By Ben Gibson
Coldlight Press
5e/Pathfinder/OSE
Levels 4-6
What’s going on in Morpheus’ villa? We’ve not heard anything from them for weeks, outside of the weeping, and the screams, and deep below, some kind of roaring…
This ten page adventure uses a couple of pages to describe a two level villa with about forty rooms in it. Overly terse, it leans hard toward the Vampire Queen style of writing, or perhaps Tegal, than a modern take.
I think I’m missing something here. This is in the OSR section on DriveThru. It’s listed for Pathfinder, 5e, OSE. The cover says “Written for 5e” on it. There’s one set of stat blocks on the back page that seems an awful lot like 5e. Is the assertion here that 5e/Pathfinder/OSE are enough alike that you can just run with it? I don’t know. I guess? Something feels wrong here.
This is a two level “villa crawl.” Some dude hasn’t been heard from and you go in to find him/loot the place/whatever. Blah blah blah, there’s monsters that drain your mental stats to represent ”draining emotions.” The mechanics are simple, you recover a point a day once the big monster is dead and if you reach zero you turn in a monster. Thusly you’ve got former residents and servants now drained of emotions and monsterized and of course the usual assortment of cultists and others looking to cash in one way or another.
Before I hit the encounters let’s talk map. It fucking SUUUUUUCKs. It’s hand drawn on … beige graph paper? The pencil weight vs the weight of the graph paper lines is too similar. You can’t tell where a wall is and where a door is. Level two, the underground, is better, but level one is all “classic gygax” map with thin walls and everything on top of each other. It’s gotta be legible man, that’s always rule number one. Handdrawn can work, but there’s gotta be enough contract that you can tell what is going on.
The encounter writing style here is terse. VERY terse. Like, twenty entries to a page terse. “Outer Patio – Both doors wedged shut. Gives a numb feeling, cold.” It just feels odd to me. Like, it’s a ten page adventure and two and a half are devoted to the room keys. That’s just odd. It FEELS like there is some artificial constraint going on here here. Like “facing pages” or something else that Gibson is trying to do that is just NOT translating AT ALL. In another place we get the room description of “Smells of rot, corpse of a slave who trapped both doors
in here wearing a lucky band (one-use, reroll failed mental save)” That’s the entirety of the entry, so I’m not quoting things out of context. (And, I don’t see anything in the intro/other keys which this could play off of.) The corpse could use an extra word. The traps two more words. It’s just sparse to the point of almost being barren. “Passing between these glyph-etched columns drains all emotion during the walk (mental damage).” I get it. I get what he’s going for. Kind of. I’d prefer this just be a little longer with a few more adjectives. I think I can make a case, also, for it being ambiguous in its effect. There ARE rules for draining emotion present in the intro. “Several traps, effects, and spells inflict mental damage, dealing 1 point of damage to a random stat (1d3 for INT, WIS, or CHA) “ So, if we take that, then … the door traps are, what, these magic emotional traps? I didn’t really get that vibe from the servant body thing. And, for the glyph pillars I’m kind of stuck on the word “all”, as in “all emotion.” Does it mean all? As in this is a death trap? Maybe I’ll chill with that at level six. Or, is it referring to one point?
And then there’s the Big Bad, The Below. The stat block is just a stat block. There’s no real description anywhere, just a reference to a spirit of earth and darkness in the intro.
I don’t want to read too much in to the intent, but it FEELS like this is an experiment to write for 5e/Pathfinder/OSE in a way that makes an adventure possible for all three. And then combine that with this kind of very terse style. Theoretically I think both of these are possible. Nothing REQUIRES a mile long state block for Pathfinder. And it’s all D&D based, after all, so with a little work I think you could do the ruleset thing. Similarly, I think you can get away with those very terse descriptions. I mean, fuck me, Stonehell is the king of this shit, but it leveraged a few pages of context for it’s terse keys. I’m also chill with some abstracted away mechanics, which saves TONS of space. “Poison needle trap-1d6” works for me. But it has to be done in a way that keeps that the enables the evocative. You have to WORK those keys, hard (and possible the layout) to stuff in enough vibe to not have this be a half step more than Vampire Queen. A few more descriptive words. Building a vibe in key after key that kind of leverage each other to create something greater than the individual entries.
If that was going to happen here, if that was the intent, then the keys needed more work. I get that a kind of “basic outline” is a different kind of structure, but I just don’t see that as being as successful in running a game.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages and shows the level one map and keys and intro. Good preview.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/567820/house-of-the-lost-shepherd?1892600