By Mauro Longo
Black Pepper Game Studio
OSE
Levels 1-3 Ha!
Twelve Dead Make One Alive, the rhyme says. Adventurers soon learn there is a grim truth at its core. Far from civilization, deep within the shadowy depths of the Grimwald Forest, lies the ominous Black Mill, an abandoned place shrouded in whispered tales of dark magic and spectral hauntings. The unwary who venture to explore the Mill must overcome its sinister perils and disturbing inhabitants: the Black Miller and its Twelve Dead, who dwell within its moldy walls…
This 78 page adventure uses about thirty two pages to describe thirty pages in a mill compound stuffed full of undead. Looks pretty. Seems to have a nice format. But its just mostly a hackfest with enemies WAYYY out of your league with a layout style that actually makes the fucking thing MORE confusing.
Seems that a hundred or so years ago the old miller made a deal with a dude named Avery Goodman. In return for killing twelve people he gets blah blah blah. He does so, the twelve rise, and kill him. He comes back to unlife. Avery shows up again and makes the same deal with the newly undead twelve: kill twelve each and you get to come back to life. Now, a hundred years on, they’ve almost killed 144 people. They are short the parties number … Not a bad setup for a locale. We got ol Goodman, a shady miller and vengeful undead with a mission all running around an old mill compound. A little bit of folklore to kick things off, yeah? Fear not, that’s not going anywhere and isn’t really going to ever pop up again. Sure, there’s a nice ring of twelve graves in the basement, a tunnel full of 140 corpses, some hearts to destroy and a couple of contracts with Goodman that you can burn, but the folklore elements pretty much dies out in the backstory.
The map is going to illustrate a lot of the issues with the adventure. It looks fine. There are monster names on it. (Yeah, I love it when I can tell easily which monsters nearby might react to the party in the next room!) and some icons indicating locked, stuck, and open doors. Hey, this all sounds great yeah? Sure. But the map is small. The monsters and creatures are kind of on top of each other in many cases. One room with a red dragon and the next with a blue and the next with a black, all within thirty feet of each other, or, the level 1-3 equivalent of that, with undead. And then all of those icons? They just kind of get in the way for the most part. Locked, stuck, I’m not sure that’s information that’s needed on the map AND in the text? It reminds me for all the world of the folks who use like eight different colored box types to denote read-aloud, hidden information, monster stats and so on. It becomes distracting and eventually makes the thing harder to use. And then the map, proper, after all of that, is just hard to read. The pencil lines, the lines on the map that make up the details of the rooms, the walls, doors, and the like, come off as a very light stroke weight. These will be the issues of the main adventure as well: something that at first glance looks great but then ends up being less than that. A lot less than that.
But first, the difficulty level. I find it hard to believe this was ever playtested. It’s listed as level one to three. That is repeated in several places. As I bitch, note, we could just bump this up to 3-5 or something and I’d shut up. But, the lack of playtesting here … It’s meant to complete in one session and in one evening. There are twelve core undead to defeat plus, maybe, a few more. Well, hang on. Once you arrive at the mill, and the mechanics set it up so that you WILL arrive at night/sunset, you can’t really leave again. Save vs spells, at -4, to find your way back through the woods again, otherwise the evil conspires to lead you back. Plus, there’s a wraith in the woods that attacks you if you try to leave. And no real place inside the mill to rest. You are really kind of doing a one and done thing here. I guess you could kill the wood wraith and get the fuck out, trying over and over again until you make that save vs spells at -4. Oh, and then the next time you show up the wraith is back again. The undead come back fully each night. So, you’re in, probably. With multiple wraiths inside You know, four HD, energy drain, magic to hit? Those wraith. It suggested using The Gaborians alternate rules for energy drain, but even that is gonna smart. How about a 6HD giant leech? There’s something like nineteen creature encounters, some with groups and some individually. This fucking shit is gonna be ROUGH. Even a hit and run loot is gonna be hard. You can make something hard, but you also gotta give them out or else you are deathtrapping a group of ones. Smart play doesn’t matter when your group of four one’s face all of the colors of the ancient dragons with no way out.
There’s no real overview of the mill. There are individual locations, on the outer walls, on either side of the mill, but, coming upon the mill there’s no real vista overview descriptions of the place. I guess you just wander in at location number one and go from there? Speaking of location one … there’s a murder of crows there ready to kill you. And some bandits in the woods ready to kill you. And a wraith wandering around ready to kill you. I guess this is just “whats going on in the woods” but its weird in that it all sounds like its all just mashed up there in location one. And then there’s the fucking stables. The stables and the hallway outside of them are, like, five feet apart. But we get two separate encounters here … one with a skeleton horse in it. If you can fucking see it from where you are, and its meaningful, then you need to note it even if its not in your room.
It’s full of long italics, and we all know by now how much I hate that, I find it hard to read in longer sections, and that holds true here. The propose gets purple in it also, here and there, on a more than regulate occurrence. “A rickety well curb is located at its center, and distant eerie wails echo all around when the rain beats softer.” This isn’t a novel here folks. And even if it were it would be a purple one. Lets keep the descriptions grounded. I’m all for allegory and metaphor and the nonstandard use of language to impart a vibe, but purple don’t do it. And Jesus H Christ, every single time you meet one of the twelve, so, twelve times, we get a little description about how they come back to life the next day. Fuck me man, i got it. You’re just padding it out. Plus, you explain the mechanic like three times in the text BEFORE we even get to the fucking keys. It’s all fucking padding. “The trapdoor is still perfectly functional, and once discovered, it can be opened and closed at will.” Yes, things that we would expect to work normally do, in fact, work normally. It’s just fucked up padding.
The layout here, the formatting, is a major pain. At first is SEEMS like a good idea. A little section of read alound, set aside in italics, with some points bolded. And then the text follows up with sections with headers of those bolded sections. But it’s SO trivial. There is SO much going on and the text for each of them is SO long. It ends up being more confusing than if you didn’t do that .It just drones on and on, and mixes the important with the trivial window dressing. The formatting was a good idea, but it was so tortured and misused that it makes the mess bigger. I’m am seriously MORE confused by it. Again, it’s like those color coded text boxes in some adventures, seems like a good idea but isnt/
Ultimately, this is just a hack. You can talk to a couple of them, but, mostly, you’ll be stabbing undead and some vermin. The only real interactivity beyond that is burning their hearts, which are located together in the same room, where their graves are. And they respawn. So you gotta kill them twice.
Levels 1-3 my ass. As a much higher level adventure, that is primarily a hack, meh. I still think its lipstick on a bullette.
This is $15 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages. You get to see the level one map and the background. No encounters shown, so, poor preview.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/515518/mill-of-the-twelve-dead?1892600
