By Andy Castillo
Celestial Skunkworks
OSRIC
Levels 3-7
The party arrives in the City of Genepa, a thriving port and trade town where they explore the city and seek adventure. Their inquiries lead them to a troll and reptile infested swamp, in search of an elusive group of slavers that are reputed to be lead by a wererat bandit and his wife, The Rat King and The Rat Queen. Meanwhile, a necromancer is busy, secretly plying his trade in or about the Ratmire District and the Planned Afterlife Cemetery. As undead start to rampage through sections of the city each night, the council summons the players to investigate the cause of these serious disturbances. This leads the players down a perilous path of uncovering the Cult of The Rat God!
This 101 page adventure uses about 22 pages to describe the titular adventure of 22 rooms, and includes a couple of other small areas as well as an extensive gazetteer/campaign guide. It is quite wordy, uses second person voice, and eventually just ends up, after all the talk, in simply stabbing things. Whatever the vision, it did not come through.
I don’t know how to get you going here. There are a couple of adventures in this. I’m going to ignore the one with a vampire and thirteen shadows in one room (rated for level four+). Oh, also that one has a level fourteen evil magicuser. But, hey, we’re gonna ignore that one. Instead we’re gonna concentrate on the adventure of the title, the rat god thing. Yes, of course it’s wererats. Duh.
But, first, we must slog through the fifty or so pages of the gazeteer. Land of blah blah blah. City of blah blah blah. We’re here for the adventure; I don’t know how to review a gazeteer. It does seem to be a bit prosaic though, so, not my style at all. Specificity! That’s what I’m after. But, also, not the kind that means a random monster encounter takes three quarters of a page to describe. FOR THE STA BLOCK. That’s just stat blocks. There are, in several places, d8 random tables for wanderers. Those generally take four or so pages to describe, the stat blocks taking up half a page at least. Every once in awhile you get a “Lore” section in a wanderer, which is something like “The traveling wizard’s apprentice will keep to herself and try to travel past the party without drawing much attention. If they engage her, she may offer to trade with the party, providing magical services as allowed by her memorized spells.” Hope your day is going better than mine. I know what a kitchen looks like, after all.
Eventually you stumble upon the keep of the rat men. It intimates over and over again their evil deeds, but there is no lead in. You’re there. They are in league with some bandits, and, of course “The bandits have committed countless terrible atrocities, and do not expect mercy; therefore, they will fight brutally to the death.” Gotcha. IIf it wasn’t clear already, it’s one of THOSE adventures. Inside you will stab things. Over and over again. With little interactivity beyond that. If you encounter a trap it will be a simple one and then you will get attacked immediately by “sentries” waiting in hiding on the other side. They don’t exist, I guess, unless you trigger the trap.
The descriptions are rather simplistic and overreveal. We get things like this: “This courtyard is 40’long and 30’wide, with a statue of a warrior pointing a two-handed sword towards the ground. A campfire is in front of the statue,where the bandits cook their meals.Wooden doors are spaced evenly along the north and south walls. A couple of these doors appear to have been bashed in, revealing that the area is used by the bandits as a barracks.” And, then, of course, it switches things up to second person ni read-aloud: “When you open the door …” and “You even find a small trail of jewels that lead around the keep to the south side.They could add up.Do you collect them?” Don’t do this. Don’t use second person in your read-alouds. We endeavor to describe something in a neutral way, and, if we include something like that statue then we do something with it, not ignore it. Sure, there can be window dressing.
And then of course the guards and monsters/bandits. They have a reaction to the intrusion. But their reactions are all included in their individual encounters. So room three and such will say things like their sentries react and run to help the people in room one. Better to put that in room one, yes, where the action is taking place? Or to include a note on the map on reactions? Something that the DM can readily see and use DURING the running of the adventure?
And then there’s the DM advice. There’s a lot of it. “Play on the group’s sense of greed. Tell them they have a vision of themselves in gilded armor or golden finery, surrounded by admiring glances! Encourage them to lunge to their deaths! Try not to laugh until you have sprung the trap” I don’t know who falls for this. Well, I guess I do every time I see something that could be The Hand or The Eye, but, there’s no accounting for taste. And, of course, everyone gets a little backstory in their room, meaningless for actual play but obfuscating the ability to tun the adventure at the table by interfering with the DMs ability to locate the text they need during play.
A mundane stab fest, disorganized, with muddled descriptions. This would have been far better as a stand alone adventure that was really worked on to pump it up. Not that there’s much here to pump up, with most everything just being a stab.
This is $15 at DriveThru. The preview is fourteen pages, and shows some of the regional gazetteer as well as those awesome wanderer tables. Poor preview.