Hyena Child

By Markus Schauta
Gazer Press
S&W/LotFP
Levels 1-4

In the 17th century, Alexandria is a city that has endured beyond the promises of its once great future. The inhabitants of the Egyptian port live in ancient ruins and dilapidated villas. The few rich and powerful celebrate in an arrogant grandeur of sad luxury, knowing full well that their days of splendor are numbered. For grave robbers and body snatchers, the port city is a beacon, a promise—for in its bowels, endless tunnels twist and hold long-forgotten treasures. Some fortune-seekers have struck it rich, while others have dug too deep, to where the past lives and antediluvian horrors lurk.

This delightful booklet uses 204 pages describe five adventures and an eight level dungeon in Alexandria in 1632. It is PACKED with things to spur adventure at the table, is easy to use, and contains many situations for your party to get mixed up in, both in and out of the dungeon. 

Warning: Bryce likes a good city.

I was a bit apprehensive in cracking this open. Two hundred pages. $25 dollars. This tends to not be a good sign. And then I hit this paragraph starting on the first column of the first page: “The players may start toying with the idea of involving their PCs in the mummy trade, with the aim of shipping a cargo hold of the dried-up corpses to Europe. This is perfectly fine. However, getting involved in the mummy trade also puts the PCs at odds with powerful Alexandrian merchants and smugglers, who won‘t just stand idly by while the PCs attempt to move in on their profits. Furthermore, the governor won‘t want to miss out on his share of the lucrative business either.” This is a designer with his head in the right place! Clearly he has dealt with players before, and their mad scheming! And, just as clearly, he knows how to deal with them: if there’s a buck to me made then someone else is already making it and they are not going to just let the party sidle in on their profits! 

The setting here is absolutely wonderful. It’s clearly a LotFP type setting, with Alexandria in the 1630’s. Mysticism. Ancient horrors. And science mixed in with the a great mix of peoples from all over the world all hitting the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria. You really get a strong vibe off this. Seedy, wonder, magic, ancient history, spies, agents, factions, opulence and decadence and grit and grime. This is EXACTLY the kind of city I love in a D&D game. 

The city is a small part of this booklet, about thirty pages. Itis also the setting for the adventures and the dungeon and a home base. Each of the about thirty locations is clearly oriented at driving play. Sure, you’re going to have adventures, and in between you’ll interact with the places in the city and each of them has something for the DM to use to directly drive some fun play. The focus here, the ability and understanding of what is needed in this environment, is wonderful. Even something as base as some old pillars near the sea. There’s a hermit there. The locals venerate him as a saint. It is said that his feces can break a curse. And, in fact, it can, four in six. Curse breaking? Of course you need curse breaking in an adventure in Egypt! And this is a perfect way to do it! Old beggar woman? Down on her luck? She’s got fleas! And you might also if you help her (a lot of fleas in this adventure …) But, also, helping her might get you a very trusted retainer who knows a bit of the healing arts. Everything, every single site, has something to play off of for the party. That IS the purpose of a description in a city/town/village. I don’t care what fucking color their cloak is. I want things to drive play, even between-crawls play, and this does it, spicing things up. It’s perfect. Maybe a sentence or two long in places, but not in any way droning on.

The focus here, on gameable content, is remarkable. The appendix is only thirty pages. And even that is composed of Factions, Day & Night encounters in the city, rumors and the like. Only a VERY small portion of the entire volume could be considered padding. And I hesitate to even use that word. The number of words, pages, etc and their absolute focus on contributing to actual games at the table is truly one of the more remarkable efforts I’ve seen. Virtually nothing here is not directly related to a game at the table.

This, also, is one of the earliest passages of text in the volume. “When finally the day is done, the mumia smokers wake from their restless dreams. It is the time of pleasure boys and whores, of the discreet and the drunkards, of thieves and astrologers. Everything punishable by law and God, all that decency does not wish to see; all of that emerges in the pale light of the moon. It is then that the grave robbers and body snatchers shoulder their shovels to plough the cemeteries in search of treasures long consigned to oblivion in dilapidated tunnels; digging ever deeper, to where the past yet lives and antediluvian horrors lurk.” The tone is sets for the city is great. You immediately know the vibe, how to run it. Your mind starts running wild. All of what you do from then on is going to be colored by those words, dripping in evocative flavour. And the adventure does this with its text over and over again. That paragraph is somewhat general, but the others are far more specific, depending on their context, and virtually all of them lend to that same effect. 

So, the adventures. Or, let’s start with  home base. There are a few notes in the beginning about how the party can start in one of four locations in the city. The merchants have excellent palace contacts. The monks have some healing available for the party, and so on, depending on where you might call home to start. Then we move on to the adventures, most of which have some connection to the dungeon, or a specific level of the dungeon. (Except for level eight, a hidden level opened only by discovering things through play.) Let’s see, we’ve got a kind of Stargazer tower adventure. Garden full of sleep flowers and some murderous baboons. And then a tower that is little more alive than Stargazer, with a murderous frankenstein monster in it … that may ignore the party completely as it REALLY wants out of the tower. Where it will begin to kill townfolk, stalking the streets at night and so on. Oops. Actions have consequences I guess. Which, come to think of it, could be the byline of this adventure. We’ve got a dinner party full of intrigue in a manor, the titular hyena child involving a cult and so on. And then there’s the Mummy Raid. The swedes are in town and need a fuck ton of mummies. You can make mummia from it and they need/want it to give to their soldiers to meth them up in their wars in the north of Europe. They know where some is, on level three of the catacombs. You need to take this legless asshat of a wizard down to level three, find the mummies, and then he’ll teleport them all to the cargo hold of a ship. Bypassing the “official” unofficial trade, and pissing people off. Also, another group is after the mummies as well. Complications abound! As do consequences. The adventures here, more than most, offer consequences, both positive and negative. We’ve seen this in many LotFP adventures where the world ends or a plight spreads because of theparty fucking around with things. But the actions and fallout/consequences here are more timely, impacting the current and future play sessions. Most adventures are just standalone and don’t mention consequences to assist the DM with. Good adventures will offer some words of advice on the subject. But this product really does integrate those consequences, positive and negative, in to the play sessions. This brings the Alexandria alive in a magnificent way. 

I’m not even touched on formatting or the dungeon rooms proper yet. Formatting is clean and clear. Easy to follow, easy to scan during play, which is critical. It’s a summary section of immediate things to notice with some bolded words that are then followed up in their own sections with more detail. 

Who wants to crawl through the statues mouth?!!?1 You do? The obvious happens. Some of the rooms are right out of … I don’t know. I’m thinking of a room with a table with a coil of rope and grapple on it. Pulling the rope fires a blunderbuss under the table. Ouchies! It’s so much more VISCEREAL than your bog standard trap, and so much more relatable. I know it sounds dumb, but, I’m going to relate one of my favorite rooms. It’s trivial, it’s simple, it’s dumb, and I love it. You’re in a dingy room. There’s one exit. There’s a rotting dog carcass in front of the exit you need. The dogs mangy buddy is right next to it, growling, protecting the body. You gonna kill a poor old staving loyal stray dog? Heartless monster! I hope there’s a dog lover in your group! It’s so … real. It’s not contrived fantasy nonsense. It feels imagined and then put in to a D&D game, rather than the the way around. I fucking love it. 

There is so much more that I could talk about with this. What it does and pitfalls it avoids. It is solid. Dense. Breezy. Exciting. It is everything I want in a D&D adventure.

This is $25 at DriveThru. The preview is fourteen pages, and mostly shows you nine of the city locations. That should be enough to convince you. Yes, it’s $25 for a PDF, but, spend your money on something good instead of slogging through shit the way I do.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/525423/hyena-child?1892600