Chapel of the Rotted Claw

By J. Lasarde
Broken Rat Games
S&W
Level 3

A mile from the village of Breckdell is a solid oak door built into the side of a steep hill. Rumours claim that the door once led to a chapel of an evil cult that terrorised the area many years ago. Not much has been heard of this cult of the rotted claw and locals presumed they had left or be slain, and as the years passed memory of the cults activities were forgotten by most. In recent weeks hunters have claimed that they have seen the door in the hill open, and an eerie light emanating from within. Fear that the cult may have returned the village wants to hire some hardy adventures to investigate and put an end to whatever evil lies within the Chapel of the Rotted Claw.

This 22 page adventure uses about eleven pages to present about thirteen rooms in a small cult dungeon with undead. It’s going for a slow creepy vibe in the catacombs, which it does a decent job working towards. The somewhat evocative writing is organized poorly and, in the end, there is not much special about a dungeon that abstracts insteads of using specifics.

Really/ A mile from the village is a hill with a door in it? I can see it from the front window of my hovel? And the cultists within are stealing babies? Really? Sometimes I wonder what people are thinking and if they have ever lived in the real world. I guess you get to do whatever you want to in your fantasy world, but the more I have to suspend disbelief the less engaged I am. Things should be relatable. People should react the way people react … perhaps with a bit of hyperrealism and such, but it should be relatable if in a What You Would Like To Do if not a Really What You Would Do manner.

We’ve got a lot of effects attached to this adventure. Things like clerics and paladins losing a point of wisdom, temporarily, every two hours. Or the offensive impact of magic-user spells increased, at the expense of a temporary loss of a hit point. I note that the impact of that offensive increase is not mentioned. 

This is a general trend in the adventure/ Things are not expanded upon, in even the most basic way. What IS the impact of that offensive increase? No advice. In another room the description goes in to great detail on the trap/puzzle that is in the room and how you make a chest appear. That chest is never mentioned again. Yes, you survived the no-save crushing lowering ceiling trap by solving the puzzle and made the chest appear … but there is absolutely NOTHING mentioned about the chest other than “a chest appears.” Or, even, perhaps, we can extend this to the marketing for the description … in which no level range is listed. It’s as if no one actually played this. It’s abstracted content. And abstracted content is NOT good content. Specificity os the soul of the narrative. Not length. Specificity. “There are symbols, linked to an ancient cult.” Wonderful. I am inspired. 

The descriptions are a maddening mix of relatively decent evocative test and padding. “This door seems to be unlocked. ‘Uh. ok. Is it or isn’t it? What does seems to be unlocked even mean? The adventure is rife with this, padding, seems, appears to be. Backstory. But. then, it will hit you with something like “Stepping down the stairs leads into a large stone room, thick marble columns reach up to the ceiling, at the top weird sculptures peer down at the PCs. The area is musty smelling, and dust, mold and strange stains cover Everything.” Thats actually not that bad. Good impressions of the room and a nice inclusion of small, dust, mold, stains. This is what a decent description should be doing. It’s sets the mood while telling the party what they can, at first glance, explore.

And then, of course, it all gets fucked up. It just dumps in monsters generally at the end, even if they are gonna gak you in the face in the middle of the text. Imagine a corridor. There’s a full description of the corridor. What you find at the end of it, etc. And, the, at the end of the description, it says something like If you step foot in the corridor then twelve monkeys appears with switchblades to attack you. Well, maybe that goes somewhere else in the text other than tacked on at the end? And it doesn’t help that this thing has some mania with describing room exits. In detail. “The exit to the east goes down a short set of stairs and ends at a door.” Yes, that is indeed what the map shows. Thanks for not adding anything to it. 

And then there’s formatting. Let’s us imagine paragraph breaks, in the text, to help organize things. But let us now do anything with the line spacing or an initial start of paragraph indent. It’s just … a left of page alignment? This is the anti-method of making things more scannable.

There’s nothing special here. The adventure is kind of slow burn. There are undead under water in corridors. There’s a temple flood/escape thing at the end, which it intimates a story for by noting that undead don’t have to breathe, setting up a madcap escape. Bt, other than that we’ve just got some standard traps and standard encounters, poorly formatted and described. Abstracted content rather than the specific content that would bring the adventure to life. 

This is $2 at DriveThru. There is no preview. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/499960/chapel-of-the-rotten-claw?1892600