Doomsong: Lord Have Mercy Upon Us

By Morgan Finley, Jack Cæsar, Chris Cæsar
Caesar Ink
Doomsong.

THE FIRST SEAL IS BROKEN AND PESTILENCE SPILLS FORTH.

THE KINGDOM OF LETHE FALLS BEFORE ITS FOETID LORD,

… but the Gravediggers’ Guild does not kneel to heretic gods.

Half a lifetime ago, the border kingdom of Lethe vanished in the blink of an eye. Its fate has long been a source of fear and resentment for the Church of the Divine Corpse — the disappearance of an entire kingdom implies a power far beyond what the Ecclesiarchy likes to contemplate…

This 347 page adventure uses about 180 pages to describe … fifty? Locations in a semi-realistic medeivel setting that has been overcome by plague. In some ways a better Barovia than Browvia, it has quite the large scope while consistently providing the framework for eeriness and a general unease grounded in reality. It also feels like the world is not populated, has a bunch of editing issues, and can be capricious. You can undertake an epic quest! And you can fail. I think it’s interesting, and like a lot of things I think are interesting I’m going to spend too much time talking about its faults and do a terrible job on its strengths.

There’s a vibe going on here, and for me to get anywhere near to talking about it then you’re going to need an overview. We’ve got some kind of mudcore setting. Medieval, lots of grit in the vibe. One LARGE region of the land disappeared awhile back. Your group of Gravediggers (literally) is travelling when they are pulled in to this disappeared land: The plaguescape. We’ve got a map, maybe six squares by eight, of the the region, it taking a day to travel one square and there being about one setting location per square. Would you like to go home? There are a couple of questgiver locations to move people along, including the Gravediggers Guildhall. 

It’s in the OSR section and for some system called Doomsong. I don’t know anything about that, and I don’t immediately recognize the reskin, if that’s what it is. I guess ‘OSR” is the ‘Misc’ category now in DriveThru? Anyway, I’m ignoring the whole rule system shit. You’re gonna need to stat it. 

There is an epic, oh, sandbox quest? present in this. You’ve got Plague, THE Plague, who has shown up awhile back and is responsible for yanking the land away in to this pocket dimension like place, separate from the rest of the characters reality. He’s present. He’s also got a chief follower, the daughter of the local lord, who is now a minor power also running around causing trouble. Beyond this we have a number of major supernatural entities of Plague, and a few others, as well as a few people working against Plague, some locals, or who would be if they weren’t currently in trouble … like a lordling addicted to bug juice/excretions straight out of a greek myth. There are objects of power that can help defeat plague that you can go get, and there are shrines to Plague that you can disrupt. The shrines are ,perhaps, the most pronounced example of the game. Each contains a token, a tongue, the left hand of someone, a sewn up stomach stuffed with dates and oats. If you destroy the token then you weaken Plague. (There are, if I recall correctly, seven of the shrines.) There is a cryptic message at each shrine. For the one in which you find the stomach we get “‘He stole my last meal, meagre morsel to share with truest love.’” From this we deduce ….? Well, one day you MIGHT find dungeons underneath the local lords castle. And therein find a dude locked in a cag who is ravenously hungry. Feeding him the stomach contents destroys this token. Yeah! It is not guaranteed you’ll visit the castle Or find the dungeon. And it’s not unlikely that you will kill the dude first. And then you’re gonna have to put two and two together that this is the true love in question. Other tokens have other ambiguous references: graves, bells … could be lots of those, yeah? Which witch is which? I’m not complaining, I’m pointing out a strength here: you can fail. Accidentally or on purpose, it is not guaranteed you will find a bit of information or put things together, or not fuck something up in a way that you can’t come back from. But these are all, in a way, side quests towards getting home and/or killing Plague. The key point being there are things you can do to weaken him/his allies. Strengthen yourself. Help your allies. But the plot, such that there is (going home/killing Plague) doesn’t rely on the success of any of them.  Nicely done. A sandbox to run around in, ala a video game, in which the side-quests don’t FEEL like side-quests. (That’s, what, only the second time I’ve ever made a positive video game comparison? Vista Overviews in Fallout) And, I hope from the summary I’ve given its obvious that it is NOT obvious what you are supposed to be doing. There’s a line or two about someone carrying a token being given certain dreams and portents, but thats with a kindly DM feeding you the right dream.  You gonna have to figure shit out along the way. Noice! 

[ED: Tell everyone it’s a mudcore adventure. At least in vibe if not practice. That it’s this kind of, idk, romanticized low medieval period. Maybe a church belltower and manor but lots of hovels. Except, that’s not ACTUALLY what’s going on, what with an orphanage being present and so on. But that’s the vibe, the feeling of the place. Make sure and mention that this is, no doubt, achieved by leaning on several good bits of imagery and side references. “Hundreds of bird corpses dangle from the treetops, strung up with red woollen cords.” Well now, that’s given this thing a kind of grounded earthy vibe to things, yes? Use that as an example. This imagery that kind of tugs on a shared cultural myth and story. Too much Blair Witch or too much Turnip Princess? Or, this kind of an appeal to old school witchery “For each of them, she has made a poppet dolly (lh:332) in his or her image; the orphans carry their doll with them wherever they go. These items put them under the control of Granny Redwork. To free them, a character must cut the child’s hair out of the doll’s scalp and burn it.” And to be clear, Point out that Weapons came out after this. Oh, and make sure and mention Spoilers before you say that. And then finish by saying something like Tomorrowland is the future that never was. Nevernever land is the childhood we all remember, and this setting channels all of D&D Europe before the scientific method ruined everything. People eat that shit up]

You are all members of the gravediggers guild which is, I take it, the gimmick of the system, Doomsong. You’re a part of a guild and that’s a part of the game here. Once you find the local gravediggers guild (there’s a slight problem with a dead member of the signmakers guild …) then they give you a map of the region, with all locations already on it. The local guildmaster also has a series of tasks for the party to undertake, to get things moving. And then there’s also a little minigame of rebuilding the guild. You can take on roles like florist or chaplain or scribe, and you can expand the guildhall. Want to cut down the old hanging tree to use its wood to hasten construction! Great! You speed up by a week … and unleash a ghost. Oops. It’s kind of an interesting base idea, brining in ideas from the higher levels of D&D and maybe melding the a bit with base construction in modern video games. You know, build the granite carver studio and get XXX bonus. Most of it doesn’t feel videogamey at all though. It integrates pretty well, and is also not forced down your throat so you don’t have to engage in that aspect if you don’t want to. Then again, you gain the BOLSTERED condition if you plan your next outing at the Guildmasters planning table … The inclusion of a small down time mechanism is a nice addition. For a lot of games, the realism and immersion of the game is enhanced when the innkeeper has a name and, more importantly, is having an affair with the millers wife, which the party gets to watch unfold in real time in weeks as the campaign progresses. I don’t need a lot here, but if the players are plopping their asses down on a map that takes a week to cross, and which they will need to criss-cross several times, then we better have a little more to go on to help out for those moments of NOT sheer terror. I don’t need a fully developed town, that’s a waste. But these little idles add a lot in a longer game. (Which this is; see again, the map size.)

The Guildhall thing is interesting on several fronts. It also reveals more than little about some flaws in this booklet. Essentially, everything (wrong?) with Lord Have Mercy Upon Us can be seen in the Guildhall. I would specifically note the depopulated feeling (and not in a good way), the disconnected between various elements in the text, literally, and a kind of abstraction of detail that is particularly interesting given that this is 350 page adventure. 

Abstracted text is something I touch on frequently in reviews. Specificity is the soul of a narrative. It provides the color of the world, often a key to evocative writing. I quoted a section above about the dead birds hanging from the trees with red woolen cords. And yet you don’t want to drone on and on and on. We know what a kitchen looks like and what should be in a kitchen. A solid vibe for the forest is nice, to cement it, if needed, but we don’t need to drone on about it and not every forest needs more unless, perhaps, its a core part of the encounter, environment, or vibe you want to set. Too few is minimalism and too many is padding. We want to target something solid that gives that vibe and that the DM can then riff on well. This needs to be balanced against the degree of detail needed and the purpose of the description. The most basic example is the typical room/key format. A standard, for good reason, and yet not appropriate for all seasons. I most frequently cite the example of a village where the purpose is not going room to have an encounter. The village is used for a different purpose, so even though it might USE a room/key format it is clear that other things are important here. Likewise, there is a type of adventuring environment that doesn’t really need full blown descriptions. A dinner party at a mansion, or a ship that is not being explored can get away with some more basic and general descriptions, much closer to minimalism, because of this. It’s serving as a framework in which other things are going on, social or otherwise.

Which brings us to how this is described. Caste Lethe is one of the sites in the adventure, the home of the lord. What we can see from this a framework. Not a traditional room/key, although its laid out like that. And, yet, it almost certainly iS a traditional room/key exploration. No one is home. The party will be exploring this unknown environment just like any other dungeon they have invaded. But the descriptions are pretty utilitarian. Like I might expect if this castle were hosting a murder mystery or the ship the party is travelling on. The specificity is lacking in these. There is little here. Two entries, the Scarred Cook and Mouldering Bodies, get a little paragraph follow up, and you get some “Echoes”, ghostly vignettes, to toss in. (A diary, in essence, showing you what has happened and perhaps helping you understand that stomach lovers last meal, or, at least, might in some circumstances let you eventually jump to that conclusion.) But beyond that there is little here to base an adventuring locale  on. And I’m not talking about the standard loot, monster, traps, and specials framing. We can acknowledge that an empty ghostly castle, forlorn, with ghostly vignettes and a catatonic cook can be a thing. But there’s nothing to sell that vibe. We have almost, if not totally, generic descriptions. There is almost nothing n the way of help to the DM  to sell that forlorn vibe. This is hard, as a designer, to communicate your vision to a page in such a way that the a DM can pick it up and run it the way you envision. And, yet, that IS the goal of the designer. And this just doesn’t do that. It comes off as generic. Abstracted. And the adventure in play will suffer for it. You must inspire the DM with the environment. And that is not happening here. Evocative writing and specificity sells the adventuring locale. And this is the manner in which it feels like the majority of the locations are described in this. It is not the one-pager that has failed but the context in which the one pager is presented, along with the actual descriptions of the environments. 

It felt empty, yes? And that is the way this entire game world feels. This is an entire fiefdom, ripped from normal reality. Eight days to cross on foot in one direction and six days in the other. Lots of locations to visit. A gracediggers guild, with people in it, implying therefore that there are MORE people than are in the Gravediggers guild. And, yet, no one is home. But only the lords manor and a single village seem to be what we normally expect to find, and then only the village has a few people. Tavern, mayor, church, and … Dentist. Is it bustling? No idea. Full of disease? No idea. It indicates that there are hovels and the like, but the movements of peoples is strangely absent with almost no indication that they exist. Either in the village OR in the greater region. We shall ignore tha the plague doesn’t kill everyone, after all maybe THE plague does, but, still … bodies? None. Signs of the plague? None. People? Almost none. The entirety of this place is devoid of life. I guess that’s ok? I just find it a strange decision. Except, I don’t think it was a decision because of that village. I applaud spending your word budget on the bits that are important and dirt farmers are not important, but, still, you need to set the vibe of a place. Bodies in the streets? Paranoia? Cult vibes? People drinking bleach? Just a sentence or two and it would have been fixed. 

This extends somewhat to the actual encounters. I don’t know anything about Doomsong, the system, so it culd be that it takes a more … studied approach than Ye Normal D&D. But the encounters here are few and far between, and the chances for combat perhaps even less so. There might be one hostile per location, This isnt quite a Shadow of the Colossus situation, but it is a slower pace than most would be accustomed to, making Stargazer look like a hackfest. This doesn’t have to be bad, but, again, I think it doesn’t quite work here. If you’re going to have these slow build ups to these tension relieving moments, the combats, then you are going to actually have to have these slow tension build ups. And the adventure here, as I’ve stated time and again to the point of nausea, just doesn’t have the chops to support this. It’s almost minimalistic in its descriptive style. It is NOT supporting the DM in carrying these eerie, plague, tension filled build ups. Which just seems to be madness for a 350 page adventure.

There is a lot wrong, mechanically, as well. The Castle Lethe tv show, which is just a stand in for a diary. “The magpies (lh:266) nest in great numbers here. The Tithe Barn contains all property that has ever been stolen by this kind of bird” ala Hoard of the Dragon Queen, you will enjoy the lack of anything meaningful behind that statement. “The sound of bells reverberate for miles, audible as far as Castle Lethe when the wind is blowing northward. Their cacophony is constant, originating from the top of a stone tower in No-Fly Forest.” better to be told about this BEFORE I reach the belltower, yes? So the DM can add the build up? No? Not gonna happen? And there are a disturbing number of high death situations that come with no warning. High death is cool. But if it is seemingly random then the players that that there is no point. No amount of play will save them. And thus we lose buy in to life. (Hmmm … sounds too familiar?) You can’t just do a save or die party wide effect out of the blue. (At least not at this level. We can discuss the impact of divination on lowering the combat effectiveness of wizards by draining off their spell slots) It’s arbitrary, and arbitrary is not a good thing. 

Just two quick notes about formatting, beyond the whole “one pager” thing. I’m looking at the PDF version and it switches between spreads and single page. I fucking hate this. Zoom in, zoom out, fuck with the scroll bars. Not cool man. Pick a poison and go with it, nothing here dictates the need for a spread. And, then, there’s a fucking index. Thank fucking god! Designer of the year just for including that!

Again, a larger adventure with an interestingly large, and open-ended, scope. The pace here could be slower, with a mundane world suddenly punctuated by madness. In each. square. moved. But, also, not a whole lot to riff on well and sell the vibe. It intricate, and openended. And it relies a little too much on quest givers. The scale and the sparseness also works against it in way, as implemented. Plague, for instance, goes on rampages, as one dies, when the party destroys his tokens/shrines. Will you ever hear about the destroyed village thats a long way away? Consequences should generally be seen to be impactful to the game, just as decision points of importance should be clear. I think, perhaps, this is one of those cases where it might play better … the slow burn. But, also, in spite of the page count the resources for the DM to support a meaningful game world in a slow burn environment are generally not present. 

This is $20 at DriveThru. The preview is one page, showing the map that the players eventually get. Maybe more in the video? I don’t watch videos. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/499568/doomsong-lord-have-mercy-upon-us?1892600