By Sean Audet
Self Published
Knave 2e
Level 1
Drawn to the light of the St. Peter’s Rock Lighthouse, a vast and ancient eldritch abomination has awoken. One night, lightkeepers Alistair MacNeil and Dylan O’Connell witnessed the creature rising from the water. It only took a glimpse to drive the two men mad. With the last of their sanity, they destroyed the lantern and made a pact to keep the lighthouse dark, no matter the cost. Four months have passed since then. A perpetual storm now lingers above the isle of St. Peter’s Rock, and dozens of ships have been lost to its cliffs. Several people have gone to investigate and relight the lantern, but none have returned.
This sixteen page adventure describes a lighthouse with seven rooms. It has TOP NOTCH atmosphere, providing a foreboding and eerie environment. There is a level two and level three baddie to face, the former keepers, and then the world ends. So, you know, maybe some pacing issues in what is quite the atmospheric adventure.
There is a general rule of thumb that the room count as a ratio to the page count is a general indicator of what’s to come. Lopsided in either directions usually a warning sign. Thus, opening this adventure I girded my loins. But, a rule of thumb is not a law and this adventure defies that meme. It uses layout and an art style, as well as its design, to create a brooding atmosphere that pretty perfectly matches the vibe I think it was going for. Horror adventures generally cross genre boundaries well, and it would be quite easy to move this one to a different RPG/time period. Also, I’m totally reviewing this because the title reminds me of a Peaches mashup with the Doors.
The initial pages, as a spread, detail the map with notable features on it. Almost the very first words, on that summary map, describing the outside of the lighthouse are “Fierce storm growing more violent by the minute, ship in the distance, door to the Keeper’s Cottage, locked door to the Storehouse, hidden locked door to the Cellar, lantern lens broken into 3 pieces, crane and pulley, miscellaneous hardware and tools, shipwrecked fishing vessel.” I am enchanted by those first two clauses. A fierce storm growing more violent by the minute, a lighthouse without a light, and a ship in the distance. There is an impending consequence, the ship, that immediately adds to the tension and environment of the growing storm. I sometimes talk about framing what is to come, and, generally, I’m talking about this from the DMs perspective, to help orient the DM. This turns that a bit and instead provides this immediate air of tension to the gameplay. When we talk about Lareth issues it’s usually in the sense of giving this more visceral vibe to the villain early on. But, also, it tends to to a more remote of passive sort of thing, signs of their violence and so on. (Else we run in to the fleeing villain issue.) I’m not sure I’ve seen something so immediately tension setting before. You KNOW whats going to happen, you can see it. It’s a slow motion disaster. The ticking time bomb ever present without it being a hamhanded literal countdown. Further we get “Night is fast approaching. • The storm has taken a turn for the worse. • A distant ship grows closer by the minute. • The silhouette of a man is visible in the Lantern Room.” Again, this sense of foreboding. The night, the storm, the ship … pressure. And then the silhouette in the window. A call to action and perhaps a threat.
The adventure is great at this, setting the mood. The Lighthouse was an explicit influence and this does a great job of capturing some of that atmosphere. It’s coming at things from a more neutral approach, a real world grounding that adds to the immersion. “Dylan O’Connell appears from the shadows, wielding a rusted knife or a broken oar, muttering incomprehensibly” That’s one of our crazed lighthouse keepers, with a rusty knife. “An open, two-story room. It smells of spoiled meat, tobacco, and coal. Sparsely furnished” Smells of spoiled meat, stale tobacco. Coal. That is exactly the vibe I want from some abandoned lighthouse horror/suspense.
This is a simple adventure. Search a few rooms, get this sense of unfolding drama, and what has happened in the past, not through a diary or exposition but from the condition of the rooms, what you find, what you see, what you experience. Ultimately, you’re facing a level to and level three fighter, in the crazed former keepers, so the combat here is few and far between and almost certainly happening in the climax of the adventure. But, the journey is the real adventure, through the unfolding tension, driving by a wanderer-like table that instead increases the event timeline or adds some strange atmosphere “The wind begins to tear shingles and pieces of the roof from the lighthouse. Debris crashes through the upper levels. “ or “A flash of lightning illuminates the sea. For a brief moment, one of the PCs sees a massive shape beneath the waves. It disappears, but an overwhelming sense of dread lingers.”
There are a few things to do other then experience things. There’s a dude to find and rescue, and perhaps add complications to your efforts as you also have to deal with his decrepitude. And, of course, the need to explore to find some lamp oil, etc, to get the beacon working again before that ship arrives.
The layout is clean. The summary map is quite good, you could almost run it from it alone. Or, at least, it gives that emission, of something that can actually help you at the table. The increasing tension/wandering table is easy to follow, clear, and provides decent interactivity in terms of avoid those falling shingles and so on. Minor things, but nice tension spikes. The rooms, proper, rely on a line break style of organization with occasional bolding. They do tend to the more “column sized” size of the spectrum, and I suspect bullets instead of line breaks, along with a few more formatting insights could have assisted here, but it is also using a ? ? layout, with some notes in that ? that help keep things on track. There’s a decent amount of stuff in each room that I suspect it just crosses the line in to needing a bit more thought.
I’m not the biggest fan of the hooks. They are the rather basic sort or being hired, etc, but do include a “raising the Stakes” line in each that mentions things like “Raise the stakes: the PCs have a personal investment in the latest shipment” or “Raise the stakes: the PCs have a personal connection to the survivor.” I can see a certain appeal there in a well crafted one. Solving a problem, like the shipping issue, for one of the parties schemes seems like fair game, while I always raise an eyebrow at including the parties personal connections; this is why PCs don’t create those, as fodder for a DM to leverage … ever the hobo.
The ending here leaves me a little nonplussed. Your goal is to light the beacon to warn away the ship. The keepers and hunt for oil adds complications. But, in doing so, we find that the keepers were right to douse it … lighting it summons an abomination from under the waves, the reason WHY they doused the light. I’m not gonna die on this hill, it’s not the end of the world. But you know the American spirit. Finally, PC’s tend to be resourceful. I suspect the storm mitigates the “light a different “approach, and if the party can find a way past that issue then more power to them. There are, also, some alternatives presented as opportunities, a flare, a seized up foghorn, that could be used to find a better way to manage the outcome. A few words of advice in this area could have been appreciated. Remember kids, when setting out to do something, always bring all the apres you need with you to do the minimum job, just in case the former keepers have hidden/used everything.
An excellent adventure. Small and high quality, providing alternative options to the party if they are smart enough to take advantage. The designer has two other publications, both for Mouseritter. I’m not generally interested in that, but I may take the plunge to see if they match the quality and can perhaps be “translated’ on the fly for more general audiences.
This is Pay What You Want at itch.io, with a suggested price of $2. There’s no explicit preview, but there are a few screenshots that give you an art style and layout vibe if you squint. (Although I think they are a bit misleading in the wrong way; you get an “art first’ vibe from them that I don’t actually think is present.) And, I guess, as PWYW, the entire thing could be considered a preview.
I took a look and I agree: it is really good. It reminds me a little of the old Dr Who story “The Horror of Fang Rock.”
I just bought it. The artwork is just gorgeous. No AI slop here.
Don’t give Knave shit good reviews
He said it isn’t shit (that’s what ‘The Best’ means).
Do keep up.
If it’s not AD&D-compatible it’s storygame garbage.
I know you are probably trying to be a troll, but it’s something I think about a lot. It seems like any adventure can be used for whatever system you play. You have to convert levels, saves, class/race specifics, treasure.
I played in a campaign in the early 90s that was very story & roleplay oriented. But when I was 11 in 85 we did zero roleplaying. It was just, this is the adventure we are playing. Explore the dungeon and try to level up and not die.
So obviously rpgs have trended towards storytelling over since then, and the center of all of that is really the hook. In 1985 we didn’t use any hook. Now people are making the hook (saving the world, or whatever) the entire campaign, sometimes without any dungeon crawl. And that IMO sucks.
There’s a middle ground, where there’s some development and a little more hook than just, a guy at a tavern tells you there’s hidden treasure beneath the marsh barrows. Or maybe that’s what the hook should be and I’m overthinking it?
If you’re going to say stupid things like that, at least have the balls to use a name, ‘Anon’.
And, rather than inanely trolling, you could spend your time more productively. I’d suggest you start by finding out what a storygame is.
This is a hard one to unpack. Is it just a stupid point, or is it a deliberately stupid point, meant to create a fake narrative that people that like ADnD are unable to like anything else and therefore they shouldn’t have a say?
The adventure seems well produced, the blurb seems very smooth-brained (3 NPCs! Wow!) but it sounds inoffensive at worst, and is probably alright.
The statement that you can convert any adventure for any system is false, and even within the family of dnd games, this mostly holds true for levels 1-3.
care to inquire further on why you cannot convert any adventure to any system. As far as I know an adventure represents a location, a place located in space. If two systems assume samey common sense for their world, then locations, which are based on common sense, are of course system agnostic. Therefore adventures are systemagnostic, but not setting agnostic, since the setting sets the common sense of the world. But most settings are the same fantasy thing so adventures in general can be considered an almost seperate medium… That’s my take
@Aggelos: You can convert any adventure to any system but the work entailed is not necessarily less than that of just writing a new adventure. Prince is a prig but that doesn’t make him wrong on specifics: adventures are not system agnostic, different information is given and it’s often not what’s needed or appropriate, stats aside.
If adventure locations are not setting agnostic, as you say, then it becomes important to consider the setting assumptions baked into each rule system. Features like Turn Undead (and how it’s implemented, if at all), spell descriptions, and class features matter here. An adventure element that interacts with leveled spell slots, for example, is difficult to translate to Knave terms. Rules that capture “world physics” like those for random encounters, reaction rolls, falling damage, etc. can also matter. Some of these are surprisingly non trivial to resolve, or if left unresolved can result in an undesirable play experience.
The matter of levels, hit dice, damage, armor, etc. factor in too, but that’s the obvious difference and can be less or more important than the prior examples, depending on how “close enough” you get with the math. I find that numbers are easy for an experienced DM to handwave and adjust for more numerically proximate systems (Knave to/from AD&D, for example) but a major barrier when those numbers diverge in their baseline assumptions (Cairn, 5e).
@Aegglos: in terms of conversion, one of the biggest problems is simply that the structural game mechanics are not always even close to being equivalent between systems. One of the problems, for example, that repeatedly appears in adventures that have been reviewed here is that undead encounters are handled very differently within the context of various systems. How many low adventures have we seen here that featured wights or vanpires. Or, conversely, mid-level adventures featuring lesser undead as the top-tier baddies. Playing with 1E or any of the BX clones, the former are TPKs in the latter and are effortless wins for the PCs.
Having personally converted a fair number of MERP scenarios into 1E, I do feel confident that a DM can convert *almost* anything, with the caveat that it’s going to entail a fair amount of work given the difference between additions and if the game mechanic at issue is in anyway the crux of the scenario, the conversion will change the scenario.
@Aggelos
Adventures are not simply instantiations of concepts, but translations of concepts into a particular ruleset, and that ruleset has assumptions. As complexity increases, or divergences between rulesets increase, the amount of work increases. In theory, enough work and cluges might be done to preserve the same gameplay across radically different systems, in practice, games with radically different assumptions in gameplay are going to be difficult to transport.
Trying to do WHFRPG in 1e is always going to be rough, certain assumptions, concepts, translations, are going to vary. How much do you have to alter the core system in order to get approximately the same experience? How much margin of error are you willing to give yourself?
I dunno, I’ve played a lot of mix-matched ADnD – B/X modules, and while ADnD characters are generally more powerful, I can’t really think of a time when a low-mid level adventure couldn’t be passed from one system to the other with minimal or no conversion. It’s not like the difference between TSR-era and WotC-era DnD.
I’ve also been running classic and OSR adventures with my own homebrew (5e chassis, OSR-face … in hindsight similar to Shadowdark, but I had been using this before Shadowdark came out). The numbers are slightly different, but everything has worked fine with minimal conversion.
I’d be interested to hear any experiences where things break moving between ADnD and B/X.
What’s wrong with liking AD&D?
lol at the idea that Knave is a “storygame”
I think the real elephant in the room is the giant monster being summoned in a low level adventure. How are players supposed to face it? Are they supposed to appease it with some sort of sacrifice, talk to it, or just get squashed? Can they run away, and is this lighthouse worthwhile to return to at higher level? There is no larger setting to build a campaign. It just looks like a one and done world ender adventure. Won’t work with my D&D players. Adventures like “The Waking of Willowby Hall” are more compelling for D&D game play – give them a chance to live and win.
I’ve been ruminating on “the turn it off” aspect of this adventure.
I’d be sorely tempted to flip it -to turn it on… and keep it going!
I’d probably be a bit miffed by playing this:
-spending the effort (and on a timer)
to overcome the lighthouse keepers,
to light the beacon,
We saved the ship! … Hurrah,
er…
Wait.
What?
REALLY?!
WTF you mean
we just summoned Cthulhu!!!
I think I would agree with you. Except there’s a flare gun. And a fog horn. And you ARE paying attention to the ranting, correct? So, the party, with its eyes opens, should succeed.
Thar be a wild storm a brewing sez I.
An looky thar…. A ship be a coming in;
By all the gods below
looky over thar Matey,
The beacon!
The beacon be out!
This is a great hook!
Needs a little tweaking but my god this is great.
Three things: the impending storm. The ship. The unlit beacon. GO!
We have a timer, can we warn the ship before it wrecks? OR do we go all Jamaica Bay and rush to get in line -to loot the shattered hulk (I mean render aid to the survivors)
As written the FOUR MONTHS with multiple parties disappearing is a problem. How to this problem- shit happens tonight. Deal with it
Cool