Review 50 - Raiding the Obsidian Keep
After the success of Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow, we were lucky enough for the Merry Mushmen to take on another couple of classic adventures for their remastering treatment. Since I loved that one so much, I naturally backed the next one almost immediately, since I saw that one of the two adventures was also by Joseph R. Lewis, the author of Ragged Hollow. This week I'll be reviewing Raiding the Obsidian Keep.
This publication of the adventure has converted it to Old School Essentials, which is not my favored system, so naturally I converted it to something else. This time around, I chose White Box: Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game, which is in essence a re-formatting of the Swords & Wizardry White Box, which is a retroclone of the original "little brown books" or OD&D. Barely any conversion was needed-- as usual, when you're going from a more complicated version of a ruleset to a simpler one (in this case, B/X to OD&D), you generally just need to ignore the parts of the stat block that wouldn't exist in the version you're converting to. Boom. I had my players create level 2 characters, as this one is recommended for levels 2-4.
The basic premise of the adventure is that the PCs have been recruited to go to an island of ill-repute to find out what happened to the fleet that was sent there to attack the evil masters of the island; a fleet that is now two weeks overdue.
Getting it to the Table
As I mentioned in my review of Ragged Hollow, the layout of this new edition was incredibly helpful for preparation. There was also a sense of continuity between this adventure and the previous one by the same author, so I felt like I knew what I was expecting to find when I started reading through it. The introduction starts with a brief background of the situation, along with suggestions for fitting the events into your own setting. Following this is a one page "Running the Adventure" section with plenty of good advice. After a great art spread (from the excellent Li-An again), we jump right into the adventure.
The module is essentially split into two distinct parts; the approach to the island itself, and the exploration of the titular Obsidian Keep. The first part is further split into two areas, the harbor and the beach, and both are presented as pointcrawls. The harbor overview includes details for running the pointcrawl procedure as well as rules for drowning in the cold waters-- always a good time! In essence, this part of the adventure is an open-ended exploration with many interesting encounters with opportunities to learn some answers to the larger mysteries in the adventure, though at this point most of these answers will just raise more questions. Each encounter site is succinctly presented with the important details and connections to the other sites, with plenty of things to interact with, dangers to avoid, and mysteries to follow up on. A great deal of content is crammed into a total of 14 pages, and you could easily fill two or three sessions with just the harbor or the beach.
The second part of the adventure, which details the keep and its surroundings, is presented as a much more standard dungeon. The exterior of the keep has some more interesting encounters that can potentially reward players with some allies or equipment, mixed with some real danger as well. There is also an alternate entrance to the dungeon, which will only be usable if the players did a thorough exploration of the harbor and beach. The area descriptions continue in the same clean and efficient layout, and it is very easy to get all of the information you need at a glance.
The keep itself is a very large space to explore, spanning four total levels. However, the consistency and efficiency of the layout makes it feel relatively easy to wrangle. The map of the keep has also got a lot of good variety, with multiple paths and secret corridors and more than one way to get from one level to the next. It also made sense as a structure, with a certain amount of symmetry in design that made it feel like a place that people lived rather than just a random collections of rooms. One thing I would have liked to have was a minimap on each page to prevent having to flip back to the main level map, but that's a minor point of preference.
The module closes with a page providing guidance for the GM as to how to end the adventure, presenting some ideas based on the actions that the players took and what things were accomplished, any of which could spin out into further campaigning. Lastly are the appendices, and the nice thing is that these are in fact appendices and not information that is crucial to running the game that must be regularly referenced. The first is a summary of the setting details as mentioned earlier in the intro and descriptions-- good for answering potential player questions about the world, but not required. The second is a collected list of all of the magic items found in the adventure; each of them is also detailed where it is found, but this is a nice "index". Finally there is a list of potential retainers or replacement characters-- these could also be used as pre-gens.
What Worked?
- Clean and consistent presentation of information. Both the layout and the choices of what details were included made this incredibly easy to prep for a game session. Despite being a pretty substantial adventure, it was very digestible and easy to run because the necessary information was in front of me when I needed it.
- Slowly unraveling mystery. There were so many places where the PCs would learn little tidbits of information leading to the larger plot; it definitely got my players interested in learning more and finding the pieces that would bring context to what they had learned.
What Didn't Work?
- Encounter tables not quite right. Each area (harbor, beach, courtyard, keep) had its own d20 table for random encounters that was intended to be rolled on whenever the party travels to a new location in a particular area. This table includes "non-encounter" encounters, like "A legless skeleton crawls past and tumbles into a fiery rift" or "A screaming cackle echoes down from the palace", as well as combat or social encounters. Generally I've moved towards a preference for bell-curve tables (like a 2d6 roll) that allows you to have some results that are more common than others. There were also a couple of instances where the fiction of the encounter wouldn't really make sense depending on the party's actual location in the area-- for example, the party could be about a mile away from the actual beach, but one result could be "A corpse washes onto the shore. Its chest bursts open. A dozen eels spill out and race for the water." Obviously this is just a flavor encounter and you could just as easily pick another one that makes more sense, but then why did you roll? Ultimately this is a pretty minor quibble and it worked fine in practice, I would just like to tweak it next time I run it.
Final Thoughts
Not much more to say! A fine adventure by Joseph R. Lewis, cleaned up and given a fantastic presentation by the Merry Mushmen.
You can preorder the Mushmen edition of Raiding the Obsidian Keep at their web store and I highly recommend it. Thanks for reading!