By Wes Stroud
Self Published
Cairn 2e
[…] Now, the once-mighty fortress lies in ruins, the steel and iron that once shined over the valley now tarnished and rusty. The spires that had greeted visitors and new residents now lie fallen and twisted. The spirits of the fallen citizens of Boccol, the mages, the guards, all roam the crushed and twisted hallways, seeking that which will let them finally cross over. Creatures have made their homes in the remains. Some venture here to retrieve the mythical treasure. Few come back, and those that do speak of stranger things still.
This thirteen page adventure presents a small ruined complex with about fourteen rooms. Dragons and ghosts and abstracted treasure compliment descriptions that are an absolute mess to wade through. Whatever was supposed to be going on here, the vision did not come through.
I am overwhelmingly confused by this. There was some vision for the vibe of this place but I don’t think it comes through at all. It is supposed to be a ruined palace/fortress type thing. A dragon shows up and wrecks the place and now there are a lot of ghosts/spirits running around. The ghosts show up in several rooms. I think we’re supposed to get a sense of melancholy, of them doing their daily tasks, and of horror. And they are everywhere. But they come off very perfunctory. It’s hard to really communicate that, but the vibe from the wandering table perhaps best relates the issues. “Skeletons, animated by Kuyyin” or “Wight, animated by a rune when Boccol was destroyed.” This is a reason WHY the undead exists. It doesn’t really communicate what they do, or hoor, or melancholy, or anything else. You just get the sense that they are illusions (and not very evocative ones at all) doing things that don’t really matter to the adventure.
And then there’s the map. This is a pointcrawl, so a kind of flowcharty block diagram of rooms with lines connecting them. This loses a lot of the vibe that a real map would bring and, I think, sows confusion how things are connected. I know it should be si,plier, it’s just a line, right? But any sense of verticality or space is just lost via that block diagram map. At one point, the very start, we get “Stream – the stream runs some 30 yards under the earth before the cistern pool. 2:6 to find an air pocket. The water is cold.” I THINK cisterns usually have a top? They are like wells, right? I’m just left confused. I guess it could be an underground aquifer? I’m open to the cistern issue being a lack of understanding on my part, but then there are other places. Like “Spire – a massive chunk of metal pierces through the ceiling, nearly touching the visible
center of the lake. A door can be seen that, when entered, leads to (6) after a while.” A door, in the spire? Is this a tower that has collapsed? I just don’t get it. And this happens over and over again. Another room has “Pulleys, cables, and platforms are frozen across the span of this room. The East wall has a number of hatch-doors, small enough to squeeze a person through. A set of levers & cranks line the North wall. The South wall is a maze of gears and springs” Is this a chasm? Are we supposed to leap from one to another? I just don’t get the intent of the room from the description. Or the main throne room which says “As large as this space is, the vault below the floor is equally large” Can we see it? I’m not really sure what is going on.
I’m not hating on this. I do think that the map abstraction just doesn’t work. And that the ghosts thing just isn’t hitting the way that perhaps the designer intended. These work together, I think, to help sow some confusion with the actual room descriptions … it’s hard to figure out what the designers intent was for each room. You can get the basic here, that there IS something in the room, but, more than the vast majority of what I see, you can’t really figure out what the vibe of the room is supposed to be. It’s like many of the things need just one more sentence … which probably means that the existing text needs to be reworked, or framed in such a way to bring additional context to them (re: the map, for example.)
This is free at Itch.
Creating free Cairn is effectively littering, but at least the customer gets what he pays for.
I’m thinking maybe it’s time we retire the whole “haunted castle” adventure trope. Along with “orcs in a hole” and “cultists in a temple”, it’s probably the most played-out premise in D&D.
Melan already nailed it.
I thought that maybe you had some upload or formatting fuckup with that cover image, but then I checked the link and yeah, that’s really it. And for some reason, it’s looks like a compressed screenshot. Well, at least you can’t blame the author for being Artpunk “style over substance” type.
Oh, and about the map. Cairn 2e suggests using pointcrawl diagrams for both wilderness and dungeon exploration. So expect to see more stuff like this in Cairn adventures.