Pedantic Wasteland - Vampire Cruise

Come Sail Away

Vampire Cruise by Amanda lee Franck is a 40-page zine containing a site-based location (the Sea Star cruise ship) for a horror-comedy adventure that unfolds over the course of two days at sea. It acts as a referee’s creative partner in bringing to life an adventure with a unique premise that is simply summed up by the title. It is system-neutral but contains roughly B/X stats for its monsters, which makes it relatively easy to adapt to any vaguely “old-school” system. 

This review is based on two sessions I ran online in February, which is described in more detail in a play report by one of the players on his blog, Benign Brown Beast. I ran the adventure using Into the Odd, which system I recommend pairing with this adventure for two reasons. First, the more modern equipment packages fit better in an adventure set on a vaguely modern cruise than the more medieval European fare you tend to find in other “OSR” rulesets. Second, Vampire Cruise is open to the players being passengers, crew members, or vampires, and Into the Odd provides a neat way to determine who is a vampire if you want a mixed party. In Into the Odd, some starting backgrounds come with an Arcanum, which is a magic item with a random power. Vampire Cruise states that “Vampire PCs have one extra ability (choose from the skills other vampires have or make up your own)”. I had the idea to reskin Arcanum as a vampiric ability. In my playtest, only one character was a vampire (a fact he kept hidden from the other players until he felt appropriate), and when he used his power, it was a nice, dramatic reveal. 

Some Assembly Required

Vampire Cruise has everything to drive a couple fun sessions but leaves the work of putting those pieces together to you. If you, like me, thrive on improv when you are referee-ing, the adventure is more than enough to prompt seaboard shenanigans. If, however, you need everything to be more clearly and fulsomely laid out before you begin your session, this won’t be a pick-up-and-play adventure for you. Instead, you’ll need to do some level of prep to put the pieces together enough for your comfort level. 

The map and itinerary are the two pillars of the adventure. As I said in a post on my own blog, an itinerary or other guidance for what happens over time during the course of an adventure is just as helpful as a map, although it is more often overlooked. There is some helpful scaffolding in the itinerary (which lists 11 things that likely happen over the course of the two day cruise) and the familiar keyed map, but the referee is mostly responsible for choosing when and where the 12 pages of NPCs fit in with respect to time and place. Some NPCs are tied to the lightly keyed locations on the ship (for instance, the 15-year-old unpublished diarist, Kate Kosciusko, is usually found in a far corner of the library or in the banquet hall, while the serial-romantic vampire, Svetlana, resides in a recreation of her ancestral tower. Most NPCs, however, are sort of floating ideas, for the referee to insert as they see fit. And this is, in fact, the best way to use them. It’s even the best way to use the NPCs who presumably have a place they frequently haunt. I had a heavily sunscreened Svetlana beneath a heavy parasol hit on one of the PCs who sat by the pool by themselves, which turned into an ongoing thread in our game, while Kate was seated with a couple of PCs during the talent show at the concert hall as a way to give the PCs the info that passengers (in this case, Kate’s aunt) were starting to go missing.

The map is an engaging and, more importantly, gameable piece of art. There is so much detail in the cutaway map that you get a good idea what the adventure entails just by looking at it. The additional top-down maps of the major decks are just an added bonus, helping you conceptualize exactly where everything is. If you are familiar with Amanda lee Franck’s previous adventure, You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge, then you have a good idea of what this map looks like. Vampire Cruise’s map key is terse and funny, perhaps a bit more terse than the map key descriptions in Garbage Barge. However, the descriptions are typically enough to give the referee a springboard to describe what the PCs encounter. Exceptions are things like the balloon launch, cannon, pools, and engine deck, while are labeled on the map but don’t have any accompanying key. Some stand-outs in the map keys are the The Broadway Experience Concert Hall, which comes with a d6 table of what stage show is happening, the rock-climbing wall that is a to-scale duplicate of the vampire’s castle elsewhere on deck, and the underwater viewing window: “Crew members lower a bag of entrails into the water every few hours to attract a dazzling shark show. More sharks every time! There are getting to be a worrying number of sharks.” Franck strikes a similarly comedic tone throughout, which makes Vampire Cruise a pleasant read (and occasionally tempts the referee to read a choice line or two aloud at the table). However, to earn the “pedantic” moniker in the title of my review series, I will note the slight nitpick that The Ruined Tower and The Box House appear to be switched in the map versus the map key. (These are the types of nits that are probably present in most, if not all, published adventures, and it is probably my anxiety about these type of errors appearing in own adventure, which as I write this post is out of my hands and into my printer’s, that make me more sensitive to it. This small error isn’t actually something that would slow or disorient any reader or referee.)

Because the itinerary and the map are the engines driving the adventure forward, I advise giving players a redacted itinerary and an unredacted map at the start of the cruise. The map encourages the players choose what to do next based on what parts of the map look most interesting, while the itinerary tends to anchor them. My players kept saying things like “okay, what should we do for the next couple of hours before the dinner at the banquet hall begins?” As an example of ways an enterprising referee can assemble the pieces in Vampire Cruise to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts, I would recommend expanding the itinerary to three days and inserting the 20 “cruise activities” included as a random table toward the back of the book as new events on board the Sea Star. This would all be much more than the PCs would reasonably be able to do during the cruise, but making some events take place at the same time forces the players to make more decisions about the type of cruise they are on.

But of course, the Sea Star is no ordinary cruise. How does the central conceit of the adventure, that it is a cruise, but with vampires, manifest? Mostly on Deck 13, which houses luxurious cabins for vampiric passengers and fancy recreations of some of the most powerful vampires’ on-shore abodes. The list of vampires on the cruise are an engaging bunch–the aforementioned Svetlana, who I ran like Jennifer Coolidge’s character in The White Lotus, is my favorite, but there is also a pair of rich hipsters and a Dracula-esque count with his spouses (like Dracula, this Count Ratherius is a bisexual icon. Count Strahd, take notes). The best vampire, however, never appeared in my game. It is the vampire shark that can turn into a mist to get onboard ships. 

The vampires are a bit of a red herring. Players who presume an adventure entitled “Vampire Cruise” would feature vampires as its primary antagonist are in for a shock. The real villains of the module turn out to be a cult run by sleazy motivational speakers and dedicated to a horrifying, twenty-foot-tall, 3000-year-old Egyptian deity. This cult will attempt to hypnotize the PCs, unleash multiple monsters on the cruise, and are responsible for the climactic presumed-ending of the cruise, where the deity breaks into the vampire ball and begins killing vampires first, then everything else on board. The vampires tend to be a bit comedic, even campy, so this bait-and-switch injects more horror into the adventure than had the cruise been populated entirely by vampires. 

Some Notes on Genre

“I want them to feel the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I’ve always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless depths inhabited by cackling tooth-studded things rising toward you at the rate of a feather falls.”

- Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise [1]

Vampire Cruise is neither fully comedy nor much of a horror. It may lean towards the comedic by subverting typical horror tropes associated with vampires, gothic and brooding monsters, on board a tropical cruise ship, it also heightens the real horrors present on even mundane cruises. The crew are an ever-present underclass on board cruise ships, and Vampire Cruise doesn’t elide this fact. For instance, when the PCs are passengers, they have the ability to call on crew members for “absolutely anything the players ask for.” There is a little sub-mechanic for these requests, which may result in crewmates “tearfully beg[ging] you not to complain” or “painstaking[ly] recounting” the efforts the crew has taken to satisfy the request, along with “details on how Room Service plans to move forward from the present impasse.” Class is built into the map too: there are 3rd, 2nd and First Class Cabins for the 3rd, 2nd and First Class Passengers. Vampires have luxury suites, if they don’t have their own castles on board. But the cultists sleep in a long hallway filled with bunk beds. Vampires have always been used as class commentary, and the choice to pair them with a location so suffused with class was an inspired one. The Sea Star is a tinderbox and it eventually explodes as the cult unleashes a monster that rises up through the floor to devour the upper class, literal aristocrats during their black-tie party. This was the moment for my group where the adventure finally morphed from slapstick comedy to horror as the PCs fled for their lives, sacrificed one of their own, and rescued the young Kate Kosciusko from meeting the same violent end that befell all the lost souls aboard the Sea Star.

Where to Find Vampire Cruise

Vampire Cruise was written and illustrated by Amanda lee Franck. You can purchase a PDF of the adventure on itch.io for $10.00 and in print and PDF at Exalted Funeral for $15.00. 

Cryptic Signals - A Book of Beasts, Monsters & Treasure, Volume 2: Monsters &

A Book of Beasts

Review by WFS

This bestiary is a supplement for a supplement. In 2015, Jason Lutes wrote “The Perilous Wilds”, a supplement for overland exploration for the Dungeon World RPG, which is regularly cited as an essential product for that system and a source of inspiration even for those who lack any interest in Dungeon World. “A Book of Beasts” was a stretch goal for the Kickstarter for The Perilous Wilds. 

The premise for A Book of Beasts is that The Perilous Wilds provides a series of random tables for generating creatures, and that all 56 of the monsters included would be rolled up using those random tables. Just knowing that each monster was born of random prompts has a certain magic akin to learning that classic D&D monsters like the Owlbear or the Rust Monster were inspired by deformed children’s toys. To add to this creative flourish, Jason assigned each creature “to a different artist, giving them very little direction in interpreting [his] written descriptions.” I think the reason that this approach tickles me so much is twofold: Firstly, I love improv and watching someone take a few random prompts and create something cool and cohesive, and, secondly, it is reminiscent of medieval bestiaries, where you had monks describing and drawing strange monsters such as “elephants” or “lions” via an ancient game of telephone, to often hilarious results.

But the wacky process means nothing if the actual monsters are no good. A Book of Beasts, however, fully delivers on being a fun and gameable bestiary. I always like the more obvious creatures that are just two animals combined (such as the White Cat of One Hundred Paws, which is a snow leopard-centipede hybrid, or the Owlbat, which is an owl-bat), but the real mark of a bestiary’s quality is if the really bizarre monsters seem like something you could bring to your table. A Book of Beasts offers plenty of weird monsters that still feel like they have some reason to exist in a fantasy world from the small (e.g., the Prayer Sparrow, a small bird that pecks the eyes out of unrepentant petitioners at religious functions) to the humanoid (e.g., the Wastewalkers, reptilian nomads who can survive without water for weeks on end) to the larger than life (e.g., the Architect Lichen, an intelligent fungus that grows to look like ancient ruins and always expanding). 

But this bestiary is far from perfect, as some entries run toward the generic. For example, the Fenkin is a toad-like humanoid that lives a tribal and territorial existence in the swamp, which is a bit too similar to…basically every swamp-dwelling humanoid proffered by D&D, honestly! Sometimes even a small twist goes a long way. Such as the Hulking Brute, which might have been yet another ogre-alike if not for their fascination with cheese, which causes them to press cheesemakers into servitude to produce poor quality, moldy cheese (their favorite).

I award bonus points to bestiaries that hint at how the creatures interact with each other. It is all well and good to present a list of cool monsters for the player characters to fight (or run from), but adding details about how the monsters interact amongst themselves makes them feel more real and also provide useful guidance on how to place them in the game naturalistically. While A Book of Beasts largely presents stand-alone monstrosities, it shines when there is interaction. For instance, The Snow Creepers are basically D&D Ankhegs for frozen climates, but they are made way more interesting by the inclusion of the Flurry Worm, which are larval creepers that appear like a flurry of snow when a female Snow Creeper’s egg sac bursts open. This clever climatological camouflage is the setup for a horrific payoff–they Flurry Worms burrow into the flesh of their unlucky hosts where they gestate for a month before “[e]merg[ing] in some horrific fashion.” That is terrifying; I love it.

The organization also makes these monsters easy to bring to the table. The bestiary is organized not alphabetically by name, but first by climate (frigid, temperate, torrid) and then within each climate by terrain type (lowland, wetland, woodland, highland, underland). Each climate-terrain combination includes four creatures on a single spread. The result of this organization is that the referee can open to the appropriate climate-terrain combination for where their players are (or the location they are prepping) and pick one of the monsters on that spread. While it includes the obvious index of listing the creatures alphabetically in the back of the book, organizing the monsters based on where they can be found makes this bestiary a handy tome to have with you while running the game and minimizes flipping between pages during play.

Disclaimer: The cover art for A Book of Beasts is by Keny Widjaja, who is an interior artist on my upcoming Barkeep on the Borderlands adventure. The interior illustrations are by Carl Antonowicz, Billage, Jan Burger, Niels Burger, Jonathan Fine, and Josh Rosen. Keny’s inclusion as an artist in this bestiary did not impact my review.

A Book of Beasts was written by Jason Lutes. It can be obtained in PDF format for $5 on DriveThruRPG.

MONSTERS & TREASURE
Review by Gus L.

The second “Booklet” of the Original 1974 edition of Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D). This thin half sheet zine is the blueprint for all subsequent monster books.  To find something earlier one has to leave the space of Role Playing games entirely and look to ancient bestiaries. Today Monsters & Treasure remains a functional and near complete list of creatures for the game it supports (or I’d argue almost any simple D&D-like game), in addition to being shockingly economical - with 76 monsters (at least 10 of which are simply alternate names or a vague one line description without stats) on only 20 half-pages (treasure tables and magic item descriptions fill more than half of Monsters & Treasure, which sets the form for subsequent role playing guides).  

I should mention the fact that I generally hate bestiaries. There are exceptions where bestiaries can be useful: densely stated tactical games, or ones that are really sets of lair adventures/hooks/scenarios. Otherwise bestiaries seem indulgent, mostly virtually useless fluff - rarely connected to setting, and almost never offer interesting deviation from the standards. Monsters & Treasure set though standards though, and it still manages to raise questions and offers lessons about the use and construction of beastiarys that should be taken more seriously today if one wants a bestiary that’s more then an excuse to draw a bunch of cool monster illustrations -- which is a perfectly fun project - just not an especially useful one for playing most RPGs.

At first it’s a bit odd to hold up Monsters & Treasure as an example of great bestiary design, there is nothing special about the creatures listed within;  without exception it offers the standard creatures of contemporary fantasy with little more than a name and a stat line. For ogres the entire descriptive text consists of “OGRES: These large and fearsome monsters range from 7 to 10 feet in height” followed by two more lines discussing their special abilities to inflict greater damage and throw rocks.  We don’t know what OD&D’s ogres look like or much about their habits or demeanor, only that they either serve chaos or neutrality and carry sacks of gold around - like giants.

Best Illustration in OD&D

This simplicity isn’t because of a lack of imagination, but rather because Monsters & Treasure is the ur-bestiary, and more than that, it’s one of the pillars of Gygaxian vernacular fantasy’s implied worldbuilding. Most creatures in Monsters & Treasure depend on the general and popular understanding of monsters to provide description and character, because even in 1974 most people knew what an ogre might be from reading Puss in Boots as a kid or some similar fairy tale source.  That’s the power of vernacular fantasy, it functions well with even minimal information and early D&D’s reliance on it rather then copious lore not only allows individual referees and players to understand threats with their creativity and general genre knowledge rather then games mastery but also keeps things easy to use and approachable.  These elements in bestiary design  are less necessary today, largely because Monsters & Treasure also changed our understanding of fantasy creatures. Beyond the basic understanding of monsters are foes to be defeated in RPG combat modeled via die roll (rather than through the ruses and abstractions popular in mythology, fairy tale and fantasy writing), Monsters & Treasure does more, it changes and defines many aspects of fantasy creatures in ways that are general today.

Monsters & Treasure (along with OD&D generally) is the source of our cultural understanding of what fantasy worlds look like, and when some other work of fantasy is considered creative, novel, or weird the baseline it’s being compared to today is the implied setting of OD&D.  This power is why I use the term “Gygaxian Vernacular Fantasy” rather than Vanilla Fantasy or another label - because even as it continues to evolve and change, today’s conception of fantasy worlds owes so much to Gygax and Arneson.  Personally I suspect Monsters & Treasure mostly this is Gygax’s work, though as with all early D&D it’s hard to tell*, the expanded and more descriptive Monster Manual is both writers' work, but the world building encounter tables of AD&D are Gygax's and expand Monsters & Treasure directly.

There might appear to be a contradiction between the generic names and laconic descriptions within Monsters & Treasure and this claim of cultural importance, but taking a look at some of the more in depth descriptions it’s clearer. Look at Dungeons & Dragons’ titular beast, the mighty dragon (or at least the very deadly but fairly fragile dragon in OD&D).  It’s the longest entry in Monsters & Treasure, spending a decadent two pages detailing the six Gygaxian chromatic dragons: white, black, green, blue, red, and golden and the mechanics around their varied breath weapons, age categories, and subdual.  This detail, while minimal, was novel in 1974 - the dragon here is conceived naturalistically, as a group of species (we even learn of their “family groupings”) rather than a singular mythic beast. Monsters and Treasure creates the idea of the fantasy dragon that’s today’s default: a species of intelligent fantasy creature whose color determines habitat and breath weapon.  While several legendary dragons breathe things besides fire (notably the Norse World Serpent, Jormungandr, who breathes noxious fumes - but then one asks if a world encircling serpent really a dragon?), fire is the norm, and it is unrelated to scale color. Monsters & Treasure created, codified, and popularized the colorful coded breath weapon trope. It’s also responsible for several other common and almost universally accepted fantasy versions of monsters such as the gnoll and slimes (borrowed from Dunsany and the movie The Blob) that weren’t a major part of the genre prior to D&D.

Gnolls, or “A cross between Gnomes and Trolls (. . . perhaps, Lord Sunsany (sic) did not really make it all that clear) with +2 morale.” are even more of a D&Dism then dragons, but their presentation in Monsters & Treasure didn’t define the Gnoll as the signature hyena monster that terrorized a million new World of Warcraft players, Gnolls became Hyena-ful in the 1977 Monster Manual. Monsters & Treasure Gnolls (see that illustration for all the detail you will ever need) aren’t hyena people, and they aren’t much like Dunsany’s Gnoles - forest dwelling fairy creatures who delight in gemstones, ropes, and torture.  In Monsters & Treasure they are one of the few illustrated creatures, but like their description they remain “similar to Hobgoblins”. This lack of definition and distinct character is also an aspect of Monsters & Treasure that makes it interesting. Gnolls are an example of what I think of as Monstrous Hierarchies.

I don’t know if it’s a taxonomic obsession specific to Gygax and sprite based computer games, but the most important monsters in OD&D tend to exist as distinct sub categories, for example undead and humanoids. These orders of foe start with the weakest and rise to the most dangerous - roughly in concert with character level. Humanoids begin as kobolds/goblins with less then one hit die and rise to giants who have exceptionally dangerous special abilities (massive boosts to damage dealing) and twelve plus Hit Dice. Gnolls are in the middle, the nastiest of the humanoids are roughly human sized - monstrous soldiers who still appear in large numbers and have 1.5 Hit Dice. After them come ogres. These hierarchies serve a purpose in that they produce an array of similar challenges that follow the same sorts of behavioral scripts, fill the same niches in the Gygaxian pseudo-ecology and gradually introduce more and better special abilities, but also ramp up challenge steadily with player level. One could simply say that goblins, like humans, have class levels and ½ to 3 Hit Dice, corresponding with fighters of the same level and then note they come in various varieties and by various names.  What Monsters & Treasure does instead is define each tier of monster as something unique - still largely undifferentiated, but with a name and specific statistics that allow them to become a known risk the players can gauge.

These hierarchies would simply be a curiosity if the first edition of D&D were a more complex system, but as it is they offer a sort of matrix of stat lines and special abilities that’s easy to adapt. If one wants dangerous hyena people or opium fantasy murder gnomes, the gnoll statline works equally well. The concept of reskinning a monster implies a fair bit of work in complex modern systems, or relatively minimal changes to description, but with Monsters & Treasure the space for reskinning and reimagining monsters is vast. This may disrupt the method that monster hierarchies teach players about monster risk, but reskinning is also enabled by hierarchies, because the whole can be reskinned multiple times: goblins become conscripts, orcs veterans and gnolls elites in an evil human army with almost no stat changes. Alternatively the same humanoid soldier monster hierarchy might represent the different types of goatmen or otherworldly fungus invaders, but monsters and treasure gives a quick reference for soldier type monsters from weaker than an average man at arms to stronger then veteran troops, and then it offers several types of the same sort of foes as giants. There are even a small number of special abilities offered in Monsters & Treasure, and they are also modular. One can snap the dragon’s breath onto a giant and suddenly you have a huge demon.

Monsters & Treasure succeeds because it’s less a bestiary and more a monster building toolkit. It offers a large enough selection of foes and special abilities, then organizes them in hierarchies that flow intuitively and mirror character level. This lesson is reinforced by the random encounter tables and the OD&D rule that dungeon level and character level are roughly equivalent - though of course OD&D’s random encounter tables allow for asymmetrical encounters as they do not seem to seek a balance where every combat is balanced. This bestiary strikes a balance in very few pages by offering sufficient examples and content to allow a new referee to judge how encounters and monsters are designed while creating a minimal implied setting, but it doesn’t stifle creativity, and offers incomplete examples of monsters that the referee can stat and add  as they desire.

As much as it set the standards for how monsters in RPGs appear, Monsters & Treasure One wishes it had done more to set the standards for bestiary design with a systemic approach to stats that is useful for reskinning while still providing sufficient information to play.  This balance is what makes Monsters & Treasure work, because despite some stumbles in layout and offering fewer special abilities than it might have (both perhaps unavoidable for a book written before the concept of the RPG was fully formed), it is a sufficient, even generous bestiary, that encourages referee adaption and expansion.

Reading through Monsters & Treasure is worthwhile simply because it makes one consider - how many monsters does one need? What really are the mechanical distinctions between an orc and a bandit? One doesn’t need every monster to be a bear, but it’s pretty likely that every monster you will need or can imagine will mostly fit into one of a small number of statlines with a novel special ability or two.

—

*Determining the contributions of Gygax & Arneson in OD&D is an impossible and pointless task. The truth is clouded by years of litigation between and self-aggrandizing myth making by the two. I prefer to think of OD&D as something they wrote happily together, with Gygax codifying and expanding on Blackmoor, and Arneson making tweeks to Chainmail to produce the final product - this of course is also myth making. We can say that Arneson’s Blackmoor supplement also includes monsters, and that the 1980’s settlement to his lawsuit regarding IP rights to AD&D materials included the Monster Manual which was affirmed to some extent in Arneson’s 1985 declaratory judgment regarding royalties on the Monster Manual II- though the issue there is largely settlement interpretation and the conceptual nature of an RPG Bestiary, not specific monster design. 225 U.S.P.Q. (BNA) 1252.

Volume 2: Monsters &

Review by Ramanan

As Gus notes above, the monster manual for OD&D, the first half of the book Monsters & Treasure, is quite modest. OD&D isn’t a complex game, so monsters can be described quite simply, mostly via prose rather than fiddly stat blocks. Gygax rightly assumes you know what a bandit is and doesn’t waste any words explaining the obvious to you. Instead he spends a lot of time explaining the fighting composition of a group of bandits.

Although Bandits are normal men, they will have leaders who are super-normal fighters, magical types or clerical types. For every 30 bandits there will be one 4th-level Fighting-Man; for every 50 bandits there will be in addition one 5th- or 6th-level fighter ...

I’m not sure that’s much better. (I sincerely love the OD&D monster booklet, though! It is charming.) Into the fruitful void left by Gygax steps the man himself—Luke Gearing. The cheekily named Volume 2: Monsters & is Gearing’s take on an OD&D monster manual. Luke leans even harder into the minimalism of OD&D, giving us a book that is far more flavourful. It’s basically all flavour. His take on the Cockatrice reads like a poem, likely because this is basically a book of poetry:

Featherless Bird 

armoured with iron scale 

and useless wings purloined from bats

stretched wide to embrace the world.

There are stats for each creature, though they are as minimal as those found in OD&D’s book of monsters. A Cockatrice is: HD 5, AC as Plate, damage 1d6, physical contact causes petrifaction. If you need Luke to tell you anything else about a Cockatrice this is probably not the book for you. If you want a picture of a Cockatrice you’ll be doubly disappointed! 

Luke’s bandits are described as follows:

1d6 relatives to grieve,

close enough to know who did it.

But who is in charge! Luke isn’t trying to solve that problem with this bestiary. This is a book about transmitting feeling and mood. 

I believe the best game books fold worldbuilding into everything they do. As terse as this book is, you get a strong sense of the implied world these monsters fit within. The implication throughout the book is that most monsters are men who have twisted themselves in pursuit of power, or have been twisted by men into the monstrous, with some fantastic beasts to round it all out. I like this take on the creatures of OD&D.

If you enjoy this take on the dragon you’ll enjoy this book. If you think this is some total art-house nonsense—and honestly, it kind of is—you will be disappointed: avoid this book, it’ll just piss you off. I for one enjoyed this unusual take. We already have Monsters & Treasure, Monster Manual, The Fiend Folio, etc. No one needs to tell that story again.

That said, Luke should have made a table with all the monster stats, like Monsters and Treasure: that is the best part of that book!

Pedantic Wasteland - Outlaws of the Iron Route

An Unacquired Taste

Some foods, drinks or games are described as an “acquired taste” as a sort of backhanded compliment for something that can only be enjoyed, or even be enjoyable, after repeated exposure. Well, let me introduce its inverse: a new backhanded insult, the “unacquired taste.” An unacquired taste is something that you used to be able to enjoy uncritically but, after repeated exposure to a superior version of that thing, you can no longer enjoy it at all. You’ve certainly encountered this phenomenon before: think of the coffee snob in your life (who well may be you) who is no longer capable of enjoying that swill by the same name that comes from the pot in the office break-room (by which I mean a Keurig, this isn’t 1997). Sophistication in taste can heighten your senses when appraising the tastes, smells and textures of the finer things, but you lose the ability to enjoy the swill. All this is to say, I am reviewing a D&D Expeditions adventure for D&D Fifth Edition, an adventure I ran and enjoyed nearly a decade ago, before becoming a game sommelier.

Outlaws of the Iron Route (“Outlaws”) is a 38-page adventure for three to seven 1st-4th level D&D 5e characters, written by Will Doyle in 2014, the first year of a new edition. Outlaws was the ninth D&D Expeditions tournament module for the Adventurers League. D&D Expeditions adventures were sort of the junior varsity adventures compared to the published behemoths Wizards of the Coast was putting out at the same time. Each season of Adventurers League was designed to fit thematically with whatever big adventure book was out at the time, which for Outlaws was the widely panned Tyranny of Dragons adventures: Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat. The author, Mr. Doyle, would go on to the big leagues himself with Tomb of Annihilation in 2017, which he co-wrote with more established names like Chris Perkins and Steve Winter. That adventure earned praise from our resident grumpy grognard Gus L., who called it “solid, interesting and usable in a way that prior 5th edition products haven't been.” Outlaws similarly has a certain charm lacking in other short, simple D&D Expeditions adventures, which were all too often a chain of combat encounters, sometimes interrupted by the veneer of a prescribed, preset story. I ran Outlaws (with modifications) for a handful of appropriately leveled 5th edition characters when the edition was still shiny and new circa 2015.

Why can I no longer appreciate the taste of a perfectly cromulent modern D&D adventure? It is largely a matter of playstyle. The read-aloud text boxes and railroady scene structure (the adventure tells you where the characters go next, instead of that being something the players playing those characters decide) simply does not cohere with my own playstyle focusing on emergent narrative and player agency. Nonetheless, there are bits in this particular adventure that are worthy of praise, even if it is constrained by being written for the modern, neo-trad/OC playstyle that dominates D&D 5e and tabletop gaming at large.

There are two sets of outlaws in Outlaws, a band of renegade ex-knights whose leader was falsely accused of attempted assassination and a force of fanatic kobolds who exercise brigandage in the name of Tiamat. After a months’ long bloody war, the gangs are set to meet at the King’s Pyre (more on this later) and negotiate a peace where they will divide the trade route between them. This is a strong premise already, with its hint at factions and intrigue, a recipe for more than just slogging through too-long combat encounters.

Outlaws is structured as a set of scenes, which by themselves are fine. My issue (again, a matter of playstyle) is that Outlaws just assumes the player-characters are along for the ride. Outlaws begins as a riot breaks out in the city (another fun premise), but for the adventure to continue, the characters must (a) save the quest giver (a retainer of a local noble house), (b) accept the quest giver’s quest (to hunt down the outlaw chiefs and restore peace to the city) and (c) go to the predesignated first lead, a remote prison tower. Outlaws does make good use of player handouts throughout, and starts with a wanted poster for one of the main outlaws. It is my general experience that, if you want to railroad players to a particular quest, give them a wanted poster handout for it. Something about having the physical handout makes players want to pursue that lead above all else.

Let’s Start (with) a Riot

A riot is a good way to start an adventure, but the way Outlaws handles it is mixed from a player agency perspective. It is good that Outlaws calls out that the characters can avoid simply massacring all of the rioting commoners by persuading or intimidating them not to fight (and it is a fault of the system, not the adventure, that this is handled by a “a DC 15 Charisma check (Persuasion or Intimidation)” with a note that “[o]utstanding roleplaying should grant advantage on the roll”). However, it immediately says that “between the adventurers and [the city watch], the riot is eventually quelled.” So another solution is implied. If the players neither fight the rioters nor lecture them not to riot, they can just stand aside and wait for the problem to solve itself. After all, they can’t afford to let the riot kill the quest giver, whose wagon is in the center of the ordeal. The adventure must slouch forward, even if it means relegating the player-characters to passive observers. Even if they fight, no real consequences of their actions are permitted: it says that the city watch will arrest characters if they killed any commoners during the fight, but that the quest giver will convince the cops to move along. No player action necessary. The guest giver tells them about the quest, and, among other information, that a member of one of the outlaw gangs was captured and is being held at the Grimshackle Jail. With no other leads, Outlaws decides it is time for the next scene in this story. 

If I had to fix this opening act of Outlaws, it would be to open it up to branching paths. Provide for what happens if the player-characters fail to quell the riot, the quest giver dies, but that doesn’t have to end the adventure. Instead, the players could recognize the quest giver as the person they were sent to see, or find the documents talking about the mission and Grimshackle Jail on his corpse. Even if they don’t investigate, the rioters are rioting because of the havoc being wreaked by the outlaws, so the real quest giver is the angry mob. And if the player-characters do kill a commoner or two in plain view of the city watch, there is no need to threaten players with a logical consequence of their actions but chicken out about making that consequence stick. If that happens, the players could just be taken to Grimshackle Jail themselves, where they will still meet the imprisoned outlaw, but in an entirely new context. These fixes offer a bit of branching, yet still follow the basic structure of the adventure without being wholly forced. And what if the characters receive the quest from the quest giver, but just don’t follow through because they have other, more interesting things to do. That should be fine too: provide a timeline of events! If the players do nothing, let them experience the consequences of the choices they’ve made.

Jailhouse Blues

It is a three hour trek to the jail upriver. Outlaws points out that the characters can hike along the river, charter a river barge or ride horses. I don’t know why it points this out because there is no consequence to the choice and no incentive (like random encounters) to travel quickly or stealthily. No matter how they travel, the characters simply arrive “cold and soaked to the bone.” (As an aside, you can see from the map that this is D&D’s junior varsity squad, but I quite like this compared to the overdone, overwhelming maps Wizards usually produces. This map has a lot of charm with the ribbons for the coastal locations and, more importantly, I could print this without draining all of the ink in my printer.)

This mission is a welcome respite from the initial railroad riot. The prison tower, the imprisoned outlaw, the jailers and their motives are outlined, after which the characters are exhorted to “approach the jail however they please,” with two potential options discussed specifically: sneaking inside and going through the front door. But then an element is introduced that has the potential to turn the scenario into a truly fun powder keg; one of the jail guards has been bribed by the outlaws to break out the very same imprisoned outlaw the players have come to interrogate. That is a great set up for some spy vs. spy antics, a welcome addition to any adventure. So this scene has a great premise, but how is the execution?

To help the referee run a covert entry by the player-characters, a map of the 4-story prison is provided, along with details of which doors are locked, where guards are stationed and how guards react to intrusions (i.e., violently). It is bare bones, but functional. I think I would prefer more detail about the patrols and how they change over time (e.g., when do the guards change shifts) so players that bide their time and observe are rewarded by learning when the ideal time to enter certain areas of the prison might be. Instead, the obstacles are fairly static from a timing perspective. The other option presented is to negotiate with the Grimshackle brothers for entry. This is mostly haggling over prices while the brothers’ thugs aim crossbows at the player-characters. Something I like, which Outlaws does throughout, is the inclusion of small bubbles about roleplaying certain NPCs, each of which has a single, evocative quote that the NPC might say. I differentiate this, as a tool, from read-aloud boxed text because the referee is not actually directed to read these quotes verbatim. Instead, they give a sense for how the characters talk. I often choose what kind of voice I will use for a particular NPC based on their first line, so it is helpful for getting me “into character”, so to speak. For instance, the quote for the greedy Grimshackle brothers is “This is definitely gonna cost you” versus the line for the aforementioned noble quest giver of “Get to the point!” Maybe it is just me, but these single lines are enough to quickly communicate a bit of personality for the NPCs, and a little bit goes a long way.

Even when Outlaws explicitly allows for branching paths and multiple solutions, box text (unlike a referee) cannot handle that. For some reason, everything about the interrogation section assumes the players negotiated their way in, from the read-aloud text describing the Grimshackle brothers unlocking the cell to the fact that the main way to get the prisoner to open up is bribing the jailers to improve her conditions (such as a blanket or better meals). It is pre-written based on an assumption of which solution the players would use. I assume that this situation would go differently if the player-characters were able to sneak their way to the cell, but that merits nary a mention despite the strong start for this section from a player agency perspective. The important quest information the prisoner provides is that the ex-knight outlaws and the dragon cultist outlaws are meeting at King’s Pyre to negotiate a truce.

The most exciting part of this section, by a country mile, is the prison break. When I ran Outlaws circa 2015, I had no issue with Outlaws directing me to “[l]aunch this event whenever seems appropriate,” but my now-refined palate now balks at this. The entire thing would be greatly improved if the players were unknowingly racing against a clock and if they don’t conclude getting to the prisoner and interrogating her quick enough, she might abscond beyond their reach. Nonetheless, this still plays out nicely, with the players being alerted by shouts from below, a clanging alarm bell and the whiff of smoke. Offscreen, the bribed jailer has released a dangerous, hardened criminal to cause enough of a disruption for the imprisoned outlaw to escape, and the hardened criminal has knocked over an oil lantern, causing fire to quickly spread across the prison. The player-characters must escape the burning tower, which they are presumed to be at the top of. Again, no timer is provided, but it would be more fun if the fire explicitly spreads a predetermined amount each turn. Two encounters also occur on the way down. I would maybe use a hazard die to determine both the chance of one of the encounters occurring and the fire spreading.

The first encounter is combat with the hardened criminal, who turns out to be Captain Walharrow, a minotaur pirate captain with a peg leg. (My players fucking loved Walharrow for whatever reason and ended up helping him escape; he became a campaign fixture for the next several years, to the extent that on low-attendance weeks, the players would play as Walharrow and his pirate crew in events happening concurrently with the main campaign.) This is an excellent example of a combat encounter for a couple reasons. First, Walharrow’s stated objective isn’t just to smash the players to a pulp, as is so often the case, it is to tear through everything in his path to escape the prison. Second, the environment has fires (the referee is directed to pick one or two squares on the map to start on fire and spread it as the combat progresses) and there are weak spots on the floor to fall through. Clever players can make use of either Walharrow’s motivation or the environmental hazards to their advantage. However, this solid setup is undercut by a warning that “[i]f characters are defeated here, Walharrow robs them of any gold and leaves them for dead. One of the surviving jailers revives the characters as soon as the minotaur departs.” Let the players fail, you cowards! The impossibility of failure throughout this module robs victory of its luster. The second encounter is a hostage negotiation, but the hostage is one of the Grimshackle brothers, who the player-characters have been given no reason to care about. I think this encounter only exists to introduce the bribed jailer and give him a chance to tell the players that this was all part of his plan to free the imprisoned outlaw. 

Truce Company

The player-characters final mission from the quest giver is to sabotage the truce negotiations between the two outlaw groups. The meeting occurs in a neat seaside location called King’s Pyre, an abandoned monument to an old king flanked by waterfalls, and the map thereof is a highlight of the adventure. This is basically an open air dungeon and a solid one by 5e standards.

The primary feature of this dungeon is the massive statue, which also serves to divide the two outlaw groups that have camped on either side. Tunnels in the cliff face provide a level of Jaquaysian nonlinearity to the location. It would, however, be nice if Outlaws included a map of these caves (a lá the Caves of Chaos) where the referee can visualize how they interconnect instead of just being told by the location keys. The zip line is also a fun addition that I don’t see enough in adventures. There are so many solutions players can bring to this scenario: they could silence the horn blowers and lookouts and take a more violent approach, they can dress as bandits and stage “false flag” attacks to turn the factions against each other, or they can sneak their way deep into the camp to try to take out or capture the leaders. This is the benefit of a location-based scenario over the scene-based scenarios used elsewhere in Outlaws and frequently in other 5e adventures, it leads itself more easily to the “tactical infinity” that is so often the goal of OSR and related play cultures. 

Each area of the location has something of interest and includes plenty of non-combat encounters. Some highlights are the ogre effigy that is puppeted by a single kobold to scare off trespassers, a bard trapped in a grimoire who communicates to player-characters by rapidly flipping its pages and folding its page corners to point to individual words, the one bandit who “believes that a hag has cursed him, and he is convinced that the cry of a screech owl heralds the moment of his death” and will be basically incapacitated if he hears such a sound. 

Exeunt, Pursued by Orcs

All of a sudden, orcs attack. If that was an off-putting transition for this review, it is no less off-putting in the adventure, coming from left field. The referee is directed to “spring the orc assault” as the events at King’s Pyre “come to a climax.” I hate to sound like a Gygaxian broken record, but this too would seriously benefit from tracking time so that this event happens not merely at the whim of the referee. 

Apparently the outlaw band dedicated to Tiamat are actually heretical, so saith the dragon cult, which has paid an orc war band to wipe them out. For the players, this happens basically as a cut scene, with chaos all around them, and then two back-to-back combat encounters, first with a handful of orcs and then with their orog chief and his worg steed, with a few orc grunts as auxiliary forces. No matter what, the dragon cultist outlaws are decimated and the ex-knights either flee or suffer the same fate. Perhaps this stems from a worry that the players will make the “wrong” decision by allying or, heaven forbid, joining one of the factions. If so, it reminds me of a moment from the original Pokémon games in which the player is asked if they would like to join the villainous Team Rocket but is given no opportunity to say yes. That agency-defying move makes more sense in the medium of video games than it does in a TTRPG, regardless of play culture, because TTRPGs have the tactical infinity built in to handle the player characters joining the “wrong” faction. 

After the adventure, the quest giver pays the characters their reward. After all, the truce meeting was disrupted! But, again, it doesn’t really matter what the characters do; orcs would have rushed in and disrupted the proceedings no matter how they interact at King’s Pyre, or indeed if they are there at all.

While Outlaws has some interesting ideas and set pieces, it is marred by its fear of letting the players fail or, for that matter, succeed. The result is an adventure that moves on its own, bringing the players along for the ride, no matter what they do. The impact of the adventure is fully alienated from the choices the players make. They don’t have to lift a finger to stop the riot, the prison break only occurs after the characters get a chance to talk to the imprisoned outlaw, the characters cannot truly die at the hands of Captain Walharrow, and it doesn’t even matter whether the player-characters go to King’s Pyre or not; either way, the mission of disrupting negotiations is a success either way thanks to a band of orcs that happens with no foreshadowing whatsoever. What is the point of playing a roleplaying game if there are no consequences to your character’s actions? Just watch a movie with cool set pieces like prison breaks, burning buildings or gang wars instead. I remember liking Outlaws in 2015, and it is better than the other 5th edition adventurers of that time. But now I’ve written and read so many adventures that seriously consider information, choice and impact, that I have unacquired the taste for a scene-based railroad of an adventure, no matter how many neat ideas those scenes contain.

The Salvation of 5e 

There are enough nuggets of good ideas in Outlaws that I want to “fix” it, but I can’t fix a problem that is inherent to the play culture of 5e. For those that are unacquainted with the Six Cultures of Play set forth at The Retired Adventurer blog, the typical mode of 5th Edition adventures is described as “OC” or “Neo-Trad.” To understand this play culture in the broader context of TTRPGs, I hope you will indulge me in a brief history lesson: Dragonlance (and its authors) brought about a play culture, Trad, which was the dominant play culture of the hobby for roughly two decades. The goal of Trad games was to create an elaborate referee-lead narrative. OSR and Story Games both have their roots in rebelling against this dominant play culture, but Trad itself did not stagnate, it evolved. The OC/Neo-Trad play culture agrees with its forebear that creating a narrative should be the focus of the game, but shifts the focus from the referee telling their story to the players telling the story of their characters. If you have ever watched an episode of Critical Role, that is an example of this play culture, but it is also the most popular set of assumptions and beliefs in the 5e scene at large. With that background, I want to look at my primary gripes with Outlaws and determine whether they are purely a matter of the OC play culture not aligning with my own OSR-inflected play style, or something that can be “fixed” without disrupting the play culture. 

My first consistent critique was that the lack of timekeeping made results feel arbitrary and zapped tension from the scenarios. There are a variety of ways to gamify timekeeping across play cultures (e.g., the hazard die in the OSR or “clocks” in Story Games), but perhaps Outlaws does provide a timekeeping method that just didn’t read as such because of the mismatch in play cultures. At several moments (e.g., the prison break or the orc invasion), the referee is directed to launch the event “whenever seems appropriate.” But if the goal is for things to happen in a narratively satisfying way, perhaps this is better-suited to OC play than time advancing at regular intervals (the OSR) or as a consequence of player action (Story Games). However, I think adventures that take this approach should give guidance on determining when launching the event does “seem appropriate.” This could be as simple as listing a few likely types of moments that would be narratively satisfying to spring the event. For the Prison Break, it is obviously intended to happen after they’ve begun talking with the imprisoned outlaw. So Outlaws could say “launch the prison break event either after the player-characters have asked a dramatic question but before the prisoner gets a chance to answer, or when it seems like the conversation with the imprisoned outlaw is winding up.” For the orc invasion, maybe appropriate means whenever the outlaw gangs seem to have struck their truce, when the player-characters are in the process of aligning with one of the gangs or whenever there is a lull in the action. Even this modicum of guidance is better than “whenever seems appropriate” and does not clash with the OC style of play.

My other, primary issue with Outlaws is more significant, but also more fixable. For every instance of possible failure (e.g., the riot or the fight with Walharrow), Outlaws gives a lazy cop-out that the referee can deploy to undo the failure. But the issue here is because Outlaws assumes that failure means either player-character death or the end of the adventure, both of which are at odds with the centrality of the characters and their narratives to the OC play culture. But this is too narrow a view of failure. I already offered some ideas for how “failure” during the riot scenario doesn’t have to end the adventure. Instead, these failures, the death of the quest giver or the arrest of the player-characters, simply change the path of the adventure, but not the direction. This is the ideal OC/Neo-Trad approach to failure. But what about that failstate loved best by the OSR: player-character death? Outlaws provides an opportunity for death (at the hands of the minotaur pirate) but also provides a cheap safety net. 5e, as a system, already provides such a safety net in the form of the death saves, but death is still possible. I agree with Outlaws that, due to the OC play culture, the mechanical safety net is not enough. An OC player should basically never have their character die unless they choose to die. But being reduced to the near-death state should still have interesting consequences, and being revived by a random, surprisingly altruistic jailer is not very interesting. Instead, I would say that, if Walharrow defeats the party, he does not choose to inflict death. Instead, he heats up his stylized nose ring in the fires all around them and “brands” the players with it. Perhaps this is Walharrow’s modus operandi, and it opens up the possibility of people recognizing the brand and knowing that the characters got on the wrong side of the dread pirate captain. This may also make the characters want to track down the minotaur pirate and get revenge. Whatever happens, this consequence of failure enhances OC/Neo-Trad’s emphasis on creating narrative more than a lazy backstop.

The flaws of Outlaws are not simply a mismatch between an OSR reader and an OC adventure. There are ways to write interesting adventures in the OC/Neo-Trad style without obviating player agency. It just requires some creativity, but solutions are possible.

Where to Find Outlaws of the Iron Route

Outlaws of the Iron Route was designed by Will Doyle. A PDF is freely available on Wizards of the Coast’s website. You can also purchase it in multiple file formats for $2.99 at the DM’s Guild.