Blue Star Forest

By Chris Carter
Exotic World Designs
OSR
Level ?

The forest now known as the Blue Star Forest has existed from ?me immemorial. Decades ago a star was seen going across the sky and entering the forest – giving it its name – before that it had a name (to the elves) which translated as the Twilit Forest [“Tinduglad”].

This 34 page adventure uses twentish pages to describe a forest with ten encounters, including a wizards tower with about eight more. It is an amateurish effort, but, also, not without a certain underlying charm. Which makes me not hate it, but, also, its not worth checking out in any way.

This is somewhat what I was hoping it would be. I was hoping it would be a kind of amateurish product that didn’t touch on the tropes of 5e, Lord of the Rings, Pathfinder, or even D&D. That’s not quite what it actually is, but, also, it’s not too far away. It’s closer, I think, to a computer RPG  adventure and its tropes. There’s a certain kind of randomness in this that does give it a bit of the Anything Can Happen that one might expect in a old school fantasy forest wandering. It’s also plagues by a lack of understanding of how to write an actual adventure. 

There’s a brief table of hooks and rumors to go along with them. Each hook being tied to a single encounter in the adventure. Yes, you could hook away at encounter one in the forest and be done after that. There are some notes about how, after encounter one, you feel compelled to go deeper in to the forest, but, also, you get to make a save, so, you know, adventure over! There’s nothing too remarkable about the hooks, or the rumors, standard things really. There IS a brief little note about a Nemesis, a rival party that could be in the first also. There are not details, and no rival party available, but, this also is an older trope from the early days that makes an appearance here. A kind of “you could also do this” sort of thing, without anything else provided. This is not the Assist the DM attitude that I think an adventure should bring, but, also, it DOES recognize that this is available to the DM, which is something lost from a lot of modern adventures. Look, man, I’m trying hard here to find the charm.

The adventure is actually quite confused. At one point we’re told that a recent battle with an outlaw band killed to outlaws. It is IMMEDIATELY followed up with “no one was killed.”  Not that any of that matters since it’s just useless backstory, but, you get the idea. Like a map showing the tower layout of a wizards tower … which is then constricted by the actual encounter descriptions. There’s a lack of proof reading here that is frustrating. Not game ending, but just frustrating. 

The forest wandering table is four pages long but has nothing, really, except monster stats and monster ecology. Nothing specific at all. The actually encounters are many paragraphs long, four or so on average, and the descriptions usually amount ot something like “3 orcors live in crude huts near the pool” … and then four paragraphs that don’t actually describe anything at all. Some ecology. SOme backstory that doesn’t matter. There is painfully little about the actually encounter you are currently facing. I don’t mean tacticial, although that would satisfy me and give me something else to botch about, I guess. But there’s just NOTHING related to THIS encounter. 

And yet there are these hints about things that could have been. A meteor field with stone stress and metallic fruit. I’m always up for a nice blasted clearing in a wood. Or glowing a farmers field covered in blue mushrooms … and strange effect. Or a Elf dude who can turn in to a giant spider. That’s fun. And yet we never get more than what I just stated, and it’s always surrounded by tons and tons of … padding? Irrelevant detail? That’s not right. Ecology and background, I guess. It just doesn’t hit AT ALL.

A little fantasy forest would have been nice, and there are hints of the weird and unusual here, but the padded out nature along with the lack os specificity in the encounters is maddening.

This is $2 at DriveThru. There’s no preview, sucker!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/465027/Blue-Star-Forest?1892600