Review 19: Fever Swamp
You know what makes for a great adventure? Swamps. Stinking, filthy, disease-ridden swamps that are painful to travel through and are full of things that are generally nasty and unpleasant. It was with this in mind that I picked up Fever Swamp by Luke Gearing, with illustrations by Andrew Walter. This was the first adventure that I encountered by this author, and I was hooked pretty much immediately, thus sending me down a long spiral of buying Luke's adventures.
This did not seem to have a specific system in mind (edit: the DriveThruRPG page lists Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but it pretty much looked like B/X to me), but is described as compatible with most retroclones. I ran it as part of a longer campaign using The Black Hack 2nd Edition. The general premise is that of a location-based adventure; there is no overarching plot, but rather a hex map seeded with rumors, interesting locations, and random encounters. I used one of the rumors from the table (regarding the ruins of a monastery) to tie the adventure to some NPCs the players had met, and that was enough to kick of several weeks of sessions inching their way painfully through the stinking morass.
Getting it to the Table
Being largely system-neutral, this was super easy to convert to The Black Hack. Monsters and NPCs had enough common points (hit dice, morale, attack damage) that it took little to no time to write their stat blocks up in the way that I needed them. The nice thing is that most of the monsters featured in the adventure have lots of flavorful bits that are completely separate from the actual mechanics, so an exact conversion was even less necessary than usual.
As far as in-game usability, the layout of the PDF in particular is incredibly helpful. It begins with a quick reference page that feature the map and all of the major hex details, each of which is a link to the page within the PDF. Then, each page has links back to the quick reference or contents page. Normally I like to keep multiple versions of the same doc open in tabs, but this made it unnecessary. Another neat feature of the PDF are the checkboxes that appear in encounters with multiple creatures-- in some cases 25 or more. It was an easy way to keep track of how many remained, and it is the only time I've ever seen this in a PDF of an adventure. Just about everything about this adventure felt like it was added with the idea of making things easy to run at the table. There are procedures in place for travel throughout the swamp (as well as mechanics for boats getting damaged and sinking, hehe), interesting locations to discover as the party traveled in the general direction of their goal, and fun random encounters to roll for whenever they were in an un-keyed hex. As is typical with a Gearing adventure, everything is connected to some degree, and the whole area felt alive in a very effortless way.
What Worked?
- So much fun and interesting stuff to do! Weird encounters, fun NPCs, mysterious situations, a mini-dungeon, a town in the midst of a cultist coup-- my players probably only explored about half of everything that was available to find in here, and it took us several sessions.
- Usable layout throughout. The aforementioned interlinking of the PDF was huge, and even the mini dungeon had zoomed in portions of the map by each location description. Also, the dungeon is the skeletal remains of a giant beast. Cool.
- Everything was where you needed it. No flipping through the pages!
What Didn't Work?
- I personally didn't lean into the disease feature of travel through the swamp. Given the dangerous and unpleasant nature of everything else, it seemed like it would have made things too much of a slog. However, the party also included a paladin PC who could remove diseases as a class feature, which would have rendered it kind of meaningless anyway. I hate paladins, but that doesn't really have anything to do with the adventure.
- I would have liked to see a little bit more development of the village of Clink. It is listed as having a population of 54 (18 of which are not members of the cult), but only five NPCs are detailed, and two of those are cultists. Even just some tables that allowed you to procedurally generate some quirky folks and names would have been a quick addition.
Final Thoughts
This one was an absolute blast to run, and my group barely scratched the surface. In our campaign, they had met some dwarven monks who were traveling into the swamp to recover the remains of a saint from an abandoned monastery (one of the ruins included in the adventure), which gave a nice hook that was still pretty open-ended; the party learned of three potential ruins in different parts of the swamp, and had to do some exploration to find the right place. As part of that exploration, they found the Ur-Corpse tomb and had a nice little dungeon crawl that resulted in them accidentally awakening a being of ancient evil who granted them a boon and set up a nice little hook for the later parts of the campaign.
You can get Fever Swamp at DriveThruRPG. Thanks for reading!