Adventure Sites 3: A Foggy Night to Forget

​For RC, Level any
By Jamie Henson 
A Foggy Night to Forget is as easy or hard as the DM decides. It can be used as: the basis of a single session (a simple in and out); a way to remove/kill PCs (of almost any power level—a campaign-fix); a method to introduce gear, treasure, and/or characters (ala aurum ex deo); or an introduction to domain play (the hamlet has to go somewhere).
   Danger Will Robinson, Danger! It can be a bad sign if an adventure has no level listed; that often is a sign of no playtesting, or some DM hand-waving, or just a sloppy oversight. Obviously, each of those things can lead to other, more serious deficiencies. But there’s a worse sign. A sign of terror. “For any level.” That means the adventure was written to nerf or bypass 90% of all the game’s default mechanics. This is actually the second such entry to this contest; the other didn’t even have a proper site associated with it, at all…that one will get reviewed at the very end along with a site that broke the 2-page limit. At least this one listened to page limits and does have an associated physical location.
   In other words, it might say Rules Cyclopedia, but it’s actually for AD&D 2E.
   Provisos aside, there’s nothing at all wrong with the site-as-a-site. The nicely-formatted and well-framed document tells of a magical cursed hamlet that appears in a foggy night? That’s Ravenloft Standard, nothing weird about accessing an adventure locale that way. Once the party is in the foggy village, they’re trapped there until they can either figure out what happened to make the village is way (it’s a curse, natch), or until they lose all their memories and become more inhabitants (or die before the curse sets in). Fixing the town’s curse involves solving the mystery (easy enough, they just murdered an immortal godlike being’s favorite servant) and them making the inhabitants admit what they did and say they were sorry. That’s a sticky wicket. Good luck adjudicating all the mind-control spells and deciding if the wizard charms a villager if that really counts. Also there’s a superpowered fighter at the middle of town who’s load-bearing if you figure out how to overcome his hugely inflated statblock. Good narrative setup for a story, proper players should work to sequence-break immediately. 

    Map is pretty standard for “outdoor site” which means its just a flat sheet of POIs to go to at random. There’s not a real “pitched battle” scenario around here but hey, trust the players, I never put a riot off the table and the picture helps run that. Despite the grid no clear scale given and it’s a weird stylistic semi-isometric. The existence of a stream automatically helps a little bit for shenanigans. It looks good, but I would prefer a larger village to be honest. Still, site is a site, so that’ll work.
   This is a social scenario like most mysteries, so there’s a need for plenty of interactive NPCs. Unfortunately, most the NPCs are a little on the spacey side, the village’s curse specifically making them somewhat unfocused, passive, and forgetful. Only a few of the villagers are original inhabitants, with extra NPCs like a passel of Gator-men, an amnesiac set of mercs (keeping the decapitated head of the immortal’s pet mystic), and a druid-turned-vampire in charge of a spider cult. Some of these can get very hostile indeed, and put a lie to the “all levels” designation. And that’s not even mentioning the automaton in the center.
   Rules Cyclopedia incorporates BECMI all the way up to Immortal, so the center figure with a -13AC, saving as a F36, is within the rules but it seems designed to be a purposeful “can’t fight this” middle mystery. Still, if it has hit points, it can be killed, granting vast riches plus a fix to the village curse-trap that is not “talk to people”. Players being players, that’s mostly like the avenue out of here.
   Assuming the players get out killing everything, there’s about a million gp, or a few dozen thousand if the middle fight gets avoided. That middle guy’s equipped with “Suit Armor +4, Shield +5, Girdle of Giant Strength, Warhammer +4, +9 against Spellcasters) And/or any other equipment & treasure the DM feels appropriate.” Otherwise the magic is a little spare, things like a few potions and scrolls, Stone Plate, a shield +1 and battle axe +1…not quite the reward I’d expect for tangling with a vampire-druid with 9th-level spells and or so on.
   Inclusion of this site is easy enough, geographically, but campaign inclusion is a mix of dangerous and difficult…a TPK or a Monte Haul, not much of a space in between, that would probably leave many players perplexed as to why. With great difficulty you could probably seed rumors into the world beforehand but that’d be a difficult task.