Review 52 - The Waking of Willowby Hall
It's time to review one of those classics that you always hear recommended whenever people are asking about Good Adventures in the OSR space. I finally decided to run it as a Halloween one-shot this year, and my players had a great time witnessing The Waking of Willowby Hall.
Ben Milton wrote, drew the maps, and did the layout for this one, and Sam Mameli did the art. It was written to be generally system agnostic, probably leaning more towards the old school clones of B/X, but I decided to run it with Cairn 2e-- a conversion has been written up on the Cairn website.
The general premise of this one is that the PCs have stumbled into an ongoing situation that may or may not have originally had anything to do with them-- there is a "rival" group of adventurers who have stolen a magical goose from a giant, and they have run into the titular mansion to hide. The giant has ripped an old bell from a church to use as a weapon in his pursuit, and each time the bell clangs into the mansion, the haunting inside wakes up a little more. The house itself could easily be a full-fledged adventure site without this element of chaos added, with plenty of spooky remnants of a mysterious magician whose experiments got out of hand. The real genius of this adventure is the combination of two situations that creates a very unpredictable and exciting powder keg for the players to interact with.
Getting it to the Table
This is a very slim volume (only 31 pages including the map overview at the front) that packs a tremendous amount of interactivity. This was accomplished by very efficient layout and terse descriptions of each room, so that each page had loads of useful information. The one drawback to this is that there was still a lot of information spread over the whole book, so there was still a certain amount of flipping around required. This was mitigated when I ran it because of how I run things online-- I'll typically have multiple copies of the PDF open in different tabs, with each one open to a different part of the book. For instance, there is a spread for the encounter tables which needed to be referenced throughout the game, as well as an overview version of the map with very brief bullet point summaries of each room-- both of these were good to have handy without needing to flip back to the start of the PDF where they were located. The fact that the PDF is not indexed was another difficulty, but that can't always be helped.
The other factor to consider when preparing this one is how many moving parts there are-- the "waking" process is a very important one to keep track of, as it has an impact on nearly everything else in the adventure from room descriptions to random encounters. I would definitely recommend reading it front to back a couple of times, but once you've got a grasp of how the adventure is intended to flow, very little additional preparation is necessary because of how the room descriptions are presented. Generally they follow the same format: a brief visual description with important details in bold, followed by bullet points indicating details that might be revealed on closer inspection. Then, most rooms have additional description that should be used when the house is "restless" or "awake", the second and third levels of the waking. There is a ton of interactivity in these rooms, so much so that it was actually a little bit difficult to fit this into a one-shot time slot (around 4 hours). If I were to do it again, I would probably increase the frequency of Bonebreaker Tom striking the house with the bell, speeding up the awakening process to help things move along.
What Worked?
- Living, dynamic adventure site. All of the factors combine into what eventually turns into a wild and chaotic time, with PCs running around in a mad panic trying to get out of the house without being squashed by the giant. The progression of wakefulness was great too as they inevitably revisited rooms they'd passed through previously, and it really made it feel alive.
- Very efficient layout. So much information in relatively little space! This was definitely written for running rather than reading.
What Didn't Work?
- Slight organizational difficulties. I would have preferred a slightly different sequence of information in some places-- for instance, the section that details "the waking" is on a page with background information and potential hooks, and then the encounter tables are on the following spread with some information about converting to different systems. I would have liked to see the conversion notes take the place of "the waking" because that's not really something you'll be referencing constantly in-game, and there are details of the waking mechanic that impact the encounter tables, and seeing those on the same spread would make it easier to remember some of the details and events that happen with each new stage.
Final Thoughts
This one is considered a classic of the OSR space for a reason-- it's fun! It also takes some familiar tropes and tweaks them around a bit, and the fact that the PCs are thrown into a situation that rapidly gets out of control through no fault of their own makes for a pretty interesting time.
You can get The Waking of Willowby Hall on Ben Milton's itch page. Thanks for reading!