By Jacob Fleming, David Cameron Gelatinous Cubism OSE Low Levels
Beyond the city wall, there are creatures with their own plans. Giant spiders desperately assault the city in swarms. No one knows the cause of these attacks, but their frequency increases by the day. Far to the north, smaller orc war-bands are beginning to gather and remote settlements are all that stand between them and the walls of Obanhold. Too much blood has been spilled in the name of human expansion and the orc tribes of Maut’hgar have called for retribution. It is a matter of time before all out war is declared. A storm is coming.
This 72 page adventure presents a sandbox region to explore with a few things ostensibly going on. It feels, though, like it doesn’t have a soul. Going through the motions of an adventure. Going through it very well, but it doesn’t feel like it’s heart is in it.
Yeah yeah, I know how that sounds. Hang in there though.
We’ve got this city, Like 35,000 people. Just past it is the wilderness. Abandoned ruins. Hardly any people. And lots of orc bans. Don’t make sense to me, but, it’s D&D, so, we’ll ignore reality and handwave a “supporting lands/communities to the south” kind of thing. Anyway, there’s another town, like sixty miles north. And then there’s a lot of hexes to explore. It’s not a hex crawl, but more of a sandbox region to explore … although I guess the difference here is mostly in format. You’g got these orcs in the north, various tribes and their ancestral homeland. You’ve got some bandits here and there hiding in ruins. You’ve got some kind of spider queen thing giving birth to lots of spiders who like to charge the city walls every couple of weeks. And you’ve got some ancient ruins of The Builders, some three eyed giant dudes who liked to leave statues of themselves in the ruins, it seems. A wyvern flying around, some orc ancestral artifacts/magic items … some decent elements to mix it up together.
Then, you chuck in the party. This would normally be flamethrowers in the gas factory, but, not in this case. IN this case it’s … boring?
There’s this really nice region map. The art style is great, with nice shading and topo marks and a clear legend. Maybe my favorite of the various styles of overland maps since it looks fairly realistic. And then the design on top of it is interesting. Towers in high places. Trails that lead, out of nowhere … but they make sense when you look at the map. I note, also, the presence of a couple of treasure maps in the adventure that leads to buried hoards, noted also on the map and unable to be found without the map. A very good implementation of this feature. Not quite a full adventure hook, but finding them gets you moving on the overland map, wandering encounters, and perhaps finding a few of the other fixed locations that are off the beaten path. Quite the nice map and utilization of it. The wandering table isn’t large enough, or interesting enough, to support the map and Idon’t think there are rules in OSE for hex visibility, so I’m not sure just exactly how you’re finding some of these places. But, handwave handwave handwave … nice map.
The rest of the adventure is, well, …
We get an opening story. Rated on the “fiction in adventures” standard it’s a fucking masterpiece. Which means it’s inoffensive. It’s just some farmer who has his village raided by orcs and rides off to the city. Oh, oh, good time for this, I guess. This is a Colonization adventure. The orcs are featured as natives who just want to get along, their lands encroached upon by the humans. Some want peace and some want war. “The orcs had been here long before humans settled it. “They had no tolerance for the human expansion and saw any encroachment on their land as an act of war.” Also, their history has them encroaching on these lands when they migrated to it. SOMETHING THAT ONE OF THE ORC NPCS ACKNOWLEDGES AS A REASON THEY SHOULD JUST MOVE ALONG AGAIN. That’s interesting. Anyway, this isn’t really played up, at all, beyond what I just typed. Yeah, they are nomadic traders and it goes on a little long with this, but, sure, whatever. Alignment: Evil. Hey Frank, what’s your god say, they glow evil? “Yup.” And you cast Detect Evil, not Detect Different Culture, right? “Yup.” And there’s a god of evil that they worship … whose goal is the destruction of all life? “Yup.” Okay man, just checking before I get to stabbin.
The first half of the adventure is useless. We get a generic description of a generic fantasy town. Then we get a generic orcs-as-natives overview, and a generic overview of a few locations on the map. Like a paragraph for each location that includes little to no specificity. In one village you get a couple of sentences and then it ends with “Some of the villagers claim to have seen orcs roaming in the distant hills, and there is a standing reward offered to any who can find those missing and deal with the orc menace” That’s your call to adventure, so better pick it up. Seriously, there is very VERY little to help the DM get things moving. Just like with that entry, there are hints here and there of the adventure actually having a soul. One watchtower had all of the guards recalled to re enforce the city walls. Except, three of them stayed behind. That had some play opportunities. Grizzled rangers or some kind of shit. Guerrillas. Maybe doing some Aldo the Apache type shit to the orcs. “And the Orc will be sickened by us, and the Orc will talk about us, and the Orc will fear us.” But, nah, it doesn’t give us anything like that. It just says that three of them stayed behind to keep a watch on the orc movements. *Yawn*
The orc strongholds are treated much like the human villages: a single paragraph of description. The second half of the adventure describes about ten locations that you can explore, each with between six and two dozen rooms … with a dozen being average? That’s a decent number of locations in the region.
But …
It’s all just a little … staid. Static. The descriptions are note very evocative, and, again, I might make the statement that they feel soulless. I’m not even sure I might say that these are fact based descriptions. They feel lifeless. And the interactivity is just seemingly lacking as well. A trap here and here (although, far too often the adventure says something like “the door is trapped” and then doesn’t actually tell you anything else about the trap.) but, mostly, it’s stabbing monsters. In the grand context of the region there might be interactivity. The orcs, their cultural magic items, some thieves in a tower, the interlinking ancient ruins. But, individually, it just feels like the rooms are going through the motion of being an adventure. Descriptions which lack life and rooms rather than situations.
I could, I think, get behind this in some ways. It’s a more realistic, or, naturalistic adventure in a region. But, you are gonna have to bring hella imagination to bring the thing to life. You’re going to have to take “three soldiers stayed behind to watch the oc movements” and turn that in to a full on thing that the party will remember and enjoy playing out. And your’e going to have to do that for every single thing that the party encounters, in every region, in every room. That’s really not much of springboard, in any of this, to build upon. Cutting down on the word count, the mundane vanilla and generic word count, and instead inserting a little life in to the encounters. Turning things in to situations and giving them, and the NPC’s, some character, would have gona long long way to turning this in to a kind of instant classic. The region is there. The locations interlinked are there. But the lack of a soul means this is not a classic. I don’t hate it, but I would never in a million years run it.
This is $10 at DriveThru. That’s a fair price, if the content delivered. But, the preview is broken. Sad 🙁
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/456393/The-Scourge-of-Northland?1892600
So the module really says that the orcs are objectively evil, not even plain Chaotic, and also the misunderstood victims? Whats the message our guy is conveying here?
Ontologically evil. Hell yes!
Not really? The only time evil appears in the text is when describing the ancient undead threat that chased the orcs out…
OSE does not “do” Evil – only law/Neutral/Chaos. So not sure what is happening here
Yet, “detect evil” exists. Huh.
Although there is no Evil alignment, OSE handles “evil” explicitly in a number places and closely follows the Moldvay original in most regards.
The OSE description for Detect Evil paraphrases the original by saying “Objects enchanted for evil purposes and living beings with evil intentions are caused to magically glow”. I.e. the spell assesses intentions not creatures.
It also says (also paraphrasing the original) “The referee must decide what is “evil”.” In other words, “evil” is not inextricably linked to OSE alignment.
Clearly the adventure is a deep meditation on this and related questions, disguised as vapid entertainment.
Notice that unless you regard a vampire as an “object enchanted for evil purposes”, Detect Evil would never make it glow.
So many questions.
Sounds the adventure is low on fantasy/supernatural and high on misguided attempts at realism. A.k.a. mudcore.
I’m up for mudcore. Not up for a morality lecture from some wiener who makes d&d stuff for a living
Nobody cares what you are or are not up for.
Sounds like someone was playing World of Warcraft and wanted to reproduce it as a TTRPG module.
Looks like a MERP cover!
it’s unfortunatly a typical adventure from this guy :(. Same map style, same mini dungeons , same prose. same boring. Really sad
I want to like his adventures, the small sandbox campaign is my favorite type of module. Everything about this, even the art, is perfectly in line with what I like…and yet.
I rather liked Jacob’s first two adventures (Tower Silveraxe and Valley of the Manticore). They played well, had fun maps, and felt immediately inviting for adventure. Silveraxe had surprising depth with a good amount of moving parts (water fairy shenanigans at Amethyst Lake, internal struggles in the cyclops tribe, bandits that grabbed hold of evil treasure, statues and riddles, etc) and felt like a real sandbox.
But this one I can’t figure what to do with it yet. It’s a sandbox, sure, but the hooks are eluding me. I think it gets at Bryce’s comment about the first half of the book – it’s descriptive but not evocative, and not written with adventure grist in mind. The city entries go on for pages but I can’t easily point out the adventure in them. It’s like it was going for gazetteer and adventure but landed halfway between the two… which unfortunately isn’t as useful as either endpoint.
Tower Silveraxe was competently made, unlike much of the stuff coming out in this fallen age, but a bit bland.
Unfortunately, I agree with you on this one. I backed it because I thought it had potential and I like the author, but after I got it I found it half-cooked. There are a couple parts where the descriptions are there, like in the original story, something about the moons, etc. but I think the whole thing lacked tension. I think the maps are excellent and the idea is generally good, but the execution misses the mark. I needed more to actually feel excited to run it, so I am afraid I will not.
I like that old school cover. I like all the ingredients Bryce describes, minus the opening fiction and the orcs as natives. I especially appreciate treasure maps placed in a module. Shame the execution doesn’t follow through.
Bryce review the new Prince of merchants dungeon!
Hype
Yuck.
In D&D terms, Orcs are there to be killed and their stuff taken. Just like Gnolls, just like Kobolds, just like Hobgoblins, etc. That’s why we have these monsters in the game.
You know it’s weird, I searched my PDF for “evil” “chaotic” and “alignment” and I can’t find any mention of any of the orcs getting assigned any alignment, let alone an evil one. The wyvern is evil! Well actually it’s chaotic, which is the same thing except when it isn’t. But there isn’t an alignment given for orcs in the adventure. I guess Bryce is basing his complaint on the idea that unless the adventure says otherwise explicitly, dms will import the chaotic alignment from OSE. Which is the same thing as evil except when it often isn’t.
Anyways, I also thought it was weird that comments mention a lack of tension, since I clearly remembered a timetable at the end of which the orcs invade the city. But when I looked back at the PDF, I only found this paragraph whose vagueness is pretty representative of Bryce’s complaints. But if you build out the timetable a bit I thought it’d turn into Red Hand of Doom with the twist that actually the humans arguably had it coming what with their morally questionable sorceress leader and her chaos emeralds.
“During the course of the adventure, the imminent threat of war escalates. The referee may wish to show this by increasing the number and frequency of orcs in wilderland encounters. Several weeks after the start of the campaign, a significant unified force of orcs marching from Maut’ghar to the north will lay siege to Obanhold.”
The invasion bit is good, but it could benefit from some helpful specificity. “What happens if the party does nothing” time tables without all the hand-waviness are easy enough, or you could do it procedurally, like how Mausritter revised has simple rules that prompt factions to act toward their goals. Something concrete like that would go a long way here.
Addendum: I started actually sitting down and figuring out how I would run this thing, thinking it’d be cool to drop Arden Vul in the hexcrawl and make some of the small dungeons connect to *redacted* in AV. But then I realized that despite the long, long list of NPCs, almost none of them have any desires or goals listed. Which means that the flavor text for basically the whole city is utterly replaceable and not really helpful for actually running a game.