Adventure Site Contest 2: Troll Market

Puppies are important

Written by Rob S.
AD&D, levels 1-3
Fairie realm market and manor.
  Atop a hill stands a towering gold leafed beech. 20’ up hang four locked gibbets. Two are empty, one
has a skeleton in rags, a holy symbol of mitra and a sign ‘PONTIFICATOR’. Final cage, watched by crows, contains Finn (Illusionist 4). Calls feebly for help.
  And now for something completely different. There’s a respectable old tradition of the “side jaunt in a pocket dimension” for fantasy games, and for low levels the most obvious other plane of existence is Fairie, because everyone can breathe there and there’s not a high danger of catching fire just walking from place to place. You also have mythic resonance out the wazoo, with folktales of elves or hairy men coming out from hidden places beneath the earth where time and space are different. Is allows for exotic adventure locales seeded anywhere in the world found through hidden portals.
  In Troll Market, we have all the classics you could want. Default hook is a weeping woman who’s had her baby stolen by elves from the titular market, which is reached under a ghostly gibbet-tree only accessible under the waning light of an Old Moon (so a seven-day timer that by default is already on day 5). The titular troll is a petrified fellow, by the way, the elf who stoned troll now runs things from a posh manor. The location itself is optimized for a heist, PCs are allowed to go down and buy stuff, collect rumors, case out the elf lord’s manor in the middle, etc. I would appreciate a little bit of order of battle information for the inevitable frontal assault that happens once the door guards demand all heavy armor and high-quality weapons from the players before allowing entry, but a cooperative crew should have plenty of levers to plan a rescue mission. Which will inevitably turn into an assassination mission. Which will inevitably turn into a pitch battle after a botched assassination, but hey, that’s the fun.
  I like the maps, they’re simple but very clear and give me exactly what I need to run this. My only bit of confusion is with how the stairs feel slightly off-center, but that’s a forgivable flaw, while the timeline is illegally placed on the map page but is also exactly what you need to know about the manor’s inhabitants’ habitual routines and locations. The layout isn’t anything particularly interesting, but for a heist adventure that’s good, you want careful players to be able to make logical suppositions from their observations. There is a least-time path involving breaking in through a single window, sneaking down to the cellar, and rescuing the stolen baby, but that’s not obvious or easy to sus out.
  Most of the monsters are the expected humanoid variety, namely elves with fairie flavoring. One merchant is just a fox, which is good. The LEGALLY DISTINCT NOT MIND FLAYER is odd. I appreciate a couple guard dogs in a heist and the fact that they’re krenshar (skull-faced hounds) is cute. NPC personalities are where a social/infiltration mission rises or falls, and the bare-bones descriptors of the colorful troll market cast of characters gives us enough to manage interactions, although I could do with a little more for the main Lord Elfypants, his motivations and his dives. An illusionist in the tree-gibbet can cloak the PCs in an illusion that has a signature, which is a nice touch. Grim horror of the ten-year-old human girl as the elf’s cook-slave is a solid touch too. The level range suggests a different set of interactions with this location, level 1s are getting bullied hard by what’s here while level 3s will be able to manage a pitched battle with the entire market I think. Not a lot of traps, but enchanted sleep runes in the dungeon are a classy problem to deal with.
  …but you don’t want to send level 3 PCs into this thing without having them revolt over lack of compensation. This is an elf manor full of magic and mystery, it’s a little dismaying how poor the loot is. Now I don’t have a problem with the easily absconded stuff being a little chintzy, but there are luxurious four-post-beds, no value given. Tempt us with hard-to-steal giant awkward stuff, module, that’s a real miss. Less hidden stuff than I’d prefer in Elfland, too. A missed opportunity is the whole hook of the lady who needs her son returned, there’s some good rewards inherent in that situation, she should be a witch or something. There are a few interesting things to be bought at the market itself, but fewer fantastic oddities than I first assumed from the name.
  I think the biggest question for pluggability is “how elfy are your elves?” I like having fairies and a portal accessed from anywhere but only during a certain moon phase, that’s lovely, but I know there might be some High Fantasy campaigns where that clashes. More loss for them, in my opinion, because this is very magical realm to have available under a tree.

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