Son of a Lich

By Tim Edmonson
Ghost Ape Games
2e
Levels 1-2

He was never meant to be a necromancer. He just had the grades for it. When the players stumble across the talking corpse of a failed wizard named Bob, things spiral fast. One page of an ancient entropy-powered grimoire is already inside him. Another waits on a savage island ruled by saurian warlords, wild elves, and ghost apes that don’t sleep. What begins as a weird jungle crawl becomes a siege defense, a dungeon delve, a psychedelic fever dream, and possibly the start of a reality-hopping campaign. Or they could just go home. If Bob lets them.

This 82 page single-column adventure details an episodic journey centering around a level-4 lich who thinks he’s a fun guy. I don’t really know what to say here. It is what it is? It’s an amateurish effort, but that’s ok. The tone, adventure-path nature, and basic mistakes in information delivery are really offputting, but only the information delivery issues are actual valid criticism?

In D&D’s long history there have been some shifts in how the game is played. These are communicated through the official rules, or through the published material like adventures, or through the way most people are actually engaging with the game, or with the visibility being communicated in online social platforms. There will be ad-nauseum arguments about the official play, the actual home play and so on, but for better or worse there are memes about the style of certain editions or eras. 2e is solidly in the plot & story area meme, and this adventure unabashedly follows that, noting it explicitly. You can’t really criticize a man for doing an episodic adventure when you buy a “story drive adventure”, or for the comedic elements when it’s communicated up front. I know the 2e crowd is fierce, so we’re going to talk a bit about this just to ensure there’s fair warning, and then I’m going to cover some of the more issues with the adventure that lead to a “but is it a GOOD story based adventure with comedy elements?”

You’re gonna start in a village of cat-people. When you reach the lich, Bob (yes, that’s his name) he’s gonna cast hold person on your group and then do some magic tricks for you before running away and escaping. He’ll later keep up a constant banter with you as you drag his dismembered body around the rest of the adventure. He throws in comments and so on. This is 100% a railroad, errr, episodic adventure adventure path. It is solidly High 2e. Are you chill with that? I’m not, but I bought it anyway and can’t really criticize a man for doing what he said he was gonna do in the sales pitch.

But Bryce’s pillars stand apart from that. This is a rather amateurish affair, and I mean that in the best way possible. It’s a single column effort, which remains difficult to read and comprehend. I know that the point seems trivial, but the eye travel study on comprehension is real, as is the anecdotal data for anyone who has had to use single-column. It’s just going to be a little more difficult to comprehend the adventure and use it. 

And then there are the asides. There are a lot of these. This one, early in the adventure, is a good representative example of what I’m talking about: “This episode is meant to open in media res—no meeting in a tavern, they start to learn how to be a team and how to play the game immediately. Characters either begin here in their home village or are here on personal business.” It explains what is about to happen. Is there a need to explain what is about to happen? I don’t think so. I’m a big fan of the designer framing what’s to come, in terms of how it works, but this isn’t that. It’s not explaining how the different areas work together or the tone, it’s instead just repeating everything that’s to come in a different tone of voice. And that’s just padding that is of no use and just gets in the way of running the adventure.

And then text grows overwrought and purple in places. “You find a patch of earth that hasn’t been claimed by vines. The river gurgles behind you, dark and sluggish. The trees here lean in, like they’re watching. The air smells like burnt grass and rotting fish. You can make camp. You can rest. But you are not welcome.” This isn’t consistent, but, also, it’s clearly trying for this epic adventure vibe (it says so explicitly) and I’m guessing that this is a part of that. The purple prose is not great. At all.

But it’s also not doing an altogether terrible job with the descriptions. If we take that purple section above, it’s not too bad. A gurgling river. A patch of earth not claimed by vines may be on the edge of purple, but the air smelling like burnt grass and rotting fish isn’t bad. In other places we get a decent description of mudmen attacking the village that ranges from te usual to very good. “A child screams. You hear the splash before you see the thing—humanoid, muddy, crawling on malformed limbs. It twitches like it’s listening to the ground. Someone yells, “It’s in the ground!” and you see dark veins stretching out from the water, moving in the soil, like the river itself is leaking something alive. As you watch, another mud creature forms before your eyes, first pseudopods made of stinking, corrupted soil, then something resembling a humanoid figure with arms and a large torso” I hate the pseudopod thing, in general, and corrupted soil is a conclusion that should be a show don’t tell thing. But, hey, not bad. We’re not saying “three mudmen attack”, it’s instead trying to describe them, something the adventure tries to do consistently, and that’s a good thing. I’m going to go out on a limb and make an assumption from this that dude is an ok dungeon master, just not a great adventure writer.

If we follow through with the mudmen encounter, this is the next thing that happens once they are defeated “When the last Mudman collapses into a puddle of inert sludge, the village is in shock. Farmers report rot in the irrigation ditches. The elders whisper about the water. Something is poisoning the land.“ This is a crude and amateurish attempt to have, I believe, a chaotic battle aftermath scene in the village. People all over the place, side conversations, helpful and unhelpful injections from by standers and so on. I think I am not alone in reading that in to the description provided? And, yet, that’s not a strong description of it or how to run it or anything close to it. And I’m sure we all know what I what I think about supporting the DM. 

In other places there’s a certain degree of disorganization of the text that requires you to be completely familiar with it in order to run it effectively. This comes to pass time to time; the designer has lived and breathed their adventure for months while any of us who have simply bought it to run and read and re-read it can never know it as well as the designer can. Thus, after entering the dungeon we get notes about a second entry point to the dungeon. I think, perhaps, it should be obvious to everyone that “Entering the Dungeon” comes after “Outside the Dungeon”, but not in the kind of stream of consciousness layout from a designer that knows the material inside and out. Likewise, somewhat later in the adventure we’ll get notes buried in a paragraph about how the second entry point is in this particular room being described right now. Perfect if you know the adventure inside and out and less perfect if that’s not the case; it just looks like throwing information in wherever … or almost a subcase of  room 54 reacting to the inclusion in room 1 … in the description of room 54. 

This is hardcore story mode 2e. It’s got a slapstick comedic element that, on going, that proves that the Mork Borg call is coming from the inside the house the entire time. But, beyond these tonal baselines, it’s also not the easiest to follow and run with as a DM. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is five pages. You get to see the mudman attack. This is enough to show the conversational tone, asides, and sometimes decent imagery and sometimes purple imagery that is conveyed. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/530935/son-of-a-lich?1892600