins that are precursors to a descent to a lower form of being. I had believed the Troika and Cairn fandoms were furthest along the path of degeneration, indeed it is difficult to believe that any mortal clay, no matter how profane, could more then such disorganization, and yet the Natural World, with its all but infinite catalogue of wonders and horrors, continues to amaze. We have here the first instance of Homo sub-Troika sub-Sapiens. The Homo has herein a profound double meaning. Notice how the creature, even while in the act of composing an adventure for fantastical roleplaying, an act that has nothing to do with the phallic or reproductive drives, is unable to control its debased and lustful impulses, causing them to intrude upon an activity that should be entirely separate. The traditional hierarchy of mind over body, already a departure from the wholeness of being wherein the mind and body are unified by a profound awareness of the sacred, has herein been inverted further, producing not individuals, but rather atomized parts with only rudimentary personality traits, enslaved to lower instinctual forces that manifest themselves in a chaotic, dionysean and superbly homoerotic fashion.

  2. Bucaramanga says:

    Love how the postscript to the review is basically “dear woke hivemind, plz no cancel me”.

    • Stripe says:

      Look, we all know there are roving bands of people on the Internet with pitchforks and torches, but if an OSR product has sweaty goat man sex in it, *no one* is going to burn down your blog just for pointing it out.

      People who want to buy that stuff will. People who don’t, won’t.

      That last paragraph endeared you to neither one of those two groups. It’s embarrassing. You already wrote three or four sentences of word salad in apologetic preempted defense. So cringe.

      You’re my hero, Bryce. You write these three times a week without fail. You’re amazing.

      Fuck the haters. Be yourself.

      Keep writing these reviews—and keep them OSR—and I’ll keep buying you half a martini at the bar every month.

  3. Sean (she/her) says:

    So happy they finally came out with a more LGBTQ friendly supplement for Zweihander! I have tried introducing LGBTQ+ characters many times before but the original ruleset would always cause them to contract various wasting illnesses or expire from malignant tumors as a result of accumulated corruption points within a session or two.

  4. Gnarley Bones says:

    So … 2E mindset and furries. Two horrible tastes that taste even more horrible together.

    I suppose it was inevitable.

  5. Blaine Pack says:

    I I for one am just grateful the octopus with hands isn’t also described by it’s sexuality. Real show of restraint there. But really, this reeks of fanfiction disguised as adventure writing.

  6. AmaranthPhoenix21167(He/Her) says:

    This supplement could not have come at a better time. Ever since we started using the previous Zweihander sourcebook Open Borders: Diversity In A Grimdark Age, our LGBTQ+ characters would frequently get beaten up by packs of roving moon-god worshipping Ratmen youths that started to show up in every major hommlet and city, forcing our characters to adventure in the country-side.

  7. Reason says:

    Gygax was doing gay better than this decades ago- Lareth the Beautiful down there with all his opal necklaces… Rufus and Burn shacked up together, just look at ’em… and he never felt the need to spell it all out for us. They just were.

    • Dave says:

      It took me decades to catch on to Rufus and Burne. It was only in the 20-teens that I happened to see again the old illustration of the two of them, one wearing pink leather armor with sculpted abs and I finally got it.

    • Anonymous says:

      Are you fucking serious? Gygax representation was terrible, it was the stereotype of effeminate homosexual typical of his day and age. You can’t do much worse than that

      • Jonathan Becker says:

        Really? Kind of depends on how you play them, don’t it? Nothing in their T1 description screams “effeminate stereotype” to me…more like “successful adventurers that will kick your newbs’ asses if trifled with.”

        Jeff Dee’s illustrations is typical of all his work, which is very much comic book super hero style (see Villains & Vigilantes for other examples). Regardless, that’s not how Gygax represents them in his text.

        Now Lareth the Beautiful (OTOH) is more of the hipster/metro- type that was recruited right out of his frat house into the Very Bad Cult thing…

  8. anonymous says:

    I wish someone would write an actual good LGBTQ+ focused Warhammer adventure about an Imperial knightly order based on the Sacred Band of Thebes or maybe just wizard hook ups gone wrong.

    Instead there’s this.

    It’s like some guy asking you back to his place to look at their original Tom of Finland prints only to show you a ceiling plastered with Sonic the Hedgehog inflation erotica.

    • Anonymous says:

      And yet, the difference is one of degree only. Once the doctrine of ‘Love is Love’ is accepted, no moral position can be taken to substantiate the inherent disgust one feels at yet another piss-orgy goatmen dungeon.

      Your desire is wrong, probably. The element of ‘gay’ in and of itself has no value to the adventure and the philosophy that it is shorthand for runs counter to most of WHF’s themes. The people that want to put gay in Warhammer are much more concerned with gay then they are with Warhammer and as such they are likely to succeed at the gay part but fail at the Warhammer part. They have no passion for and no understanding of the thing they are trying to gentrify. This is a recurring theme.

      • MooseAnon says:

        If there’s one thing you can count on this site for it’s homophobic word-salad!

        Is this Prince or Kent?
        Is there a difference?

        • DeerAnon says:

          You misspelled ‘its.’

          • Grammar Monarchist says:

            In English “its” is used for the possessive, while the common contraction of the words “it is” is “it’s”.

          • Grammar Na-Monarchist (Rank II) says:

            The mutant also seems to grapple with other complexities of the High Speech. “If there is one thing to count on this site for it’s…[…]”

            The critical verb is ‘to count on’ not ‘to count.’ If there is one thing to count on this site its? Does it mean if there is one thing we can count on and it is this site? Or does it mean we can count things on this site?

            Regardless, nothing a firm thrashing with the riding crop and banishment to the Radium Mines won’t fix.

    • Jonathan Becker says:

      “Wizard hook ups gone wrong” should be a whole line of adventures. So many great examples in the S&S genre (Theleb K’arna from Elric immediately springs to mind).

  9. Anonymous says:

    I have no problem with gay characters in D&D but no freaky sex please

    And no I don’t consider sex freaky just for involving 2 people of the same sex. I’m talking about the sweaty goat man threesome shit

  10. Melan says:

    Zweihänder is probably the weirdest mutant in traditional gaming. A grim and perilous Warhammer clone whose author and fandom seem to detest everything that makes Warhammer Warhammer. It is, indeed, like a Wild West RPG whose audience hated guns, booze, horses, and cigars. This explains the present module.

    • Shuffling Wombat says:

      The adventures for Zweihander have been underwhelming, to put it politely. Escape the Noose has promise, although the themes are covered better in the 2E WFRP fan offering The Nine Virtues of Magnus the Pious. There are some covering very adult, some might say distasteful, material. The Saint of Bruckstadt is a much stronger treatment. There are also a few railroads, wasting decent premises.
      And yet WFRP has a (deserved) reputation for excellent adventures.

    • Anonymous says:

      “It is, indeed, like a Wild West RPG whose audience hated guns, booze, horses, and cigars.”

      But, they really love chaps and cowboy boots and cowboy hats!

  11. Anonymous says:

    Updoot

  12. rekalgelos says:

    It is for reviews likes this that I keep returning and donating

  13. OSR Fundamentalist says:

    >A focus on how gender and sexuality have not always been as cut and dry as presented in history, and influences seen in history and mythology. That’s cool.
    It actually isn’t, since the authors have a clear biased agenda and will use cherrypicking and backprojection to create a narrative that supports their views. Anthropology is bullshit, anthropological gender studies is even more bullshit.

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