By Scott Malthouse
Necrotic Gnome
OSE
Levels 2-4
The market town of Lankshorn is abuzz with excitement after the cruel Lord Malbleat announces a festival honouring his sorcerous ancestor. Only when the young singer Emelda—famed for her beautiful voice—is reported missing do things take a sinister turn.
This 44 page adventure uses the vast majority of its pages to describe a small fair, manor party, and some underground crypts with around a dozen rooms. OSE style guide gets a little long in this digest, with the investigation half being well supported(?) and the dungeon being a hack.
I don’t know about this. There are multiple things wrong here but they are wrong in such interesting ways. Or, perhaps I mean to say wrong in complex ways? It’s just fucking weird, the kabuki around the actual adventure.
No where in this, I think, will you find a summary of the actual adventure. How the thing works and an expected arc for the party. I’m a fan of Not over-explaining, but, also, that only works for short adventures, and a 44 page booklet is not short. The titular chickula has gone missing and you should find her. You are pointed toward an inn where she frequented. In town there’s a fair going on, with fairgrounds. Associated with this fair is a party at the local manor, exclusive for the nobility and such. Underneath the manor is a crypt where the lord is using a chick to bring a dead relative back to life as the climax to the fair. As one does. So, you gonna poke around the town a bit and then find an entrance to the crypts in the fair/town or bluff/sneak in to the party and eventually find your way down via the GAPING STAIRWAY MAW in the main salon. I found this rather amusing: “Crypts Entrance – Ancient limestone archway (set incongruously in the northern wall). Arcane symbols and sigils (carved in blocks)” Whats that? Oh, that is our hosts brain collection. He keeps his 36 ex-wives brains in jars to admire here in the salon. I do love a farce like this, where the folk ignore the outrageous, having normalized it as commonplace.
The adventure is, essentially, in two parts. First you gonna poke around town, getting up in peoples business and sticking your noses where it don’t belong. Ask around the town, ask around the fair, maybe infiltrate the party. This part is rather well supported. Sections on party guests and their manners and conversations, the town, rumors. It’s a relatively simple A leads to B leads to C sort of thing where asking at the inn gets you a clerics name, which followed up on gets you someone else’s name, which leads to a party invitation… and there are several examples of that, different paths that the party might follow, with, if I recall correctly, like four different entrances to the crypts, paths that the party could take to discover them.
Inside the crypts you’ve got some household guards, a few skeletons, an intelligent spider, and a decent number of captured/coerced people. And a distinct lack of anything but stabbing. Yeah, sure, you can talk to a prisoner and they’ll tell you something. Or you can loot a room. But puzzles and specials and interactivity beyond the stab is quite rare here … and every stating its rare is a stretch.
This puts this adventure in a weird category. It’s a raid. In my experience, all raids start with a wacky PC plan to infiltrate and then turn in to a slugfest when the party gets busted. What is perhaps unusual here is the investigation beforehand. That is not something we generally see in a raid.
So, given that over HALF the pages are the investigation, we would expect that portion to be pretty good. I don’t think it is. Oh, sure, pretty formatting and nice layout. The Gnomes do that well. But in this case there’s a distinct lack of content especially for something taking up over half the pages. I mean, sure, there are places to go and people to talk to and juggling and fire eating to watch, but it lays the window dressing on REALLY heavy and it seems that the adventuring content is pretty light. From this, I can only intimate that the first part is supposed to be a slow and relaxed affair. We take our time. We enjoy the view of the meat on a stick vendors. But I ain’t no senator’s son. I really do not give a shit at all about most of the content in this section. I like the Gnomes formatting and descriptive style, when used correctly, but here its overkill. We get these lush room descriptions for no purpose. And none of that Journey is the Destination crap. I got an adventure to run. The descriptions get long. It smacks, in areas, of throwing things in as boilerplate. “The style guide says we need to note how many pimples each NPC has on their nose, so I don’t care if they don’t have a nose, you need to say they have no pimples on their nose.” Hyperbolic of me, to be sure, but the point I’m making is that hte mundanity of the adventure is taken too far.
I note this is to a degree in which, three times through the adventure, I’m still not sure I could adequately describe to you the various entrances to the dungeon and how the adventure interconnects to each other. Farmer A knows B which leads to F, that sort of thing. There is no overview, it’s all buried in what feels like descriptive text thrown in because a style guide says to. I’m not saying that’s the case, but it feels like it is. The other explanation is an overindulgence in trivia to the detriment of the adventure, which is the greater sin.
The dungeon is no better. While I’m a fan of the OSE style, in this case I think its not used very well. I’m thinking specifically of a room with an insect swarm in it in which the swarm is treated almost as an afterthought. This is the initial room description, although I’m not sure my point comes across well with it alone; “Sandstone blocks (walls, floor, ceiling 10′). Dimly lit (large lantern suspended from ceiling). Moss-covered walls (dripping moisture). Humid (nearly suffocating). High-pitched buzzing (whizzing clouds of insects).” And then, near the end of the colum, a colum of insect swarm stat blocks/notes. I’m not sure that giant clouds of insects, large enough to kill you, deserves to be last in the description, even in a dimly lit room. The corpse, the workbench, the vials, everything gets spoken to, except the swarm, which just gets essentially a stat block, at the end. Things are out of order. Correct things are not emphasized. And while I like the OSE style I do recognize that it also takes skill to use and its achilles heel IS just that. It requires that the correct things be emphasized, and in the correct order. The Bolded KeyWord (A couple of more words) isn’t magic. You still have to do the work to put the right things there.
An investigation that is quite loosey goosy and a town/festival/manor that overindulges in the mundane and its format to the detriment of the actual play. Combined with a raid. This makes this adventure akin to the old investigation that leads to a five room dungeon with cackling villain at the end. It’s not terrible, but its leaning enough that way, or not enough to the good side, that it falls in to the Colored Lights May Hypnotize category.
This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is sixteen pages. But most of it is useless. A couple of pages of DM background, a page of hooks, a page of players background/common knowledge … a situation overview that is quite poor … the preview needed some room descriptions. That would not, in this case, have led me to a better purchasing decision, but the OSE style is a little jarring and a page showing a typical room would have been in order.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/527293/emelda-s-song?1892600
Huh, so this is how it feels when a new category drops.
I’m not 100% what “colored lights may hypnotize” is supposed to mean as a tag. Flashy allure with little substance? Tricked by the lack of a preview? Too many things all at once? Something that is merely “okay-ish”?
From the second verse of The Guess Who’s “American Woman.”
“Colored lights may hypnotize / Sparkle someone else’s eyes”. It’s show biz glitz without substance.
https://genius.com/The-guess-who-american-woman-lyrics
To clarify – I know the source of the phrase (I mean, who hasn’t heard American Woman before?), I just meant that I couldn’t pick up on the context in which Bryce was assigning it as a tag.
Does it mean he is not impressed by a module’s flashiness, or does he imply that there is an element of deception in what is being offered versus what is contained within?
American Woman? Hope this adventure is better than the song
Heresy.
Out of all of the adventures that came out of the Dolmenwood Kickstarter, this is the one I had the most misgivings about. I like how tied into the setting it is, especially how it uses one of the obvious low-mid level villains and its willingness to shake up the status quo. But it has issues, like what you said. One of the issues I had is that no matter what the PCs do, they arrive in the ritual chamber just as soon as Lord Malbleat completes his compromised resurrection. I think this issue could have been resolved by having a timer and having all those little things at the party be tied into encounters that could tick away at the timer. There was a blog post I remember reading about structuring a ball as a “social dungeon” where people and dancers could make up shifting walls and there would be people you’d want to avoid, similar to monsters. I could see something like that working here.
Arriving in time to stop the summoning is a time-honored trope. It probably accounts for a solid 60% of all CoC scenarios every published.
I’m just trying not to be bitter that I was one of the very first kickstarter backers (after swearing off kickstarters forever) and I haven’t received my books yet.