Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… Wyrd-Pearl of Bryne

​A town and dungeon adventure by Masters of Evil, level 1
For Heroes of Adventure
  Hey look, it’s a Dungeon Magazine adventure (Paizo Publishing era) to close out November. Technically a twenty-one-page adventure, with about fourteen pages of “adventure” content (rest cover, back page, NPCs, monsters, items), The Wyrd-Pearl of Bryne is a first-level adventure where the PCs get sent to Innsmouth, hopefully pursue the tentatively-linked investigation sequence, and then kill Dagon (sorry, Yog-Lammor). It’s traditional enough to make me vaguely nostalgic for the early 2000’s Dungeon…with two-column layout, colorful but tasteful AI illustrations, and tiny but clear dungeons, it’s all a very modern style. It’s written for Heroes of Adventure.
  The basic plot won’t surprise anyone with any vague familiarity with the genre. The suggested start is, of course, “you’re all caravan guards” or other extremely generic hooks going to a lonely city. Local baron is concerned by a lack of fish shipments from Innsmouth (the eponymous Bryne), has sent a guy but nothing came of it. An extremely untrustworthy pack of ruffians (the PCs) is the ticket, go there, the village is miserable and gross (with drowned undead wanderers), faded rails lead to a town hall, then a graveyard/crypt, then a cove where the solution to all problems is found by killing a weak low-level god. Hope you brought your random-encounter Blue Pearl to nerf him.
  Nostalgia for the formatting aside, what I liked in the Wyrd-Pearl was the relentlessly miserable atmosphere, this sucker drips, it oozes, it even squelches with solid atmospheric writing as soon as the rails reach the sodden Bryne, with AI illustrations that complement the story and environment. Most of the key locations are pretty generic but I do like the submerged crypts section where the module expects the players to take hours maneuvering in deep water, lurching from air pocket to air pocket. Rewards are low, but at the end is your plot coupon to the next location and it’s a gorgeous handout:
   I know everything here is the current WotC/Paizo style so I’ll ignore the formatting in listing what can be improved. I’m going to talk maps again…I know they’re small, but that’s no excuse for how linear they are. The initial caravan scenes and a subplot about bandits in the region are disconnected completely from the main plot here, and the rando “slowly being empowered god” at the end could also probably use some more telegraphing. Heroes of Adventure is a silver standard system, so treasure amounts that seem penurious “1d10gp and 100sp” are merely slightly stingy. But the biggest issue to fix, what crops up again and again, is illustrated in that treasure amount above…there are waaaay too many “dX appearing” comments in this thing. The entry to the final boss’ lair is guarded by 1d4 mid-difficulty monsters, for example…so it’s going to be an easy little warm-up, or maybe a brutal gut check of a fight. This isn’t a random sandbox, this is an adventure module for first level players with a very strict, very traditional, railroad of a setup…you tell us how many monsters are there.
  Unfortunately because of the strict setup the best use case for this is as a Dungeon adventure…pull it out with your D&D 3.5-loving friends and run it for a single session, while planning to actually finish it out in 1-2 more, but then mysteriously fail to schedule anything further. The best parts of the adventure, the handout and the atmospheric writing, really don’t translate well to plundering for other use. It’s a railroad, with some slippery and badly-maintained tracks, hard to repurpose.
  Final Rating? */***** Admirably good production value and evocative writing over a fundamentally dull adventure.

---