By Jacob Densford
Illuminated Snail Press
Knave 2e
Only one of the foul creatures remains—abominations forged by the meddling hands of wizards. After generations of slaughtering us, we’ve finally driven them back to the brink. Let the final hunt commence: the hunt for the last Owl Bear.
This sixteen page adventure has seven hexes to explore as you slaughter the last living owl bear. You’ll need all of your wits to survive the monotonous boredom of hexes with nothing/close to nothing to do in them.
Sixteen fucking pages my ass. I’ve been noticing a lot of Knave adventures pop on DriveThru all at once. Looks like there was a contest and this thing was the third place winner. Which seems to mean the public voted on it being the third place winner, so you know, the unwashed masses and all that jazz.
Ok, so, there’s one owlbear left. You’ve just arrived incountry at some white colonizer camp in the jungle. There are two hunting parties going out tomorrow. You want to join the big game hunter and her quisling local businessman sponsor or you want to join the white savior environmentalist and his smiling caricature of a local? Or maybe go your own way?
But first, the news. You wander around those seven hexes, notably NOT going south. IE: you start on a hex border at the six o clock position with nothing else shown on the map but the rest of the surrounding dial from the centerpoint of the hands. And from there you wander from hex to hex with little initial direction in finding the owlbear. Eventually you’ll find something. A village of locals who have all been grisly slaughtered by the owlbear with some ghosts playing a flute.. Or a bunch of monkeys in a tree banging on a drum. Or a wizards hut with nothing to do in it.
I really really can’t emphasize enough how shitty the encounters are. There is this thing that designers sometimes do where they are SO resistant to actually putting anything concrete down on paper. Maybe, if you squint really hard, you can get what they are going for. But, the wizard hut. It takes a fucking page, like all of the encounters do. And it’s nothing. It’s a dude living in a hut. He’s not fucking histile. He doesn’t really even have anything. You CAN get a spell component from him, for some project later, but it’s just so empty. He’s got no real personality other than “likes flowers.” The entire thing is pointless. I get it, you want a place to get the spell component. So, put some interactivity there. Likewise the monkeys in the trees. They’ve got a drum they bang on. That’s it. I guess you are motivated to get the drum because you se ethe monkeys have it? And I truly am guessing; I don’t see any reason to do anything here other than yawn. You’ve got to lead the party on, give them something to follow up on, give them SOME kind of bone to get them going an interested. We’re not talking spoon feeding them, but, something. ANYTHING to get the going. “Monkeys in the trees” ain’t it.
You know what else isn’t it? If you pick up the drum then you hear in your head “Rebuild my shrine and I will reward you!” Likewise if you pick up the ghosts flute or the other thing. LIterally a voice in your fucking head. This is not roleplaying. There is no subtly here. Telling someone directly what to do is not embracing the joy of player discovery. But, in the rumours, there is no specificity. “The local gods are feuding with each other, with dangerous repercussions for mortals—take shelter in bad weather” Well that’s exciting. DO the local gods have names? Is there a story to go with this? No? There’s just senseless abstraction of a rumour? Got it. I am not amused.
And now to the part of the review that the fuckwits will feel the need to comment on. You know what’s a decent novel? Things Fall Apart. Not my favorite, but pretty decent. You know what’s not Things Fall Apart? A sixteen page adventure. I have no fucking idea why someone decided that a sixteen page adventure, with a contest deadline attached, was the correct medium to comment about white colonization. We get white colonizers. We get the enviro dude with a white saviour complex. We get lots of references to white colonizers. We get a note about portraying the locals with empathy … even though we don’t get any information about them except they are all friendly. It’s fucking nuts. But, sure, dump in the smiling native caricature and the evil quisling businessman caricature. Or, the infantilized natives who can’t solve their own problems. And don’t forget to slaughter the smiling natives family so we can know for sure he’s just there as a trope. Got it. Ham fucking handed. And let’s be clear, I’m not bitching about your white colonizer shit. I’m bitching that its done is a hack fucking way.
But, also, I’m a hypocrite and can get over that. Well, I could get over that that. I mean IF THE FUCKING ADVENTURE WAS ANY GOOD. The smiling native guide has a village. If you go there everyone is slaughtered bloodily by the owlbear. There are some ghosts playing a flut. If you bury the villagers bodies then the spirits go to rest. IT TAKES A FUCKING PAGE FOR THIS. An entire page. Is there detail? None to speak of. Evocative descriptions? Not really, not to justify a page. Big fonts, a lot of white space and A LOT of extraneous padding. “IF the party picks up the flute THEN [fuckwit local god] speaks directly in to their mind: Build me a shrine and I will reward you.” Fuck off with that shit man. There’;s nothing to this village, or any of the encounters. There’s no content. There’s an ABSTRACTION of content. “You could, maybe” put in some ghosts of the villagers or something, I guess.” This is the equivalent of what is going on here. The specificity that brings an adventure life is just nt present at all.
This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages, a mix of intro and hexes. That’s enough to know what you’re getting.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/498863/hunt-for-the-last-owl-bear?1892600
I’m a bit surprised, as Ben Milton (a proven not-a-moron in adventure design) gave this an honorable mention.
I believe he might have saw this review and decided to bump it down
I got the impression he used the top user ratings entries otherwise
It sounds like this module ended up being the thing it intended to criticize.
How ironic
Lets be clear about something
It’s not possible to write a good DnD adventure about the evils of white colonialism
It’s like writing a romantic comedy about a guy with a cuckoldry fetish
DnD adventures are genre writing. Genre writing doesn’t permit all possible themes and characters
I would totally watch that romantic comedy
>> DnD adventures are genre writing. Genre writing doesn’t permit all possible themes and characters
That’s an interesting statement
It’s possible, and they can be pretty good.
Try these lesser known adventures:
Lorn Song of the Bachelor
Keep on the Borderlands
Keep on the Borderlands about white colonialism. That’s a new take. I guess every adventure into the wild is about white colonialism to some people.
Just noting out that anonymous is equating goblins, orc and other sub-humans to non-white natives, no one else, just him.
I know I am!
How about a scenario based on white colonialism establishing a world-class city on a desert island ,which is subsequently driven to decline after being handed back to non-white imperialism?
So in this romantic comedy, is the main character the cuck, or the bull? Or maybe the girlfriend/wife? And does the comedy come (sorry) from kink-shaming, or does it arise (really sorry) from some some other aspect of the film?
More seriously, isn’t there a whole subgenre of fantasy where the main characters are fighting against colonial forces? With such obscure titles as “Lord of the Rings” or “Star Wars”? Or more subtle ones like “Avatar”?
Lord of the Rings is not about fighting against colonialism and you have to be on serious troonjuice to have that take. It is about the forces of good (the West, the Good, the rightful King) prevailing over Evil (the rebel, the conniver, the outsider, the despairing, the corrupted).
Star wars is about fighting against an empire, its fighting the british empire mixed with fighting the Nazis, it doesn’t get any more american then that. Native auxilliaries are used on Endor, but Endor is not ‘colonized.’
Avatar is about fighting colonialism.
Both Star Wars and Avatar are anti-imperialist, not anti-colonialist. The difference between fighting empires and colonizers is colonizers are so much stronger that resistance is futile. In Avatar the bad guys want resources not liebensraum which feels colonialist but still suggests the natives can resist if they just fight hard and/or are led by a colonizer in drag, which is very problematic as they say. James Cameron later made a hilariously offensive comment that if the Lakota could’ve foreseen how bad their descendants are doing now they would’ve fought harder against the Europeans.
Things Fall Apart famously ends in an incredibly depressing way with the white colonizer guy remarking that the protagonist’s story might be worth “a paragraph” in his book “The Pacification of the Niger”. That’s legit.
So — can we have a rousing pulp fantasy adventure where resistance is literally futile? We can do a sterile performative thing where we go through the motions of an adventure but the real point is the virtue signaling circlejerk. But a “real” adventure? I don’t think so.
I’d argue Avatar definetely has the theme of a primitive but virtuous society taking on an advanced but immoral one (this is why it is fiction, real primitive societies tend towards violence, corruption and barbarism and are thus easily exploited by more savvy societies). I don’t think you could make it more anti-colonialist if you tried. The advanced society discovers the virtues of the natives and thus a handful of guys turn over and help the cat-boobs. If you replaced all the cat-tiddies with big eyes with giant bugs Jake’s evil nature would be immediately obvious. But this is a story, often a false one, and hollywood constantly tells stories that are false.
The often brutal reality does not interfere with the message of a piece of media.
Anonymous said
“Lets be clear about something
It’s not possible to write a good DnD adventure about the evils of white colonialism
It’s like writing a romantic comedy about a guy with a cuckoldry fetish
DnD adventures are genre writing. Genre writing doesn’t permit all possible themes and characters”
I can’t decide if this is a sincere attempt at meaningful discussion or an attempt at trolling. I’m leaning towards trolling.
“It’s like writing a romantic comedy about a guy with a cuckoldry fetish”
Definitely trolling, because that premise sounds like it could be legit hilarious.
Respectfully, I must disagree.
I appreciate that D&D or other games can tell stories with deep moral and political themes. I enjoy that. But I’m weird.
Most of the people I play with just want to relax and have fun. They do not want to play an adventure that explores the existential nature of good and evil, or colonialism, or counterinsurgency. If you gave them an adventure like that, they would not call it good.
And I think those people are very common in the D&D audience.
So while as poorly worded as most anonymous comments on the internet are, I can understand why most people would characterize D&D exploring white colonization as no more fun than sitting down to read Piketty’s Capital instead of Terry Prachett’s Bromeliads trilogy.
And thus that D&D adventure would be bad.
You can probably write a good adventure with anti-colonial theming (say, have the villains be an outpost from some other plane, enslaving the native inhabitants in a valley, Neogi or something) but the problem is that people that are interested in doing so are generally not interested in making a good DnD adventure.
DnD has roots in S&S literature which is fantasy influenced by westerns and the frontier. There’s a definite strain of that in DnD, with clearing the wilderness and building a fortress and taming it. If you have been indoctrinated to despise the idea that civilization exists and something that must be preserved (often through force) from encroaching barbarism, you will always be fighting that part of DnD, in the same way that if you have been demoralized you will always have trouble accepting the concept of objective morality and thus alignment.
Very well said.
I quibble only to note that fantasy being inspired by the frontier and the Western genre is a stretch. REH’s “Beyond the Black River” notwithstanding, the primary inspiration for the Fantasy genre (or, at least, that Genre as it existed at time of the game’s founding) is clearly mythology and, specifically, those mythologies of the cultures normally taught in Western Civ. classes – Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Celtic all the way to “fairy tales” (which are often written accounts of *ancient* stories themselves).
Howard was certainly influenced by westerns (and the historical adventure fiction of Howard Lamb) but far more saliently, he was a texan in the 1900s, and the real western was only a few decades away. “As the son of the local doctor, Howard had frequent exposure to the effects of injury and violence, due to accidents on farms and oil fields combined with the massive increase in crime that came with the oil boom.[15] Firsthand tales of gunfights, lynchings, feuds, and Indian raids developed his distinctly Texan, hardboiled outlook on the world.”
Howards conception of hard-bitten proganists and trackless open wilderness, seedy taverns and cruel despots certainly uses lots of historical inspirations and mythological imagery, but there is something of the praerie in there. A distinctly american flavor that is different from the old world fantasies of True Kings and bucolic farmlands. Leiber innovates but it retains its picaresque character.
As I said.