Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…A Soul to Take

An adventure by Scott Malthouse, level 1-2
Written for Against the Darkmaster
   Oh man, it’s one of these. Seven pages, double-column, outdoor “hexcrawl” with subhexes broken out, mystery plot, oddball indie system. These things are the plankton of the itch.io RPG ecosystem, churned out by the dozen every month, each one a perfect exemplar of hope against experience.  I have no idea what “Against the Darkmaster” is as a system, but it certainly looks like something that falls under the aegis of “OSR”. We’re going to see competent writing, decent information organization, and something that approaches a house style, I can dig it.
   The story here is something right out of the sagas; lord guy weds fairest maiden in town, jealous jeweler contacts local bog witch to curse a wedding band he gives as a gift, lord wears band and thus sickens and gets fed on by ghosts every single night and is dead and about to turn into a ghost himself. All very Norse, a little bit spoiled by all those involved being “Dusk Elves” for not a lot of benefit but there’s a Silmarillion vibe to the plot too so I’m okay with it. The PCs are assigned to solve the mystery of the lord’s illness and presumably eventually confront the bog witch about it. ‘Kay.
   Honestly what I liked most here was that saga-by-way-of-Tolkien flavor of the story, it’s a little awkward to mesh with “drunken murder hoboes solve your case” but that’s every mystery plot. I approve of the module’s manful attempt to make the story’s resolution open-ended. I liked that the Murk Witch is a fallen elf woman whose true name is discoverable, and using that true name gives a tremendous debuff on her in a fight. The ring’s curse itself is nice and gameable. The writing conveys mood, scene, and especially NPC personalities very well, which is helpful in running this somewhat difficult-to-manage scenario.
   As you may be picking up, what can be improved first and foremost is “give us a bit more of a roadmap to the solutions”. It’s all well and good to encourage other solutions to your puzzles, but there should be a logical sequence for a normal solution set. In particular there’s a whole area to the southeast of the hexmap involving a human settlement, an undead giant in his burrow, and a water elemental who can fix curses…it’s all fine in and of itself, but it’s rather disconnected from the main story here. In general, the maps are a bit wonky, the mainhexcrawl is five-kilometer hexes which is huge, then the little sub-maps are pretty pointless, not much exploration happening here. If you have a map, you should ask yourself why you are including it in your page count…and most of this stuff didn’t need to be added for gameplay purposes, just there to break up block text.
   The best use case for A Soul to Take is probably “play as a low-level adventure in Against the Darkmaster”, although it can certainly be adapted into most other systems without too much difficulty. The juice being worth the squeeze is more up for debate but the right game master with the right players will certainly have fun with this.
   Final Rating? **/***** with another star easily added if you’re someone who loves the flavor (curses, mysteries, social interaction, swamp hags). It’s competently done, just a bit of a lift for not a particularly original story.