Beneath the Moss Courts

By Gus L
Through Ultan's Door
OSR
Levels 2-3?

[…] It expands one of the hidden locations of the sewer point crawl into an entire pirate-themed siege adventure that also reaches up into the law offices of Zyan Above. Receive your first glimpse of the city of Zyan! Defeat your enemies at trial with the testimony of cats! Loot the wreck of the Verdant Purveyor, rich with blood-stained pirate booty! Or, more likely, end up imprisoned in its water-choked hold!

This 46 page supplement presents a corrupt solicitor/office as well as his thug/pirate buddies who live in the sewers unearth on a grounded ship. Ultan and Gus primes you for expectations, and those are met. Evocative, interesting, twisted yet relatable. And, deserving of a little more work to make it fully usable.

Each piece of Zyan that comes to light is wonderful. It’s bizarre and yet fully relatable. Wonderfully byzantine and, piece after piece, consistent with what has come before in style and tone. This chapter comes in from Gus L and fits easily within what has come before. This alone, should be a remarkable feat.

What we have here is a little mini-adventure setting that revolves around the party getting in to legal trouble. Probably. There is no ham handed plot here. Or, plot of any type. Instead we get a small introduction to the legal system in Zyan. This then dovetails in to the office and personage of a certain Fee Inquisitor & Lawgiver, Millbrath Osban. This then leads us to a grate outside his window in to which the party can descend in to the sewers (Beneath the Moss Courts!) and travel a bit before coming across a pirate base. This is run by an associate of Millbrath, who uses his gang of thugs to make witnesses disappear and so on. Thusly we have an opportunity for adventure. The party could be in legal trouble and come to know Osban through tha mechanism. Hiring him to help them, or, better, having opposing counsel that is running in to trouble with the legendary Osban and his legal ‘skills.’ The party in legal trouble is always a great side adventure, eh? The offices and base nearby make perfect sense in this context and any DM could easily use the resources here to guide the party though an adventure. Other uses for this should be obvious. For the supplement is giving you resources to use to create and/or have an adventure around. The legal system, a corrupt solicitor, and his mob organization associates. Parceled out over week or diving in to it, you’ve got what you need.

This falls in to weird category. It’s not really a site based adventure. It does present multiple sites but its clear that this is meant to be taken advantage of to supplement a certain thing that can happen in a game. I don’t know, as if you needed to raise a daid dude and there was an article about how it works in the city along with a church and a couple of other places, so you could spin that task in to an adventure in any of a few ways. This straddles the line between a supplement and an adventure. And, because it’s city based, I love every minute of it.

Everything about the place is great. Wonderful monster description, a great vibe to the language that successfully communicate the tone of the place and the people. The writing is used to great effect to add to the tone. This end is, mostly a pirate base. Infiltrate or assault, based on your levels. Or, infiltrate until the inevitable discovery occurs? There’s an order of battle, watches are mentioned well, using the slaves and their reactions to an infiltration/assault are well covered without droning on. Gus knows what the point of the descriptions here are, to facilitate play, and covers the important things you need to do that and minimizes or leaves out the rest. God, so many people could learn from that. Anyway, the interactivity here is centered mostly around skullduggery, the social and sneaking parts of the game. A little exploration, related to infiltration perhaps, and a few traps around treasures and so on, but, mostly, navigating the complexities of getting what you want to happen to happen, through talking, stealth, and some well placed stabbin.

There are a couple of points that I wish were handled better.

It feels like there is a map missing. While there is a decent little map of the “law offices” (nothing so mundane in Zyan, I’m paraphrasing here …) and of the “pirate ship”, there is, it feels like, a missing map of the envions around the ship. A little build up around the “bay” where the ship is and then, perhaps, the little “settlement” around the ship as well. These are keyed, in the text, but there doesn’t appear to be a corresponding map. This is not an impossible situation, I suspect you can run it a bit linearly, but I do like the stripper to tell me she loves me even if it’s not true. I note that there are various lookout posts that the text focuses on, that being a trigger in to the “pirate” order of battle. And, yet, spatially, these are a bit offputting, being relegated, it would seem, to just the encounter area they are noted in. That whole “vista overlook” thing that I like to harp on sometimes. It becomes a bit cumbersome without a map.

Then there’s the text, proper. It can get a bit long in places. Information is dense and embedded well. Taken as a whole the thing reeks of flavour, but, it also comes off as having dense entries. And it’s not always obvious to me that those dense entries were handled in the best way and that rehoming certain pieces of information other sections/entries would not have been smoother. The goal, of course, is to supportive during play and that’s a spectrum. But I think what I’m saying is that the density of the entries, and sometimes the nature of the information in the entries, seems like it should be elsewhere in the text. An overview, a different section. A sidebar. Something/where. 

It comes across, again, as a kind of … I don’t know. It’s not an exploratory adventure. It’s not a plot adventure. It’s not a regional setting. Or, maybe it is? I’m trying to get across the nature of the text, supporting play but not directing it, even in the way that an exploratory dungeon would. 

Anyway, I love it. It’s great. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. I don’t see a preview here … bad Ben! Bad! No cookie for you! Console yourself with a Best.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/364637/beneath-the-moss-courts?1892600