By Daniel Harila Carlsen
Mudnight Media
Knave
Levels 1-3
Crimson Creek, a scenic slope up a young mountain. Your adventure starts of in a familiar, almost homely fashion. There’s a hamlet, home to quirky villagers with mundane problems. But every trail you follow will take you deeper down into the meat of the mysteries, scandals, and unusual horrors hidden under the red moss.
This 24 page hex crawl presents seven hexes in a dark whimsyish environment of orphans and necromancers. It mostly hits the technical aspects, but is just weird for the sake of being weird, and shows, with low stakes being the result.
I watch some horror but I tend to not watch the ones with demons and ghosts. There is a tendency amongst those to have No Rules. The demon/ghost can do whatever they want whenever they want. Knowing this, it’s hard for to buy in and attach. Whats the point of attachment and/or caring if the game world rules just don’t make sense at all?
It should be obvious where I’m going with this. The technical aspects of this adventure are relatively decent. It’s laid out fine. The whitespace and bullets are mostly ok and the language, while strained at times, does an ok job. The pink/red shit that it uses as color is a little busy, in my opinion, but it’s not a no go. But the problem is one of tone and/or understanding what a D&D adventure is.
The adventure just does shit. “Bully Dregbuck, miserable ratcatcher. Spine replaced with an untuned accordion. Hates rats. Can’t sneak, stalk, or hunt. Got kicked out of the graverobbers guild. Followed by his one-eyed cat, Astrid. Carries rat-stabbing spear, traps, chewing tobacco, catnip.” So, dudes got an accordion for a spine. The adventure has told us, up front, that theres this dude who is replacing peoples parts with prosthetics. I think that word means something else though. An accordion for a spine seems somewhat different. As does a tub for a head. As does a wood stove for a stomach.
This is the world that this adventure takes place in. I don’t see how you can adventure here. In a world in which there is no logic AT ALL then all actions are as likely to succeed as fail. Just stab your friend to do damage to the monster, because I mean, there’s no indication that you should NOT, right?
And this fucking does this, over and over again. And it does it while also tossing in shit like “Grimspoon’s Home for Bastardly Children” as the name of an orphanage. That’s not bad. It’s like, I don’t know, Series of Unfortunate Events turned up to eleven. But then it also, in all seriousness, has a black bear in a point hat in the tavern, on stage, playing the bagpipes.
And this shit extends to most aspects of the adventure. “Garden: An overgrown shrubbery of
thorns (d4 damage). A small skeleton can be found deep inside” This is meaningless. It has no impact on the adventure. It’s just some bit of trivia thrown in. And a HUGE part of the adventure is this trivia.
If I were to write “A kklsdfkjhd is sdkljfhsdkjfh here.” then you’d, rightfully, be wondering what the fuck what was going on. You have no basis for running this. There is not context to help you figure this out. Ok, so, what about a human face, no longer attached, that now shits coins. It’s not a head. It’s explicitly a face. Not attached. Eating corpses and shitting coins. There’s just not enough here to do something with. “A printing block of flesh.” Uh, ok. “A grandfather clock that records the history of the universe.” Uh. … ok.
This is the standard nineteen hex flower. Seven are populated. It takes 24 pages to do that. The titular Crimson Creek makes no appearance in the adventure. And there is just nothing here that matters. The world rules don’t matter. The words looks like they were randomly generated and then pieced together in to an adventure. It’s Porky in Wackyland. There is a semblance of plot, with necro dude making monsters who have escaped, but that’s it.
Is this the kind of work you’d like to do?
This is $9 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Else you wouldn’t buy it, silly goose!
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/504571/the-curious-creeps-in-crimson-creek-revised?1892600
Having read this, it can be a little extra in some places. But I will offer a tepid defense of the coin-spewing monster because it leads to fun gameplay. If the players can keep it a secret, they can make some good money. At the same time, the grave robbers guild will actively seek them out and try to take it for themselves. So there is some interactivity here.
Also, the obligatory “why is the musician bear a bridge too far but elves and wizards and dragons are fine?”
Elves & wizards & dragons have decades of RPG context behind them (and centuries of legend), and are expected; although we see dancing bears in history & in fairy tales, and in the Slumbering Ursine Dunes, they’re much more suprising here, and the author owes the DM a sense of how they fit into the world, or whether they’re just an intentional non-sequitur.