Review 25: Putrescence Regnant
I'm just going to come right out and say it. I love swamp adventures. I love damp, smelly, mucky, excruciating crawls through bogs. They're simply the best, and at one point last year I had three games going at the same time that all happened to be in different swamps. This week I'm talking about Putrescence Regnant, the Mörk Borg bog crawl with an accompanying LP soundtrack by The Dead Robots.
This one was written by Johan Nohr and Pelle Nilsson, with art by Johan Nohr in his unmistakable style. If you haven't already experienced the soundtrack, it is available on most streaming services, and it is fantastic.
The general premise is that a group of exiled nobles are searching the bog for a seer who can tell them the location of their missing deposed king, and the PCs can potentially get involved by doing the searching for the nobles, who are loath to leave their floating basilica which is dragged through the swamp by a horde of chained zombies. I know, pretty basic Mörk Borg stuff.
Getting it to the Table
Like most of the official works published for Mörk Borg, they manage to perfectly walk the line between sheer style and pure usability. The entire adventure is covered in about 10 pages (granted they are square LP album sized, so you can fit a bit more), so it was really just a matter of reading it through a couple of times to see how things are interconnected, and then I was ready to roll.
Essentially this is a pointcrawl adventure-- rather than modeling the exact paths that the party is taking through the swamp, the time it takes to travel between two adjacent points by boat or on foot is randomly determined with a die roll. Encounters are also combined into this roll, making a nice little nod to the overloaded encounter die. The keyed encounters on the map are of two general types. First are minor encounters that have something neat (or horrible) to interact with, and these are all detailed on a single spread alongside the map of the bog. Second are the major encounter sites, which each have their own spread (and in the PDF version, they're hyperlinked on the map page which is always a nice touch.) In practice, it was very easy to describe the journey through the bog as the party explored the various points of interest along the way as they followed up on the rumors from town and directions given by the Scions of Schleswig in their search for the seer.
In typical Stockholm Kartell fashion, all of the information that you need for a given encounter or site is right on the page where you want it-- stat blocks, random tables, weird treasure, all that good stuff. It was very easy to start the soundtrack, dim the lights, and just run the horrible bog crawl.
What Worked?
- Soundtrack! It's so perfect, and captures the tone of the adventure so well. I've been listening to it as I wrote this, and it's making me want to run it again.
- Surprisingly expansive for an effectively 10 page adventure. On the map key page, there are 22 minor encounters detailed. Just a couple of these on the way to a major encounter site is enough for a session or two.
- Algae-Rots! I love these creepy crocodile-headed ghouls. They just want to do gross experiments and hopefully find a way to finally die, rather than being forever reborn from the rotting slime that they collapse into when killed. Aww.
Final Thoughts
I absolutely love the minimalist idea of cramming as much gameable content as possible into weird formats, and this one succeeds remarkably well. It would be worth it alone if it was just packed full of incredible art and great music, but this is a solid adventure as well. Several characters from my run-through of this one survived and had memorable careers afterwards, marred by the permanent stench that you can get if you're not careful!
You can get a physical copy of Putrescence Regnant from Exalted Funeral or just a PDF copy at Nohr's itch page. Thanks for reading!