Whispers from the Sky-Spire

Review 1: The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen

I'm going to kick off this thing with one of the adventures that I have had the most fun with this year. Included as a stretch goal for the Black Sword Hack Ultimate Chaos Edition kickstarter, The Darkness over Nijmauwrgen is a gloomy city crawl that draws some clear inspiration from stories like H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow over Innsmouth. It was written by Olivier "Nobboc" Revenu, with help from Eric Nieudan. Clocking in at just 18 pages, not counting the spreads in the zine that detail the Deep Ones and the cult of the Black Sun of the Deep, it is dense with information but presented in an easy-to-use format, and it provided my table with many hours of enjoyment. I ran this for two separate groups, using Black Sword Hack for both.

The cover of "The Chaos Crier" zine

Getting it to the Table

This one was remarkably easy to pick up and run; indeed, the adventure itself recommends in the first paragraph that the GM should not prep beyond reading through it once. I took that advice to heart, though there are some things that could actually benefit from doing a little background work beforehand-- more on that later.

One thing that made this adventure easy to jump into was that it did not spend pages and pages going over the historical details that are unlikely to come up in play-- the relevant information for players is presented in bullet point fashion, as is a brief timeline of the cult's presence in the city. It quickly moves on to the meat of the adventure; how to let your players wander around in the salt-crusted, gloomy city.

The city encounter tables are front and center, and a clear and concise method is presented for rolling on the table when needed. Consisting of a d66 "day" table and d12 "night" table, there are a variety of interest events that help bring the city to life with a minimum of effort. One minor critique that I had was that some of these encounters are written more like cutscenes or set pieces rather than situations that encourage interaction from the PCs; however, all of them helped to build the mood and tone of the adventure. The bulk of the text (9 pages in all) is comprised of the keyed locations from the city map. These are presented in a very efficient manner, with all relevant info at hand-- stat blocks, page references, and even maps for the two mini-dungeons are included along with the text to minimize the need to flip back and forth.

Overall, the recommendation to not prep is absolutely doable, as long as you're comfortable with improvising reactions on the fly. Plenty of weird and interesting NPCs can be met, and my players had quite a bit of fun interacting with some of them. One notable mention was the inherent tension between Callinoctos ("the god of edible crustaceans and protector of all net casters") and Palinuridas ("the goddess of shellfish cooking and protector of walking fishers")-- in both groups, my players latched onto these quaint little shrines and their attendants, and in one case a minor rivalry developed between the faiths.

What Worked?

What Didn't Work?

Final Thoughts

Right out of the box, The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen gives you a lot of stuff to do in a city that could easily be the central hub of a whole region for an extended campaign. There are multiple factions for players to work with or against, and a variety of excellent magical items in Shanizar's Bazaar. The only thing that I excised from it for both groups was the idea of "mnemophagia", which is a memory-loss curse that afflicts the primary friendly NPC, and seems to serve only to prevent the party from finding the MacGuffin as soon as they meet this NPC. It felt strange to me upon reading it, and I preferred to just have the object be hidden somewhere in the city-- it's not like there's a dearth of interesting hiding places for it!

You can get The Chaos Crier zine with this adventure from the Merry Mushmen. Thanks for reading!