The Valleys

By Matthew Jennings
Missspire Publications
OSR
Levels 5-8

So, you have helped your brothers deliver your family’s hard cider all over these valleys and you’ve never even heard of Arcadia. When you asked the parents about helping Rigs out with a delivery, they dispar- aged the idea. Said it was “out past Broken Valley… straight up a mountain…in giant and barbarian territory … a bad idea”

This 129 page heartbreaker uses seventeen pages to describe a ruined village full of kobolds and a red dragon. Your level eights are helping a mary sue move and hew new house isn’t working out right. It is a classic heartbreaker, full of wall of text, extraneous detail, disorganized, and conversational. I’m not even sure how you run this. 

Ah, the heartbreaker. Let us wax poetic on the creations of a single designer with a vision of what they want, and falling far short of reaching it. I salute you, and your singular visions, even if I ant absolutely nothing to do with them. GenCon approaches, and I’ve always to have a booth where I just sell heartbreaks and my Worst list. There are many ways for me to not want to have anything to do with an adventure, and a heartbreaker is perhaps the saddest.

You’re old buddy RIgs wants you to help move Karen. You are levels five to eight, so, sure, why not? In this adventure your old buddy is a level 3 in like five different classes, Karen the Herbalist is a level seven magic user, and the old hag living on the mountainside is a Level eleven cleric and a level five illusionist. Which, maybe, makes sense because one of the towns has a golem factory where they make and export them. This is not my D&D style. It sets my teeth on edge and reminds me of the bad old days of adventures with Sphere of Annihilation garbage disposals. But, whatever you’re in to I guess.

This is a single column wall of text adventure and regional setting. I guess it describes “The Valleys” and then has a small adventure set in it. For level five through eights. Again, we can see that “delivering your families hard cider” and “levels five through eight” is clearly a sore point with me. Anyway, the first ninety or so pages describe, abstractly but in many words, the various locations in the valley. Then there’s the adventure of about twenty pages, and then a description of the various magic items and creatures. Is it a regional guide with an adventure in it? I don’t know, the product description makes it sounds an adventure.

I really can’t emphasize enough the mess of the text. Things are just dropped in to it without much thought. Your hooks, with your buddy RIggs, appears on page seventeen in the appropriate physical location where he might be found. And then seventy pages later comes the adventure. WHich then starts with “Karen will send the boychild that didn’t runaway on the porch off with a handful

of gold coins to fetch some lunch for her friends,” Uh. Ok. Sure. Time to refer back to page whatever earlier in the adventure to find Karens home, I guess. You’re gonna be doing a lot of flipping in this adventure.

So, the adventure. You show up, have a long and tedious lunch with Karen, who you are instructed to be as long-winded and rambling as possible, then you help Karen move in to her new home.  Which involves going through a trunk to the connected magic trunk, coming out in the ruined village, and fighting a bunch of kobolds and a 10HD red dragon. Oh, and Karen is with you the entire way. Invisible. And when you reach the dragon then “Karen ends the fight almost before it gets started with a lucky Polymorph Other, changing the dragon into a blood raven.” Groovy, I guess. That IS the role of a mary sue. Anyway, so you’re fighting kobolds. As level five through eights. A large group is the kobold common room with fifty in it. Fifteen males, 25 females and ten children. So, fifteen kobolds. Dump in a fireball, I guess? Anyway, the ruined town has about twelve locations, one being the clocktower with the dragon it. 

It is TEDIUM, beyond words, to wade through. Information is scattered everywhere. A section heading may be important or it may be just more background information. And, given the page count, it is almost always fluff. Unless of course you actually needed it. And the whole conversation tone of the long form paragraphs … There’s this thing that some event based adventures do. FIrst this happens and then this and then this and then this. This isn’t really scene based, in the way those are (and, I’m differentiating between scenes and the “first this then this” style) but the encounters, the various keys, many are in this format. And sometimes the format, the conversation, runs across rooms. And then there are just other things dropped in out of nowhere. “Karen will ask what the burned corpse smells like. If the answer is “cinnamon”, she’ll know there is a female red dragon involved” Uh. Ok. Does it, in fact, smell like cinnamon? I don’t know. I guess if I go wade through everything else I can see its a female red dragon somewhere in the adventure and then make the inference? It’s just bizarre, these random assumptions coming out of nowhere with no context to them. Second person read-aloud abounds “You pass an iron brazier upon entry that fills the room with the smell of sickly sweet herbs and incense but all you really notice is the idol of Naama on the far wall.” except it’s not really read-aloud, in the traditional sense? It’s not set apart and you really wouldn’t know its read-aloud except for the fact that there’s some second-person tenses to it. It’s all just a mass of text, with a running conversation throughout, changing tenses, changing tone, changing meaning and purpose, willy nilly. It’s a fucking stream of consciousness adventure. Which can be a fun way to write and deliver SOME sorts of entertainment information (like a review …) but is absolutely terrible in a piece of reference material. 

There’s not much here. It’s a regional setting, I guess. The actual adventure is a nightmare of finding information, scattered throughout the book seemingly at random. I know, I bitch about organization a lot, but this is just on a whole other level. Imagine I put half of the room one description on page 18 and the other half on page 86. The whole tone (which, I admit, is a matter of taste) is just off with the level 5-8 thing and the hard cider thing and the helping a chick move thing. The mary sue. The kobolds as enemies? Second person? I salute the hubris, but am horrified by the result. 

This is $4 at DriveThu. The preview is six pages, and is actually the first six pages of the actual adventure portion. So, decent job. Check it out. It really does a decent job of conveying in a nutshell the issues.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524001/the-valleys-a-grunions-and-flagons-mirrspire-module?1892600

EDIT: I take it back. It’s not a heartbreaker. Future Symbolism …