Review 30: Graves Left Wanting
If any system is going to have a campaign-starter adventure that takes place in a weird graveyard, it would be Mörk Borg. This time around I'm talking about Graves Left Wanting, written by Karl Druid with art by Johan Nohr (of course).
As I mentioned, one of the intended uses for this adventure is to kick off a campaign, as it presents a nice alternative to "you all meet in a tavern." I have also seen many folks use it as a post-TPK adventure, since it opens with the PCs waking up in the cemetery of Graven-Tosk. I ran it as a one-shot pick up game, using randomly generated Mörk Borg characters.
Getting it to the Table
In the usual official Stockholm Kartell style, this is a concise and well-formatted adventure that focuses on usability as its top priority. It's relatively short (17 pages counting a couple of full-page pieces of art), and is laid out in a way that is quite logical for the way the adventure progresses. It opens with a two-page spread with a map of the graveyard, and immediately sets up the tone for how exploration is going to work-- the map is "not to scale" and "places may not be where they appear." Players typically have two choices when moving from an area-- there is always a pathway connecting to the next section, or they can set forth into the shifting mists of the graveyard and then end up in a random location. After the map page, there are some random encounter and rumor tables along with the mechanical details for traveling around, followed by a small bestiary page for the random encounters.
The next section details the various locations that can be visited, and the amount of useful detail included made this very easy to prep, which was ideal for a pickup game. Each area is presented with the major points of interest, followed by where each exit path leads. As is usual for the Mörk Borg "house style", you've got your relevant stat blocks and treasure/magic item details where they're needed. There are plenty of weird things to encounter in these areas, any one of which could easily be turned into an interesting hook for further play.
As written, this adventure naturally unfolds itself and eventually guides the PCs to the "ending"-- once all of the locations are visited, the next path that is taken twists and confuses them and leads to the Undertaker's Hut. My players grew increasingly uneasy as they explored the weird places (and lost a couple of characters to dangerous things that they shouldn't have messed with), and finally relaxed a bit at the relatively normal encounter in the hut, only to panic and flee once the Übertaker arrived, leaving their newfound friends to be slaughtered.
What Worked?
- Situation-based adventure. In my opinion, the best modules are the ones that just present the players with something interesting and then leaves them to decide what to do with it. No pre-scripted encounters or cut-scene type events, just weird stuff that sparks creativity in the GM.
- Efficient and usable layout. You know this one.
- Variety of encounters. Not just a bunch of fights, there is weird stuff that can be interacted with, weird people who can be talked to, and incredibly dangerous things that can kill PCs without hesitation.
What Didn't Work?
- "Right" path. I think that this would have been more of a weird, surreal exploration if the only way between locations was stumbling through mist-shrouded rows of grave markers. My players never once chose to leave the pathways that led directly to the next area, and while it still worked out fine, I think an expanded version that was more of a wide-ranging pointcrawl would be even better.
Final Thoughts
This one was an early adventure, back in the days when the Mörk Borg Cult was still accepting community submissions, and I honestly think that it captures the mood of the game world a lot better than many of the popular third party adventures that I've seen. I feel that a lot of people tend to lean way overboard into the grinding, monstrous, gross-out theme that you can get from the core book (I'm not going to say "grmdrk" because I fucking hate that word), and often miss the aspect of the setting that is more about slow decay and dereliction. This adventure captures that mood incredibly well, and reading through it for this review makes me want to run it again.
You can get Graves Left Wanting for free at the Mörk Borg content page. Direct link here. Thanks for reading!