Adventure Site Contest 2: The Herbalist’s Son

​Written by Jacob72
Classic D&D (B/X), level 3-5
Lost elvish tomb
  The players find a map pointing to, or hear word of, the lost tomb of the elvish prince Calithilben is said to be close to the tiny ruined druid chapel in the village of Sorn, a sorry place of some two dozen low stone and turf windowless huts. The grounds of the chapel are bounded by a circular wall and shared with a single man-sized standing stone. When the party arrives in Sorn they learn from the headman Jasper Hurley (middle-aged, dirty, bald crown with wild hair, worried and truthful) that the local herbalist Tilo Dietl and his teenage son Hempel have been surveying the stone and have now gone missing. They believed that they were close to finding the tomb of Calithilben.
  I’m charmed by the gentle suggestion at the beginning of this adventure site, where our noble author shyly suggests that this works best if there are no elves in the party. I think that in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Twenty-Five, “fae jerk” is a safe elf default assumption. I’m sure some long-winded philosophical essays could be written as to why, talking about social, political, historical, and religious developments in the past half century, but I’m going to blame Rings of Power and leave it at that.
  Our adventure site is a standard little tomb-inna-cave complex with a long(ish) adventure hook involving a kidnapped herbalist and his son, a small bandit party led by a pair of werewolves, a smashed fairy village (smashed by giant toads or stoats, I believe), and of course the actual tomb itself with a giant bee theme. Little bit involved for the hook but a muddy hole in the ground and a promise of bad guys to kill should bring players in easily enough.
  A little aside on the formatting. There’s a standard of bolded monsters, italics treasure, and then some kind of special designator for traps/magic. It’s not strictly needed, but having big solid paragraph blocks without the threats/rewards in any way called out makes it a little bit difficult to parse while using a module at the table. Format can be overdone, and what “too much” looks like is something that’ll be a subjective taste, but this one was a little slower to parse without that formatting pass.
  Our map is a set of caves, a phone photo of pen/pencil on graph paper. I like the use of color to make the water feature pop and elevations stand out more, but a crisper scan would help. Again, not an art contest, so moving on to the map’s actual features I like the flow in the beginning with the river, the fact that everything narrows down in a single pinch point at the middle is realistic, but a little bit troubling during play. Blobs-with-tunnels are how real caves often work out but it means that the exploration becomes a little bit linear. Perfectly cromulent map for a site, in the end though, and the 13-key size is just about perfect for the contest’s scope. 

  A lot of attention is paid to environmental effects, making a nice and naturalistic set of hazards early on with a tight 2x4 entrance to the whole thing, risky bridges, a deafening waterfall interfering with casting and surprise, toad mud-holes, the like. Once you get to more worked-stone areas, that’s where a trap spraying poison gets found and a well is present to much around with. A monster/trap/situation crops up in a couple places, with an elfgate that can summon more elves from Fairie and a changeling (reskinned doppelganger) in a cave impersonating the titular herbalist’s son. Interaction, good.
  Beyond the sneaky doppelganger and the son NPC (infected with lycanthropy and trapped in a fairy ring, good), our fights and wandering monsters are naturalistic; giant stoats, giant toad, bugs, sprites, elves…for a tomb there’s only one undead part, which brings a couple wraiths out if graves are desecrated. Our “bossfight” is four bandits and a pair of werewolves, so I think level 5s are going to steamroll the spot, while level 3s better be lucky with their sleeps.
  Treasure is a little sparse for the stated level range, total of ~8,799 (some cash is rolled for), but what’s also interesting is that it’s pretty darn front-loaded, the first two areas hold over 5k in a chest and some sheepskin bags full of electrum. Magic items are all book but pretty decent, but if this is indeed for B/X then you’re not getting XP for them either…I think level 5 players will be more than a little unhappy about facing wraiths and werewolves for pocket change. The distribution and hiding/guarding level is fine, but I’d personally multiply all the cash past the first two rooms by about x5 at least, if you’re going to put your suggested level that high. One odd place is a little graveyard that has the implicit assumption that the players will go corpse-robbing by default, there’s a statuette retrieved that has no listed value.
  This adventure site is fine to place almost anywhere, a cave system with a fae tomb deeper in is easy to run with baseline assumptions of “standard D&D”. Just an edit pass needed to tune up delivery and buff the rewards and we’re in archetype range.